He tore around a beech tree, gauged the distance and leaped to the rocky strip of beach, then pounded into the water. He could hear only the roar as he swam out into the current. Flipping water from his face, he got enough purchase on a rock to lift himself high, catching a glimpse of the little girl as she floundered and grabbed a buoyant pack—and after that brief instant, bobbed out of sight.
Black Skull struggled in that direction, barely feeling the rocks he scraped by. He caught another glimpse of her as he was carried over a rock and then down into the swirling backwash.
The water sucked at him, dragging him under, but it spat him back up.
There she was, clinging desperately to the pack and the trapped air it contained. He stroked after her.
Like your canoe, Trader. You’ve got to keep steerage. And he managed to sink fingers into the girl’s wet shirt where it rode high from the air bubble inside.
“Hold onto my neck!” he shouted in pidgin as he pulled her close. “That’s it. Crawl onto my back!”
“Where’s my mama?” the girl cried. “Where is she? Did you see her?”
“No. Now hold tight!”
He began battling toward the shore. As he was washed over yet another of the rapids, he caught sight of a raft of driftwood piled in the rocks. He made for it, only to be pinned against the.
thick logs by the surging current. He shoved the girl and her pack up on top of the mess.
He himself started up, casting a glance out across the water.
The canoe, upside down, whirled past and vanished into the leaping spray and crashing water. Then he saw the woman, up the river, hanging precariously onto a rock. She looked back at him. Black Skull held up her daughter. Some of the fear left the woman’s face.
His perch on the logs was anything but secure. The entire raft was held in place by a single log that had wedged between two rocks. Looking down, Black Skull saw their sanctuary shuddering and giving under the force of the rushing current.
The shore lay farther away than it had any right to be, ten body-lengths, and when Black Skull glanced behind him, the canoe hadn’t bobbed back up. In fact, nothing was bobbing anywhere behind him. All appeared to vanish into a curving nothingness.
He could see the swirling mists rising beyond, from a long, long way down. He crouched at the lip of an incredible waterfall.
He shook his head, refusing to believe what he’d just seen, and looked back upriver in time to see the woman’s hold loosening.
She slipped into the rush, twisting and splashing in the water as she shot down toward him.
“Stay here!” Black Skull shouted at the petrified girl. She’d twined one hand in the pack, the other clutching the driftwood raft.
Black Skull groped frantically and found a splintered pole in the mass. Tugging it out caused part of the pile to break away and whirl off over the cascading falls. The girl let out a sudden shriek.
“Thrice-cursed wood,” he muttered, struggling for balance on the heaving debris. The woman might have been a plaything, the way the current tossed her this way and that.
In the midst of that insanity, Black Skull caught a momentary glimpse of a ludicrous sight. A second canoe, this one painted in Ilini designs, plunged down the river, rising and falling in the rapids. It took only moments before it went over the edge of the falls. Sunlight flashed on some kind of bone breastplate. The single occupant paddled on air, his mouth open, the scream lost as he continued to paddle outward, downward, beyond the curvature of the falls.
Black Skull turned back. The woman rushed toward him. Wet black hair covered her face, but her dark eyes were insane with fear. “Help me!” she screamed. “Please! Help me!”
“Mama! Mama!” the little girl cried.
Black Skull jabbed his stick into the rushing water, like a spear, throwing his weight against it, praying the wood wouldn’t shatter when it hit bottom, or that the force wouldn’t wrench the raft from underfoot and kill them all.
He roared as he struggled to hold the pole so she’d have something to grab onto.
“Try to grab the pole!” he shouted.
In that last desperate instant, she twisted, got hold of the slippery wood, and he was able to drag her into the lee of the rock, where the backwash swirled. From there, he could pull her close enough, and finally reach down to drag her up, shaking and terrified, onto the driftwood raft.
Immediately the woman grabbed her daughter, crushing the child to her breast, so engrossed that she didn’t see another section of their perch break loose and pitch over the falls behind them.
She wept as she hugged the girl, cooing in a language Black Skull didn’t understand.
He wiped the spray from his face, trying to assess what was left of their crumbling nest. With their combined weight, they were literally crushing their perch beneath them.