The Survivors

Slave traders from a Sumerian city burn a small village. A boy fleeing the village is pursued by lions. Time Travelers try to intervene to save him.

ISLANDS IN TIME                               

                   Chapter One

                 The Survivors

 

Tezah dreamed of his mother’s wheat cakes.  As he bit into one, he felt an itch on his chest.  His left hand reached up to scratch at the fleabite below his left n****e. He nestled closer to Napthali. Tezah and Napthali shared the same mat with Enkil, the other child of Baram and his mate Marna. The family occupied the south east quarter of the long house. Tezah stirred and then lifted his head. On the next mat he could see his parents moving. Baram knelt behind Marna. She moaned as Baram’s hands fondled her breasts. Baram groaned, pushing deeper into her. Tezah ignored them.  Instead he rose and stepped off the mat onto the earthen floor.

The boy crept along through the central passageway of the longhouse.  He unlatched the leather thong that fastened the door.  As he opened the door, the cold night wind brushed against his bare skin. Tezah shivered. Anxious to return to the warmth of the blanket, Tezah hurried over to the pit at the rear of the long house. He crouched and emptied his bowels. As Tezah squatted, he looked up to see Tiamat, the great hunter, striding across the heavens. The lights burned in the houses of the gods. There dwelt Shahat the beautiful, whose stone he wore.  Enku, the mightiest of them, ruled the heavens. His arms could shatter mountains.  He respected mighty Enku, but his favourite remained Tiamat.

Born a man, Tiamat had battled both demons and men. He saved his people from the filthy southerners.  When he was old, after leading the people for many years, the Gods raised him on high.

Through the dark, towards the well he ran. Tezah hauled up a goatskin full of cool water and cleaned himself. The water that remained in the bag, he poured back into the well. Wasting water would anger the gods. As he dropped the goatskin back into the well, he saw a red glow beyond the palisade wall. It came from the north fields, the wheat crop.

Baram grumbled and turned over as his son shook him. Tezah hissed. “Fire.”  The one word, repeated in his ear woke Baram.  He pushed away Marna's arm, rose and strode over to the door.  As he looked out, he could see the yellowish red flames leaping up from the precious fields.  His voice roared across the hut. Somnolent forms began to stir.

Baram, followed by his eldest son, Enkil, ran towards the palisade gate. Tezah trailed behind.  Baram swung back the great wooden door and raced towards the fields.  With him he carried the woollen blanket he shared with Marna. He would use it for beating out the flames. If he moved fast enough, they would save most of the crops. Other men and boys followed, including Tezah. The women would come after them, bringing goatskins of water and more blankets.

Baram reached the wheat field to see forms rising behind the flames. He paused and gaped. His bearded mouth opened to shout at Enkil.  The arrow struck him in his right breast. Enkil assumed that his father had tripped, until he saw the shaft protruding from his chest.  Enkil turned, screaming a warning. An arrow caught him in the left buttock. As he stumbled forward, another struck his back piercing his left lung. He pitched forward. Blood bubbled from his mouth.  Enkil gripped the soil, squeezing it between his fingers, trying to pull himself forward, calling to the others not to leave him, calling for his mother.  Blood dribbled from his mouth choking his cries. One last spasm shook him.  His bowels and bladder emptied.  Enkil quivered then lay still.  Tezah, with the other men and boys fled towards the palisade. Between them and the open gate a line of axe men stood.  The villagers, most of them naked, all of them defenceless, fell on their knees and begged for life. The killing resumed.

This being his ninth slave raid to the north, Marduk did not have to tell his men what to do. He looked on as the axe men went among the kneeling villagers, separating them into two groups. The adult males would die. The boys they would take south to the slave markets in Nish. Sharrumkin’s instructions, perfected during previous raids, were simple. Any male above fourteen died. If a soldier had doubts about a captive’s age, the captive died. They would impale anyone offering resistance.  As the axe men went about their work, they dropped each head into the sacks that they carried. Sharrumkin would want an accurate count. The higher the number of heads, the greater would be the man’s reward. His men would not find many heads in this paltry collection of huts.  

The archers, led by Marduk, moved into the village. They fired each hut, forcing those hiding inside out into the open.  They herded the frightened women, children, and old people into the centre of the village. His men searched for the specimens prized by the merchants, attractive, fertile women, and healthy children. Old people and infants died.  Marduk knew that preserving their strength keeping themselves and their older children alive would be better for the women. It would be a twenty-day march to Kish. A woman tried to cling to him. He pushed aside her arm.  The woman, her infant clinging to her bare breasts, gibbered at him, pleading, he assumed, for her child’s life.  She would have others. A soldier seized her by the hair, and dragged her away. 

