The King's Horse by Secchia Marc

Author:Secchia, Marc [Secchia, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Young Adult
Amazon: B00C1ESGD6
Goodreads: 18393134
Publisher: Kindle
Published: 2013-03-26T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14: Rolling Boulders

“Giant! Giant giant giant!” screamed the village children as they scattered in all directions like chickens frightened by a swooping buzzard.

Talaku, far from being annoyed, flashed Shioni a broad grin. “Sometimes I growl like a lion just to see how fast they can run.”

“I once pretended to be a ghost,” said Shioni. “The poor man nearly wet his trousers.”

He hooted. “At least you get to hide under that cloak. I can’t hide anywhere.”

Apart from behind an elephant… anyways, she couldn’t change her face or hair either. But Shioni kept her thoughts to herself.

Traversing the high pass had been a day and a half’s struggle through mud, loose rocks, and more torrential rain during the second evening. Shioni was splattered with mud up to the top of her head. Star had turned a different colour altogether.

Then they started the descent–the mud slide, according to Tariku–a slippery, foothold-by-foothold affair broken by some good sections where the ground was rocky enough to take their weight well. To cap it off, they were now travelling inside a cloud that clung to the peaks. Thick, soupy mist obscured their vision and made their clothes stick to their skin.

Shioni had stumbled across a set of clear tracks the previous evening. Tariku calculated from their condition that they were only a few hours behind the mad Arabian now. She was pleased to have earned his grudging approval of her tracking skills, at least, but her foraging so far had earned a shake of his head and a snort of disgust.

The other thing that Tariku kept muttering about was Talaku’s appetite. Despite several meals of large tubers which were cooked by burying them beneath a fire for an hour or two, they were already running low on supplies. Talaku shrugged mountainously and called his stomach ‘his inner wolf’.

This village was a small collection of round, mud-and-stick huts on the hillside. As they approached, Shioni saw a landslide had collapsed one of the huts. Most of the village seemed to be trying to dig through the mud and dirt with their hands. There was even a donkey lingering nearby as though it intended to lend a hoof to the effort. A couple of men were wavering between checking that the travellers were friendly, and helping tear at the rubble.

After a brief exchange of greetings, Tariku asked the villagers what had happened.

“A dragon’s claw struck the hut!”

“Lightning, it was lightning!”

“This boulder was dislodged by the rains,” said the oldest of the group. “There’s a child under there.”

“Underneath the boulder?”

“No. We can hear his cries. He was in a crib by this wall when the boulder–stop it! He’s alive!” One of the women had begun wailing and screaming and tearing at her face and hair with her fingernails. “That’s the mother. The boulder’s on the crib and the child is somewhere underneath, but we can’t get to it.”

“Let me take a look,” Talaku rumbled, popping his knuckles purposefully.

It could have been any one of a thousand mountain villages, Shioni thought, perhaps forty or fifty adults and children, raggedly dressed, not a shoe in sight.

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