Elysium

Chapter 3: On Monsters and Men

On the day that dawned, I walked my way like a ghost, in a kind of dreadful dreamworld. It was as if a perpetual mist floated all around us, although I understood my companions didn't see it. For them, the day was as bright as it could be in those humid swamps.

We wandered on, and I consented to someone else leading. Someone else made decisions on where we would turn right or left, cross a brook, fill our flasks, and again continue to wherever firm ground seemed to be. It was not clear, though, who made those decisions. Max wanted to be our leader, and I had nothing to complain about his determination and his gallant confidence in success – God only knew how I wished him to succeed. Brynhilde wanted to be our guide, and she knew this world, but not the area where we had crashed. And Roland – he posed opinions and analytical assessments of things, whenever he wasn't taking care of me. Yet most of the time he did the latter. He was by my side when pain overwhelmed me; seated me down on a hummock or a trunk, checked my wound, applied the burning antiseptic, and bound the bandage better.

"We're gonna get out of these swamps", he talked to me, although I often felt he just wanted to assure himself. I didn't mind. I knew what he saw when he investigated my wound. If it was to go septic and we would not reach civilization, I would lose either my leg or my life.

Because of me we could not walk nearly as fast as the three others could have done without me. Max and Roland even tried carrying me, but it didn't quite work out. They were both smaller than me, and I just felt more helpless, a greater burden, when one or the other carried me on piggyback. So, I chose to walk on my own feet, but I would often have to get support from one of them or both. Brynhilde carried my backpack.

About the raouhs, Brynhilde had been right. They followed us, stalked us, prowled upon us, and waited. We first noticed them as we reached a brook that forced us to go a bit of way back to reach a decent ford. Who knew, they might have been tracking us for quite some time by then. Waiting for my companions to abandon me – the one marked by death – and to leave me to be mauled and devoured by them.

It occurred to me several times that a more indifferent crowd would surely have done that. I was nothing but a burden to them. I should have given up my captain's cap and the memory cards in it to one of my companions, and I should have stayed behind. I grew increasingly weak. Max and Roland had promised to rescue Mary and the girls and to take them to Mah Island. I could have stayed here, to face my end in an unknown jungle, in an unknown world.

Around noon, the raouhs set out for a new attack on us. They run over us from both sides, closed our way ahead, and besieged us, then harassed us from both flanks, trying to annoy Max, Roland, and Brynhilde, and seeking to isolate me from the others.

My pain was increased by total understanding of what they were doing. After all, they were primates, our distant relatives. Their wicked cunning was of the same quality as ours. Were the raouhs to take over and build a civilization, it would not have been any better than that established by men. If men, at their best, were a nation of wolves, the raouhs surely were one of jackals. They identified the weakest link in a group, tried to isolate him, and then topple him down to be their prey. That was the eternal logic of predators. It was the logic of the schoolyards of my time, where fists and crowd usually mattered more than reading or math. According to that logic, I was marked by death, and that was known both by the predators and by those seeking to evade falling as prey, by passing it on to the one already marked.

Yet my three companions never left me for a moment. Whenever the troop of raouhs tried to assault me, my heroic friends struck with their swords and shot arrows. Once the attack had failed, the raouhs remained behind us, lurking and following, and I saw genuine wonder in their malevolent eyes, in their menacing gestures and bloodthirst, for my human companions had not sacrificed me to them, the predators, but instead continued to lug the damned along while sloshing about the morass. Obviously, this didn't make sense to them. Why would the two healthy males and their female keep risking their own lives protecting a worthless cripple?