                Savages. Those who died would have spent their lives living in this filthy hole. Those who survived would become part of a great world. The Gods decreed man’s fate.  His own father died in such a raid. Even so, he would not wish himself condemned to a life in such a village as this.   It would be better in the south, especially for the children.

He stood besides the well allowing the cool water from the goatskin bag to pour over his face and shoulders. Half-interested, he looked on as the killing continued. He took a deep swallow of water.  Sharrumkin and he had once been two bare-arsed brats running through the streets of Kish, pilfering from the merchants’ stalls.    Sharrumkin and his adopted father Aqqi the gardener had spread a story about Sharrumkin having been born the son of a high priestess, from Azupiranu, Saffron-town. The truth, Sharrumkin told to Marduk over too many jars of beer.  Sharrumkin’s mother had been a slave in the temple. Faced with another unwanted child, and lacking the heart to strangle it, she placed it in a basket and set it adrift on the Euphrates. She hoped that the river would do what she could not bring herself to do.  Aqqi had found the basket and the infant washed up on the river shore.  Taking the child as a gift from the gods, he took it home and raised it as his own son.

A favourite servant of the ensi of Kish, Ur-Zabadda, Aqqi would often show the ensi the work on the drainage ditches. On one such tour, Ur-Zabadda noticed Aqqi’s adopted son, playing in the river. He brought him into the palace as royal cupbearer.  Sharrumkim had performed other duties of a more intimate nature.  Better, Marduk knew, to forget what those duties had been.

Marduk shook the water off his face.  Sharrumkin, hard as bronze, and yet a dreamer, led nine raids north, Each brought back more slaves, and more wealth.  With it Sharrumkin bought support in Nish from the merchants and young men. He talked of being appointed as lugal,  commander of  the army, of becoming the vizier. As Sharrumkin rose, so Marduk would rise.  He would be to Sharrumkin, what Enkidu had been to Gilgamesh; the true friend to be prized above all treasures. Only to Marduk alone, had Sharrumkin spoken of his dream.  The vision, Sharrumkin claimed, came from Innana herself.  She had chosen one man, himself, to rule, not one city or town, not two or three, but all. From the upper sea to the lower sea, as far as the mountains of cedar and the mountains of silver, Sharrumkin would stand between the gods and the black-headed people. Such a man could command an army, not of two or three thousands, but tens of thousands.

It could be done. The older cities to the south had grown weak from generations of squabbling. Lugulzaggishi, lord of Ereck had snapped them up, one after the other, forcing their rulers to crawl before him on their bellies as Ur-Zabbada, ensi of Kish had done. Sharrumkin would be the man to force Lugulzaggishi to crawl.  Marduk would stand beside him watching it being done.

Marduk had thought that Sharrumkin's dream might have been as much a product of the beer as of the Gods.   Nevertheless, Sharrumkin had continued to rise, breaking one enemy after another.  He gained the trust and support of the merchants, of the army, and of the common people without losing Ur- Zabbada’s trust.  Even so, such success contained its own peril.  Man could be certain of only one thing. Only the Gods were eternal.

That was me, the way of things. The Gods placed the black-headed people on the land. The Gods taught them to build their cities and canals, to tend their crops, and to fish. To man the Gods granted both joy and care. Nothing changed. Some cities grew favoured by the gods. The gods’ favour changed.  Cities faded. Yet Sharrumkin seemed so confident.  Perhaps he did possess the eternal favour of the Gods.

The screams faded, sinking to a collective moaning. The raping began. When it ended, the women would be bound with the children. In the morning they would begin their march south, three days to the bend of the great river where Sharrumkin had his main base. Marduk knew that he could take a woman. Some were attractive, underneath their dirt, but he had little taste for it this night.  He was getting old, almost thirty now. Marduk was glad that this would be the last raid north. Sharrumkin had agreed that he would concentrate on cultivating the merchants, persuading them to persuade the ensi to give him command of the army.

Marduk strode over to the great fire burning in the village square. Here squatted a detail of troops playing at knucklebones. Behind the troopers huddled the village children, their legs and arms bound with rope. Marduk nodded at the men, sympathising with their boredom. He lifted up a glowing branch from out of the fire and stepped among the children. He had told the lads to leave them alone. Sharrumkin would want them in prime condition.  One or two men might overstep their orders. He remembered the boy shot down by the archers.  Although an accident caused by the darkness, Marduk struck the archer. A good leader should discourage waste.

