Chapter 26

You should have seen the faces of the men on horseback as I disappeared over the side. It would have been comical if I hadn't known even then that I wasn't out of danger yet. The drop was precarious at best and I was doing this without any gear and without gloves. Making a controlled descent was going to be fun. What was going to make things worse was the fact that the rope was too short. Even with a couple of lengths knotted together it didn't quite reach the bottom of the gorge. It did go most of the way and that was fine with me. I was counting on my so-called enhancements to get me the rest of the way.

The guards above me had other plans. Their first plan was to shoot me with arrows. I was roughly fifty feet down the stone wall when an arrow bounced of my coif covered head. That got my attention as did the next arrow that bounced off my shoulder before it then got tangled in my fur cape. Quickly I rappelled down another twenty feet and hoped for the best. Well it helped for a moment but only a moment. Their arrows whizzed by me now, passing harmlessly into empty air since the angle was too steep for any of them to hit me, and I was further into the darkness of the gorge which made me harder to see. That only caused the guards to switch to plans in their endeavour to kill me. They started to hack at the rope with their swords.

It only took a second for me to realize that I was really in trouble. By then I'd descended roughly a hundred feet, but I was still hundreds of feet above a ground that was strewn with rocks and boulders and other things that I really had no desire to fall on. Feeling the rope jerk for an instance above me warned me just in time to do something to save my neck. As the second blow of the blade above me severed the rope, I pushed out from the face of the towering cliff and pushed myself towards the ruins of the trestle bridge. As the slack rope slipped from my hands, I reached out for the dark shadow of the trestle, hoping that my luck was still with me. It was, but only for a second. I landed with my arms on a thick wooden beam and I hung there for a second breathing a sigh of relief. Then the beam gave way under the impact of me hitting it and my weight. As it did, I twisted to the side and reached out into the shadows for whatever I could find to arrest my descent. I got lucky for a second time.

I dropped about thirty feet before I hit another beam. It held for a second and then it broke loose as well. This time I pitched backwards in my sudden descent and I slammed my back into another support. I bounced off of that one and fell some more before striking another crossbeam that slowed me down once more. Unfortunately, my reactions weren't fast enough this time and I bounced off of that beam as well. Then things got worse for me. I hit my head and that was it.

I woke looking up at my friends. I had to blink a few times but eventually my vision cleared and I could make out who was looking at me. The first person I saw was Felicity.

"Thank the fuck you have a supped up healing factor," she said in a low voice, "or you'd be dead. Boy are you a lucky bastard."

I had been very lucky as I soon learned. I had bounced a couple more times after getting knocked out and then miraculously I'd bounced free of the trestle and ended up flat on my back in a patch of clover growing by the river that flowed around the base of the summit. Somehow I'd missed all the rocks and other nasty things in my descent and I hadn't broken a thing. If I had continued down through the trestle, my fate would have been different. Rory told me later that the debris from the collapsed bridge had resembled a pit filled with spikes waiting to impale someone.

It was dawn when I woke up. By then the group escaping through the sewers had arrived and they'd had a chance to rest. Felicity had treated what injuries she could using what she had on hand, the whole time cursing me for not bringing her medical bag along with us, knowing full well that she'd probably need it. Truthfully, I hadn't even thought about it. Nimue was still out of it. She was resting in the arms of her sister-wives when I woke. I left her to their care and tried to focus on the immediate, which was getting out of here.

"We need to get going," I said glancing about the area we were in. "The sun is coming up and sooner or later somebody will think of bridging the gorge or trying to climb down into it to find me. I suspect we don't want to be around when that happens. Let's get ourselves organized and out of here."

Organizing was going to be a big priority. We had almost no food at all. Nobody had thought of gathering any before fleeing into the sewers. We did have our water skins and I had Kola and Caitlin fill them up river from the drain pipe. While they went and did that, I sorted out who was with us and whether they needed assistance. As it turned out, Nimue was the only one who needed care. Those that had been injured in escaping had been cared for by Felicity and while still in pain and hurting, they weren't bleeding to death. Even the big guy was doing okay considering that he'd been shot twice with arrows and he had a couple of grazing cuts on his arms and legs where a spearheads had nicked him. By the way I learned his name was Dork. I had to fight myself not to laugh at that.

