Waltz
By Alekto
Chapter 4: Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.
I can't say how long I stood there, watching, staring at her.
She stared back, and I felt inexorably drawn into the depths of dark eyes whose regard I had previously delighted in. In them for only the briefest instant I saw a flicker like dancing flame, but it was enough to shatter the moment. Her gaze, her whole mien was not that of the woman I knew, of the woman that I perhaps even loved.
"Marguerite," I breathed, more in remembrance than as any gesture of recognition to the woman who stood before me. I could feel the dampness of tears pricking at the corners of my eyes, and a sense of loss that was matched by my growing rage at whoever had done this to her. "Oh God, Marguerite!" The anguished words were torn from me and I slid listlessly to the ground. "What the hell have you done to her?" I vaguely felt the touch of a consoling hand on my shoulder, but whose it was I couldn't say. My own tear-blurred gaze slid away from her, no longer able even to look at her face.
"J-- John?"
I looked up. It was *her* voice, not the grating mockery that had taunted earlier. With frantic haste I rubbed clear my eyes and scrambled to my feet. Her whole stance was different, more wearied, far less sure. On her face I could see the beginnings of a frown playing on her forehead as she blinked in apparent confusion. Then her eyes cleared, darkened, and the twisted smile returned.
She-- *It* looked at my face, and the anguish which I couldn't hide must have caused some amusement if its mocking laughter was any indication. Its mirth faded and it stalked towards the cage stopping just the other side of the wooden bars. Its hand lifted up and reached out as if to caress my face. My own hand lashed out in reply and caught the slender wrist before it could touch me. I consider myself strong, but stopping that hand's forward motion took every ounce of strength I possessed.
The hand jerked back, breaking my grasp as easily as if I were a child. The smile changed, softened, until it was almost regretful. "Es mindeg is ejjel lesz mar... ejjel... ejjel..." The words seemed to echo in my mind.
I could feel the strength flee from my body and the darkness of unconsciousness begin to gather at the edges of my vision. Marguerite's face seemed to be drifting away from me at the end of a long, dark tunnel.
All I could think as the light finally faded was: 'not again'.
Then everything was dark.
*********
My sleep was dreamless, after the parade of nightmares, mercifully so.
The sky held the rose tinged glow of dawn when I awoke in the village, in the cage, alone. Challenger, Malone and Veronica were nowhere to be seen. With a quick roll I pulled myself to my feet, only to have to cling onto the bars for a few seconds as a sense of vertigo washed over me. My head was pounding, and my mouth and throat felt sandpaper dry.
I rolled up my sleeve looking for the pinprick injury from the blowgun's dart that had knocked me out... how many days ago? There was no sign of it, not even a red mark or a scar. With a growing sense of unreality I checked the shirt for a hole that might have corresponded to the wound that I remembered receiving.
The shirt was mystifyingly intact. I looked around at the empty cage. "What the hell is going on?" I muttered, as much to break the oppressive silence as anything else.
Unsurprisingly there was no reply.
In the growing light I noticed the door of the cage was slightly ajar. Beyond, where 'Marguerite' had stood, there was a small pile of gear: a gourd with a carrying strap, several small leaf-wrapped packages, a crude machete and a simple wooden spear about six feet long.
Need quickly overcame caution and I walked over to the pile. A cursory glance about myself gave no hint of being watched or of anything that might suggest the pile was a trap - at least not an obvious one. I reached for the gourd and picked it up, delighting in its weight and the faint splash of what I desperately prayed was clean water within. Unstoppering it, I took a careful sniff that revealed nothing amiss, then I dribbled some over my hand and dabbed a little on the end of my tongue. So far as I could tell it was okay to drink, so I threw caution to the wind and drank.
The small packages looked to contain some form of pemmican. I took a mouthful and resolved to wait for a few hours to check for any ill effects. In that time I decided to search the village to see if I could find any sign of the others or of any of our gear - especially any of the guns. Whoever had taken them had done a good job of searching us; even the derringer I often carried down my boot was missing.
