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Fine Alabaster Isle Whitewood served as an excellent base to compile a raft, or just to dig-out a canoe. Tying several massive, buoyant trunks together into a viable raft became the adolescents of Secondhome’s rainy season project of sorts. Even Kur'iel joined in when a third-cousin of his clan didn’t require his labor.
The flooded temple formed a natural harbor of sorts. A team of teens could haul runt whitewoods that had been felled in various storms down to the temple with long strings of intertwined dew vines. Once in the water, the trunks would float, hemmed in by the ruins and kept there with only moderate restraints. Ropes made from buoyant fur of an uplands armadillo – hard to source in the Stormheaths, but of no other use beyond pontoon bridges so there were plenty of spares – tied the logs together. Before long they had the beginnings of a workable raft more than capable of comfortably fitting five people. In fact, it could hold up to twelve full-grown adult Stormlanders in a pinch, with room for cargo.
It would be crewed by Maat, Sara, and Lloyd of course. Sam’ien and Kur ought to be able to spare at least a day for this river adventure.
The question then became, where to take this new craft? The Quarterchief’s ornate map could help in this regard. Stormlanders such as acting chief Kev’kurien scoffed at the outland-clan’s strange “cartographic” magics, instead opting to describe landmarks in elaborately detailed hours-long ballads. This is to say, Ma’at had the map room to himself for long hours of the day.
The River Torrent cut a mile-wide swathe through lush tropical jungles on the south side of the Alabaster Isle. It meandered along, opening into a wide delta floodplain as it neared the sea. Further up, it turned to near-constant rapids and eddies in a canyon many times deeper than it was wide. The raft would disintegrate in waters half that vicious, and it wouldn’t last at all on the open seas around the isle. But they could take it up and down the river on quick jaunts – preferably upriver, away from the hostile neighbors.
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With no indication of when the Laval settlement cross-river could decide to launch another, larger raid, the youth of Secondhome were required to have an adult escort whenever they were off-compound.
In this case, that was none other than Hector. While he couldn’t see any raiders approach at a distance, once alerted to their presence the old man’s vision wasn’t so poor that he couldn’t fight them off.
“Don’t need to make out every detail in a target’s face to tackle them to the ground,” Hector was fond of saying. “Been that way since we were your age.”
The Quarterchief and Hector had been part of an elaborate squad of ritual ball players at some point, though the exact rules, type of sport, and reason for playing were locked away in tomes in the old language. From what the youth had managed to gather over the years, it was quite martial in nature.
At any rate, Maat didn’t mind having the old man around, though he sensed that Lloyd and Sara felt otherwise.
“The ol’ temple makes a natural harbor,” Hector said, sipping on his mid-morning water rations as he supervised the finishing touches. “Why, this takes me back.”
“Oh, did you used to spend much time on the river, Mister Hector?” Maat asked.
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Hector shrugged. “Not this one. My father was a, well, shipbuilder, let’s say. Used to hang out beside a lake on summer afternoons.”
“Must’ve been really hot,” Lloyd said. “How’d grandpa work in the water while it was steaming?”
“You never talk about grandma and grandpa, or any clan,” Sara added.
“Wait until you’re all north of twenty,” Hector said with a dismissive grunt. “Anyway, spent long hours working with boats, maintaining them. Had a big glass-bottom boat…”
Maat and the crew were burning compartments into the thick “hull” of the raft with a slow, controlled flame. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go out on any body of water in a boat with a glass bottom, not when it left you fully visible to the giant river catfish lurking behind layers of silt.
They’d spent a week stripping the fireproof bark away, then both waking periods of another three days carefully prepping the boat so that it didn’t burn down when they slowly dug out storage nooks. It was that or leave everything on the deck to be thrown into the water at any inconvenient bump.
Their work continued until the end of the second week. With no word from the Quarterchief and minimal duties expected of them under the interim chief, they could put in work on both waking periods, greatly expediting the process.
And so, exactly eighteen days after cutting down the first ailing whitewood sapling, the youth of Secondhome were ready to push off.
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“Got a destination?” Hector asked.
Maat and Hector were alone in the map room. The younger man had his thumb on the raised bumps that represented the flooded temple.
“Downriver is right out,” Maat said. “Safe passage can’t be guaranteed. The far shore is in the same boat.”
Hector snickered. “Guess so. That Laval scion must really hate your guts.”
“Anyway.” Maat punctuated this with a cough. “That just leaves this shore upriver, a location that can be reached in a day.”
They considered the map. Dozens of similar raised bumps sat all over the river – other temples. The vast majority were in the river delta. There was one due north-west on the far shore. Along the river’s midsection, at its widest (and least populated) point, there were barely twelve temples. On this side of the river, there were only three. Once they hit the canyon rapids, there was only one – a single dot at the river’s very source.
Maat pointed out the three viable targets. “Goanna explore these three temples. It should be doable in a day, especially with the tides in our favor and the return trip on the currents speeding things along considerably.”
And if not, they could always camp in one of the temples doing the river-boiling hazy early-afternoon hours.
“River temples, huh?”
Hector’s face was contorted into a perpetual squint to better focus on the map. He scratched at his beard, then sighed.
“Guess it was inevitable eventually. Michael explored most of these in the early days – well before you were born. If it’s treasure you’re looking for, these sites will have already been picked over a dozen times over. Beyond that, eh, well, sure you don’t want to wait for the Quarterchief to return?”
Maat shook his head. “Won’t be anything we can’t handle. And treasure is no object.”
In truth, Maat was just looking to go out on an adventure of his own. His father and Hector, and some number of outlander comrades many of whom were dead or gone by now, they’d already been performing great deeds, exploring the isle, and establishing reputations for themselves by the time they were Maat’s age. Teaching initiates how to spear-fish helped the compound, sure, but it did not fulfil the ego-based drive to perform great, adventurous deeds. And that, Maat felt in his own mind, was what separated him from the Quarterchief’s generation.
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“Chief expressly said to accompany you all everywhere you go until he returns,” Hector said at their impromptu dock. “But, what the hell, I went out in my first boat alone when I was fourteen. Go have fun, kids.”
Lloyd breathed a sigh of relief.
“You’re not going to get in trouble, will you, dad?” Sara asked.
“Nah. If Michael didn’t want you to head out on your own, he wouldn’t have put me in charge of supervising your boat building. Go have fun. Just be back in two days, or we’re sending out a search party for ya.”
Hector waved the crew of the yet-unnamed raft off. Maat and Lloyd pushed off with extra-long paddle-sticks. They maneuvered the raft through the low-lying flooded stumps of some collapsed buttresses on the way out into the wider River Torrent.
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