The man glanced down at the children as he walked among them.  Dirty, lice-ridden, stinking of urine and of fear, they seemed unhurt. By the morning, after some sleep and food, they would be ready. It would be a slow march tomorrow. The children and their mothers would have time to adjust themselves to the longer march that they would have to endure under Sharrumkin.

As they sat around the beer vat, Sharrumkin asked Marduk what his dream was. Marduk felt ashamed to speak of it.  It seemed so plain. He wanted to sit on a bench under a date palm in his own courtyard and watch his grandchildren at play. Sharrumkin laughed and clapped him on the back.  “You are a dull fellow,” he grinned. Marduk shrugged.

A small boy crouched in the dirt.  He whimpered as Marduk leaned closer, trying to hide himself behind his sister.  Something odd about him, Marduk thought. He noticed the amulet. It dangled by a leather thong from his neck, a small red painted triangular stone. He shoved away the girl sheltering him and pulled the boy to his feet. By the light of the torch, he studied the stone.  No hole allowed the thong to pass through. Instead string held it in place the sides of the thong forming a tiny pouch.  It felt heavy to the touch.  He pulled it off the boy and held it up closer to the fire.

From the weight and feel he knew it to be a firestone.  The most precious of all stones, harder then the strongest bronze, forged by the gods themselves.  It was his by right with everything else in this stinking village, except the slaves. The value of the stone would be enough to enrich him. However, Marduk knew that more than just the value of a stone would be involved.  A wise man did not interfere with the wishes of the gods, even of foreign gods.  Besides, something stolen from a child, even from a slave child, was not something boasted of.  He would have to tell how he had battled with a great warrior for it.  Someone might bring the lie to Sharrumkin’s notice. Sharrumkin would lose respect for him.  He would also desire the stone. Was the stone worth angering both the gods and Sharrumkin? He dropped the amulet back around the boy’s neck. 

As he watched him, Marduk noticed the boy’s face. On the right side he could see a dark stain. It seemed little more then a smudge caused by smoke or dirt, easy to overlook at night.   Marduk gripped the boy’s neck with his right hand. As the boy squirmed, he rubbed his left hand against the darkened side of its face.  Marduk examined his own hand. He could see no trace of dirt. Marduk knew then what had to be done. As a sign of their anger the gods had laid their mark on this child. They could not allow him to live. He had suffocated his youngest daughter, cursed with such a mark.  He had buried her in a pit, unnamed, with no marker to show that she had once lived.

Marduk dragged the boy closer to the fire and pointed the sign out to the other men. The soldiers began muttering prayers to ward off the gods. Marduk told them that he would do it outside the gate so that the other children would not see. They had seen too much death that night. The men muttered agreement. Marduk could see their respect for him grow in their eyes.  Throwing the boy over his shoulder, Marduk marched towards the gate. Outside the gate he dropped the boy down onto the ground. From out of its leather scabbard, he drew his bronze sword.  The boy, hobbled by the ropes around his ankles, tried to crawl away, sobbing in his barbarous tongue.  Marduk watched him for a moment and considered how best to perform the sacrifice. Should he thrust at the heart or at the throat? Then he glanced back.  No one watched them.

He could not understand why the child’s parents had not strangled him at birth. To allow such a creature to exist he knew to be blasphemy.  Small wonder that their gods had failed to protect them.

Marduk admitted he knew little about such matters. He sensed that the gods who lived in these hills were different from those of Kish. He also knew what Sharrumkin would do if he should see the boy.   Sharrumkin would cut the boy’s throat and toss the body to the vultures, grumbling about Marduk’s becoming a woman.

Sharrumkin’s dream: Sumeria would rise above all the peoples.  It would teach them writing and art.  His dream would bring cities and law. It would also mean burning villages.  The dying would go on, through all the years ahead of him, and beyond, through the years of his sons and grandsons. Would he ever sit beneath that date palm?

Marduk leaned down and took the boy by his throat. With one well-practised slice he cut through the ropes binding the child’s ankles. He then cut through the ropes holding his wrists. Lifting the boy up, he shook him.

“North,” Marduk told him. “Go North.”

He pointed in the direction of the mountains. Tezah dropped to the ground. He looked up at the tall man in the leather cap, wondering what he was saying, seeing only the sword in his hand. Then his eyes followed the man’s outstretched finger.

