The Glaciermen #40: Fugitives (Part One)
Early access prepublication manuscripts of "The Glaciermen"
Good Tuesday to You!
It’s a busy week at the ‘ol day job, so we’re just gonna jump in today.
One quick announcement: I’ve partnered with some other great authors to offer free books through BookFunnel. You can check it out here or find it at the bottom of this post. (If you’ve already seen it, check out the two new categories!)
(Here’s the previous segment if you missed it, and the first chapter and index, if you’re new).
Recap (spoilers!): Lee and Tyra find the bald, bearded, tatooed man in the pit. Turns out he was Tyra’s uncle. Lee dubbed him Viking, because he looked just like one. After a failed rescue attempt, Lee and Tyra were forced to leave him behind…
Fugitives (Part One)
High above the stone and ice of the chasm, the sun had set and clouds covered the moon, leaving the kilometer deep rift in the glacier shrouded in darkness but for the flickering fires in the tents of the Sikanuk village. Lee crept along with Tyra following, staying deep within the shadows. They were about a hundred yards from the village. His plan was to get to Aguta, but he must have taken a wrong turn in the tunnels, because the one they came through had opened farther down the chasm than he had expected, costing them precious time and dumping them out on the far side of the village. There was no way to get to the stone stair leading to Aguta’s chamber without sneaking directly past the occupied tents.
As they crept closer, shouts rose up from among the tents, so Lee ducked behind a large rock, cautiously peeking over to watch as activity began to unfold. Tyra took the pause as a chance to attempt to remove some of the knots from her hair. Lee saw men with torches begin running between the tents. That was going to make things difficult. Worse still, two of them ran off toward the stairway on the opposite side of the village, posting themselves as guards at its base. There was no way they could sneak past them and get to Aguta.
He cursed, then dropped behind the rock to think.
Tyra looked at him expectedly, tugging gently at her hair. Lee was bewildered at her calm demeanor—the girl was resilient. After everything they had just been through, she had the presence of self to take a moment to groom. It must run in the family, Lee thought, remembering that her uncle had also taken the time to braid his beard in the killing pit as his fellow prisoners were freezing to death around him.
Lee popped up to look over the rock again. The running and shouting had died down, but the two guards at the stairs were still there, and now there were scattered patrols of men walking the perimeter of the village.
“Change of plans,” Lee said. “Follow me.”
He crept forward on his hands and feet, Tyra close behind, both silent as cats. He paused when they were only a dozen yards or so away from the tents, just out of the reach of the torchlight as a pair of tired looking men walked past, eyes scanning the darkness.
This had better be the right tent, Lee hoped to himself as the patrol moved on. He waited until they were out of sight.
“Now!” he whispered, then dashed across the last few yards toward one of the tents at the edge of the village. He had his knife out as soon as he reached it, and sliced a long horizontal cut across the stitches of a seam near the ground. He pried it up just as Tyra reached him and ushered her through, then followed after, dropping the flap back in place behind him.
Inside the tent, the only illumination came from pulsating embers in a fire pit in the center of the space. Lee had to wait for his eyes to adjust before he could make out what he needed to see in the dim glow. There were two sleeping mats. One was empty—Lee let out a breath of relief—its normal occupant likely out on patrol with the other men. The blanket on the other rose and fell gently with breaths of the sleeping figure within. He signaled for Tyra to stay still, then crept to the edge of the mat. He reached out his hand, hesitated for a moment, then gently nudged the shoulder of the sleeping woman.
Mika groaned, but did not open her eyes. Lee nudged her again. She rolled onto her side, turning her back to Lee pulling the blanket over her head.
“Lemme sleep already, father,” she grumbled, “All that stupid shouting kept me up and I finally just managed to fall asleep. Leave me alone—I just wanna sleep.”
Lee rolled his eyes, then said, “Mika, wake up. It’s me, Lee.”
A second passed with no reaction, then Mika shot up in an instant, fully awake.
“What!?”
“Shh!” Lee hissed, “Stay quiet!”
Mika shook her head to clear the shock of the moment, then grabbed Lee by the shoulders.
“You have to get out of here!” she whispered. “Everyone is looking for you. I heard Muktuk yelling at my father. He said you killed one of the—” she hesitated, “one of them.”
