Chapter 22

Act 3

Scene 8

A befuddled Clark looked at the odd contraption in front of him and wondered in bemusement at how a few smiles and brushes on the hand had led him here. The heavy rope cable running from one corner of Lofthold fell off to a huge tree over two hundred feet away. Under the rope, hanging from large wooden pulleys, a small cart hung from four ropes that met at the apex and connected to the bottom of the pulley. A long lever hung from the block the pulleys were attached to, apparently a brake to lock the cart in place, or to slow its descent. Two bench seats faced each other and ropes surrounded the entire assembly to give some safety, and light ropes were attached to both ends of the cart to allow the passengers to pull it back up to Lofthold from its forest quay.

Still not sure of the purpose of the cart or trolley, Clark turned his attention back to the enchanting creature that had lead him here. Collean was her name he remembered with a blink as a beam of sunlight set her strawberry blonde hair afire with its light. The beam also was shinning through her loose shift and highlighted her slender, perfect, nude body. Clark unconsciously licked his lips, transfixed by her beauty, until he noticed her head crooked to one side, as if waiting for his reply.

"Sorry!" He stammered and to his embarrassment, his voice broke. He cleared his throat and decided that rather than look clueless, he would just agree with anything she might have asked, "Sure!"

A huge grin lit up her face more than the sun. She took one of his hands and led him to the cart and asked him to steady it as she got in. As he grabbed hold of the ropes and held them steady from the minor swaying as the slight girl got in, Clark wondered what he had just agreed to. He searched his memory, and all he could come up with were pert breasts, sun-fired hair, and a brilliant smile. So, with a rueful grin at himself, he decided it couldn't be all bad as long as he was with her. He stepped carefully onto the cart, which swayed dismayingly. That made him grab convulsively at the safety lines and he held on with a death grip as the ground swayed dizzyingly, two hundred feet below.

Collean giggled at the look of terror on his face. He looked up, prepared to be furious, only to met her lips which brushed his forehead in a light kiss. His anger and fear melted and ran away as he sat up and watched her grasp the brake lever and yank it loose. They immediately began to accelerate down the cable, when they reached the halfway point, Clark twisted to look at their destination coming at them at nearly fourty miles per hour. He glanced back at Collean and saw her non-chalantly slowly increasing the pressure she applied on the brake lever. Sure that she had done this before many times, Clark was reassured and looked back toward their destination. As they sped through the outer layer of leaves, he was taken aback by what he saw. A thirty foot tall section of one of the gigantic eight foot diameter bamboo had been tied to the near side of a great oak tree. The platform at the top seemed to offer the only entrance, as only small firing ports broke the surface below the roof.

As they glided to a smooth stop next to platform, Clark asked, "Is this a brace for the tree, or a lookout post?"

She slipped a loop of rope over a peg, jumped out onto the platform and answered, with a gay laugh, "Neither! It's a love nest!"

Kim looked up through her tears at Margaret, then back down to her daughter Becky's face. She felt so helpless, unable to help her child, or to even offer hope. The tearing feeling in her heart made her voice break as she asked, "Margaret, could you help me get Becky back to Lofthold?"

"Oh! Aye madam, that I could," Margaret responded, as she helped pull Becky off Kim's lap. With Kim's left side totally paralyzed, Margaret had to hold on to help Becky stay upright until Kim moved to her left side and drapped her immobilized arm over her shoulders. Margaret then moved to Becky's right side and they started to half drag, half carry the poor lass, wracked by sobs, back to Lofthold. Suddenly, the sound of several rapid fire shots rang over the forest to them from the general direction the men had disappeared into the forest.

Kim jerked reflexively towards the sound, just as three more shots were heard, and dislodged Becky's arm. She had to grasp Becky's waist to keep her from falling, but couldn't resist darting her gaze over the forest's edge, even though she knew logically that the shots had come from far beyond her eyesight.

Margaret glanced at Kim with wide eyes, "What manner of weapon was that? I have never heard shots fired so close together before"! Kim replied quickly, "Yeah, our weapons shoot faster than yours, but even so, those were awfully fast. If Evan and Peter are just showing off, they're going to get a piece of my mind, but if not, that means something is wrong." After a moments silence, she regained her hold on her daughter, and they continued their laborious progress up the hill towards the gate. The slope of the hill hid the gate and even the tops of the walls, and the dizzying hieghts of Safehold made it difficult to judge the distance, but as sweat ran down her brow, and her breathe became more and more labored, Kim argued with herself that it really couldn't be ten times as far away as she remembered.

Finally, the two women managed to gain the top of the slope, two hundred yards from the gates to Lofthold. They paused to catch their breathe, when a loud sudden shout came from down by the riverside they had just left. Turning back to look, they saw two straggling lines of men, dressed in a mottley assortment, trotting out of the forest carrying muskets. The young lad atop the guard tower, cried out in alarm, shouldered his own musket, took aim and fired. One of the men flew backwards bonelessly into the man behind him in a spray of blood and brains. The first rank stopped, shouldered their own muskets, and fired back at the guard tower in one long resounding crash. Their rounds smashed into the walls of the tower and the space where the lad had fired from moments before, but he had ducked down to reload and was unharmed. The group of young girls doing the wash down by the river, frozen into stark immobility for a few seconds at the cry of alarm, suddenly threw down their loads with shrieks of fear and dismay at the gunfire, lifted their skirts, and took off down the banks of the river away from the oncoming men at a dead sprint.