The Glaciermen #41: Fugitives (Part Two)
Early access prepublication manuscripts of "The Glaciermen"
We’re back!
I’m one day late again. Oops. But hey, it’s here every week, as promised!
This one is the last bit of peace we’re going to get, so enjoy the moment and get ready to hunker down for a wild ride to the end.
P.S. If you haven’t already checked out the free books available through BookFunnel (no account required), you can find them here or at the bottom of this post.
(Here’s the previous segment if you missed it, and the first chapter and index, if you’re new).
Recap (spoilers!): Lee and Tyra fled to the village only to find it crawling with men searching for him, so they enlisted Mika’s help. She helped them sneak across the lake to a secret hiding place, leaving them with a promise of her return.
Fugitives (Part 2)
The night was damp and miserable, and even though the heat of the deep earth and their cloaks kept Lee and Tyra from freezing to death, the rock was hard and uncomfortable. The only consolation was that even though the little cave was just a few feet tall, just beyond the narrow opening it widened not insignificantly and was quite deep. While there was just enough space to sit upright, there was plenty of room to spread out.
At daybreak, Lee peered out to survey their location. Their little cave lay near the far side of the narrow lake, with about a mile of open water separating them from the village. He could just make out the tents poking above the distant shore. Here, the water rose directly against the chasm’s vertical walls, broken only by occasional tiny outcroppings of shore scattered along the edge, many of them sporting rocky openings like their own. Mika was right—this was a perfect hiding spot.
Other than occasionally crawling to the water’s edge to drink water, Lee and Tyra stuck to the cave, napping and resting more than anything else, recovering from the past two days of hectic chaos. Tyra took the opportunity to finish working the knots out of her hair, then spent several hours braiding it into thick, tight rows, connecting the rows together at the nape of her neck to form a long braided tail. Now she was beginning to look like a viking too.
Nightfall came. Lee crept out onto the gravel shore to wait for Mika. He sat back against the rock face of the chasm wall, pulling his knees up toward his chest, grabbed a pebble from the shore and fiddled with it in his hands. The cool water of the chasm lake lapped the stones in the quiet darkness, a soft rhythm of calm amongst the silence.
Lee breathed a long breath and looked up. The chasm walls rose black into the heights, somewhere above shifting from stone to ice, then even further above that opening to the night sky in a narrow rift in the glacial ice that probably looked no different than any other of the countless crevasses and cracks in the surface. So many were merely great wounds in the ice, lifeless scars across the glacier. Yet only one, this one, hid a world below.
The moon was out again, free in the sky, casting its rays down to the captive land below. Only a few slivers of silver light would find their way into this particular crevasse and bounce down to glint off the water of the lake, itself in liquid form only thanks to the heat rising from the deep crust of the earth. Light and heat. The lifeblood of the ice.
Lee sighed again as ran his thumb across the smooth face of the pebble. It was one among so many on the shore—at the mercy of the lapping waves of the lake, powerless to change its fate, its sole destiny to lay in place among the others. Was his destiny any different?
He frowned, then threw the pebble into the lake. Instead of a splash, he heard a soft thunk, then a stifled yip of surprise.
“Ouch!” It was Mika, pulling up in the canoe. “What’d you do that for?”
“Sorry,” Lee said sheepishly, and helped her pull the canoe in.
“I couldn’t get much,” Mika said, “But I did manage to swipe a few smoked fish and some roots. I’ll try to get more next time.”
At the mention of fish, Lee’s stomach growled. They quickly retreated into the fissure, where the two fugitives wolfed down everything they could get their hands on. Mika was eager to hear the details of what had happened, but the conversation was minimal. Lee’s muffled one-word answers past mouthfuls of fish told her he was not yet ready to share.
Back outside, she gave Lee a long hug, to which he responded with a pair of awkward pats on her back. He thought he might have heard her sniffle, so he patted again, not sure how to respond.
“Are you okay, Lee?” Mika said, arms lingering around him from the hug.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you gave up a lot to save this girl.”
“I suppose so, but I didn’t really think about it at the time. It was the right thing. I just had to do it.”
“You know I would do the same for you, right? You’re important to me,” she said, looking up at him with an unwavering gaze.
“Of course!” he responded, “You’re important to me, too.”
