“What?” Sawwar sputtered out as he caught sight of our five-fingered hands. “How?”
“Those are both very good questions,” I replied. “But Bethany doesn’t know what we are, so we are going to put our six-fingered human costumes back on if that is alright with you.”
“That’s fine, but let me feel your hands first,” he replied. Bowen wandered over and let Sawwar inspect his hands and I let him feel mine as well. There was a lot of poking and prodding involved. Finally, I lost patience.
“That’s enough,” I said. “What we are should be abundantly clear at this point.”
“But what are you doing here?” he asked. “If you are found out you’ll be thrown into slavery.”
“I don’t have time to go into the full story in the short time we have, but let’s just say that we are on a self-imposed mission to improve the lot of some five-fingered humans. Bowen and Aleyda came into this world on this island. I arrived in this world by another less natural route. I lucked into some wealth and bought some of our kind at a slave auction. I wasn’t lying about the farm. That really exists. But none of that is why we revealed ourselves to you. I realize you are trying to be careful but you know things that no new arrival would know. And I don’t buy your bullshit story about being a member of some nomadic hunting and gathering tribe. Your clothes were clearly pieced together here on the island. I don’t think you made them. That means you are a member of a group of indeterminate size who has banded together and largely avoided capture. You haven’t been here for a week, you’ve been here much longer than that.”
He looked stricken as I spoke. In his mind, I suppose he thought he had all of us convinced with his cockamamie story. To have the house of cards come tumbling down around him must have been humbling. Don’t worry, buddy, I thought. We won’t think less of you. I have been there too many times to count.
“What are your intentions towards me now that I know your secret?” he asked.
“I’m not in this for my enjoyment. I think how people like us are treated in this world is abhorrent. If I was just trying to enjoy myself, I would be back at my farm living the good life. All the people back there think I am a fine and upstanding member of the six-fingered community. But I can’t just sit around and watch other people like me suffer. I can’t help everyone. I am not that powerful. I don’t have enough resources. I can help some, though, and some is better than none. But that didn’t answer your question, did it?”
“Not really,” he admitted.
“If you are affiliated with a larger group, I want to meet with that group. I have been kicking around some ideas to get a bunch of people off the island, although that will most likely require another trip with a chartered ship of our own. Funding that ship will be a problem, but I have some rough plans that might work. I know somewhere we might be able to raise the funds. Above all, though, if we are going to try something like that I need some coordination. That’s where your leadership comes in. I need to make certain that we can get enough people together and keep them together to make it worth our while. But, to answer your question, you are correct that now you could jeopardize everything we have built and everything that we have worked for. I hate to be so mercenary, but we are in one of those or else moments. I can’t risk you being captured again and spilling our secret, now or in the future. What’s it going to be?”
Honestly, I felt dirty as hell when I had to make that admission. I have never been an end justifies the means guy, at least when I was sober. I was in uncharted territory, ethically speaking. I actually wasn’t certain I had the guts to follow through with my threats. I was absolutely sure, though, that Bowen did. This was a needs of the many versus the needs of the one situation if there ever was one. I had decided to go for broke. I hoped that I hadn’t botched my assessment.
“Alright, yeah, you figured everything out,” he replied. “There is a group of us living up near the top of the mountain in a cave. Most slavers don’t make it up that far. The local wildlife around there is both very interesting and extremely deadly. I was out doing some foraging when that group captured me. I had never seen slavers that far up the mountain before. Nobody had.”
“That’s because people are getting desperate,” I responded. “The army is moving in and trying to take over the place. All kinds of companies are treating this as their last hurrah. I imagine you will see more people farther afield before this is all over. And if the army does take control, I am certain they will send some expeditions out as well. Your window of safety is rapidly closing. How many of you are there?”
“It varies from day to day,” he said. “Living up there is not an easy life. New people are found and pulled into the community regularly but we lose people fairly often as well. Our methods of defending ourselves are quite crude and if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time its fairly easy to become prey. Usually, there are about twenty five or thirty people in the camp at one time.”
Twenty five or thirty? In one swoop I could do more for the lot of my people than I had since I came to this world. There would be a lot of logistics to work out and I wasn’t certain I could add that many people to our little community without someone noticing in a negative way but his words filled me with hope.
“Alright,” I said. “When Bethany gets back, you need to pretend this never happened. Then, you need to lead us up the mountain to your group. I need to talk with your actual leadership and try to work some things out. How long have you been here anyway?”
“Eight or nine weeks. I lost track of time somewhere along the way. I went out drinking. Made it back home to my apartment alright. I got the bed spins and threw up. Then I passed out and woke up here. Luckily I was high on the mountain and got found in short order, still with a raging hangover. That’s how I knew I wasn’t dreaming. Now I am living like some primitive caveman on an island smack dab in the middle of nowhere. I am not cut out for this shit. I am an accountant.”
“Well, maybe if this all works out you will get your chance to account again,” I offered consolingly, although it didn’t sound like much of a consolation to me.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
I saw that Aleyda and Bethany were returning back up the trail. “Anything you want to add in the few seconds we have left to talk?” I asked Sawwar.
“Yeah, I got turned around on the way down the mountain and I’m not precisely sure how to find our camp again.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Do your best.”
As Aleyda and Bethany approached, I called out to them.
“How did the boots work out?” I said.
“It feels like I suddenly grew duck feet,” Bethany replied. “They feel fairly decent, all things considered.”
