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Chapter Eight: Last Resort (1)
One foot is placed in front of the other. One step is suffered at a time.
Alice can no longer feel their plodding progress itself, even as they make it. The cold, sucking mud has long since drawn all feeling out of her legs from the knees down. Her hips and thighs and back compensate for the lack of sensation by screaming in agony as she pulls one foot out of the muck, thrusts it forward, sinks it back into the marshy earth, and then lifts the other.
She can only imagine how Tarrant is bearing this.
Reaching up, she yanks on his hand again where it dangles in front of her chest. She’s too lightheaded – perhaps from lack of sleep although that has never affected her this strongly before – and too shaky – from pushing her body past its limits, no doubt – and too exhausted to be gentle with him. At this point, she’s just trying to remind him that they’re both still Alive. Loving and teasing touches will come after they’ve made it through the Slough.
She fairly claws at his clammy, mud-splattered, grimy hand. Tarrant fumbles until his fingers grasp hers and although he does not speak – he can barely keep his eyes open for any length of time! – he does respond with a painfully strong grip.
If she weren’t incapable of stringing two words together, she would have thanked him for the discomfort. Anything other than the monotony of their trek is welcome at this point. Anything.
“Tam... safe,” he rasps suddenly.
Alice blinks, breathes, and winces as she pulls her left foot out of the muck. A few steps later, when the meaning registers in her brain, she nods. “Yes.”
“... good,” he points out flatly.
“Very.” Yes, it is very good that they had decided to send Tam to Upland. He’ll be safe there. Margaret will look after him. Hamish will lecture him. Winslow will corrupt him. Yes, Tam is fine.
“Son...” Tarrant grunts and Alice thinks she might have actually heard a sprinkling of emotion in his tone. “So glad. Thank you, Alice.”
She takes one more step... one step which Tarrant does not take with her... and stops. “No,” she tells him, finally understanding what he’s trying to say. “No quitting.”
She tugs weakly at his arm. He shuffles a bit in the mud and stops again.
“So sorry.”
“Shut up and walk, Tarrant!” she hisses, hot fury flaming through her muscles, reanimating her. She knows it won’t last and when it burns out she’ll be even worse off that she had been before. That doesn’t stop her from taking advantage of it. “Are you going to let me die here?”
He raises his eyes – a frighteningly dull gray – to her face and stares at her.
“You quit; I quit,” she threatens.
Slowly, he shakes his head. His long auburn hair is matted and tangled and looks utterly foul from where he had permitted the slimy moss hanging from the skeletal branches of the half dead willow trees to drag over his head and shoulders. He had been too tired to try to duck or dodge them.
Alice continues her onslaught and there is no room for sympathy in her attack: “Will you make our son an orphan? What was the last thing you said to him? Did you tell him how much you love him? Did you tell him he’d never see you again?”
“Alice...” he wheezes, pained. His face twists with such agony she doesn’t doubt she’ll feel guilty for torturing him like this... later... when she has the energy to spare for it.
“Either keep walking or let me fall into the mud, Tarrant.”
“Twimble fumpt,” he curses and begins slogging forward again. Alice grimly joins him, taking note of his colorless state. She can even see the pinkish shadows of lingering stains on his once-again-too-white face. She has a fleeting thought for checking his wound, wonders how much blood he has lost, but there is nothing she can do to improve his state by expending energy on either.
“Ten,” she announces, completing a step. And then another: “Nine...”
“Eight,” he gasps.
“Seven...”
They count down to one and then Alice starts over again. Over and over and over they count down from ten and little by little the ground firms, the trees thicken, until – suddenly! – she stumbles against Tarrant, scrabbling at his waist in a futile attempt to keep herself upright as her feet hit what feels suspiciously like a hard-packed dirt path. The solid surface beneath the mud-saturated soles of her boots jars her knees and she squeals with the vibrations as they run up her aching spine. Tarrant’s right hand fists in the remains of her tunic and keeps her from falling flat on her face.
“Sorry. Sorry,” she mutters, climbing shakily back to her feet. She tucks herself under his arm again, noting that he’d locked his knees to stay standing. They have to get moving again or he’ll pass out right where he stands.
Alice uses whatever is close at hand to pull them further along the path.
“Familiar,” Tarrant whines as the path begins to slope upward through the scraggly forest of foliage-less trees.
“I know.”
“Alice...”
“I know.”
“Won’t help...”
“He will.” Or else.
“Impossible.”
“Only if you believe it is.”
Alice sets her jaw, ignores the oscillating torment of shattering cold and frightening numbness along her heart line, and nearly drags Tarrant along the path. They pass intersection after intersection but Alice continues stubbornly south. She conserves her voice, struggles to plan her strategy but her thoughts are slippery and every tactic she considers turns into a threat or a plea. She can only hope she performs better than she thinks when they arrive.
