Land of Mist and Snow by Debra Doyle & James Macdonald

Author:Debra Doyle & James Macdonald [Doyle, Debra & Macdonald, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 2006) # Language: English # ISBN-10: 0060819197 # ISBN-13: 978-0060819194, 0-06-133657-2 # Mass Market Paperback: 320 pages # Publisher: Eos (November 28
Published: 2011-03-27T17:25:42+00:00

From the field journal of Captain Edward

Bartlett, USA. Recorded in a personal

shorthand adapted from the Pitman method

(continued).

#

CARRYING OUT MY PLAN, HOWEVER, PROVED more difficult than I had initially anticipated. Without further ado, the tavern keeper and his companion entered my room, seized me by ankles and shoulders as though I were no more than a sack of potatoes, and bore me ungently outside between them. I was hard put to maintain my resolve in the face of such treatment; fortunately, I was not transported in this manner for very long. A donkey and cart waited in the dark outside, and it was into this rough conveyance that I was unceremoniously deposited.

The cart rattled into motion—a form of progress scarcely more comfortable than before—with my two captors walking alongside. They conversed in low voices as they went along, but spoke no more of LAND OF MIST AND SNOW

149

Alecto or of what might be intended for the two men she had apparently demanded tonight from San Anselmo. I dared, then, to open my eyelids to more than mere slits for the first time since hearing the tavern keeper’s footsteps outside my room, and to take stock as best I could of my physical situation.

As I had already suspected, I was not alone in the cart, but shared it with the second portion of Alecto’s human tribute. He had not been taken unresisting; his hands and feet were bound, and the moonlight that shone down from gaps in the wind-torn clouds showed that his face was swollen and marked with dark clots of earth or blood.

For my own part, I was keenly aware of my good fortune in being neither injured nor bound. A sleeping draught meant to keep me insensate until morning had apparently been deemed security enough.

Greatly though my conscience pained me, I did not venture to make known my relative freedom, or even my conscious state, to the other man. I was determined to hoard whatever slender advantage I currently possessed until such time as I had discovered at least some part of what I had journeyed so far, and put myself at such hazard, in order to see.

The journey to the shore of Lake Nicaragua was not overlong, but uncomfortable enough to seem a great deal longer. The necessity of continuing to feign a drugged stupor meant that I could not change position to brace myself against the cart’s dips and lurches on the track. The resultant accumulation of cuts and bruises at least provided me with some distraction 150

Debra Doyle a nd James Macdonald

from morbid fantasies. A peculiar curiosity, such as I suspect a bird feels when facing a serpent, compelled me to see the drama to its last act.

At the lake shore, the bound man and I were manhandled, without ceremony, into a rough wooden boat, perhaps a dugout canoe (the requirement that I once more shut my eyes to escape detection prevented me from observing it more closely). Our captors joined us, and rowed us for some distance out into the lake.

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