“Well, at least you have room to grow into them,” I joked. “Are we ready to move on? Sawwar has decided to stay with us.”
Aleyda gave me a hard look and subtly wiggled her fingers. I nodded at her. She shook her head at me. I had a feeling there would be a litany of complaints in my future.
“Sawwar said he saw some other people farther up the mountain, so let’s go see if we can find them,” I said. Then, we started wandering up the trail.
When viewed from the deck of a sailing vessel, the island didn’t look that large. It was just a few square miles of land out in the middle of the ocean after all. Once my feet were on the ground, though, that perspective changed fairly markedly. The topography was rough, in many places the forest was dense, and it was impossible to move in a straight line for any appreciable amount of time. More commonly than I would like we would wander down a path for a half an hour or forty five minutes only to find out that the trail ended at some obstacle that was either impassible or too difficult to overcome. Then, it was back down the trail we would go only to hope that the next one would offer better progress. We spent the next three days trekking and even with the inevitable backtracking we continue to climb up the mountain. We just weren’t very fast doing it. And we were further slowed by having to throw down with some of the local fauna a few times.
We ran into more of the cats and harvested a couple of more pelts. They were quite large, maybe the size of a mountain lion back home. Their pelts were tawny colored but crisscrossed by undulating stripes. Luckily, we came upon them singly. I had Bowen protect our two new charges while Aleyda and I fought. I could heal quickly and Aleyda had her skill and armor to fall back on if the skill failed her. I took a few shots but nothing that required protracted healing. Aleyda was unscathed.
We fought a pair of lizards that had to be at least ten feet long. They moved quite slowly and ponderously until they got within striking range, where they would lunge forward several feet with a burst of speed, their inches long teeth loudly clacking as they crashed together. Bowen had to involve himself in that fight or I expect we would either be dead or still be fighting. We defeated them by essentially baiting them then dodging their attacks. They did not regather themselves very quickly after they lunged so outnumbering them made all the difference. Having an extra person came in very handy. While two of us were dodging attacks, the third would do some damage while the attacks were reloading. It was a fight of attrition, pure and simple. Two of them against a single human and the human would have been lunch. After they were slain, I considered skinning them as well but I had no idea how we would transport ten foot long lizard skins. I gave up on the idea and collected a few of their teeth as souvenirs.
We also encountered more “normal” animals. One was a wolverine. It was feasting on the carcass of some goat-like creature. Their reputations for being angry and irritable were not overblown. When it spied us, it stood in front of the carcass grunting and snarling. That thing is mean as hell, I thought. Discretion being the better part of valor, we retreated back down the path and gave it plenty of time to finish its meal. Thankfully, it did not follow. We sat around for a couple of hours before we ventured forward again. The wolverine was gone. Needless to say, we didn’t make much progress that day.
And then there was the bear. I had always heard that if you make enough noise in bear country, especially if you are walking in a larger group, bears will leave you alone. That may be true in a place where bears are habituated to humans but it was not at all true on an isolated island where bears have likely spent generations never being really threatened by the humans they encountered. The bastard came bowling out of the forest right into me. Before long, I found myself pinned under its bulk being mauled. Black in color, it was eight or nine feet long and likely outweighed me by at least one order of magnitude. Its attack soon relented, though, when the other fighters with me started hacking it and stabbing it with sharp things. That made it quite angry. As it started pulling back from me, I drew my belt knife and started plunging it into its belly over and over again. Beset on all sides, it decided we weren’t the easy prey it was looking for and ran away. We tracked it and skinned it after it had bled out. It took me the rest of the day to recover from the attack, so there went more time.
Bethany and Sawwar were amazed by my rapid recovery powers. I didn’t bother explaining how I had obtained them. I just replied with one word. “Magic,” I said. Apparently it was enough because they didn’t press me for a better explanation.
Even though we suffered from some delays, foot by foot we made it up the slope of the mountain. After some time, Sawwar started to recognize some landmarks. I let him set our course from that point but apparently his memory wasn’t completely reliable. We had to retrace our path more than once. As we got higher on the mountain, though, he began navigating with more confidence and much better results.
He told me we were within about half an hour of travel when it happened. One moment, we were walking up a path in the forest on the stony side of the mountain and the next there were five people standing in front of me. They were dressed similarly to Sawwar. One was armed with a scavenged sword but the rest were wielding crude spears or clubs. Then, I heard more activity as five more came trotting up the path behind us. Ten on three. Poorly armed or not, those numbers were no joke.
“Sawwar, what have you done?” the man with the sword asked angrily. “You have lead slavers to us.”
Before Sawwar could answer, I responded. “This is not what it looks like. We are here to help you, not to harm you.”
“Quiet, slaver.” he said angrily. “I was not talking to you.”
“I am not some ten year old than you can just tell to shut up,” I spat back. “If we fight, best case scenario is that two or three of you survive, and I will guarantee you are not one of them. But that isn’t the question you should be asking. The question you need to ask yourself is how I am speaking your language.”
“Segerick, you need to listen to him,” Sawwar started to say.
“Stay out of this, Sawwar,” I said, quite hypocritically. “These men came here all ready for battle or at least primed for a pissing contest, and until they decide to listen nothing any of us say matters.”
I could see the thoughts flitting through Segerick’s mind. How was it that I could speak to him in his language. Finally, clearly deciding that he still had the better negotiating position, he spoke.
“Say what you need to say,” he said.
As the saying goes, in for a penny in for a pound.
“Bowen, take off your left glove and let them count the digits,” I said.