“Really?” she said, a smile forming on her lips.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve cared about you for a long time. You’re like the sister I never had.”
Her hopeful smile dissipated, then she pushed away from him and turned her face so he could not see her embarrassment, or the tears that were beginning to flow.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” Lee said, still oblivious, and reached for her.
She waved his hand away, fighting to keep her sniffles from turning to sobs. Lee paused, hand still held out, then all at once realized the cause of her distress.
“Oh. I’m sorry, Mika. I didn’t realize. I thought you and… I promised him I’d never tell you.”
Mika looked back at him, eyes puffy from tears, her voice bitter as she shot back the words, “Promised who? What would you never tell me?”
Lee fumbled to say something, blindsided by the unexpected turn of the conversion.
“Well?” Mika demanded.
He couldn’t think of a better way to say it, so he simply blurted out, “Nantuk is in love with you.”
Mika’s next words caught in her throat.
“Always has been,” Lee said, “since we were kids. I just kinda assumed that you and him would… you know. So it never really made sense to think of you like that. I’m sorry.”
Mika took another step back, shoulders slumped. She covered her mouth with a hand and shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” Lee said again.
Mika nodded, let her hand drop and forced a weak smile, then turned and climbed into the canoe.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said, voice flat. “I’ll be back soon enough that you and your new girlfriend don’t starve,”
Without another word, she pushed off from the shore.
Lee watched for a few seconds, dumbfounded.
“Wait, it's not like that—Mika!”
It was no use. She was already paddling away, disappearing into the darkness.
• • •
The next night, Mika did not come.
Another passed with no visit, then another.
Lee sat again on the gravel shore, waiting through a fifth night at the little hideaway. Hunger gnawed at his stomach like an old friend. It was his constant companion now, accompanied only by Tyra. With little to do, they passed the days napping and attempting an unruly process of trying to learn each other’s languages. So far Lee had figured out that she was from Denmark, or “daine-mark” as she had called it, along with a smattering of Danish words that mostly had to do with fish: eating it, catching it, gutting it, and so on. He longed for a slate and chalk to draw figures to add to their vocabulary, even to the point of trying to scratch drawings on the cave wall with stones, but his art skills had proved insufficient to the task.
Now he leaned against the chasm wall, tilting his head back to gaze upward toward the top of the great ravine, as had become his habit. If he waited long enough, he could usually spot a star or two as they passed across the sliver of the opening high above. From his limited view, he guessed the gap at the top could be no more than ten feet wide, though he had never seen it from the surface to confirm the estimate. Occasionally he hoped some poor animal would fall down and splash into the lake—anything to connect this prison below with the freedom above. But to the surface world, this chasm was just another crevasse among the thousands in the glacier, and nothing living was ever going to venture far enough onto the ice to ever slip into it anyway.
A gentle splash alerted him, and for a second he thought something might indeed have fallen in from above. Another splash let him know it was only the sound of a paddle stabbing into the lake water.
Food, came the first thought to his sleepy mind, but he stayed sitting, waiting for the canoe to scrape onto the shore before expending any unnecessary energy.
“Psst!” came a voice over the water.
Lee cocked his head.
“Psst! Anybody there? It’s me, Nantuk. Answer if you’re there.”
Lee was up fast, “Over here. Follow my voice!”
A minute later, Nantuk hopped over the side of the canoe and bear hugged Lee.
“It’s good to see you, my friend! Sorry it took so long to find you. All I had to work with was, ‘look for where the stone is cracked up the middle.” What kind of directions are those? I had to check every nook and cranny from here to the village, calling out for you in the dark like some kind of idiot. Boy, am I glad you’re alive—oh hey, look what I brought!”
He jumped back to the canoe, held up a pair of wicker fish traps and a sack dripping with oil from the bottom.
“I hope you like roasted fish!”
Inside the humble cave, Nantuk jabbered as Lee and Tyra gobbled mouthfuls of the fish.
“Everything went crazy! The first night, they made all the men—me included—keep watch and search around for you. My dad was being a real prick about it, said you killed one of our great masters or whatever and have to pay for your crimes. Me? I don’t care about any of that nonsense. I care that I had to stay up all night then still go out fishing in the morning without a lick of sleep. By the way, they think Aguta is involved somehow, so he hasn’t been allowed to leave his chamber. If it weren’t for old Lusa bringing him food, he’d probably have starved by now.