We had horses. In fact we had twenty horses, which was a very good thing because I intended to make use of them all. I had Dork and Tina, who was the dwarf limb a couple of saplings for me. I wanted them for a travois to carry Nimue on once we were up and out of the gorge. They went off and did that while I put my people to work getting our mounts back up the path that we'd used to get down into the gorge. With the help of a few volunteers they got it done quickly. While they did that, I went and spoke to Josh.

Josh was with the rest of the escaped slaves from the palace. Incredibly there were almost four dozen of them. Almost all of them were outworlders of various ethnic backgrounds, although they were all Caucasians. Not one of them was African or Asian. There were both men and women in the group and a couple of children as well. They all looked exhausted and dazed by the night's events.

"Josh," I said to the man as I approached him, "we're getting ready to leave. I'm taking my people down to Lufkin. If everything's progressed as I planned it, the city should be in even more chaos than the capital was last night. We're heading for the port and a ship that will be waiting for us. Once we reach it, we'll be heading out to sea. If you stick with me, I'll take you and your people and get them to a place I know that will take you in and treat you well. It's your choice but you and your people will have to make it now. We'll be heading out in fifteen minutes."

The thought of being left behind appalled Josh. He quickly insisted that his people wanted to go with me and that he'd get them moving. I accepted that and went to talk to the menagerie.

The menagerie was gathered near the spot where Nimue was resting. There was the Elven man and his three female companions, plus the Elven woman who had fought by my side last night. There was also the gnome who was sitting off by herself, resting under a tree. Then there were the others who I hadn't really taken notice of the night before. The first ones I spotted were three individuals who were about the size of the gnome, but they weren't totally humanoid. They had bright orange fur on their heads, their backs, and the backs of their limbs. They also had long furry tails that were monkey like and they had little pointed ears. Incredibly their faces were very human in appearance and you could see intelligence in them when you gazed into their eyes. The three of them were wearing only loincloths. Two were clearly female and one looked to be male. He was slightly taller than the other two. Beside them sat another of their number who also took me by surprise given her appearance. The woman looked like what I would call a gargoyle. She had a small, lithe body, and she looked to be just less than five feet tall. Her skin was bluish-grey and it looked like stone. She had a slightly elongated face with deep set eyes and pointed ears and jet black long flowing hair. She too was wearing only a loincloth to preserve her modesty. What made me think of her as being a gargoyle were the blue-grey bat-like wings that were growing out of her back and that she had wrapped about her to shield herself from prying eyes. That and the fact she had a small set of horns jutting out of her forehead. She was certainly a very interesting sight.

The one that caught my eye though was the woman who was sitting off by herself. She looked normal to me. She was medium tall and slender in her appearance. She was Asian and she had long straight black hair that reached the base of her spine. She was wrapped in silken robes and she looked like a princess. When I noticed her, I inclined my head towards her and then walked up to her and asked her what her name was.

"I am called Ursa by the people of this land," the woman replied to me in Minoan, her eyes cold with anger when she looked into mine.

"Are you mad because I rescued you?" I asked her pointedly.

"I didn't need rescuing," the woman replied defiantly. "I had a home and three meals a day and I was safe. You've taken that away from me."

"Well you could have stayed at the palace," I pointed out, feeling a bit miffed.

"The palace that you and your friends set ablaze," the woman scoffed in reply, "I don't think that would have been a good idea, do you?"

I didn't answer right away. Instead I just looked at her and sighed and shook my head. She ignored my annoyance.

"Well, we're leaving," I told her just as coldly as I could manage, "and you don't have to come with us."

Then I walked away. Fifteen minutes later we were all up on the road to Lufkin, including the displeased Asian woman. I wondered what her problem was for about half a second and then I forgot about her altogether. I had more important things to deal with. The travois for Nimue had been rigged up and she was lying on it. The gnome was sitting on the travois with her, watching over her and the dwarf was seated on the back of the horse, between the two poles. Seeing them and then the mass of people we had with us made me stop and think. We had kids that either needed to be carried or they would have to walk and that would slow us down. I needed to improvise and do it quickly. I got Dork and Josh and a couple of other men to limb some more saplings and rig four more travois. The kids could ride on them as could some of the people from the menagerie. Thank god we'd brought our bedrolls with us. They were about to come in very handy.

