Small eyed the egg carefully. He was ferociously hungry. He scooted over to the nest and picked up the cracked egg, held it over his mouth and separated it with his fingers, dripping the yolk into his mouth. It tasted pretty good.
Small eyed the log on which he had been sitting. It was rotten and filled with plump, white insect grubs. Small watched the grubs quiver in the wood for a moment, then plucked one of the grubs between his thumb and finger, tossed it into his mouth, and began to chew.
It was a gritty meal, but not as bad as he expected. Not as good as one could hope, but still serviceable if you were nearly naked and lost in the jungle and tired and filthy and had just run away from a panther after spending the night under fallen trees in a storm. Not to mention that prior to the storm you had been chased and shot at, and had a huge python crawl over your legs. All those events considered, a meal of a bird's egg and grubs was, time and place considered, fairly cosmopolitan.
Small began to eat the grubs like popcorn. He ate them until the log was absent of them. Then he found a low-limbed tree, climbed as high as he dared, located a cluster of crisscrossing limbs and vines, and stretched out on them. Glad for the hot golden sunlight that was leaking through a gap in, the foliage, Small slept.
As Small slept, the wind picked up, and the tree rattled as if it were a dry skeleton. Small sat up. He felt strange. He climbed down from the tree. He began to walk, and as he walked the jungle opened up before him. On either side of him he saw great black walls, and in the black walls, as if they were trapped beneath tar, figures moved. Small observed them with an odd detachment. But even beneath the thick black tar, the shapes were recognizable.
Jean. Hanson. Hunt. The wild man he had seen tied to a tree. Cannon and Wilson and Gromvitch were there. The tar-covered figures writhed and wadded together, and twisted into a great black knot, and from the knot, oozing out of the squirming black wall there dripped pops of blood so red a prize-winning rose would have paled beside it. Small looked at the blood, and as it rolled toward the ground it came to rest on a piece of ancient stone wall, and on top of the wall the blood gathered and swelled and took the shape of a heart, steaming and pulsing.
Small felt a tinge of horror, but no more than that. And he considered that most strange, for he knew the heart was his own. He touched his chest. There was no wound, but he knew the heart was his.
And then as he watched, the heart went soft, became a red puddle, and the puddle leapt off the stone and onto the wall and fled upwards until it reached the great black knot of humanity. It entered the knot. The knot went flat against the wall, and Small stirred in his sleep. He opened his eyes, blinked, and found that he was still in the tree. It had been a dream. A moment of trepidation swelled inside his chest. His mother had once dreamed of her own death. She told him she saw her own heart lying on a table, steaming and beating. Then it ceased to beat, and she awoke.
She told him this, and then she died a week later. She said she knew she would die. It was an inherited ability. Her grandfather had envisioned his death in a similar manner. Their ancestors, long ago traded to whites by other Africans, had been descendants of a powerful shaman who could foretell the future. It was his mother's belief that the trait had been passed on to later generations-at least in one way. The ability to sense one's own demise.
Small disregarded the vision. The dream. It was nothing more than his natural fears swelling inside him. He would be okay. He would be all right.
Maybe.
His anxiety could not fight away his exhaustion. He slept in spite of the dream, and he slept deep, and sound, and good.
Jean felt empty. She no longer cared what happened to her. The warriors had abandoned their trefe camouflage, and were pushing her quickly along a rough trail. They were silent as they walked, and she noticed the warriors were both men and women. Due to their size, she had at first assumed they were men, but now, devoid of their tree camouflage, she saw at least a third of them were women.
Many of the warriors were quite young. All were very tall with classic Negroid features and skin black as wet ebony. They were well built and muscular and wore white paint on their foreheads and cheeks to complement the scars burned into then: flesh. A few of them wore plumes of feathers. Those without plumes wore their hair long and well oiled. Some carried short, thick spears while others carried long, almost floppy spears. Several had bows and quivers of long arrows strapped to their backs. All wore huge knives-swords actually-in loops at their waists, or in scabbards slung over their shoulders. Under other circumstances, Jean might have found them fascinating. But now all she could think of was her father who had fallen before their attack. She was happy to see the body of the warrior she had killed being carried on a litter. She never thought the death of a human being would please her, but she was glad she had killed this man. It did hot bring her father back, but it was something and she was glad.
The man who led her was not happy with her progress. He tugged and the leash tightened, causing her to , stumble. When Jean regained her footing, a bolt of anger shot through her. In that moment, she felt the best thing to do was fight. Fight until her captors became so angry they killed her. That way she would not have to think about her father, about poor Billy and the others who had been slain or captured.
But no, that would not be the way. That would not be her father's way. That was not a Hanson's way. You stuck with it to the end. That's what life was about, hadn't her father told her that?
You lived life no matter how hard. And if she was going to die at the hands of these people, then so be it. She would die in time anyway, so she determined that she would sell herself dearly with a good and noble death.
That would be the way to go. For now, she would push her fear, anger, and pain deep inside. Wait and watch. And when the moment came, she would try and escape, and if escape seemed impossible... well, she was uncertain. But she would do something. She would not lie about like a turnip in the ground waiting to be plucked.
She would do something, even if it was wrong, but her first course of action was, if at all possible, to do something right. To be calm, and observe.
They trekked for some distance, then to Jean's amazement they came upon a road. An actual road! It was built of dark, dried blocks set in concrete and was twelve feet wide. Jean assumed it had been constructed in a fashion similar to that used by the Romans to build roads. Layer after layer of material. Whatever, it was an incredible feat of engineering.
The road went for a great distance, then twisted out of sight behind a great rise of trees. The road was well kept and along its sides the jungle had been cut back so that limbs did not overlap it. A row of carts and chariots stood parked beside the road.
Nearby, a handful of men and women, none of them dressed in warrior garb, came forward leading zebras. The zebras wore bridles and reins and appeared very tame. The stock workers fastened the zebras to the chariots.
The big warrior pulled at Jean's leash, forced her to step into one of the chariots. A woman of powerful proportions stepped up beside them, took the reins, and the chariot moved forward.
Glancing back, Jean saw other chariots following, and behind those the remaining warriors and stock handlers walked. It was a colorful procession.
The equatorial sun was burning hot and high when the winding road broke from the jungle into a vast clearing where Jean saw a large number of sweaty workers in the distance struggling with huge blocks of cut stone. They were pulling the stones from a quarry with thick ropes. Whips flashed in the sunlight, cracked on the backs of the struggling slaves.