The Stone of Lamfedios

The Stone of Lamfedios 11

- 11 -

 

 Marti had never seen real mountains. She was now surrounded by a bleak land with towering peaks which cast long cool shadows. It was the scale and the authenticity which made Marti insecure. No longer did she feel trapped inside an adventure game, this was for real.

 The track was barely discernible. Marti hoped that the old woman knew where they were going because it did not appear to be a very hospitable place. Her stomach rumbled and, with her chocolate long eaten, she looked longingly at Nembaw's slim saddle pouches. She wondered how she could get away, and . . .. She realised that there was a gap in her memory, but was not sure what should have been in it.

 Her feet ached, she remembered that she hated walking, that was for sad people. She liked . . .? She liked motor bikes, yes that was it. She looked around at the terrain with a new interest. What a great place to ride a trials bike.

 Marti glanced sideways at the woman who seemed to be shaping her life, trying to remember something, like a bundle of rags on the ground? But somehow she couldn't recall any details. She consoled herself with trying to assess the woman's weaknesses. She was enormous, at least a size 20, and she must be unfit with all that puffing and panting as she rode. Fat people had heart attacks, well they did on T V, so may be she just had to hang on for a little longer. But what then? If this was not a bad dream then how was she going to get home. That was another fact that she could hold onto, home. Then there was the trials bike, a shed or something like it. She could remember reaching out and touching.... It was no good.

 In the meantime Marti found the steep climbs very tiring, and the scenery rapidly became boring. She had to get out of this somehow. She looked again at the horsewoman, if only she could get rid of her. She began to bounce stones over steep precipices and then tried to make them land at the feet of the horse to make it bolt, to no avail. Nembaw sat firmly with a deepening scowl on her face, oblivious to Marti's increasingly more daring attempts to unseat her. More often now she would look about her then consult her stone thing which, from the frustrated curses, was not doing what she wanted.

 

 

 After several days of foot slogging, one thing Marti knew for sure was that she was lost. She had never left the city, not even for a holiday. When she had been at junior school, she had been banned from the school trips, and she had now been excluded from the special unit for three months. She also had the feeling that Nembaw too was lost. The journey had so frequently entailed entering and following deep valleys, only to find that they ended either in vertical cliff walls or sheer drops. The only option was to return by the way that they had entered. So back to where they had started and go on a bit further having lost track in a kind of giant maze.

 Marti was glad that at least the woman had stopped repeating the phrase: 'Just over the next little hill my dear,' accompanied by a supercilious and yet inane smile.

 The pace, for all the mistakes, had been urgent, with only a few brief stops for rest. The food had certainly lost its flavour, although there was the occasional sparkling stream to drink from.

 Once the sun had risen above the peaks the valleys became uncomfortably hot, with the rocks holding and reflecting their heat until long after nightfall. Then the cold rapidly seeped into Marti's body, making her teeth chatter involuntarily. To take her mind off this spreading numbness, she would look up at the night sky, something she had never bothered to do since she was a little girl. In the darkness her mind seemed to clear. She had a purpose, to wait for the sound of the woman's deep snoring. While she kept vigil, she joined the dots of the brightest stars, forming a series of patterns. These were random, like the tea leaves her Gran had showed her when she was four and her father had just left home. Marti had since reasoned that, like the children's numbered dot books, if you had enough of them, you could make up any old pattern that was in your head.