An excerpt from the memoirs of Marie-Louise Thomasine Alexandra Dumas Thierry, natural daughter of the writer Alexandre Dumas.

 

~ * ~

 

You must imagine my surprise at passing through the dark, dank crypt beneath Notre-Dame de Paris, to find myself in the middle of a sunstruck desert!

 

I should have spent no small amount of time staring around in perplexity, but my emergence from a jumble of rough stones put me face to face with a singular child. At first sight, I took her for a girl of five or six years, a barefoot street urchin in a simple shift, with a head-cloth covering her hair and drawn under her chin.

 

Then my eyes completed their adjustment to the brilliant light, and I noticed more details. The child carried a small spear with a metal point, red as a ruby and honed to unmistakable sharpness—details which thrust themselves forcefully into one’s attention when the point is aimed at one’s heart. The child’s limbs and face were covered with short fur of rusty red, which harmonized with the desert sands and bore dark spots and bars. The child’s head-cloth left bare a pair of rounded, furry ears, which were set high on the sides of her head and were turned to face me. Her dark eyes stared at me from the head of a lion or panther cub, complete with fur, whiskers, and muzzle. And, as if recovering from the surprise of my appearance, she jabbed her spear at me and hissed like a cat, revealing four white fangs.

 

Reflexively, I stepped back and laid my hand on the hilt of my sword.

 

This nearly got me killed, because this was the moment two adult cat-people stepped from behind the jumbled rocks. The male flanked the female, standing slightly behind her; he was shorter than her by a head, and rangy with adolescence. Both wore cloth tunics and leather weapons-harnesses and had long spears with heads like red metal daggers. The male raised his spear for a throw in my direction; the female left her spear fastened to her back, for she didn’t need it.

 

Uttering a harsh and unfamiliar word, she pointed a fluted handgun of red metal at my chest. The weapon was smaller than any handgun I’d ever seen, and of a peculiarly simple design, with only a trigger and trigger guard. Her confidence convinced me the weapon was as dangerous as any familiar firearm.

 

Her utterance caused the child to step behind her, but I had no idea whom she was addressing. However, with all eyes and many weapons pointed my way, I raised my empty hands in the air in the classic posture of surrender and addressed the cat-people calmly in French.

 

“I mean no harm.”

 

The woman and youth wrinkled their brows, which for all their fur and head-coverings seemed as lofty as a philosopher’s. The woman’s handgun did not waver.

 

I repeated myself in German, English, Italian, and Latin. Changing languages only strengthened the adults’ scowls. Perhaps it also bored the child, for she turned and drifted silently towards a pair of ruddy boulders which rose a few yards behind the trio.

 

Her eyes piercing me like augers, the woman snapped a command and indicated my sword with her free hand, then jabbed a pointed fingernail. She repeated the sequence twice, watching me expectantly.

 

“I’ll put my sword on the ground,” I said quietly, hoping my tone would reassure her where words couldn’t.

 

I began drawing my rapier awkwardly by the pommel. I moved slowly, lest I become too intimately acquainted with her pistol. I wasn’t afraid—there is no fear in the bloodline of the Black Count. However, I saw no reason to die a pointless, stupid death; and I was buying time to think and observe.

 

Her back to us, the child stilled, raising her spear for a throw. A few hen-sized birds were emerging from the low, scarlet-leafed bushes at the base of the boulders. It took a moment to discern her targets, so suited were the plump little creatures to their habitat; their feathers resembled the foliage in both hue and shape. Each bird had a pair of peculiar wings which served as taloned forelegs, in the manner of a monkey’s arms when it walks on all limbs. Useless for flying, the wings bent and straightened, letting the birds dip to peck for food with ruddy beaks and rise to watch for predators. Though their side-set eyes were keen enough to discern seeds or bugs in the sand, the quadrupeds missed the hunter crouching motionless barely a yard away.

 

A stone—about the size of a curled adult wolf—rose quietly from the sand near the child’s ankle. Oblivious to this singular development, she flung her spear. As her pierced prey shrieked like a raptor and spooked its flock-mates into the brush, the rock rose higher, revealing two glowing white eyes. Recessed under a rim like the edge of a tortoise-shell, they focused on the child.

 

Freeing my rapier, I pointed awkwardly with the blade and shouted, “Attention!”

 

As the rock-thing seized the cat-girl’s ankle in a pair of stony crab-like claws the size of my fists, the young lion-man flung his spear at me. I leapt desperately aside. His spear missed me, in part because I traveled a yard farther than I should have, and stumbled and nearly fell on my rapier-point. Thus, I discovered my weight had lessened--not enough to notice with small movements, but obvious in energetic activity.

