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Post by Treijim on Jul 24, 2009 16:19:37 GMT 9.5
"Right," Gerit said, though he didn't seem at all convinced.
He took back the device and looked across the river. He looked through it for a while, though even Quera could see the animal moving slyly through the bushes.
"Gimme!" she said, reaching for the scope. "I wanna look!"
Gerit pushed her away and continued looking. Finally, he lowered the scope and told Quera, "Get Arka. Tell him Rosaria is back."
At first shocked, and then proud to be given such an important task, she ran girlishly back into the camp to look for Arka. Soon enough, she came back with the leader and he took the scope to check.
"It's her," he said. "She's moving away." He put fingers to his mouth and whistled. The horse didn't seem to respond. "Gerit, tell Jed to get the raft ready." He handed the scope to Cliff. "Stay here and watch her for us. If she moves out of sight, say which way she went." He and Gerit left.
A sudden sense of excitement and emergency filled the camp. Some of the others moved to the shore where Cliff and Quera stood. They tried to take the scope, but Quera held them at bay, repeating Arka's instructions for Cliff to keep watch through the scope. The horse began to turn and head steadily northward, towards the cliff and parallel to the river.
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Post by Ethereal Panda on Jul 25, 2009 7:22:27 GMT 9.5
"North! Towards the cliff!" Cliff announced with as deep of a voice as he could muster. He patiently watched the horse mosey up the bank. If she kept her current pace, the others would have no trouble intercepting her. In the back of his mind, Cliff wondered how Arka lost the horse in the first place.
It was then that he noticed the crowd that had grown behind him. Although his role in this endeavor was hardly extraordinary, he felt an overwhelming sense of self-importance. Rosaria stopped moving for a moment to graze on something at her feet.
[Why does there have to be so many cliffs XD]
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Post by Treijim on Jul 25, 2009 10:25:45 GMT 9.5
Jed and Gerit emerged from around the bend in the river, pulling a large raft along in the gentle shore current. Arka met them, carrying a homemade saddle over one shoulder and some equipment in his hands. He tossed it on the raft and turned to Cliff, asking where the horse was. Cliff explained it and Arka waded into the water and climbed up the raft along with Gerit. Jed stopped it from drifting downstream by keeping hold of a rope attached to it. He waited until the two on the raft used two large rods to keep the raft in place. Jed climbed up and the crept along the river by pushing it along with a rod while using the other two rods to prevent it from floating down the river. It was a slow process, but the horse was not moving much at all.
When they got past halfway, the horse seemed bothered and began to pick up pace a little. Arka whistled again but it didn't respond. By now, everyone else was standing along the river, watching intently. When nobody was paying attention, Tex snatched the scope and looked through it backwards.
"I can't see anything," he complained. "It's broken."
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Post by Ethereal Panda on Jul 26, 2009 5:10:07 GMT 9.5
Cliff immediately tried to grab the scope back, but Tex put out his arm, keeping it just out of the slightly smaller boy's reach. "It is not broken," Cliff stated impatiently. "You are just using it stupidly." Temporarily ceasing his struggle, Cliff looked back across the river trying to identify where the horse was. He did not dare try to take the scope back from Tex, because it would likely get broken in the process.
"Give it back," he stated with a hint of emotion. "I can show you how to use it."
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Post by Treijim on Jul 26, 2009 5:48:23 GMT 9.5
[Yeah. Arka probably wouldn't be able to hear him anyway]
"I'm not using it stupidly," Tex said. He thrust it towards Cliff, almost hitting him in the face with it. "Go on then. Show me."
Across the river, they had reached the other side. Jed jumped off first and began to circle round while Arka took a more direct approach toward his horse and readied a lasso in his hands. Rosaria began to move out of sight into the thick of the trees, and, consequentially, so too did Arka and Jed. Gerit stayed at the boat and glanced over his shoulder at everyone watching. He seemed unsure of what was going on; he didn't wave.
"Well they're gone now anyway," Tex said, suddenly taking the scope back. He happened to put it against his eye the right way round this time. "Hey you fixed it. That was pretty quick. Wow! I can see real far! Like an eagle!" He spun round aimlessly, pointing it at nothing in particular and unable to withhold his wonder. Some of the children began to laugh at him.
Suddenly, he stopped completely, staring towards the cliffs to the north. He lowered the scope slowly and tilted his head.