“Anyway, it calmed down after a couple days, and I noticed that Mika was acting all weird for no reason, so I asked her what was up. Out of nowhere she just broke down and told me everything—you’ve gone wild, man! I can’t believe you really killed one of them—then she told me that you said I was in love with her, which I was mad about at first, but then I realized it was probably for the best. At first she was really sad, so I tried to be extra nice, you know, like bringing her pretty rocks, listening to her, and letting her cry on me and stuff, then out of nowhere she just kissed me!”
Lee nodded between mouthfuls, only half-listening as Nantuk continued his rambling exposition.
“Then Mika’s dad, Sugu, got all weird about how much time we were spending together, so he’s watching her real closely now, which is why I came out this time to bring you more supplies instead of her—but that’s not all!”
Nantuk lowered his voice.
“This morning, I overheard my dad talking with some of the other guys. There’s rumors about all sorts of stuff going missing the last couple days—of course my dad thinks it's you or Aguta somehow, but the other guys think it's an evil spirit. They said that we’ve been cursed with a demon because we let outsiders live among us. A couple of drop-off guys even started a rumor that this demon attacked the latest godseye delivery, killing two of the masters with a glistening spirit blade on the end of a stick, but I think that’s a load of crap. The drop-off guys probably just saw a funny shadow and ran off, then made up a story to explain why they left a sled in the tunnel. Plus, you’ve been hiding out here the whole time, and they’ve got Aguta under constant watch, so it’s impossible anyway. Point is, everybody’s spooked, so I gotta be real careful sneaking out here.”
Lee had finished gorging himself and was lying down on his back. His eyelids were heavy with the drowsiness that follows quickly after a feast. Tyra was already asleep.
Nantuk nodded understandingly.
“You guys look beat, so I’ll see myself out. I’ll come by again as soon as I can—won’t be tomorrow, though, ‘cause it’s my turn in the rotation keeping watch on Aguta. Anyway, It was good to see you.”
• • •
Muktuk clenched his fists, his knuckles going white as he watched his son push the canoe into the glistening water of the moonlit lake. He spat on the ground, cursing the day his son had been entangled with the outsider on that damnable seal hunt. From then on, the boy’s spine had gone soft, becoming more and more infected by the corruption of the outsider.
Four weeks had passed since they received the command to hunt the outsider, and Muktuk was hating every minute. The last two weeks were made even worse when he had spied Nantuk fawning over Sugu’s daughter, groveling like some lovesick pup, peddling trinkets and soppy words to curry her favor. Pathetic. A true man would take what he wanted, if he was foolish enough to want that girl at all. She was a worthless tramp anyway. It was a shame her weakling mother had died from fever before getting the chance to teach her daughter the woman’s role to know her place.
The thought of his son and the girl together had soured Muktuk’s mood further. He could barely stand to look at him anymore, and avoided talking to him except when strictly necessary. Despite his attention being split between the search for the outsider and motivating his lazy compatriots to keep watch over Aguta, Muktuk couldn’t help but notice his son’s empty bedroll every other night or so.
At first he thought Nantuk had finally dropped his stones like a man and was off shagging the strumpet. He almost felt proud of the boy—almost. Nonetheless, he could not stand for it, so the next time Nantuk’s bedroll was empty, he had barged into the girl’s tent, expecting to catch them in the act. But Nantuk wasn’t there, which only intensified Muktuk’s suspicion. From then on, he had pretended to sleep each night, waiting for Nantuk to slink off. Finally, after two sleepless nights, tonight was that night.
Where are you sneaking off too, little rat? He thought, watching as Nantuk paddled off into the darkness.
Muktuk had a good guess, and if he was correct, this unfortunate family tragedy could turn out to be his great triumph. He would have to disown his son, yes, but at this point that prospect was almost appealing. Muktuk was a wily, clever man, and he could be patient when stalking his prey. He would lay a careful trap, and spring it when the time was right, but first he would have to discover where the boy was headed.
He turned his back on the lake and began making his way back to the village. It was time to pay Sugu’s daughter a little visit.
Until Next Week
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– Xavier Macfarlane
Author, The Glaciermen
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Oh man now that's how you end a chapter. Really well done. Can't wait to read more.