I found no trace of any recent presence in any of the huts or any clue of how or where the others had been taken. The ground outside the huts was too hard to hold the tracks of anything except a fair sized dinosaur. From what I could see, nowhere in the village was there any sign of a struggle. I could only surmise that like myself they had been knocked unconscious. The 'how' of that was still very much a cause for concern.
On my final circuit around the outskirts of the village I finally began to find some tracks. Marguerite's boot prints I knew as well as my own handwriting, but the gait looked off somehow. Nearby there were other foot prints: bare feet, human, not apeman. I could feel a smile of satisfaction creep over my face. No ghost I'd heard of ever left a trail. Whatever the Kothoga were, they weren't ghosts and if they were alive, they could be tracked.
I went back to the supplies that had been left for me and packaged them up. The spear I'd been left was well made: a single piece of good, solid wood with a fire-hardened point. But even so, spear against dinosaur made for poor odds. Hefting it lightly, getting an idea of its balance, I headed over to where the trail from Marguerite's boots disappeared off into the tangle of undergrowth.
I took a last look at the village before I turned and ducked into the twilight murk of the jungle floor.
*********
The days drifted on, and a slight lifting of the gloom at ground level was the only clue that high overhead the sun was blazing. Under the canopy the air was still and heavy with moisture. The smell of rot was everywhere: dead leaves rotting in the heat, fallen wood rotting away in moss-covered logs sinking slowly into the mud. My clothes, soaked with sweat, clung to my skin. My arm was stiff and aching from hacking through undergrowth that whoever I was following had apparently been able to bypass somehow.
A couple of hours in I paused for a while and, as it appeared to have had no ill effects, snacked on the rest of the pemmican. The chance discovery of a tiny, clear running stream allowed me to drink my fill and top up the gourd. All in all, though, it was hard going. The rest of the forest on the plateau was nowhere near so dense, and I had become unused to the sheer hard work it was to travel even a short distance through real jungle.
Sound slowly returned to the jungle the further we went from the village. High overhead, birds shrieked their warning of my passage, their cries returned by the alarmed screeches of spider monkeys disturbed from their foraging. Far away the ear shattering cries of howler monkeys resonated through the jungle, for a while drowning out closer, quieter sounds.
Such as the creel of a hunting raptor.
The dinosaur was upon me almost before I had time to turn. It bounded from the cover of a straggly bush, its mouth gaping, its teeth grabbing for my neck. Hard learned instincts saved me from immediate death as I dropped to the ground and rolled desperately away from it. The raptor landed, then spun on its haunches with frightening speed to snap at me again.
Still off balance from avoiding its first attack, I swung with the machete and more by luck than intent slashed deep into the side of the beast's snout. It reared back with a cry of pain, blood splashing from the wound. Never one to ignore an opportunity, I leapt forwards, the machete held two- handed and swung at the raptor's exposed throat. Blood gushed from the deep cut, running down the blade and over my hands. The raptor took a couple of unsteady steps backwards before settling to the ground with a low sigh.
I stood over it, panting as much from excitement as from the stress of the fight. On the ground, blood pooled around the raptor's head and started to soak into the mud. Its legs gave one convulsive shudder and then it lay still. I leant down, wiped the machete clean on some leaves, sheathed it and picked up the spear.
Then from far too close came the call of another raptor, drawn by the scent of fresh blood in the air. I backed away, hoping, praying, that it would ignore me in favour of the fresh carrion on the ground. Moments later the raptor sprang from the jungle, landing on the corpse of the other. Its head lashed left and right as it proclaimed its ownership of the kill before lowering its muzzle to feed.
I continued backing away, keeping my eyes on the feasting raptor. The all too audible crack of a breaking twig told me I should have been paying equal attention to where I was treading. I glanced down for scarcely a moment, then back up to see the raptor bounding towards me.
With less than a second to act I brought the spear to bear. Ignorant of the threat posed by the spear, it leapt towards me. Unlike the previous attack, I felt a certain amount of confidence. After all, the Zanga had long hunted raptors with nothing more than spears with some success, and modesty apart I figured myself at least the equal of a Zanga hunter.