"There's someone on top of the cliff," he said, as seriously as he could muster. "All dressed in white. Watching us."
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Post by Ethereal Panda on Jul 26, 2009 6:19:30 GMT 9.5
Cliff looked in the direction that Tex was facing. He studied the cliff edges not immediately seeing anything on their rocky terrain, but after about thirty seconds of staring, he spotted something that might be a person on a precipice. "Are you sure it is a person," he asked Tex. "Maybe it is a rock that just looks like one." As though to disprove Cliff's theory, the figure moved. Cliff, slightly startled, stepped closer to Tex.
The boy broke his stare and turned to Tex. "I thought you were the only ones in this valley." Cliff quickly looked back to Gerit and the raft to see if they had made any progress. When he looked back, he couldn't find the figure on the precipice.
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Post by Treijim on Jul 26, 2009 6:33:10 GMT 9.5
There was no sign of Jed and Arka. It was undoubtedly a person atop the cliff -- that much was clear now. The other children had taken to trying to spot him, but, like Cliff, were not able to. Tex spent a while searching over the jagged terrain with the scope but lowered it in defeat. Nobody addressed Cliff's last statement for a while. Many of them had taken to whispering, mostly saying that the man was watching them catch the horse, or that he had stolen the horse in the first place and Arka never told anybody what really happened. Distrust quickly bubbled up in the small group.
"What's going on?" Monopa asked. She had been praying at the edge of the field in silence and hadn't noticed there was nobody else in the camp until just then.
"We saw Rosaria over there," Tex said, swinging out his arm, almost amputating Cliff's nose with the scope, and pointing somewhere toward where Gerit was still waiting. "They went over to get her just not long ago."
"Rosaria?" Monopa said. "Well, good. It's about time she came back. Arka will be pleased. But we don't all need to be standing here to supervise them. Come on, back to work, everyone!"
Just then, Jed came out of the trees and got back on the raft. He and Gerit began to creep back towards the other shore. They all opted to stay and watch, so Monopa sighed and let them.
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Post by Ethereal Panda on Jul 26, 2009 6:57:03 GMT 9.5
"There was someone on the cliff face to the north," Cliff said moving Tex's arm out of the way. He pointed to where they had spotted him while still facing Monopa. "Tex saw him up there through the telescope."
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Post by Treijim on Jul 26, 2009 7:11:35 GMT 9.5
"Through the teles...? Oh." She turned her whole body and faced the cliff with her hands on her hips, as though the figure would be intimidated out of hiding. "I don't see anyone." She declined the assistance of the telescope and again instructed everyone back to work. Everybody but her, Tex, and Cliff left.
"Arka got her," Jed said as they pushed the raft onto the sand a little. "He's going to take her around the river, across the bridge. He should be here soon."
"Good," Monopa said, smiling. "At least there's some good news around here."
"Enough to celebrate?" Tex added.
"We'll see how Rosaria is, first."
Sure enough, it wasn't long before Arka came riding up through the fields on a strong grey stallion. The horse seemed happy to have Arka seated on top; there was a joyfulness evident in its steps and the way it moved its head. As he came to them, Arka, however, seemed saddened. He was wet and a little muddy, as though he fell into a deep puddle, and he was looking down at Rosaria's mane. Avoiding all their gazes, he rode past and towards his tent, where there was a tethering post for her.
"I need to wash," he said.
"Maybe we won't celebrate," Monopa said to Tex, who seemed disappointed, but understood why. "Something must've happened. I'll talk to him about it." She followed her fellow leader.
"What did you call this again?" Tex asked Cliff, waving the scope about.
"A scope," Gerit said. "It's called a scope."
"I wasn't talking to you!"
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Post by Ethereal Panda on Jul 26, 2009 7:23:18 GMT 9.5
"I called it a telescope. That is what we call it where I come from." Cliff dexterously slipped tho scope out of Tex's hands and returned it to Gerit. Knowing that Gerit knew nothing of the stranger just observed, he decided this might be the best time to get some answers. The amount of unknowns and unanswered questions was starting to visibly frustrate Cliff. "Who else lives in the valley?" he pressed sternly posing the question again to both Tex and Gerit.
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Post by Treijim on Jul 26, 2009 7:40:32 GMT 9.5
"Nobody," Tex said, and he immediately left to work on the boots.
"There are others," Gerit said, "but we're not allowed to talk about them. There are lots of things we're not allowed to talk about. I think it's stupid. I'll tell you about it, but not here." He paused and looked around with added drama. "People can hear us."