 

A soft sizzling sound drew my attention to the woman. She was firing her pistol, striking the rock-beast’s dorsal shell with a steady golden ray like concentrated sunlight. Abruptly, the ray disappeared, and the sound with it; and the woman snarled and flung her hand-weapon at the creature. It struck the edge of the stony carapace and bounced harmlessly away, but already the woman was taking her spear in her hand.

 

I rose, hilt in hand, and lunged toward the rock-beast. I promptly flew off my feet and landed clumsily beside its captive, whom the rock was dragging towards an emerging beak that looked less like a tortoise’s or bird’s than the complex mouth-parts of some stone insect or arthropod. As the parts reached like tiny arms for the girl’s foot, I thrust desperately, and my sword-point disappeared into the black hole of the gaping maw.

 

Clashing its mouth-parts against my steel, the living stone jerked its captive off the sand, to swing her at me like a club.

 

Releasing my sword-hilt, I caught the child in my arms. With one claw, the rock-beast fought to wrench her free. The other claw released her ankles and seized my wrist with such force I thought my bones must break.

 

The woman’s spear sank into one snow-white eye. The rock-beast quivered as if trying to rise, but she held it pinned in place, muscles rippling in her limbs. The youth sank his recovered spear into the other eye.

 

The mouth-parts went still as earthly stone. The youth pulled his spear free and wheeled, aiming its point at me. Blood or some stranger substance dripped from the spearhead, viscous and bright blue.

 

With my right wrist trapped and my left arm holding the girl, I could only say, “Je me rends.”

 

The youth looked at my rapier, its blade sunk deep in the stone-thing’s maw. Then he thrust his spear carefully between the pincers gripping the girl’s ankle. Sinking the blade into the sandy ground, he levered open the chela.

 

I released the girl gently onto the sand. She promptly drew her dagger to aim its point at my heart. The youth then freed my wrist from its pincers. In the meanwhile, the woman freed her spear from the rock-beast and pointed its blade at me.

 

Hoping she’d taken my defense of the child as the act of an ally, I met the woman’s keen amber gaze, patted my open right hand on my breastbone, and started to say, “Marie-Louise Thomasine Alexandra Dumas Thierry.” Though my father never acknowledged me legally, I am proud of the name he gave me. But, I realized, such a mouthful might be incomprehensible to the cat-people as a name, or indeed as anything.

 

Instead, I said, “Alex.” Patting my breastbone several times slowly, I repeated “Alex” with every contact.

 

The woman pointed a claw at me and said, “Alex.” Then she touched her claw to her own breastbone and said (as best I might render it), “Garkha.”

 

Beside her, the child lowered her dagger-point from my breast, to pat her chest and say, “Atta.”

 

The youth identified himself as “Rekkar.” He had spots and lines on his limbs, fainter than the girl’s, and I thought of the spots which lion-cubs lose as they mature. He’d lost his head-cloth in attacking the rock-beast and not yet restored it, so I saw he had the short mane of a juvenile lion.

 

The woman gestured at the dead rock-creature and named it “caven” for my benefit, then glanced at her companions and uttered a few words.

 

The girl turned her attention to the avian quadruped she’d slain, while the youth flipped the caven over and began prying flat plates off its belly with a knife-blade that might have served a butcher in jointing an ox. These plates lay in layers, like slate tiles over a roof. I had supposed the exterior stone was created in some way by the creature—perhaps with a formidably sticky hide which accumulated sand and hardened it into rock-like armor. Now I began to suspect (correctly) the creature represented a tribute to the wonderful imaginative power of Nature, creating a species which generates plates or large scales of stone, as the pangolin generates its smaller scales of keratin. Later, I would learn the caven (the word is singular and plural) is not the only species of this world to possess this astonishing defense.

 

With only the woman watching me, I risked a survey of my surroundings.

 

However inexplicable my transition to a desert, the sight of cacti was not remarkable in itself—prickly pears were introduced to Europe in the 1500s. However, the scattered cacti were of an unfamiliar species, which was bright purple and curiously shaped. Each had a single fleshy, segmented, spiky body or stem, which grew in a polygon, joined at both ends of the shape to its base. The smallest cacti formed triangles and tetragons, and the most common shapes were pentagons and hexagons, but I saw a couple of decagons, and a scarred giant with twenty angles.