It didn't take long setting up the extra travois and getting everyone organized. When we had, we were off. We broke into three parties. The main group was the travois and the walkers. I left Tagus and Josh and Felicity in charge of that group. I left the princess with them. The second group included Dork, Goiania who was my Elven fighter, Rory, Zahra, and me. Our job was to ride protection for the walkers just in case the garrison at the capital found a way to bridge the gorge and pursue us. The last group was comprised of Kola and Caitlin and Hugo from the palace and a couple of other men who knew the area around the capital and the road down to Lufkin. Their job was to find us food and water and if possible wagons to load the people walking into so that we could get to Lufkin before we missed the boat.

The fact was that there was sixty miles of winding road between the capital and Lufkin and a group walking at a moderate pace wasn't going to make it there in one day. Trained soldiers could, given proper boots and water and supplies but not a bunch of slaves fleeing with only the clothing on their backs. I wanted Kola and Caitlin to find us food and supplies and if necessary they were to take it by force. There was to be no compassion if someone squawked about it. They could offer the person silver in payment but if they refused, they weren't to take no for an answer. My mates told me that they understood and took off with their party within minutes of us moving out.

The morning passed slowly. Our pace was slow even with the children riding travois. We were making roughly three miles an hour and as the sun rose higher and higher over the island, I knew that the pace would drop as the day progressed and our water skins ran dry. Already people had drained one of them and it wasn't midmorning yet. If Kola and Caitlin failed to find provisions, I'd have to start rationing the water. It was all that we had.

The pace did allow me to talk to people. I learned from Dork all the sordid information on the menagerie. Some of it wasn't very nice. It turned out that the king was a sick bastard who enjoyed himself with his prize collection or at least some of them. Dork assured me that nothing was ever done to Nimue's sister and I chose to believe him. The most interesting thing that I learned was about Ursa. It turned out that Ursa was a shape-shifter or what the locals called a 'skin-changer'. She could at will change into a large black bear. I found that interesting for a moment or two until Dork told me that the king had often used her to entertain his favourites. He would drop her into a pit with some dogs or wolves and she had to change into a beast to protect herself from being killed. The king found it amusing, but Ursa hated it because of the humiliation that it entailed, as she viewed it. As a beast she was just that. She had no control over herself and only fatigue and sleep released her from the form. Deep down Ursa feared becoming a bear for she believed that one day she would never change back into a person. I just nodded my head thoughtfully as I listened to this tale and kept my own thoughts and words to myself.

My biggest nuisance that morning was the princess. The young woman was a whiner. She complained about everything from being hungry to getting sunburnt. I eventually had to gag her because she was annoying everyone. I also had to bind her hands and tie her to a horse. Rory was busy watching our rear and no one wanted to watch over her. From time to time, I wondered why I had taken her and occasionally I thought of just dropping her off on the side of the road to be found perhaps by anyone trailing us. Of course I thought better of doing it well before actually giving in to the temptation.

Kola and Caitlin returned shortly after midday. They'd been successful to a point. They had found food and water off a track that branched away from the main road some distance ahead of us. That track had taken them into a small valley that contained several farms. Hugo had acted as spokesperson of the group since neither of my mates spoke Minoan. He'd told the farmers that he was foraging for a royal party that was making a progress down to Lufkin and that he was requisitioning food and drink for the group. To smooth the way he offered coin in payment and the farmers had gone for it. My mates had brought back fresh baked flatbread, pre-cooked meats, and wedges of hard cheese along with skins of water and a cask of dry white wine. Thankfully it was enough to feed us for the afternoon and I thanked my mates. Then I set about organizing the distribution of the food and water. The cask of wine I kept for later. I didn't want any drunks wandering about in the heat of the day. They wouldn't last long.

As I predicted, our pace dropped to a crawl during the afternoon. By evening we'd covered just over twenty-one miles. It meant that we needed to push on into the night and I needed to find a solution to this problem, besides abandoning anyone not on horseback. Thankfully Kola and Caitlin came through for us again. They returned just before dusk with a surprise. They had found another cluster of farms and with plenty of persuasion and some silver they'd found a couple of small wagons that were now being pulled by a couple of their horses. Two of the men with them had known how to drive them and they had everything in hand by the time they got back to us. The wagons contained both food and water which was received with gratitude from all of us.