It was almost too easy: the raptor's leap carried it onto the spear. Then I saw the danger as the raptor's own weight wrenched the spear from my grasp, and too late for it to be of any use I realised that I should have braced it. What should have been a straightforward kill turned suddenly messy as the impaled raptor fell to the ground and started lashing around in panic with tail and claws. I tried to back pedal, to dodge, to do anything but just get out of the way.
It didn't work. The raptor's tail slammed against my knee and sent me crashing to the ground. I held out a arm to stay my fall, but it became entangled in the dense branches of a bush and was twisted backwards as I fell. I had a moment's foreknowledge before I heard the horribly audible ~crack~ and felt the first white-hot blaze of pain before the arm finally came free and I crumpled to the ground.
I don't know how long I lay there; right arm cradling the left, feeling each heart beat as a stab of pain. With a massive effort of will, I rolled to a half-seated position and looked down at my left arm fearing the worst. Had I been in less pain I probably would have smiled at my relative good fortune. The arm was still straight and the skin unbroken. It could easily have been so very much worse. Trying to think analytically about it, I guessed one of the two bones in the forearm must have gone: radius or ulna. I was never sure which was which. Or it might have been the wrist. It certainly hurt enough.
I sat there a while as only feet away the second raptor's convulsions slowed as it too died. My arm throbbed while I tried to consider what to do. One thing was sure: I couldn't stay where I was. The only thing likely to find me was another raptor. I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket, and between teeth and one good hand fashioned a sling. The delicate, agonising process of manoeuvring my arm into the sling took almost as long. After a few more minutes for the pain to subside to a more manageable level, I hauled myself to my feet and retrieved the spear from the raptor's corpse.
Then I turned and continued on through the jungle, albeit at a much reduced pace. About a couple of hundred yards further on I found a tree whose leaves could be chewed as a mild pain killer. It wasn't ideal, but in the absence of the medical supplies we'd brought with us, it was as good as it was going to get.
Walking through the jungle, my mind drifted and my thoughts kept going back to the others. The trail I was following was the only one I'd found going out of the village, hence I'd followed it, but so far I'd found no sign on it of Challenger, Veronica or Malone. Apart from the light tread of bare feet, the only other human tracks I'd seen were of Marguerite. I still couldn't help but think I should have made another few circles deeper in the jungle around the village, try to see if I could find any hint of where the others had been taken. After all, it was three of them against one of Marguerite. If what I was following really was Marguerite. If it wasn't all just another nightmare I'd yet to wake from.
If-- if-- if-- if-- A man could lose his mind worrying about that. 'If you can dream and not make dreams your master...' Kipling's line sprang unlooked for into my mind. Was that what I was doing? I knew for sure that I was being manipulated, though as yet I had no idea by whom or for what reason. I wondered if it was some kind of vendetta against me: I'd made enemies as well as allies since arriving on the plateau, but all that I could bring to mind would simply have had me killed, with varying degrees of unpleasantness. I couldn't think of anyone who would have gone to the lengths of getting involved in anything along the lines of this Byzantine mystery I was presently caught up in.
I sat down to rest, to think things through and try to get some kind of perspective. Marguerite had apparently been critically injured by an apeman who had subsequently disappeared, then had gone missing only to reappear - not acting remotely like Marguerite and with no sign of the terrible head injury caused by the apeman's attack. Then there was the equally mysterious illness that had left me unconscious for days, not to mention my getting knocked out by a blowgun dart that had afterwards left no wound. As for what had happened to the others I had no clue.
Things that couldn't happen, had happened, were happening. For one vertiginous moment I wondered if everything that had happened was real, or if I were dead, fevered or asleep.
I wondered if perhaps I had gone mad.
That would make sense.
But then I remembered in the village the briefest glimpse of the real Marguerite, lost and frightened as if trapped in her own mind, whispering my name, and mad or not, it was a plea I couldn't ignore.
And mad or not, it was Marguerite I was going after.