Marduk watched as the boy ran off into the night. If he ran far enough, deep enough into the mountains, the child would never become part of Sharrumkin’s dream. If he ran far enough, escaped death by lions, by thirst or at the hands of men, he might live to be free. For the briefest of moments Marduk wished that he could run with him. He shook his head, sheathed his sword and strode back towards the gate.

                           ***

I am Sargon, the mighty king, king of Agade . . .

Joanna leaned down to close the infant’s eyes. A blue fly, sluggish in the morning heat, crawled out of its mouth. Joanna longed to get back into the helicopter, to feel clean air in her lungs. The village stank of burnt wood and decomposing corpses. The bodies would be left where they lay, left for the vultures, hyenas and wild dogs. Even now she could see the dogs waiting outside the palisade for the strangers to leave.  The agents still had more pictures to take.

. . . defeated them, cast them in heaps, and overthrew their widespread host.

As she looked through the ruins, Joanna tried to calculate how many infants would make up a heap.

                Only after they had kicked over the last heap of burnt timbers did she concede defeat. “I had hoped. . . .”

“Sharrumkin’s too damn efficient, You should know that,” Sean Mulcahey told her, his right eye pressed to the lens of his recorder, still filming the last heap of ruins, the last decapitated body.

“You sound as if you admire him?”

“Sharrumkin, Sargon the great, built the first large empire that we know of, defeated his enemies, marched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and died in bed of old age. You have to give him credit.”

“I’d like to give him something,” she muttered.

“Historical objectivity, love. Don’t forget, all of this, including Sharrumkin, was dust before you were born.”

“Study the past, learn from it, but never change it. Preserve and protect.” Joanna recited the agency creed. The truth, which in the academy classrooms on Pitcairn seemed so noble and clear, seemed to wither in the ashes of that burnt village. 

Agents, both islanders and mainlanders, found it hard to maintain their objectivity.  Twenty-three years before, one agent, Benjamin Dzingira, had abandoned it at the sight of a baby girl, starving to death in an English village, annihilated by the bubonic plague. Unable to leave the infant to die, he defied regulations and brought it back to Pitcairn. The agency confined him to the one cell on the island and debated  the child’s future. They could only return her to her village to die. To let her live in her own time would change the past. Neither could they release her into the general population. The directors of the agency were neither cruel nor unsympathetic but they were logical. They could not allow the child, taken outside her time, to disrupt the future.  The agency would then have returned the child.  Then two things happened.

A native islander, one of nine remaining Pitcairners, Jane Christian, appointed as the child’s nurse, refused to surrender her. Instead, she barricaded herself and the infant inside her home. The eight other Pitcairners, all of them old and ailing, kept watch outside. In front of her small wooden house, Jane displayed the former flag of the Pitcairn Island colony. The Union Jack and the anchor of the Bounty hung again in the sky above Pitcairn. A Pitcairner took a photo.  Computer screens carried the image around the globe.  In front of the parliament building in Wellington, a hundred and sixty-seven former Pitcairners and friends gathered to protest, joined by ten times their number of sympathetic New Zealanders.  Similar demonstrations followed in Auckland, on Norfolk Island in Canberra and in Papeete.

The agency could brush aside such petty resistance.  However, worried about muttering from its own agents, and possible damage to its public image, it hesitated. During that moment of hesitation, the other untoward event occurred. Doctor Foley arrived on Pitcairn.

The old man arrived uninvited, the one person to whom the agency could not deny admission. Ignoring the hurriedly assembled honour guard, Foley demanded that the driver take him to see Dzingira. He left the directors, and most of Pitcairn’s population waiting, as he visited the disgraced agent in the man’s cell. The doctor then ordered the driver to take him, not to the director’s office, but to the home of Jane Christian. Over a glass of peach juice and a dish of Jane’s pilai, her chicken stew, he chatted with the woman as she nursed the child, the innocent source of all the trouble. 

Three hours after his arrival on the island, Doctor Foley met with the directors.  The result of their discussions became known in history as the Adamstown Agreement. The directors, moved by the old man’s pleas, made two concessions.  They agreed to the release of Benjamin Dzingira, granting him a general discharge and dropping all charges.  They also agreed that, when it did not violate the laws of historical determinism, they would cede permission to agents to salvage children abandoned to die in their own time. Every April thirteenth, the agency commemorated the agreement with banqueting and speechifying.   To no one did the day mean more than to the children of Pitcairn, allowed to celebrate by travelling to the beaches of Oeno Island to swim, feast and to receive presents.  At the end of the day the chief director would tell them of the agreement, to which they owed their lives.

