Chapter 2

Nabooru trudged on. Her lips were starting to crack and her throat was so dry she couldn't speak even if she wanted to.

The sand was still cool, even though the sun was well over the horizon. That sure wouldn't last long.

She had originally intended to stop for the day to conserve water, but just as the sun cleared the horizon she had been struck with an intense acute headache and nausea. The fit was so closely associated with daybreak that it was a safe educated guess that her body was becoming unable to adapt to changes in the availability of light.

Along with it having been over a week since she had last eaten and she wasn't hungry at all, the dehydration must be progressing much faster than she had initially supposed. Rather than having two to almost three days, it looked unlikely she would manage a full day, even.

The sand dunes abruptly stopped and were replaced with sandstone. I must be getting close. Then she heard it: a distant roar. The roar unique to very large quantities of water moving very quickly: Hyrule River.

She picked up her pace. The roar was still faint, but it was getting louder.

She skidded to a stop and flailed her arms desperately to prevent from falling forward. Finally she managed to make herself turn so that she could fall onto her stomach. She crawled back up to the edge. The water was down there alright. Almost one thousand feet straight down.

Nabooru had heard that the Hyrule River had eroded this chasm. Obviously anyone who said that had never seen it: erosion makes for steep slopes, not outright vertical cliffs. She looked to her left and to her right. There was no path to descend further on down and it was entirely possible that the Great Falls to the North and Lake Hylia to the South were both impossibly distant. She would die of thirst within sight of water. The last obstacle was just too powerful for her to ever overcome.

She gave the canyon one more look over. There was nothing she could use and no path she could follow down to the water…except a series of thin tan lines that ran down the cliff. It was an exchange pulley.

She walked toward the ropes.

The Gerudo lacked the Hylain's skills for architecture: they had tried several times, but had never managed to make a bridge that spanned the Hyrule River. So they had to improvise with exchange pulleys. The idea was simple: on the way down you would counterbalance the equipment with a barrel of water. As long as the equipment weighed more than the water barrel, a Gerudo at the top could use a friction knot to control the speed of decent. The way back up was balanced with a barrel of earth from the other side.

There were problems, of course. For a single rope to go from the top of the chasm to the water, the rope would have to way so much that it would break from it's own weight. The weight of the ropes would also start to affect the exchange pulleys by making braking at the end of the rope almost impossible. Between these two factors, exchange pulleys had to be broken up into stages. If the stages were longer than one hundred feet, it was light equipment only. People were allowed on one hundred foot segments, and the segments had to be seventy feet or less for heavy equipment.

Of course, Nabooru didn't have a person on the top to control her decent with a friction knot, nor did she have a counterweight set on the bottom. She would have to arrest each of the pulleys and freely repel down the stationary line.

She came up to the first line and undid the equipment around her ankle. Arresting the pulleys would be difficult without having anything designed to do so. If she just jabbed a rock into the pulley, a firm tug on the rope might loosen it or it might force the rock into the pulley with such force that the pulley would splinter.

She started to unravel the hemp ropes to separate the twines they were made of out. When she was done she took a good look at the pulley. It was a classic pulley from a block and tackle, with a hemp rope almost two inches in diameter running through it. She took one of the twines she had separated and passed it back and forth between the weaves of the rope, then tied the twine to itself. Hopefully that would hold it together.

Nabooru took the remaining twines and the cloth and wrapped her hands and feet as best she could. The cloth was by far superior for keeping her from getting rope-burn, so she put it on her right hand.

She pulled up a length of the rope and made a loop on the ground with it. She put her left leg into the loop, then pulled the rest of the rope over her shoulder into a dulfersitz repel. She looked at her groin. Every inch of rope would pass between her legs against her groin. A man could never do this without protective clothing. She would almost certainly get blisters, anyway.

She took a deep breath, then stepped up to the edge and put her dagger between her teeth. She turned around and put the balls of her feet right at the edge. With her right hand carefully controlling how much rope she fed through, she slowly leaned back and started walking backwards down the cliff.

Ganondorf looked from the promontory from the Hyrule side of the chasm. On the other side a thin tan thread flapped as a tiny dot of brown skin and red hair slid down it.

"She appears to have found one of our exchanges." Maeroo said. "Would you like me to cross over and…clean this up?"

One thread went slack as the brown dot changed over to the next thread.

"That will be unneeded. Once she's to the bottom and she's had her drink she'll need to either cross-over or head down-stream. The Hyrule River is very swift and is barely above freezing." Ganondorf chuckled. "She'll get far more water than she bargained for. You may return to the fortress."

Maeroo bowed and walked off the promontory.

"Probably." Ganondorf turned to leave as well. "…But I'm still hoping you'll cling to life. I still have use for someone like you."

Nabooru had just used up her last length of twine to descend the last rope. She slid herself off the rope onto a loading platform cut into the cliff. The platform was flat on the downstream side, but then gently sloped down further upriver so that the river flooded part of the platform so it could be used as a dock. Nabooru walked down to the water and drank.

The water was so cold that it left a knot in her stomach until the water had finally warmed up. She would have to be patient and drink slowly.

After several minutes of drinking and resting, she stood and recovered her dagger and the strip of cloth. The dagger's sheath now had teeth-marks in it and parts of the cloth had been worn through.

She gave herself a once-over. Both her hands were developing blisters and a line of blisters from rope-burn wrapped around her where the rope had been with several blisters on her groin. There were a few marks still left from her torture, but the few marks that hadn't healed over were inconsequential against her new injuries.

She tried her best to treat the blisters with the cold river water, but it was a loosing battle against so many. Finally she just decided to do her best to ignore them.

She really didn't have any option but to ride the river downstream. Hyrule River's flow was so strong and the way back up so far that there really wasn't another choice.

The sun cleared the edge of the chasm. White ripples glistened on the river.

Nabooru gave a good look around. There was no wood or anything that could float, so she would have to just float herself down the river. There was a very real chance that she would get hypothermia if it took too long to get to Lake Hylia.

She tied the cloth strip to her dagger, then tied it around her neck. She took a few breaths and jumped in.