Fish (11 page)

Suddenly I remembered Fish. I had rescued him from mud like this—what must it have seemed like to
him to be sinking into it again? Then I remembered that the lid of his bottle would be screwed on tight, and that he was still breathing easy in his own element. The mud would be too thick to squeeze through those tiny pinprick holes. He would have coped much better than I. He would be fine, if I could just get out of this.

A frog-style kick with my legs and suddenly I felt no resistance on my arms, as they must have come out into the air above the mud. One more push down with them, and my head would be out.

As my face broke the surface, I opened my mouth and dragged in a great gulp of air. I couldn't see a thing, and mud was between my teeth, over my tongue. Somehow I flailed, blind, toward the bank, got my hands on it and felt my feet firm on the stream's bed again, at the shallow edge.

The terror of not seeing, now, was everything. Were they standing there, guns aimed? Would I hear a shot and then it would all be over, without seeing anything? Would they stand there and wait for me to get
out and just take me captive? Eyes still tight shut against the mud I could feel streaming down my face, I scraped the backs of my hands over the sparse grass I could feel on the bank, then pulled my fists over my eyelids.

When it seemed I'd cleared away enough of the mud, I opened them. Everything was blurry and my lashes were still caked, so I looked out on a world fringed brown at the edges.

The first thing I saw was some type of rough material, right in front of my nose. I couldn't make sense of that at all, so I looked up and slightly beyond it, then stiffened. There were the two men—Leader and Stocky. They were looking straight at me.

It was all over, then. It was almost a relief. I wanted to say, “All right, here I am.” But I didn't. For some reason I just stood there in the mud still, and waited.

It all seemed strangely calm. They spoke quietly to each other in a bored way, as if they'd finished a job, and to my surprise, started to turn and walk away. It hit me suddenly. They hadn't seen me!

As they disappeared along the path, I looked again at the rough material almost against my nose on the bank. My eyes were clearing. I looked along it—it was something about the size of a large tree trunk. It must have blocked their view of me as I surfaced.

Slowly, slowly, I realized the fabric was clothing. Slowly, slowly, not wanting to look, I saw feet at the end further away from me, and turning my eyes unwillingly to the end of the shape nearest to me, I saw dark, curly hair, the back of someone's head. It was the body of a man, lying with its back to me along the bank.

Though it was further to wade to the end with the feet, fear made me choose that way. Clinging to the bank and going crabwise, I made it as far as I thought I'd need, past the feet, to be able to get out without touching it.

Painfully I dragged myself out of the mud and crawled on all fours a little way across the path. I don't know why, but I seemed to have lost all fear of the men, and didn't think about them returning. I peeled off the backpack and set it upright. It looked like part
of a brown statue. I wiped a finger over Fish's bottle, to make him a window, and saw him dart and flash behind it for a moment. Like a dog drying itself, I scraped myself over the ground and rough grass, anywhere, to get the worst of the mud off.

Then, when I was ready, I sat down and faced the dead man.

It was, of course, the youngest man, who'd been shot. It wasn't as scary, or as bad as I thought, to look at him. He had a nice face, and he just looked peacefully asleep. There was a terrible dark stain on the side of his clothes nearest the ground, but you didn't really notice if you didn't look at it. And I decided not to.

I must have sat there for a long time, but I didn't notice that either. I felt lots of things that are hard to put into words. I wondered if he knew he'd helped save me, even though he was dead. I was angry with the other man for shooting him. And for just leaving him here like he wasn't worth anything. I sat there and felt that somehow I was keeping him company. none of this makes any sense, I know, but maybe my
head was a bit mixed up from being in the mud and everything.

Then suddenly something changed, and I felt I didn't need to be there anymore. He was gone, after all, and there was just a useless body. And at exactly that moment, Mum, Dad and the Guide appeared from the path to the right of me, and Mum rushed up, but I couldn't stand up or even look pleased, I just sat with my arms around my legs, and my forehead on my knees, and started crying for no good reason, just when people could see me.