He took Cliff around the back of the camp, towards the west, where the trees were near and many. He sat under a tree where he could still see the tents, but they were far away enough to talk safely.
"Has anyone told you about the Gianthands?" Gerit began. "It's a location at the other end of the valley. It's an abandoned vineyard with some homes, you know: grape vines, orchards, like that sorta thing. Giants live there, people twice as big as Jed. They dress in white all the time. We hardly ever see them, but it's never good when we do. They always want something." He glanced back toward the camp for a moment. "It's always different what they want so I can't tell."
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Post by Ethereal Panda on Jul 26, 2009 7:56:13 GMT 9.5
Cliff sat down next to the boy, and listened quietly. He thought for a minute before saying anything. This was an opportunity to get an idea of what the others wouldn't tell him, and he knew that it could be wrecked with the wrong types of questions. The boy took a deep breath before proceeding.
"Arka told me about them, but he said they were gone. What kind of things do they want? Tex said he saw one through your telescope, and I think I saw it too. Are the Gianthands the ones that came from the water?"
Cliff asked the last question despite believing this was probably not the case. However, he slyly added it in hopes of getting an explanation of what the last strangers did that made these children consider throwing him off a cliff. There was so much that remained unknown about this place, and its growing complexity in the boy's eyes was making it increasingly confusing.
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Post by Treijim on Jul 26, 2009 8:12:03 GMT 9.5
Gerit was frowning at the leaves on the ground. He pulled his knees up to his chest and crossed his arms over them, pushing his nose into his forearms. He closed his eyes for a few moments and said nothing. The forest here was surprisingly peaceful: birds sang high above and the sunlight streamed through rich green leaves, splattering everything beneath with glowing patches. A small and colourful spider was crawling up his leg and onto his arm. He turned his head slightly and watched it. As it walked in front of his face, he released small puffs of breath. Each one caused the spider to stop and curl up, but it would soon recover and continue trekking. There was gentle rustling nearby and rabbits sped out of one bush and dived into another.
"They usually want one of us."
"Gerit! Cliff!" Monopa's voice came trailing in the wind.
The boy looked up quickly. "The giants don't come from the blue water. The things in the water are much, much worse." He gave Cliff a terribly serious look and then started heading back to the camp. "We'd better get back before they suspect anything."
"There you are."
"I was showing Cliff the other trees," Gerit explained.
Monopa looked up at Cliff. "Really? You can show him another time. Nierra has seen to Rosaria and she seems well. Come on, we need to get back to work."
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Post by Ethereal Panda on Jul 26, 2009 8:31:16 GMT 9.5
Cliff remained in a deep silence with his brow heavily furrowed. Because of Gerit's reaction, he didn't want to press the boy any further. He was beginning to understand why no one wanted to talk about these things. However, knowing part of the truth only made him feel more pressed for answers. If there was a giant out there, they should do something about it, but what? The boy didn't have an answer. Lost in his own thoughts, his bare foot caught an exposed root, and he tripped, hitting the ground very hard. He laid face down groaning for a moment.
The boy lifted himself to a half upright before a sharp pain in his left ankle sent him back to the ground, this time on his butt. Observing the violating foot, there was no visible sign of swelling, at least yet, but he suspected he twisted it. Looking up at Monopa, he rubbed some dirt off his forehead and let out a single annoyed huff.
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Post by Treijim on Jul 26, 2009 8:43:17 GMT 9.5
Monopa shook her head. "What did you do there?"
She and Gerit helped him to his feet and took him to one of the girls tents. A girl was sitting in there doing her hair -- again... or still. Monopa asked her to look at Cliff's foot. The girl hesitated and repositioned the shard of mirror she was using to see what she was doing.
"Felinor," Monopa said. "Now. Please."
"Fine. What's wrong?" Felinor asked Cliff, and she waited while the other two left and he explained what happened. She began to wrap it tightly with bandages, apparently to stop it from swelling, and she took a leather bladder and went and filled it with cold water. She pressed it against his ankle without saying anything -- the cold surely a surprise. She had a certain vigour in the way she moved and acted; she was quick and sharp to speak and always seemed sure and confident.
"There. Keep it cold and it'll be fine in a few days, maybe. You might want something to help you walk. Get Larr to make you a walking stick." She picked up the mirror again and smiled at herself. "Do you like my hair?"
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