To be continued...
By Alekto
Chapter 4: Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.
I can't say how long I stood there, watching, staring at her.
She stared back, and I felt inexorably drawn into the depths of dark eyes whose regard I had previously delighted in. In them for only the briefest instant I saw a flicker like dancing flame, but it was enough to shatter the moment. Her gaze, her whole mien was not that of the woman I knew, of the woman that I perhaps even loved.
"Marguerite," I breathed, more in remembrance than as any gesture of recognition to the woman who stood before me. I could feel the dampness of tears pricking at the corners of my eyes, and a sense of loss that was matched by my growing rage at whoever had done this to her. "Oh God, Marguerite!" The anguished words were torn from me and I slid listlessly to the ground. "What the hell have you done to her?" I vaguely felt the touch of a consoling hand on my shoulder, but whose it was I couldn't say. My own tear-blurred gaze slid away from her, no longer able even to look at her face.
"J-- John?"
I looked up. It was *her* voice, not the grating mockery that had taunted earlier. With frantic haste I rubbed clear my eyes and scrambled to my feet. Her whole stance was different, more wearied, far less sure. On her face I could see the beginnings of a frown playing on her forehead as she blinked in apparent confusion. Then her eyes cleared, darkened, and the twisted smile returned.
She-- *It* looked at my face, and the anguish which I couldn't hide must have caused some amusement if its mocking laughter was any indication. Its mirth faded and it stalked towards the cage stopping just the other side of the wooden bars. Its hand lifted up and reached out as if to caress my face. My own hand lashed out in reply and caught the slender wrist before it could touch me. I consider myself strong, but stopping that hand's forward motion took every ounce of strength I possessed.
The hand jerked back, breaking my grasp as easily as if I were a child. The smile changed, softened, until it was almost regretful. "Es mindeg is ejjel lesz mar... ejjel... ejjel..." The words seemed to echo in my mind.
I could feel the strength flee from my body and the darkness of unconsciousness begin to gather at the edges of my vision. Marguerite's face seemed to be drifting away from me at the end of a long, dark tunnel.
All I could think as the light finally faded was: 'not again'.
Then everything was dark.
*********
My sleep was dreamless, after the parade of nightmares, mercifully so.
The sky held the rose tinged glow of dawn when I awoke in the village, in the cage, alone. Challenger, Malone and Veronica were nowhere to be seen. With a quick roll I pulled myself to my feet, only to have to cling onto the bars for a few seconds as a sense of vertigo washed over me. My head was pounding, and my mouth and throat felt sandpaper dry.
I rolled up my sleeve looking for the pinprick injury from the blowgun's dart that had knocked me out... how many days ago? There was no sign of it, not even a red mark or a scar. With a growing sense of unreality I checked the shirt for a hole that might have corresponded to the wound that I remembered receiving.
The shirt was mystifyingly intact. I looked around at the empty cage. "What the hell is going on?" I muttered, as much to break the oppressive silence as anything else.
Unsurprisingly there was no reply.
In the growing light I noticed the door of the cage was slightly ajar. Beyond, where 'Marguerite' had stood, there was a small pile of gear: a gourd with a carrying strap, several small leaf-wrapped packages, a crude machete and a simple wooden spear about six feet long.
Need quickly overcame caution and I walked over to the pile. A cursory glance about myself gave no hint of being watched or of anything that might suggest the pile was a trap - at least not an obvious one. I reached for the gourd and picked it up, delighting in its weight and the faint splash of what I desperately prayed was clean water within. Unstoppering it, I took a careful sniff that revealed nothing amiss, then I dribbled some over my hand and dabbed a little on the end of my tongue. So far as I could tell it was okay to drink, so I threw caution to the wind and drank.
The small packages looked to contain some form of pemmican. I took a mouthful and resolved to wait for a few hours to check for any ill effects. In that time I decided to search the village to see if I could find any sign of the others or of any of our gear - especially any of the guns. Whoever had taken them had done a good job of searching us; even the derringer I often carried down my boot was missing.
