The Ancient Lands: Warrior Quest, Search for the Ifa Scepter (12 page)

Bomani blocked arrow after arrow with his
wide shield, as he stepped over Farra and Pupa toward the rear of
the boat.

“Row the boat. Hurry!” he yelled.

Farra grabbed the oars and thrust them in
position to cut through the water as fast as she could. The ogres’
boats began to close in on them.

“Faster!” Bomani yelled. “Paddle
faster!”

“I’m paddling as hard as I can!” Farra
shouted.

Arrows came at them again and Bomani held
them at bay, but despite Farra’s efforts, she couldn’t out row the
ogres. The first ogre that tried to board their boat was greeted
unfavorably by Bomani’s spear. The sharp instrument tore into the
ogre’s belly with ease. Bomani pulled it out uncaringly, and
pierced the ogre again.

The defeated beast fell into the river, and
to Bomani’s dismay, another ogre immediately replaced him, and
charged Bomani, angrily. They fell to the bottom of the boat with a
hard thump and the rickety boat swayed roughly as Bomani used all
his strength to move the strong, stocky ogre off of him. The angry
ogre snarled and swiped at Bomani, but Bomani’s shield lay between
them. As they struggled, two of his runes fell from his pouch. The
runes caught Pupa’s attention, and the cowering pup cautiously
picked up one of them with his teeth and took it to Bomani.

“Pupa, I’m kind of busy right now,” Bomani
said. He smashed his shield into another ogre’s face and sent him
into the water. Pupa took the rune to Farra, who was still at the
bow of the boat, paddling as fast as she could.

“What is it Pupa? I told you to hide in my
pouch!” Pupa dropped the rune next to her, and it immediately
caught her attention. Farra looked back at Bomani and saw that the
hideous ogres now out numbered him in the boat. She picked up the
rune immediately. “How do we use them?” she said, looking at the
rune curiously.

“I don’t know!” Bomani shouted back,
startling Farra. “I don’t even know what they do!”

“Oh, why don’t you just do something,” she
said to the water rune, under her voice as she shook it
desperately.

Bomani fought with all of his strength to
overcome another ogre, who was doubtlessly stronger than he. This
was unlike anything he had ever experienced, wrestling with Mongo
or Anan or one of the other boys in his village couldn’t compare
with the strength of an ogre.

“Bomani, I can’t figure out how to use these
things,” Farra shouted over her shoulder, still trying to row and
examine the rune simultaneously.

Just then, Bomani noticed the crystal
dangling from the ogre’s neck as it twinkled in the light. “I got
this under control,” Bomani said. He suddenly felt a surge of
confidence.

Farra grabbed her staff and hit the ogre in
the back of the head as hard as she could. The stunned ogre tried
to get up. The blow had clearly shocked him, but before he could
get his bearings, Bomani kicked him so hard that he fell back onto
his own boat. The ogre’s boats swerved into each other, giving
Bomani and Farra a chance to get away.

“What, no
thanks
from you?” Farra
asked.

“I had it under control,” Bomani
insisted.

He had put up a good fight
, Farra
thought. “Sure you did — okay,” she said.

“Did you figure out how the runes work?” he
asked.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why would she give us these things? We
don’t even know how to use them. How are they supposed to help us
if we don’t know how to use them?”

“She just said we would know how when we
needed them and….” Farra paused for a moment and then she took the
water rune and tossed it into the water far ahead of them without
even thinking.

“What did you do that for?” Bomani
asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I really
didn’t think about it.”

A flash of light could be seen under the
water where the rune fell, and then it disappeared. They looked at
each other with disappointment.

“That was it? That’s all it does?” asked
Bomani. Suddenly an arrow tore through the air passing closely
by.

“Get down!” he exclaimed.

They quickly lay down in the boat, Farra
instinctively scooping Pupa close. Bomani held Farra and Pupa close
to him and put his shield over them for protection. Farra looked
up, peeking beneath the shield, and immediately noticed that the
current was getting stronger and that the river ahead of them began
to twist and turn.

“Bomani!”

“Keep your head down!” Bomani instructed
her.

“But, Bomani, there’s a whirlpool up ahead,”
Farra yelled over the sound of the noisy rapids that moved nearby.
Suddenly the water stirred them into a full-fledged whirlpool. They
both grabbed an oar and desperately tried to turn the boat away
from the powerful current that pulled them closer to the forceful
vortex.

“If we can manage to stay clear of its pull,
maybe the ogres will fall into it,” Bomani said fighting against
the water with his oar.

The ogres took up oars at the site of the
whirlpool. At first they panicked and toppled over one another in
their boats, too clumsily to manage it; but they quickly fell into
sync, and barely guided their boats away before the current over
took them.

Bomani and Farra, however, did not have
strength to steer their boat clear of the angry waters. They looked
at the whirlpool desperately. It looked like a hungry black hole,
and as the current of the whirlpool picked up speed, they realized
that there was no way to escape its grasp.

Farra looked down at Pupa apologetically.
She wanted to tell Bomani that she was sorry for throwing the rune
into the river, but it was all happening so fast, that she couldn’t
speak. Besides, she was not even sure why she had thrown it into
the river, or what she expected to come from it.