 

And the sky? It was clear, revealing a firmament of a translucent green hue I would not see again until I returned to Earth, centuries after my unplanned departure, and beheld an empty Mexican Coca-Cola bottle. The sun was near the zenith, and red, and larger and dimmer than our bright little yellow orb. I wondered if it were cooler, as well, for the air was warm but not sweltering (now I know that I arrived in winter, and that red stars are cooler than yellow).

 

As for the moon? There was none—an unremarkable event in Earth’s sky, to be sure. But I had to suppress a shiver. A band of pale rocks arched across the sky like a world-spanning bridge, or the Milky Way viewed from a remote and lightless field. The arch of loose stones spanned from horizon to horizon, as if one of Saturn’s fabulous rings had been placed round the world.

 

The pieties of the priest who served my mother’s family had made few inroads on my innate nature, leaving me at twenty-two as godless as my grandfather, whose religion was the French Revolution. But now I could only wonder if my pursuers had slain me in the cathedral crypt, and released my spirit—not to Heaven with its angels, or Hell with its demons, but some unguessed pagan afterlife.

 

Putting the mystery aside, I focused on the lion-people. The youth and child had finished field-dressing the slain creatures. The woman was still watching me, her spear not quite pointed in my direction; and, observing the return of my regard, she swept her free hand to her right, then tilted her muzzle at me (a pointing style that would prove the habit of her race). Then she gestured again to her right.

 

As I started in the desired direction, she holstered her handgun and raised my rapier from the sands, where the youth had laid it while dealing with the caven. Then she fell in behind me. The child and youth followed her, bearing the slain beasts. My captors’ bare feet were so quiet, my bootsteps began to seem the tread of an elephant.

 

I didn’t look back at my captors. I didn’t need to. I’d have pointed a weapon at me in their situation.

 

We walked for somewhat over a mile, and came to a town unlike any I’d seen before—a town so strange, I had no idea we approached one.

 

~ * ~

 

The land rose gradually to a level area with a widespread collection of pits and dirt mounds. The area overlooked a small lake or broad pond, created by a stone dam and fed by the thread of blue water in an otherwise dry river-bottom, which was littered with rocks and branches and patched with stands of tall grass. The river meandered across the desert from the direction of a ruddy, white-capped mountain range which filled the horizon.

 

As we drew closer to the pits and mounds, the figures moving amongst them resolved as lion-people and their odd-looking mounts and draft animals. The lion-people were almost uniformly clad like my captors, in tunics and head-cloths. The cloths were long enough to cover the face against blowing sands, which made me suppose the pits were dug for protection from sandstorms, although how openings so wide would keep out sand, dust, and wind, I could not imagine. The lion-people must not know any better, I decided, foolishly assuming that people who didn’t look human must be stupider than humans.

 

I saw no one point in our direction, and heard no shout, but the heads of the closest lion-folk turned towards our little group, and many began to approach us. Most of the people lacked a visible firearm, but only the smallest children lacked a leather harness; and every harness supported a knife and spear of suitable size. Many adults also wore swords, and a few had long guns that did not differ appreciably from my captor’s sleek metal handgun.

 

My hopes of escaping my captors were now quite slim—and should I accomplish something so unlikely, how should I find my way back to the rock jumble through which I had arrived in this strange desert? And if I did, would the jumble return me home, or send me to yet another world—possibly one more inimical to human life—or do nothing at all?

 

I squared my shoulders. My grandfather, General Alex Dumas, never gave up hope, even as a years-long prisoner of the Italians. Neither would his granddaughter.

 

The sight of so many lion-people increased my wonder and revived the speculations I had entertained while walking at spear-point. I was sweating freely in the men’s winter clothing I had donned to hide my sex as I walked alone on a damp and chilly Paris evening; and I was weary from crossing sands which sometimes were ankle-deep. Clearly, I had not left my body. Neither could France have harbored secretly an entire population of lion-people; and neither my nation nor the rest of Europe had a desert like this. And the strange sky and lower gravity—impossible as it was, I could deny it no longer.

 

I was not dead, but neither was I on Earth.

 

My thought was immediately interrupted by a shout.

 

The approaching people reacted by turning to look at a small party coming up quickly from the rear. At their head strode a powerfully built lion-man with a bare head and luxuriant black mane, wearing a sword and handgun and, on the front of his harness, an abundance of gold disks. He was followed by twelve warriors. The pair flanking him were male, and their gold disks were numerous, but fewer than the leader’s; behind the pair, the remaining warriors were female and wore few gold adornments. All twelve warriors had rifles in their hands and pistols and swords on their harnesses. In addition, each wore a conical metal helmet. The twelve were clearly the guard for the chief or king of the lion-people, and the closest onlookers made way for the royal party as they trotted in our direction.