I found no trace of any recent presence in any of the huts or any clue of how or where the others had been taken. The ground outside the huts was too hard to hold the tracks of anything except a fair sized dinosaur. From what I could see, nowhere in the village was there any sign of a struggle. I could only surmise that like myself they had been knocked unconscious. The 'how' of that was still very much a cause for concern.
On my final circuit around the outskirts of the village I finally began to find some tracks. Marguerite's boot prints I knew as well as my own handwriting, but the gait looked off somehow. Nearby there were other foot prints: bare feet, human, not apeman. I could feel a smile of satisfaction creep over my face. No ghost I'd heard of ever left a trail. Whatever the Kothoga were, they weren't ghosts and if they were alive, they could be tracked.
I went back to the supplies that had been left for me and packaged them up. The spear I'd been left was well made: a single piece of good, solid wood with a fire-hardened point. But even so, spear against dinosaur made for poor odds. Hefting it lightly, getting an idea of its balance, I headed over to where the trail from Marguerite's boots disappeared off into the tangle of undergrowth.
I took a last look at the village before I turned and ducked into the twilight murk of the jungle floor.
*********
The days drifted on, and a slight lifting of the gloom at ground level was the only clue that high overhead the sun was blazing. Under the canopy the air was still and heavy with moisture. The smell of rot was everywhere: dead leaves rotting in the heat, fallen wood rotting away in moss-covered logs sinking slowly into the mud. My clothes, soaked with sweat, clung to my skin. My arm was stiff and aching from hacking through undergrowth that whoever I was following had apparently been able to bypass somehow.
A couple of hours in I paused for a while and, as it appeared to have had no ill effects, snacked on the rest of the pemmican. The chance discovery of a tiny, clear running stream allowed me to drink my fill and top up the gourd. All in all, though, it was hard going. The rest of the forest on the plateau was nowhere near so dense, and I had become unused to the sheer hard work it was to travel even a short distance through real jungle.
Sound slowly returned to the jungle the further we went from the village. High overhead, birds shrieked their warning of my passage, their cries returned by the alarmed screeches of spider monkeys disturbed from their foraging. Far away the ear shattering cries of howler monkeys resonated through the jungle, for a while drowning out closer, quieter sounds.
Such as the creel of a hunting raptor.
The dinosaur was upon me almost before I had time to turn. It bounded from the cover of a straggly bush, its mouth gaping, its teeth grabbing for my neck. Hard learned instincts saved me from immediate death as I dropped to the ground and rolled desperately away from it. The raptor landed, then spun on its haunches with frightening speed to snap at me again.
Still off balance from avoiding its first attack, I swung with the machete and more by luck than intent slashed deep into the side of the beast's snout. It reared back with a cry of pain, blood splashing from the wound. Never one to ignore an opportunity, I leapt forwards, the machete held two- handed and swung at the raptor's exposed throat. Blood gushed from the deep cut, running down the blade and over my hands. The raptor took a couple of unsteady steps backwards before settling to the ground with a low sigh.
I stood over it, panting as much from excitement as from the stress of the fight. On the ground, blood pooled around the raptor's head and started to soak into the mud. Its legs gave one convulsive shudder and then it lay still. I leant down, wiped the machete clean on some leaves, sheathed it and picked up the spear.
Then from far too close came the call of another raptor, drawn by the scent of fresh blood in the air. I backed away, hoping, praying, that it would ignore me in favour of the fresh carrion on the ground. Moments later the raptor sprang from the jungle, landing on the corpse of the other. Its head lashed left and right as it proclaimed its ownership of the kill before lowering its muzzle to feed.
I continued backing away, keeping my eyes on the feasting raptor. The all too audible crack of a breaking twig told me I should have been paying equal attention to where I was treading. I glanced down for scarcely a moment, then back up to see the raptor bounding towards me.
With less than a second to act I brought the spear to bear. Ignorant of the threat posed by the spear, it leapt towards me. Unlike the previous attack, I felt a certain amount of confidence. After all, the Zanga had long hunted raptors with nothing more than spears with some success, and modesty apart I figured myself at least the equal of a Zanga hunter.