I managed to stop fairly quickly when they all put their arms round me, but then I started to shudder and shake and couldn't talk and tell them what had happened because my teeth were chattering too much.

They were very good, and didn't ask questions or tell me off for running the wrong way in the first place, like you'd expect grown-ups to.

One of them got a blanket from somewhere and put it round my shoulders as I was shaking so much, and Mum said, “It's the shock,” and I managed to stop my
teeth clanking together long enough to say, “What shock? I'm freezing because the mud was so cold.”

Then Mum and the Guide started to rub me all over with the blanket, which was very rough and hairy, so it did work really well at getting off the mud and warming me up. I wondered why Dad wasn't helping and looked across at him sitting next to me and was shocked to see he was
crying
—my dad— crying!

“Dad! Please don't!” was all I could think to say. He was very quiet about it, I will say—but still. Then I felt guilty, I don't know why, and said, “I'm sorry, Dad. But I'm all right.”

“No, no, Tiger. It's not your fault. It's all mine. I'm just—it's just happiness, you know, like women do at weddings sometimes.”

I didn't know. I'd never been to a wedding. I looked at him doubtfully. The Guide touched his shoulder.

“Come on, now,” he said simply.

Like me, the adults seemed unhurried and calm now. The Guide stepped across the mud to the other bank, using a huge log that had fallen, and collected other bits of tree and wood, making a dam. Then Dad sort of passed me across and we took the path on the other side with no problems.

There, at the end of the path, stood the donkey, with her back to us. When she heard us coming she turned and gave a little wheezy bray of welcome. It was so good to see her, I had to run up and give her a hug, though I think it was the Guide she was pleased to see really.

“What happened to her when we all ran off?” I asked.

“Good as gold,” said Dad. “She seemed to just tuck herself away somewhere, and popped back out when we did.”

The path this side was clear of scrub, and wide, and we sat down at the edge where the mountain fell away again below us. Here we told our stories in quiet voices.

Mum and Dad had run in the same direction as the Guide, who had practically had to fight them both, by the sound of it, to stop them rushing off to find me while the armed men were still racing about looking for them. They had managed to remain hidden in the scrub until it was safe, and had then started to search. All of them were very cut about by thorns.

Looking for me at the mud-stream had been the Guide's idea, because he knew that
I
knew we had to cross it. He thought that if I'd escaped—which he thought very likely—I would have sense enough to find my way there.

I was proud that he'd thought all this, but of course, my ending up there had nothing to do with sense and more to do with blind panic. They were kind enough not to say if they noticed this, when I told them my story.

“Ah,” the Guide said, when I got to the part about
finding the youngest man dead. “He didn't agree with their plan, you see—and it doesn't suit these people to have one of their number turn against them.”

“It doesn't seem right to leave him like that,” put in Mum. “He was some mother's son, as they say.” There was silence for a moment.

“And now,” explained the Guide, looking at me carefully, “we must go on, and not give too much thought to these men anymore. I have asked some friends of mine, real soldiers, to look out for them and they are in pursuit. They will also,” he added, turning toward Mum, “find and attend to that young man.”

“We do have to finish this, Tiger,” said Dad, tired, looking at me. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” agreed Mum, and stood up.

“OK,” I said, feeling much, much stronger for a moment, now we were all back together. But I couldn't help looking around as I stood up.

The Guide noticed.

“We can't do this looking over our shoulders all the time, Tiger. You must trust, now. We have to get down
the mountain and concentrate. What will be will be. We can only try our best, eh? And it is harder to catch a Tiger than those men thought, eh?” And he smiled suddenly, which he didn't do very often, and which always made anyone smile back however they felt.

We went to the edge and looked down.

There was no path, just loose rubble and bushes, some growing, some fallen. I had clambered down similar slopes, but not for such a long way. It wasn't a sheer drop, and every so often there was another outcrop, or more level area, where we could stop and catch our breath—or where you might end up if you slipped.