 

Garkha stepped into sight, Atta and Rekkar trailing her, and touched my shoulder. I halted. As Garkha faced the approaching crowd of over a hundred lion-folk, the royal party came to the forefront. The leader halted, his bodyguard immediately stopping without a command, and looked at Garkha. He spoke again. Garkha raised her voice in answer, but lowered her head in obeisance or subordination.

 

The leader gestured at the lion-man on his left, who responded by hanging his rifle on his back and approaching us. His expression was unfriendly, his whiskered brows lowered. When he stopped, directly in front of me, he was so close I wanted to take a step back, or wrench my rapier from Garkha’s harness and run him through.

 

Though they had the occasional scar or missing digit or eye or limb of a warrior race, the lion-people were as graceful in appearance and movement as any Earthly feline, but this one struck me as remarkably handsome even by the standards of his race. He was my height. I kept my arms at my sides, but I met his gaze levelly.

 

He looked at Garkha, growling a question, and she spoke a few words. His expression grew sardonic, a match to the tone of his reply. She inclined her head to him for a moment, then caught my eye and shaped a bump or hill in the air with her hand. She pointed at me, then formed a fist and bobbed it up and down, then pointed in a direction where no one was standing.

 

I realized she wanted me to jump, and so I did, several times.

 

I observed the lion-people, as best I might during such activity; and I saw they watched me with wide eyes.

 

I began to hope I might survive my captors. Clearly, they had not seen such leaps before. My gratitude grew for my robust health, and for the good fortune of the lower gravity that magnified my strength and increased my bounds sufficient to wring wonder from a feline race.

 

Later, I would learn the lower gravity merely made me their equal in strength and ability, and their surprise arose from the fact I was not of feline derivation; but the humbling of my conceit lay in the future.

 

At the time, the king and the unfriendly man looked neither awed nor pleased by my leaps, and the king spoke to his glowering companion.

 

The latter approached me again, to walk around me. He appraised me as one might judge whether to send an aging work-horse to the boucherie chevaline. He was very close to me, insultingly close, and when he stood before me again, he was, as you Americans say, very much “in my face.”

 

One side of his muzzle lifted up in an obvious sneer. He seized my head between his great long-fingered hands and I forbore the insult, not knowing the laws or customs of this singular race. Then he thrust a finger in my mouth and tried to pry my jaws apart.

 

That was when he made the acquaintance of la savate.

 

He flew back from my kick—in my anger I had forgotten how my strength was multiplied in this strange new land—and landed on his ass with a grunt.

 

The lion-people gaped for a moment. Then they began shouting and purring and striking their cupped hands together, making a hollow but noisy sort of applause. I supposed this must be a prelude to tearing me to pieces, and set myself to give as good an account of myself as would make my ancestors proud. But then I saw the lion-people’s expressions and realized they were cheering.

 

The king, however, was not amused.

 

Neither was the man I’d felled.

 

But the man still beside the king pointed his muzzle at my opponent’s harness and said something.

 

My opponent ceased holding his palm to his breastbone, where my boot-sole had connected. He rose, gaining his feet as dexterously as a cheetah, which signified I had broken no bones, only bruised his muscles and his dignity. He gave a glare to the king’s other companion. Then, snarling at me as if he would tear me apart, he removed one of the gold discus-ornaments from the front of his harness and fastened the disk to the front of my jacket.

 

I knew I had made an enemy, but I did not understand just how greatly I had humbled a man of small character. If I could have foreseen how dreadful an enemy the royal advisor Solen Baz would prove, and what grief he would wreak in vengeance, I would have thrown caution to the wind and killed him.

 

Certainly, I had no forewarning in the measured way the king spoke to Garkha, or in her calm response to his command.

 

That response was to take me, trailed by Rekkar and Atta, into the village, and thence into one of the pits. Steps carved into a circular wall of raw sandstone led us downward, to a depth of perhaps three stories, where the first of a series of uniform ledges circled the pit. The ledges were streets or walkways, and the topmost served a row of carved housefronts with tall, peaked doorways and windows, hung with skins or leathers. These housefronts were bare of paint or wash or tile, but they were carved thickly with angular abstract shapes.