And arrive they do. Tarrant is shuddering, shivering, swaying on his feet as Alive pounds on the door. The effort is only possible with the aid of her entire body. Tarrant has no strength left to offer. He is spent and standing only because Alice had leaned down and locked his knees into position herself before she’d thrown herself at the castle gate.
She pounds on the door, screams to the midday sky... or, at least, she thinks she does. In all honesty, she cannot be sure.
“Prince Jaspien!” she pleads, all thoughts of threats long since evaporated. The heart line alternately burns her with cold, sears her with heat, and numbs to nothing, which is the most frightening sensation of all.
She slumps against the door, cries out when her knees hit the hard-packed dirt, and sighs when the door swings open. She looks up and into the unfeeling face of the man who had once lusted after the White Realm, had participated in Alice’s capture and had held Mirana against her will... She looks up into the face she hates more than any other in all of Underland.
“Please...” she begs, swaying, struggling not to fall prostrate on the ground. Although it won’t hurt her case, she doubts she’ll be able to get back up again.
Jaspien regards her for a moment that seems to warp into an eternity. She pants on the threshold of the only available haven for miles, too tired to plead, too exhausted to argue, too dizzy to even keep her eyes open for more than an instant at a time.
Finally, the gray, indifferent man replies, “If you can get him to a bed, I will fetch what medicines I have.”
She very nearly passes out with relief right then.
“However...” he muses softly.
Alice holds her breath, wills herself to concentrate.
“You will owe me a boon.”
“Name it,” she whispers despite her dry tongue and cracked lips.
He does.
“Agreed.” She would have agreed to anything to save Tarrant, so the concession is not difficult to make. No, not difficult at all.
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(^__~)
I endeavor to find a place and a purpose for all my characters... even the baddies.
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Tarrant trying to quit halfway through their walk...garrr. I'm glad Alice was there to bully him into continuing, and that he was there so that she felt she had a reason to continue herself!
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And Jaspien? *sputter, sputter* Wha?
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And Jaspien. Oh, Jaspien... This is what happens when the author doesn't just kill off the bad guy. They come Back.
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I could believe that in his pain and exhausting Tarrant would think he has to give up, but I'm glad Alice was tough enough to Choose Them. No matter what.
The boon? My goodness...this is now pure horror...
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Sweetie, I will never, EVER interfere with Alice and Tarrant's relationship by writing anything... icky like what I'm sure not only you but several readers were fearing. No no no. Never. It's Alice/Tarrant all the way. Trust me. (^__~)
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And if Alice hasn't even got her Tough on yet...I shudder to think of what she has to fight in OPK 5, even tho I know it's the Worst Enemy of All!
I'm really back into the swing of this and I have to say that my afternoon flew so fast I was amazed.
I have to also add that you continue to surprise me with how much drama and excitement you can add to a seemingly straight-forward scenario. You put in twists I never see coming. You even make a sleeping Tarrant fill me with apprehension because he discovers where they are!
That, and the pacing and spacing, are just right. This feels almost like a serial/drama. I risk repeating myself, but your imagery is so striking that I can really almost "see" the scenes. I get more visual images in my head than from other stories where I think and imagine it in descriptive words. I get more actual pictures with these stories, for some reason, and it feels as if I'm watching it on the big screen. Nice!
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I remember when I first switched my writing style - I used to do so much scenery description - my mother complained that my "new" style wasn't descriptive enough. And now that I'm comparing some stuff that I wrote back in 2001 with some of my recent work... yeah. It's different. And, weirdly enough... "less" somehow ends up equaling "more".
Maybe because the reader is able to imagine the scene as it strikes them and I don't try to interfere with that (unless it's necessary for understanding what's going on... like in the scene with Alice fighting Tarra in the tunnel or whatever - I describe the tunnel for the fight scene and for "atmosphere"). Am I wrong to think it's kinda like a magician's trick? I mean, the story seems descriptive, but really the reader is doing all the background filler themselves... Or maybe this just works with fanfic where everyone is familiar with the setting already...
Hm. Something to ponder...
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For myself, I think, now that I have pondered it, that it is as you said: I have images already in my mind and your writing does not distract me from them unless necessary.
You don't overboard with every ruffle of a gown, every detail of a stitched pattern...my own mind fills that in for me.
Perhaps also, your dialog and the action scenes draw my imagination to create the setting all by itself. You write "sewer" and I just picture one and from there I see the moss, the filth, the rough and smooth parts of the walls, etc.
I thought that sometimes, Dickens, in "Great Expectations" went a little overboard. However, people then didn't have movies and televison, so every detail was more called for? Regardless, I thank you for whatever it is that makes your scenes so vividly visual for me.