Lee nodded, then said, “I would if I could, but I don’t know what to do. I was going to Aguta for help, but they put guards on the stairway to his chamber. And I can’t run off, because there’s nowhere to go and we have no supplies. We’d never make it.”
“We?” Mika asked, then noticed Tyra for the first time, crouched in the darkness on the other side of the tent.
“Who is she?”
“She’s… a new friend,” Lee said. “The tunlaq were going to—I had to stop them. I couldn’t just stand by and let it happen. You understand that, right?"
Mika nodded, then threw off her blanket.
“You can’t be here in the village.”
“I know, but where can we go?”
“I know a place,” Mika said, “Across the lake. My father showed it to me once when I was young. You can hide there until we figure something out, but we have to go now, while there’s still enough night left for me to get back before my father returns. Here, cover yourselves with these.”
Mika tossed them each a darkly colored sealskin cloak from a basket nearby.
“They’ll keep you warm and make it harder to be seen. It will fit her well, but unfortunately might be a bit small on you. They were my mother’s. She would want you to have them.”
When she had collected a few other things, she peaked out the front flap of the tent. Two men stood nearby, watching over that area of the village.
“We can’t go that way… wait, how did you get in here?”
Lee nodded toward the cut seam at the back of the tent.
“Great, now I’m gonna have to fix that, too,” Mika said, flashing a playful smile.
Lee cracked open the flap at the back, peered out.
“A patrol just passed. We’ve got a window if we move now.”
The three of them slipped into the shadows, stealing across the stoney ground out into the darkness. Mika led them to the edge of the chasm lake, then down the shore some way until they reached a short outcropping of stone, only a few feet high, jutting out into the waters. A small canoe lay behind it, out of sight from prying eyes.
“My father keeps this here to fish on his own sometimes, to get away from the other men. He doesn’t really like them, you know, but they push him around so he just does what that bastard Muktuk tells him most of the time.”
They clambered into the canoe, which was barely big enough for the three of them together. Lee took up the single oar and pushed them off from the shore. The waters were flat and dark except for a weak sliver of moonlight that somehow found its way down the chasm to reflect off the ripples of the lake. The dim gray stone of the chasm walls on either side was nearly invisible in the gloom.
After about twenty minutes of paddling in silence down the narrow lake, Mika touched Lee on the shoulder.
“There, I think. See that spot where the stone looks like it’s cracked up the middle,” she said, pointing past him to one side into the darkness.
She must have had great vision, because Lee could not tell what heck she was pointing at. Nevertheless he guided the canoe in that direction until eventually the sealskin hull scraped up onto a stoney shore. Some cloud must have shifted high above, because the moonlight was now potent enough to make out a small strip of gravel peaking above the waterline of the otherwise sheer face of rock. Lee could see what she meant by a crack. A thirty foot vertical fissure split the rock. It was barely an inch wide, except for the bottom few feet, where there was a gap big enough to squeeze a person through.
Lee and Tyra disembarked, but Mika stayed in the canoe.
“It is too late in the night already,” she said, “I have to get back before my father finishes his watch. I will return tomorrow night with more supplies.”
Lee nodded. Tyra was already poking her head into the gap in the rock. Mika looked at Lee with an expression of devoted concern.
“Lee,” she said, using his birth name instead of the one he was given when he was brought into the tribe, “I want to tell you that I—” she hesitated, biting her lip, “I’ll… I’ll make sure to bring something good to eat. You two look famished.”
Lee nodded again, perplexed at the there-and-gone display of emotion, and also suddenly aware of the dire state of his empty stomach. He hadn’t eaten anything proper since the day before the hunt, and warming himself and Tyra had burned a lot of calories. He had been running on pure adrenaline and the now-worn-off effect of the mycelium fibers. A heavy exhaustion pulled at his limbs.
He watched Mika paddling away until she disappeared into the night, wishing he had asked her for something to eat while they had been in her tent, then turned to the gap in the rock. Tyra was already inside and out of sight. He really hoped it was bigger inside than it looked.
Until Next Week
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– Xavier Macfarlane
Author, The Glaciermen
©Xavier Macfarlane 2024. All rights reserved.
Lee is resourceful as always. It was nice to see Mika take his side and help him out.