The agreement carried a price.  “We are not,” Robert Delisle, the executive director noted, “a charity.  We must pay our way.”  The rescued children became the property of the agency.  They could not run loose in a time different from their own.  They assigned those lacking in the intelligence required of agents various tasks, from administration, to maintenance, to tending of the gardens.  The lucky ones, such as Joanna and Sean travelled into time, finding there the freedom to leave the two square miles of Pitcairn.  In the end, whatever their assignments, the islanders, as they called themselves, would all share the same fate.  Once an islander died, agents would transport their bodies back to their own period.  The agency would preserve the natural order.

As a further safeguard to the time line, the directors decreed sterilisation for every foundling at the age of thirteen. Any accidental offspring, whether on Pitcairn or in the field, could have a detrimental effect upon the future.  Mainlander agents used temporary contraceptives. To offset any undue psychological hardship, the agency allowed a sexually permissive atmosphere to develop on the island. Around the sterilisation the agency draped a coming of age ritual celebrated with gifts.  They now regarded the child as sexually mature.

For those islanders with parental instincts, the agency took pains to ensure that they would be eligible to adopt any new foundlings.  Not a perfect solution, Delisle admitted to his fellow directors, but the best that they could come up with, given their limitations.

                Joanna Dzingira would never see Benjamin or his family. She would never, except through holograms or videos, travel to his home in the Hunyani Hills.  She could ramble through Benjamin’s village, but it remained an image. Joanna would never feel the red earth under her feet upon which Benjamin had trod. He would never hold her. She would never be with her sisters and brothers. Still, she should not be bitter, Joanna would tell herself.  How many women of her time knew how to fly a helicopter?

As she walked back to towards the stubby rounded body of the copter her memories lay, not with Benjamin, but with the bodies scattered throughout the village.  For two years, she and six other agents had studied the life and rise of the world’s first empire builder, Sharrumkin, Sargon the Great.  She had walked through eight other villages such as this. The pattern remained the same. Sharrumkin’s raiders, whether led by Sharrumkin or by his lieutenant Marduk, left nothing behind except the dead.  Only among the dead could Joanna salvage a life. Every time she had failed.  They turned her pleadings to move closer to the village aside, as she knew they would. Protection of the time line came first. The agents must wait until the raiders had moved on beyond the sound of their engines.  Even with the engines muffled that required waiting until the raiders and their captives were miles away from the village.

With every walk through the gutted villages, Joanna reminded herself of the mission priority, to observe, to note, to learn. If they could save a life, do so, but never at the cost of the mission.  She brushed away the flies gathering around the dead infant’s face.  As she did so, she tried not to think of the jackals waiting beyond the palisade.

“Better be on our way,” said Sean.  He wished that he could say something that would comfort her. How often had he wanted to go back to that dying village where he had been found?  He still remembered that snow-shrouded cottage of the dead.  Ruth, that tall, bronze-skinned woman, had bent down to lift him up from that frozen corner where he, in his rags, had dragged his feverish, skeletal body to die.  Robin passed by hundreds before saving one. Accept the unacceptable. Otherwise, the work could not be done.

"Tomorrow perhaps,” he whispered.

Joanna nodded and turned towards the copter.

They sped towards the Zagros Mountains. As Sean concentrated on examining his prints, Joanna stared ahead at the distant mountains. She would change, have a swim, and make love with Sean and then sleep. The village and the dead would slip back into the past where they belonged. She did not look aside when the beeper sounded. A good pilot, her gaze remained on her instruments and on the view in front of her.

Sean turned away from his computer screen, towards the viewer. The beep could, and usually did, suggest animal life. Human travellers in this part of the plain were few. If they were human, they were probably nomads or a convoy of merchants. They might make interesting material for picture taking but represented nothing which they had not seen before. The agents did not worry about being spotted.  At the speed and height at which they travelled, any chance observer would dismiss them as the Gods hurrying about their affairs.

As he glanced at the screen, Sean saw four objects moving across the plain. He adjusted the viewer lens for greater magnification increasing it to a factor of ten.

“Jesus Christ.”

Joanna looked at him.

He increased magnification to fifteen.  Without looking up, he called to her.

“Take it down. Quickly.”

“Down? Why?”

He continued to peer through the lens.

“I’ve found your survivor.”

