Issib, who couldn't lift it, pointed to the bag on his lap. "It's looped to the pommel!" he shouted.
Zdorab maneuvered his animal close; Meb held Issib's camel steady. Deftly Zdorab reached out, unlooped the bag, and then, brandishing it high like a trophy, rode on ahead.
"Leave me now!" Issib shouted at Meb.
Meb ignored him and continued to drag his camel upward, passing the slower pack animals.
Soon they came to a place where Zdorab, Luet, Hushidh, Shedemei, Sevet, and Eiadh waited on foot. Mebbekew realized that he must be near the top now—Zdorab must have left the Index with Volemak, and Rasa and the other women must be keeping the infants on high ground. "Take Issib!" shouted Meb, handing the reins to Zdorab. Then Meb rushed back down the canyon to the next pack beast. He thrust the reins of the animal in Luet's hands. "Drag him up!" he cried. To each woman in turn he gave the reins of a pack animal. They could hear the water now, a roaring sound; they could feel the rumbling in the earth. "Faster!" he cried.
There were just enough of them to take the reins of all the pack animals. Only Meb's own mount, now last in line, was untended. She was clearly frightened by the noise of the water, by the shaking of the earth, and didn't stay close behind. Meb called to her, "Glupost! Come on! Hurry, Glupost!" But he kept tugging on the reins of the last pack animal, knowing that the coldboxes it carried would be more important, in the long run, than his own mount.
"Let go, Meb!" cried Zdorab. "Here it comes!"
They could see the wall of water from where they were, that's how high it was—higher, in fact, than the top of the ravine, so that they instinctively ran even higher up the slope they were standing on. Those at the top were never in danger of being swept away, though, for the water stayed lower than they were.
However, the water that was snagged into the side canyon they had climbed through shot up into it with such force that it rose higher than the main body of water in the ravine. It slammed into the last two camels and then into Meb, lifting them all off their feet and heaving them the rest of the way up the side canyon. Meb could hear women screaming—was that Dol, howling out Meb's name?—and then he felt the water subsiding almost as fast as it had risen, sucking him downward. For a moment he thought of letting go of the reins and saving himself; then he realized that the pack camel had braced itself and was now more secure on the ground than Meb himself. So he clung to the reins and was not swept away. But as he hung there, pressed against the side of the camel that he had saved, and which was now saving him, he saw his mount Glupost get dragged off her feet and sucked down into the maelstrom in the ravine.
In moments, he felt many hands on him, prying the reins from his fingers, leading him, sopping wet and trembling, up to where the others waited. Volemak embraced him, weeping. "I thought I had lost you, my son, my son."
"What about Elya?" wailed Eiadh. "How could he save himself from that?"
"Not to mention Vas," said Rasa softly.
Several people looked at Sevet, whose face was hard and set.
"Not everyone shows fear the same way," murmured Luet, putting an end to any hard judgments anyone might be inclined to make about the difference between Eiadh's and Sevet's reaction. Luet knew well that Sevet had little reason to care much whether Vas lived or died—though she wondered how much Sevet herself actually knew.
What was most in Luet's heart was the fact that Nafai was also not with them. He and Obring were almost certainly on high ground, and safe. But they would no doubt be deeply worried.
Tell him that we're safe, she said silently to the Oversoul. And tell me— is Elemak alive? And Vas?
Alive, came the answer in her mind.
She said so.
The others looked at her, half in relief, half in doubt. "Alive," she said again. "That's all the Oversoul told me. Isn't it enough?"
The water subsided, the level dropping rapidly. Volemak and Zdorab walked down the side canyon together. They found it a tangle of half-uprooted trees and bushes—not even the boulders were where they had been.
But the side canyon was nothing compared to the ravine itself. There was nothing left. A quarter hour ago it had been lush with vegetation—so lush that it was hard to make way through it, and they had often had to lead the camels through the stream itself in order to pass some of the tangles of vegetation. Now the walls of the ravine, from top to bottom, had not a single plant clinging to them. The soil itself had been scoured away, so that bare rock was exposed. And on the floor of the ravine, there were only a few heavy boulders and the sediments left behind by the water as it dropped.
"Look how the floor of the ravine is bare rock near the edges," said Volemak. "But deep sediment in the middle, near the water."
It was true: already the stream that remained—larger than the original one—was cutting a channel a meter deep through the thick mud. The new banks of the stream would collapse here and there, a few meters of mud slipping down into the water. It would take some time before the floor of the ravine stabilized.
"It'll be green as ever within six weeks," said Zdorab. "And in five years you'd never know this happened."
"What do you think?" asked Volemak. "If we stay to the edges, is it safe to use this as a highway down to the sea?"
"The reason we were using the ravine in the first place was because Elemak said the top was not passable—it keeps getting cut by deep canyons or blocked by steep hills."
"So we keep to the edges," said Volemak. "And we hope."
It took a while at the top of the ravine to check the camels' loads and be sure nothing had come loose during the scramble to safety. "It's better than we could have hoped, that we lost only the one camel," said Volemak.
Zdorab led his own mount forward, and held out the reins to Meb.
"No," said Meb.
"Please," said Zdorab. "Every step I take on foot will be my way of giving honor to my brave friend."
"Take it," whispered Volemak.
Meb took the reins from Zdorab. "Thank you," he said. "But there were no cowards here today."
Zdorab embraced him quickly, then went back to help Shedemei get the women with babies onto their camels.
It turned out that neither Zdorab nor Meb nor Volemak did much riding the rest of that day. They spent their time on foot, patrolling the length of the caravan, making sure the camels never strayed toward the thick and treacherous mud in the middle of the ravine. They had visions of a camel sinking immediately over its head. The footing was wet, slimy, and treacherous, but by keeping the pace slow, they soon reached the mouth of the ravine, where it emptied into a wide river.
There had obviously been much damage here, too, for the opposite side of the river valley was a mess of mud and boulders, with many trees knocked down and much bare soil and rock exposed. And the rest of the way down the river they could see that both banks had been torn apart. Ironically, though, because the force of the flood had been less intense here than in the ravine, their passage through the debris it left behind would be far harder.