The Guide set off first, and the donkey braced her back legs on the edge and felt around with little tap-tapping movements of her front hooves. She seemed less worried than when she'd had to enter the mud, despite her earlier fall.

Seeing them upright, and moving downward, we all followed—me and Mum first and Dad behind. We told him not to fall, because we didn't like the idea of him landing on top of us.

At first, we could almost walk in a normal way, especially as areas of path would suddenly appear from out of the rubble. The Guide obviously knew the way very well, because he led us across the featureless piles of stone and earth, tracking exactly where the path must have been. Where it reemerged it was a relief, even for a few paces, to stride along.

But increasingly you had to walk sideways, trying to keep a grip with your back foot, while your front foot slithered. Loose rock scuttled away with every step, and showered down the mountain. Dad's heavy feet sent earth and stones onto me and Mum, so he hung back a little.

In the tricky bits, it seemed to take hours to go a few paces. The only good thing about the occasional, scary slither was that you covered the ground very quickly.

None of us said anything, because we were concentrating.

Dad, from his vantage point above and behind us, called out once, “Watch the Guide. Follow him exactly. He knows what he's doing.”

We realized that it was too easy to end up staring at your own feet. Not only did this take you slightly off course, but you missed the handy tips the Guide passed on in the route he chose—for example, he had a knack of noticing where a bush would hold the ground well with its roots, and of keeping handholds nearby, such as roots and even tussocks of grass.

By midday, we had been walking and sliding for almost six hours. Without a word between us we kept our eyes on the only level place ahead, where an out-crop jutted out horizontally with a few bushes to mark it, and knew we would rest when we reached it.

The donkey, who had overtaken the Guide at some point, got there first and obviously had the same idea. She stopped immediately and started picking at the bushes in a determined manner.

The Guide and Mum reached it next, and I slipped, went down on my bottom, and arrived sitting down rather suddenly, so Mum had to hop out of the way. Luckily, seeing this, Dad picked his way very carefully for the last few feet. A tobogganing man might have
sent the lot of us, donkey and all, over the edge of the outcrop, in spite of the bushes.

I stayed sitting down, getting my breath back, and Mum and Dad hovered around for a moment as if looking for a rock to sit on. There weren't any, except a few jagged ones, so they sort of crumpled where they stood and sat hugging their knees with their heads down.

The Guide straightened the donkey's packs before sitting down next to me. For once, I had nothing to say. I didn't even seem to be able to think, I was so tired. The Guide leaned back to look at my backpack.

“Fish still there,” he said, as if to cheer me up.

I had almost forgotten the Fish, after my slide. Guiltily, I slipped off the backpack. It wasn't really heavy, but it suddenly seemed very difficult to pull it around onto my lap. I took out the bottle and surveyed the Fish. Small and pale—such a fuss I had made about such a little thing.

I examined him closely. The fins, almost transparent, had tiny lines radiating outward. They were all placed just so. The tail spread upward and downward,
forked in the middle, the tips tapered just right. Looking very closely, you could make out the tiny scales all over. Each one fitted snugly over the next. The eye was big and golden, with tawny mottling, and a black pupil right in the middle. He was perfect. I forgot how small and dull he seemed to have become, and felt a warm glow run through me. I was very glad I had saved him and he was still with us.

“So small, so delicate, but so tough,” said the Guide, looking with me, and giving me one of his rare smiles.

It was the dullest, quietest and saddest rest we'd had so far. Usually, we didn't exactly celebrate, but we cheered up at these points. This time there was no reward of a little food. The only reward we could offer ourselves was simply to stop for a while.

Mum passed around the water bottle. We had been rationing it, but now it was obvious that there was not enough left to save. There was one gulp each left. For some reason, I didn't much care. I didn't really feel thirsty anymore, and not even hungry. I was used to
the dull ache in my stomach now, and it almost made you feel
not
like eating.

The Guide was looking at my sandals. “The feet are rubbing again,” he said to my mother, looking across at her.

She lifted her head and looked at him for a moment as if she had been daydreaming, and didn't understand.