                           ***

Tezah found the pool in the early morning after wandering across the plains for hours. The barbarian had pointed towards the mountains. Towards them, Tezah ran. His father had once told him of villages to the north.  Three days march for a grown man. Tezah was far from being a grown man.  Fear and his shorter stride made the distance greater then that faced by men.  He knew how to move north by the stars, but without food, water or clothing, he had little chance of reaching the mountains.  Somehow the gods would help.

As he stumbled towards the grove of date palms, he knew that they had guided his steps. Here in the midst of the plain he found both food and water. The palms fringed a small water hole. Tezah fell into the water, lying in it for what seemed to him to be hours, allowing its coolness to soak into his skin.  He then shinnied up a palm tree to pluck some dates. As he ate, Tezah realised that he could not stay at the water hole. Footprints and droppings of gazelles and onagers surrounded it.  From the treetop he watched a small herd of wild onagers looking at him, waiting for him to leave. Where onagers went so lions and jackals went. Tezah stared out over the plain. He saw no sign of predators.  He looked across the plain at the foothills. It would take him until evening to reach them. At their base were small stands of cedar. He could spend the night in one. That would protect him from the lions. In the morning he would find water, and with any luck, people.  Tezah touched the amulet on his chest.  The goddess would protect him, as she had protected him in the village.   The fear of the goddess had caused the soldier to return the amulet and to release him.  Shahat would see him safe to the next village.

Huddled beside the base of the tree, Tezah rested against the trunk, the roughness of its bark scratching his back.  As the sun rose he tried to sleep.   Memories of his father and mother, of his brothers and sisters mixed with those of the savages killing and burning.   They were animals, not true people. They huddled together in thousands, filthy and cruel.  When he grew to be a man, he would slay them all as Tiamat had slain his enemies. 

As he squatted beside the water hole and drank, Tezah studied the small herd of onagers.  They seemed nervous and might have caught the scent of a predator. He could not stay here any longer.  One thing he had to do before he left.  He sang the song of remembrance for his people taught to him by his mother.  The knowledge that they remembered them would help his father and brother and the others find peace in their new life.  He thought of his mother and sisters bound, slaves to those barbarians.  His voice thin and tremulous, he tried not to weep like a woman.

Tezah ran towards the hills. His bare feet pounded the ground. A few minutes after leaving the tree, he looked back.  Three low slung creatures sniffed the ground beside the water hole.   Even as he looked, the lionesses looked up and stared at him. He prayed to Shahat they would prefer the onagers. When they began loping towards him, Tezah knew that he would not live. He had allowed the stranger to violate the amulet.  The goddess in her anger had condemned him.  Even so, he began to run.  Fear, not hope, fear of the great claws and teeth kept him running.   He had not gone twenty feet before the leading lioness fell upon him, raking his  right side with a paw.  As he fell forward, the snarling of the three lionesses buried his scream.

The copter streaked through the air.   As the animals and their prey appeared, Joanna touched a button above her.  A high-pitched shrill exploded upon the lionesses.  Their ears numbed, the animals bolted, shaking their heads.  Sean grabbed the first-aid kit, and a blanket.  As the copter settled, he opened the door and sprinted towards the child lying in the grass.

Air bubbled through a gash in the boy’s throat, mixing with blood. Only a tendon and scraps of flesh held his right arm to his trunk. Sean knew that this child would not live.  A pulse still fluttered, but for how long?  The boy, deep in a coma, could feel nothing.  Sean slapped a bandage upon the gaping hole torn in the boy’s throat.  The other wounds, the ripping up of the right arm, back, legs and buttocks would have to wait until they reached the base.  He noted the dark stain on the boy’s face. The slave traders must have rejected him.  Why had they not killed him outright? They might have thought it would bring bad luck. Butcher a village and spare a child to avoid offending the gods.  He glanced at the stone dangling from his neck.  It might be a clan symbol.   Had a doting parent fastened it to ward off evil spirits?   Sean doubted whether he would ever know its purpose.  The child in his arms, he dashed back to the copter. 

As the machine lifted off, he strapped the boy into the rear seat, and injected him with antibiotics.  With any luck, Sean lied to himself he might live long enough for them to get him to base.  The fingers of the boy’s left hand moved.  Sean knew it to be an automatic reaction. Even so, he placed his hand on it. Maybe his initial diagnosis had not been accurate.  The child died sixteen minutes before they reached the base.

Islands in Time    Amazon Press, Kindle

                             

Author's Note

Written in Canadian English.