It was almost too easy: the raptor's leap carried it onto the spear. Then I saw the danger as the raptor's own weight wrenched the spear from my grasp, and too late for it to be of any use I realised that I should have braced it. What should have been a straightforward kill turned suddenly messy as the impaled raptor fell to the ground and started lashing around in panic with tail and claws. I tried to back pedal, to dodge, to do anything but just get out of the way.
It didn't work. The raptor's tail slammed against my knee and sent me crashing to the ground. I held out a arm to stay my fall, but it became entangled in the dense branches of a bush and was twisted backwards as I fell. I had a moment's foreknowledge before I heard the horribly audible ~crack~ and felt the first white-hot blaze of pain before the arm finally came free and I crumpled to the ground.
I don't know how long I lay there; right arm cradling the left, feeling each heart beat as a stab of pain. With a massive effort of will, I rolled to a half-seated position and looked down at my left arm fearing the worst. Had I been in less pain I probably would have smiled at my relative good fortune. The arm was still straight and the skin unbroken. It could easily have been so very much worse. Trying to think analytically about it, I guessed one of the two bones in the forearm must have gone: radius or ulna. I was never sure which was which. Or it might have been the wrist. It certainly hurt enough.
I sat there a while as only feet away the second raptor's convulsions slowed as it too died. My arm throbbed while I tried to consider what to do. One thing was sure: I couldn't stay where I was. The only thing likely to find me was another raptor. I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket, and between teeth and one good hand fashioned a sling. The delicate, agonising process of manoeuvring my arm into the sling took almost as long. After a few more minutes for the pain to subside to a more manageable level, I hauled myself to my feet and retrieved the spear from the raptor's corpse.
Then I turned and continued on through the jungle, albeit at a much reduced pace. About a couple of hundred yards further on I found a tree whose leaves could be chewed as a mild pain killer. It wasn't ideal, but in the absence of the medical supplies we'd brought with us, it was as good as it was going to get.
Walking through the jungle, my mind drifted and my thoughts kept going back to the others. The trail I was following was the only one I'd found going out of the village, hence I'd followed it, but so far I'd found no sign on it of Challenger, Veronica or Malone. Apart from the light tread of bare feet, the only other human tracks I'd seen were of Marguerite. I still couldn't help but think I should have made another few circles deeper in the jungle around the village, try to see if I could find any hint of where the others had been taken. After all, it was three of them against one of Marguerite. If what I was following really was Marguerite. If it wasn't all just another nightmare I'd yet to wake from.
If-- if-- if-- if-- A man could lose his mind worrying about that. 'If you can dream and not make dreams your master...' Kipling's line sprang unlooked for into my mind. Was that what I was doing? I knew for sure that I was being manipulated, though as yet I had no idea by whom or for what reason. I wondered if it was some kind of vendetta against me: I'd made enemies as well as allies since arriving on the plateau, but all that I could bring to mind would simply have had me killed, with varying degrees of unpleasantness. I couldn't think of anyone who would have gone to the lengths of getting involved in anything along the lines of this Byzantine mystery I was presently caught up in.
I sat down to rest, to think things through and try to get some kind of perspective. Marguerite had apparently been critically injured by an apeman who had subsequently disappeared, then had gone missing only to reappear - not acting remotely like Marguerite and with no sign of the terrible head injury caused by the apeman's attack. Then there was the equally mysterious illness that had left me unconscious for days, not to mention my getting knocked out by a blowgun dart that had afterwards left no wound. As for what had happened to the others I had no clue.
Things that couldn't happen, had happened, were happening. For one vertiginous moment I wondered if everything that had happened was real, or if I were dead, fevered or asleep.
I wondered if perhaps I had gone mad.
That would make sense.
But then I remembered in the village the briefest glimpse of the real Marguerite, lost and frightened as if trapped in her own mind, whispering my name, and mad or not, it was a plea I couldn't ignore.
And mad or not, it was Marguerite I was going after.
To be continued...