For a moment, he thought his ears were being deceived by some trick of the fire; perhaps pockets of moisture evaporating to steam were causing the high-pitched shrieks as they escaped from the super-heated wood but when he cocked his head to listen, he knew better. The cries were human — female.
Notre femmes, Claude had said, and now Dodge understood what he had meant. Our women.
The pirates had taken all the able-bodied villagers from the settlement, male and female alike, but there had only been men in the cage with Dodge. The women had been locked up elsewhere and as the screams grew to a fever pitch, he realized that their prison cell lay somewhere within the flaming fortress tree.
Dodge thrust the mortally wounded Krieger from his thoughts even as he also cast aside hesitation. Following the path of screams, he raced into the tree and into the heart of the fire.
The interior of the tree was wreathed in stifling flames. Dodge inadvertently drew a choking breath of soot-filled smoke then wisely covered his mouth and nose with a shirt-tail as he stumbled toward the ladder. The catwalk on the second level appeared to be on the verge of collapse, but there was no turning back now. He climbed up and charted the quickest path to an opening leading out onto one of the baobab’s massive limbs.
The screams were louder now, away from the crackling of wood being consumed by fire, but Dodge sensed that he was also physically closer to the captive women.
“I’m here to help!” he shouted, hoping that his earnest tone would compensate for any linguistic differences. It seemed to work, for the cries became more urgent and coherent. Dodge turned until he fixed their location; they were in a cage on the next highest branch, some twelve feet above and a quarter of the way around the exterior of the tree.
He ducked back inside the hollow trunk, but the catwalk was immersed in fire; there would be no going back that way. Cursing this turn of luck, he returned to the exterior. There was only one way to reach his goal and it was going to require him to employ skills he had not tested since childhood: he was going to have to climb a tree.
The rough bark made for a decent handhold, but Dodge was too battered and worn to play squirrel. To facilitate the traverse, he used the cutlass to hack out a series of steps reaching above head height and as far around the trunk as he could reach. Then, with the sword tucked in his belt, he started climbing.
It was much harder than he could have imagined. After only a few seconds, his forearms began quivering with the exertion. His anxiety escalated toward all-out panic when he happened to glance down and he forced himself to focus only on the goal, still well out of reach. He scaled out to the limit of his hastily cut notches then used the bark for a handhold as he lifted his feet up onto that last step.
He was close now; his head was level with the boardwalk deck that ran the length of the target limb, and under ideal circumstances, he wouldn’t have hesitated to make a leap of faith. He decided instead to get a little closer — to use the last of his flagging strength to shorten the gap for that final fateful jump. When he knew he could climb no more, he got a good grip with his left hand and drew the cutlass with his right.
Dodge coiled his body like a spring then launched out toward his goal. An instant later, his chest slammed into the edge of the boardwalk, knocking the wind from his lungs for the second time in only a few minutes, but this time he was ready. Ignoring the sudden breathlessness, he drove the cutlass tip into the deck even as he started to slide back from his tentative perch. The sword point caught fast, arresting his fall and giving him a precious moment’s rest to catch his breath and gather his energy for the final effort. The cries of the trapped women changed from fearful screams to shouts of much-needed encouragement. Thus motivated, Dodge hauled himself up to safety.
Smoke billowed from the opening into the trunk, a measure of the intensity of the blaze that now consumed the chimney-like interior of the tree. Dodge hadn’t yet figured out how he was going to get down from this new height, more than forty feet up, and while he had the rough start of a plan, it wasn’t his uppermost priority.
The cage housing the women was not situated above a deathtrap like the one Dodge had briefly occupied but was instead nestled in the hollow of several branches at the end of the tree limb. He chopped through the ropes that secured the door and nine women emerged, their clothes in tatters but their dignity still intact despite the abuse they had suffered at the hands of their captors. He led them back as close to the main trunk as the smoke and heat would permit. “Stay right here.”
Using the sword tip and his bare hands, he tore up a section of the walkway to expose the limb beneath. The arterial branch was as thick as his body — it had to be to support its own weight — and Dodge sensed his hare-brained plan for escape starting to crumble. Still, given the time constraints, a bad plan was better than none at all.
Using the cutlass like an axe, he started hewing at the limb. His first few attempts rebounded as though he had hit a stone, but he stayed at it, refining his attack until he had removed a section of bark nearly a foot wide. Using a crosshatch technique, he was soon knocking out wedges of wood as big as his fist, and little by little, the task became less daunting and the goal that much closer to reality. When he had hacked a third of the way through the limb, there was a sound like a gunshot as the weakened wood broke nearly in two and the entire section fell away. A loud crash followed as the network of branches at the end came to rest on the ground below.
Dodge gazed down the length of the felled limb, admiring his handiwork. “Looks like my luck is finally changing,” he remarked.
“Pardon, monsieur?”
He glanced at the woman who had spoken and shook his head ruefully. For all he knew, this was Claude’s wife — widow, rather — and the thought dampened his elation. He clambered onto the near-vertical surface. “Follow me.”
The slats of the boardwalk served as expedient ladder rungs, facilitating the escape from the doomed fortress. Dodge assisted the women in their descent and used gestures to urge them toward the river but freedom remained elusive. As soon as they left the cover afforded by the burning tree, they came into plain view of the pirates who were beginning to realize that their captives — who represented a source of future income — were slipping away. Some had taken refuge in the second fortress tree, but others were regrouping in the open and hefting clubs and blades as they moved to cut off the only avenue of escape. Dodge raced to the vanguard of his group to meet their charge.
He was only one man and against such odds, he should have been quickly overwhelmed. But it had been a long time since these men had faced a determined enemy, and Dodge’s manic confidence coupled with the wildly swinging tip of his sword, was more than they could bear. Without Krieger’s demon face and hellish wrath to drive them, they simply stood aside and let the fugitives pass. A few crossed swords with Dodge but did not pursue the fight after parrying his fleeting attack. The fugitives broke through the scattered ranks and made the final push for freedom while Dodge fell back to guard their rear. When the last of the women splashed into the muddy water, he whirled to join them.
He almost made it.
One moment he was running headlong for the marshy shallows, the next he was facedown and unable to move. In between jaw-clenching waves of agony, it occurred to him that he had once more been struck by lightning. Krieger?
But Krieger was dead…he had to be.
Dodge focused all his will power into pushing with his left hand, and rolled over onto his back. He wasn’t surprised to see the pirate leader, a walking corpse reanimated solely by the intensity of his hatred; there could have been no other explanation for the electrical discharge. In fact, Krieger’s toehold on life was tenuous at best. He shambled forward like a drunkard, barely able to keep himself erect. His head had swelled like an overripe fruit about to burst, and splinters of bone protruded from the wound in his skull. His eyes however were clear, and focused wholly on the object of his wrath. He took another lurching step forward and leveled his remaining steel talon at Dodge.