 

My captors took me into one of the houses. Here was a large room cut from the raw stone (as are all pit-houses and pit-buildings of the village, I would learn). The space held six lion-women, one nursing a swaddled babe; a pair of adolescent males; and several children, three older and three younger than Atta. I would later learn all were blood-kin to Garkha. Save for the infant, all had harnesses with knives, each matched to its bearer’s size, and the women also had pistols and swords like Garkha’s.

 

Garkha led me through a corridor into an empty room, which, like the passageway and front room, was painted or washed in abstract shapes in cool blues. The spaces were also lit by the cold, steady white glow of little round panes of glass set flush in the ceilings—artificial illumination, and a marvel to someone for whom the height of interior lighting technology was the Quinquet lamp and the paraffin-oil lantern. I did not understand where the glow came from. Clearly, it wasn’t gaslight; neither was it sunlight, transmitted downward by some system of shafts and mirrors. My obvious wonder provided my captors with no little amusement.

 

Atta and Rekkar ducked out, to reappear bearing furs of oft-curious colors—purple and blue and scarlet predominated—and a blanket of soft gray fleece, and some foods in unglazed bowls of fired red clay bedaubed with abstract streaks and swirls, earthenware which reminded me of Spanish clay búcaros I had seen. The provender consisted of odd-colored fruits and a succulent purple meat cooked rare and a liquid resembling milk the color of clover—all looked strange, but Garkha gestured for me to eat, and all proved pleasant in taste and texture. With additional hand-motions, Garkha gave me to understand that this was my room.

 

It was also my cell.

 

I could leave. Indeed, I could wander all over the strange pit-village, where dwelt the three hundred-odd lion-people who called themselves the Ferrel, and none would molest me. In fact, no one paid me any particular notice beyond a head-nod if we passed close, with the exception of Solen Baz, whose covert angry glances warned me to stay well clear whenever possible. However, if I passed beyond some unmarked outer perimeter of the pit-town, the nearest adults would immediately aim rifles and spears in my direction, whether it was day or night. Quickly, I learned the limits of my new world.

 

That it was indeed a new world, I was positive. I looked at the swollen red sun and supposed I had traveled to the planet of some star so distant, the constellations and stars in the sky were completely unfamiliar. Later, I would wonder if I had traveled through time, remaining in the same spot on Earth, but reaching a future so distant, the skies had grown alien and the moon had burst, to ring the globe with rocks—but that did not explain why I had lost almost a quarter of my weight.

 

Now that I am back on our Earth, some two centuries after my translocation from the crypt beneath Notre-Dame, I am conversant with theories conceived far later than I; and I think I traveled not to the distant future, or an alien planet in our universe, but to an Earth in a very different universe—an Earth far older and odder than our own.

 

But in those early days under the unknown star, I was a stranger in a strange land, knowing neither language nor law, and grateful that Garkha or another member of her household was always ready to teach me. Perhaps because she was young enough to appreciate knowing more than an adult, Atta seemed especially to enjoy instructing me in speech, writing, customs, and those day-to-day chores and tasks which excluded armed patrols and weapons practice, and which fell on me no more onerously than on any other adult, save the king and his two advisors, who were exempt from such quotidian activities. The three were also, I quickly realized, the only adult males in the clan.

 

The martial duties shared by all adult and adolescent villagers included the perimeter watch, and one watch-post was the summit of a narrow, rocky hill which rose above the pit-village like an age-gnarled tower, tufted with grass and brush and the occasional succulent or thorn-bush or tree. I wondered if the solitary hill were no more natural than the dam of assembled boulders, or the pits and mounds; but, whatever its provenance, an armed warrior stood aloft here, day and night.

 

I suppose it was because the hill offered no escape that the lion-folk let me ascend it. Whoever was on guard duty would gesture for me to stay off the hilltop, presumably on the assumption I might make a try for her weapons. But, with that proviso, I was welcome to ascend at any time, and study my surroundings and the sky.

 

So it came to pass I was sheltering beneath an overhanging rock when Solen Baz came to relieve Luren Gotek, the friendly royal advisor, from the hilltop post. The pair exchanged greetings that sounded amiable, if laden with no especial warmth. My position allowed me to see them together, through a chink between rocks, without their knowledge—it was the fluke of an old rockfall, which I appreciated, for I preferred to keep watch on Solen Baz.

 

So I saw Luren Gotek turn away, hanging his long gun on his back before he began his careful descent. The slope was sheer on every side, requiring even the acrobatic lion-folk to use hands as well as feet for ascent and descent, and to watch for loose rock. The least risky cliff overlooked the lake created by the dam, and had the high small ledge on which I was seated. This was the side that Luren Gotek chose to descend.

