Welcome to my seemingly endless journey.
A trip that will take you to places I might have visited many moons ago.
It´s a tale that came back to me when I meditated on one of my past lives. A life I told you about in my unbelievable true story.
As promised in that story I will now share this story with you.
Chapter 62
Retsj immediately takes action, but the knife on the young woman's throat quickly changes his mind. I turn in the direction of the glare, of which I now suspect I know what it is.
My suspicion is confirmed when, before I have fully turned around, I also feel the cold, hard steel of a dagger pressing on the artery in my neck. I even think I feel that the sharp blade has already broken the surface of my skin and that a thin trickle of warm blood is running from my neck to my chest.
I see Numico and Retsj raise their hands in the air, signaling that they will not resist.
Men appear everywhere. There must be at least thirty of them lying in ambush here on this plateau. Without any form of resistance, they captured us. I attribute all this to my curiosity. I should have exercised a much greater degree of caution.
It is the ideal place for a trap.
Why haven't I thought of that?
The answer comes quickly; I am not a warlord. I do not think in terms of traps and tactical maneuvers. Even if I had, we would have been so outnumbered that we would have dropped it.
Especially here on this dead plain, which offers no possibility of shelter or building traps. No, we certainly could have sent some of the soldiers to their ancestors among the stars, but at what or whose cost?
Numico has already examined the wooden latticework that surrounds us several times for weak spots. After the third time, he really seems to give up.
"There is no escape, I won't get through anything, and even if I did, I wouldn't know how to free you. Even if we could, how do we get down the mountain unnoticed? And even if we made it down the mountain, we wouldn't get any closer to our goal. It would probably even move us away from our goal. But I still don't understand why I didn't feel them. Looking back, it seems like I wasn't aware of what I was feeling?”
Retsj lies in a similar wooden cage next to us, gagged in such a way that at least 30 meters of rope must have been used. It looks like a huge roulade. I blame my stomach for this comparison because despite it spontaneously starts to growl at the idea of a large piece of meat.
"Retsj would have gotten us out of here in an instant if it weren't for the fact that he is beautifully wrapped," Numico remarks idly.
The three of us sit on the floor of our prison, our faces turned away from our captors. “For the time being, we cannot change this situation,” I say after looking at many options and abandoning them because of their impracticality. "But one thing seems clear to me, they are not going to kill us."
Cabilah's big eyes look at me. “Why not?”
"Would they bother to lock us up like that if they wanted to kill us? They could have cut off our throats and thrown us all into one of the many gorges. That didn't happen. They chose to imprison us. I think that indicates they have other orders. But I think it would be useful to find out a little more about our friends. Who's in charge here? Where are we going? Why do they need us? Although the latter may probably have something to do with that little thing in Kratyo."
"But be careful, don't take any risks. We have seen the carnage these dogs can cause, something I would prefer not to experience personally.”
'Master Oniko came to me last night for a reason. He talked about a downfall, but whose downfall? It seems to me that he was trying to point out the possibility that, despite things looking bad for us, we may have found ourselves in a more advantageous situation than we can currently imagine."
"Trust your friends was one of the other sentences that stuck with me. That is something I always found difficult. There was only one person I trusted and even that person I doubted at times. But if this was the intention, it might explain Numico's perception. Or rather, the lack of perception.” Retsj nods but says nothing as the ropes also make it impossible for him to speak.
Cabilah lowers her eyes. “After that terrible night in my village, I believed that I could not trust anyone in this world ever again. But if I have to trust people, those people are you. Together, we possess enough talent and strength to defeat an army of these soldiers,” fire burns in Cabilah's eyes. “We will escape, we will achieve our goal. We could not have come this far if the gods hadn´t been protecting us. We must have faith in each other and in fate.” She says the last words in a hissing manner so that the approaching soldier cannot hear them.