But it was as if she had been compelled to
throw it, as if
it
wanted her to. All of that didn’t matter
now, for the whirlpool showed no sign of slowing down, and in spite
of their efforts, they could not change its direction, or change
their fate. And so the three of them, Bomani, Farra, and Pupa along
with the boat were swallowed by the center of the whirlpool and
they all disappeared beneath the water.

Once the whirlpool had its meal, it seamed
to be satisfied, for the water stopped spinning, and in one quick
instance it was as calm as before. The bewildered ogres drifted
over to the spot where the water had taken the children, and they
looked about in confusion.

“What happened to dem?” said an ogre.

“Dunno,” replied another. “Me think them
drowning.”

“Look and see.” Commanded the first ogre. He
pointed a stubby finger caked with mud and hair toward the
water.

The second ogre reached down into the water,
and he wriggled his thick, dirty, fingers inside. “Hey children,
you drowning down dere?”

A fish swam by and took notice of what
looked to it like a lovely meal moving about in the water and bit
down on the ogre’s finger.

“Owww!” the ogre yelled. He yanked his hand
back and rocked himself back and forth in the boat, soothing his
fingers in his mouth.

“Fine then, you stay drowneded!” He turned
to another ogre, and complained. “See what happen when me try to be
nice and help?”

“That why me always true to self,” the other
responded. The second ogre nodded and agreed, and he nursed his
finger like a simpleton, as the baffled ogres drifted away.

XIV FIRE AND
WATER

It was dark. Extremely dark, very dark,
pitch-dark dark. They sped through the darkness along an
underground river, their boat totally submissive to the will of the
tunnel and where it wanted to take them. The river twisted and
turned through the belly of the cavern, carrying them swiftly
through this obscurity at full speed. Farra held on to Bomani
tightly, and Pupa nestled into the crook of Farra’s arm, while
Bomani held on to the boat securely with every turn as the obedient
boat rode the stream. And though he would not admit it, Bomani was
glad that Farra had come along.

The pace of the current began to slow down.
Gradually the darkness began to give way to a faint red glow at the
end of the tunnel, making it just barely possible to see looming
silhouettes of the shapes around them. The light slowly spread
along the walls of the cave. It revealed the deep, knotted, roots,
which hung overhead from the trees above land and outlined the
cavern walls like huge spiders. The end of the tunnel was defined
by a bright red glow. They both wondered what it was, and even
though the fear of the unknown was with them, the prospect of
reaching some form of illumination seemed more appealing than the
eerie darkness that had enveloped them before. As the river pushed
them closer to the light ahead, its red glow became larger and
larger until they found themselves airborne in a large fiery-red
chamber. In an instant, they hit the ground with a thud and the
old, rickety boat smashed to pieces.

The air was thick and stifling, and the
children found themselves panting to catch their breath. It was
terribly hot inside — much hotter than the cool, dark, tunnel that
had just deposited them into this inferno. The children could see
swells of heat waving from the surfaces of the large igneous rocks
that lined the room from earlier eruptions.

“Are you okay?” Bomani asked Farra.

“Yes.” She said. She looked worried.
“Where’s Pupa?”

Beyond the enormous rock they stood upon,
that bulged from the wall of the cavern like a fantastic slab of
flooring in a loft, there lay a sea of molten rock. Huge blocks of
igneous rock poked out of the smoldering sea of hot magma, creating
haphazard stepping-stones in plateaus and peaks. Farra looked
around intently for Pupa and then she suddenly stopped. She heard a
faint whimpering, just barely, through the sound of the boiling
magma. She followed the plaintive cry to the edge of the rock upon
which they stood and peeked over. Her heart dropped the instant she
saw him.

Pupa hung desperately from the ledge below.
He clawed frantically into the surface of rock trying his best to
gain traction to lift the lower half of his small body. Farra
gasped. She reached down as far as she could, but she could not
reach him.

“Here, take my hand,” Bomani said.

Farra took Bomani’s hand and leaned over,
but that was of no use. They were still too high to reach him.

“Okay, I’m going lie to down and reach as
far as I can. You hold my ankles,” she commanded Bomani.

“It’s not going to work,” Bomani said. “He’s
too far down.”

“Bomani, we’ve got to try!”

Bomani held onto her as firmly as he could
as she balanced the upper half of her body over the edge. She
reached back down, but she still could not reach little Pupa. He
struggled not to fall. The steam and hot magma below, made the heat
unbearable. Perspiration coated them completely, making their hands
slippery and clumsy. Farra reached desperately for Pupa as far as
she could while Bomani strained to stay balanced against the pull
of her weight.

Suddenly Farra’s shoulder bag gave way and
slipped down her arm. She caught it just as the strap was about to
pass her wrist and fall through her hand, and now it dangled from
her hand in the thick air, and then it came to her.

“Bomani, you have to lower me just a little
bit more.”

“I can’t. We’ll fall in,” Bomani said.

“You’ve got to try!”

Bomani was nervous. If he moved a hair with
Farra hanging at this angle, they could both fall over, or he could
lose her. His heart was beginning to pound wildly and he became
keenly aware of how fragile of a grip he had on her because of the
humidity and perspiration that poured from their skin.