 

As he drew nearer, I awaited his greeting—he was always cordial to me, in a distant way, and he would pass about a yard to my right. Standing in the shade, I chanced to glance up. Thus I saw Solen Baz drop a small stone to strike more small stones and set them falling.

 

Luren Gotek heard the sound and looked up. Within the next second, rocks struck his arms and face. Under the impact, he plunged downward through the air and disappeared in a splash.

 

I heard Solen Baz shouting— “Luren Gotek has fallen off the cliff!” —and waited for Luren Gotek to surface and swim for shore if he were able, or for the lion people to plunge into the lake and recover his unconscious or dead body.

 

People gathered on the shore, and some, like Garkha and her sisters, waded deep into the water, but they didn’t start swimming, and Luren Gotek didn’t reappear. Then I realized the lion-people must not know how to swim, even as most Parisians did not know in my day, though the Seine bisected the city. But I had learned as a child, when I nearly drowned in a pond on the country estate of my mother’s family. So, grateful I had abandoned my heavy Parisian men’s fashions for the simple tunic, harness, and bare feet of my captors, I dived off the hill-side and plunged through the air into the water.

 

Though the lake was clear and calm under the midday winter sun, I supposed I might not espy Luren Gotek. But he surfaced, his helmet lost and his arms thrashing desperately. Aim and luck had landed me not far away, and I immediately struck out for him.

 

Then, as you Americans say, the fun began, because he was in a panic, his flailing arms raising water in a spray that shone like silver silk and white diamonds. As I reached for him, he seized my right arm and began clawing himself closer to my body (and thus I learned, as my flesh parted, the lion-folk’s pointed claws were as sharp as they looked).

 

As we began to sink, I tilted my head back, to gasp my lungs full of air, and reached with my left hand for the belt-knife the lion-folk had recently allowed me to add to my otherwise weaponless harness. Then we sank beneath the surface of the water, which was as dangerously chilly as the Seine in winter.

 

A pair of small leather straps joined together just below the pommel of my knife, to keep the blade in its sheath. It was fortunate the straps were closed with a snap fastener, a simple technology unknown on the Earth I had left. A fingernail jerked the snap open and I drew the weapon. Fighting the hindrance of water and current, I slashed the hands tightening round my neck.

 

Spilling blood in dark clouds, Luren Gotek’s arms drew back violently. Freed, I propelled myself behind him, moving out of his reach. Grateful for my oft-mocked habits of swimming in all seasons and lingering beneath the surface to strengthen my lungs, I sheathed my knife with one hand and closed the other on the uppermost harness-strap across his back. I kicked my legs and moved my free arm.

 

And we ceased to sink.

 

But my practiced lungs were burning with the desperate need to open my mouth and gasp in anything, anything at all, by the time I was able to start upward, swimming with three limbs and a heavily muscled, panicking man toward the light. Then something blocked the light, some barrier on the surface of the penned river. As I struggled to change the direction of our ascent, I thought even my iron Dumas resolve would fail and I would drown.

 

Then we broke the surface beside the shadow, and there was Garkha, astride a floating tree-trunk. She grabbed Luren Gotek by the back of his mane and shouted something at him. He didn’t listen, just kept flailing, and I feared that panic, or the bloody injuries to his face and head, had pushed his mind beyond any recognition of help. But I got my hand under his, knocking it upward to alight on the tree-trunk, and he seized a thick branch-stub with both hands.

 

The trunk began to move, and I realized someone had tied a long, stout rope to it, a rope in the hands of Rekkar and Atta, and more than a dozen lion-women and adolescent males, and the king. The assemblage pulled on the rope, drawing the fallen tree into shallow water, and I swam after the great log. As I stood in the shallows, Garkha helped Luren Gotek to his feet.

 

After that, my glances from Solen Baz grew only more inimical. Had he suspected what I knew, I am certain he would have arranged quickly for my accidental death. But I remained alive and unharmed; and I continued to avoid Solen Baz.

 

As for Luren Gotek, he gave me one of his gold disks, where we stood in the shallows of the river-lake, and he recovered swiftly from the rock-fall, with minimal scarring, for the lion-folk had potent healing potions. As for the king, he commanded my sword be restored to me, and furthermore that I teach his people to swim, starting with himself. Thus I gained a new duty among the Ferrel, and I bore once again the rapier of my grandfather, General Alex Dumas, hero of the Republic.

 

 

Originally published in Futures That Never Were (Broadswords & Blasters, January 2023).

Reprinted with permission of the author