“You’ve had experience in this kind of travel. I haven’t. Just get us off this ridge as quickly as you can and down into thick woodland with a good-sized river. Then I think we’ll be able to shake off the trackers.”
They skidded and tramped and once even rappelled over a small cliff in their downhill flight, making better time when they found a dry wash that turned into a thin rivulet in the lower elevations. Trees crowded together and became taller, roofing over the widening stream and shading them from some of the sun’s heat. As they splashed down the rock-clogged watercourse they startled big brown trout and fishing weasels that resembled pale minks. They took to the stream bank, first on one side, then on the other, in an attempt to confuse pursuit. Claude had them tramp an obvious trail up a tributary creek, relieve themselves to enhance the spoor, then double back in the water and continue wading down the original stream. It was becoming dangerously deep in places, broken with short pouroffs and stretches of white water.
Claude called a halt in midmorning. He and Felice were in good shape, but Richard and the nun sagged with weary gratitude. They rested on half-submerged rocks out in a backwater pool, straining their ears for sound of pursuit. They heard nothing but an explosive splat! a short distance downstream.
“If I didn’t know better,” Amerie remarked, “I’d say that was a beaver.”
“Quite likely,” Claude said. “Might be our old friend Castor, but it’s more likely Steneofiber, a more primitive type that didn’t go in much for dams but just dug holes in the…”
“Shhh,” Felice hissed. “Listen.”
Rushing water, birdsong, the occasional screeches of what Claude had told them was an arboreal ape, a small squirrel chattering its annoyance.
And something large clearing its throat.
They froze on their rocks and instinctively drew up their legs, which they had been dangling in the water. The noise was a guttural cough, unlike anything they had heard before in the Pliocene. The bushes on the left bank swayed slightly as an animal passed through and came down to the stream to drink. It was a cat, massive as an African lion but with large canine teeth protruding like daggers below its closed jaws. It muttered to itself like a dyspeptic gourmet after an overly lavish feast and took a few desultory laps. Its upper body was decorated with marbled polygons of russet edged with tan and black; these merged into dark stripes about the animal’s face, and black spots on its underparts and lower limbs. It had whiskers of heroic proportions.
The breeze shifted and carried the scent of the humans to the drinking sabertooth. It raised its head, stared directly at them with yellow eyes and snarled, exuding the studied restraint of a creature in complete command of an awkward situation. Felice met its gaze.
The others were immobile with horror, waiting for the cat to spring into the water. But it did no such thing. Its belly was full and its cubs were waiting, and Felice’s mind stroked its feline vanity and told it that the scrawny prey crouching on the rocks was scarcely worth a ducking. So the machairodus lapped and glared at them and wrinkled the bridge of its nose in a contemptuous one-sided snort, and at last withdrew into the undergrowth.
“It will take me five minutes,” Amerie whispered, “to offer a Mass of Thanksgiving. And long overdue.”
Felice shook her head with an enigmatic smile and Richard turned away looking superior, but Claude came to Amerie’s rock and snared the gold thimble of wine and the flake of dried bread from the Mass kit she carried in the pocket of Richard’s uniform. And when that was over they went on their way again, chopping a path on the bank opposite from that claimed by the sabertooth.
“It was so incredibly beautiful,” the nun said to Claude. “But why does it need those teeth? The big cats of our time got along nicely with shorter ones.”
“Our lions and tigers didn’t try to kill elephants.”
Richard exclaimed, “You mean those monstrous hoe-tuskers they tried to frighten us with in the auberge Tri-D’s? Here?”
“More likely the smaller mastodons in these uplands. Gomphothcrium angustidens is probably the common sort. Hardly half the size of those rhinos we dodged yesterday. We won’t run into deinotherium until we have to cross a swamp or a large river bottomland.”
“Kaleidoscopic,” the pirate growled. “Pardon me for asking, but do any of you aces have a destination in mind? Or are we just running?”
Claude said softly, “We’re just running. When we’ve shaken off the soldiers and the bear-dogs, then there’ll be time enough to make strategic decisions. Or don’t you agree, son?”
“Aw, shit,” said Richard, and began hacking at the stream-side shrubbery once more.
At last the brook merged with a large turbulent river flowing in a southerly direction. Claude thought it might be the upper Saône. “We won’t follow this river,” he told the rest of the Group. “It probably curves around to the southwest and empties into the lake forty or fifty kloms downstream. We’ll have to cross over, and that means the decamole bridges.”
Each Survival Unit was equipped with three bridge sections that could be married to produce a narrow, self-supporting span twenty meters in length that resembled a ladder with close-set rungs. Moving up the river to a point where the torrent narrowed between two craggy shelves of rock, they inflated and ballasted the sections, joined them, and swung the bridge over to the opposite bank.
“Looks kinda flimsy,” Richard remarked uneasily. “Funny, when we practiced with it back at the auberge it seemed a lot wider.”
The bridge was a good third of a meter in width and steady as a rock. However, they had used it to cross a still pond in the auberge’s cavern, while here surging rapids and sharp rocks awaited below.
“We could inflate another bridge and lash the two side by side if it would make you feel safer,” Amerie suggested But the pirate bristled indignantly at the suggestion, hoisted his pack, and lurched across like an apprentice tightrope walker.
“You next, Amerie,” said Claude.
The nun stepped confidently onto the span. How many hundreds of logs had she walked over, crossing the mountain streams of the Oregon Cascades? The bridge rungs were less than a handspan apart, impossible to fall through. All that was necessary was a firm step, balanced posture, and keep the eyes on the opposite bank and not on the foaming chute six meters below.
Her right thigh muscle went into spasm. She teetered, caught herself, then overbalanced on the opposite side and went feet-first into the river.
“Dump your pack!” Felice screamed. Moving so fast that her hands were blurred, she dropped the bow and arrows, unfastened her own backpack, slapped the quick-release buckles of her cuirass and greaves, and jumped in after Amerie.
Richard gaped from the other side, but the old man ran back the way they had come, to the relative calm of the smaller stream’s outspate. Two heads bobbed in the rapids. The leading one fetched momentarily against a humpbacked boulder and disappeared. The second one swept up to the rock and also went under, but after a long minute both women reappeared and floated toward Claude. He seized a stout piece of driftwood and held it out. Felice caught hold with one hand and he was able to pull her in. Her other hand had the fingers entwined in Amerie’s hair.