Cross The Amazon

by Chatoyance

4. Prayers for Children

Chapter Four: Prayers for Children

"SWEET CELESTIA! PROTECT US!" Dropspindle was gritting her teeth so tightly that Calloway could hear the grinding even through the pony's terrified call for intervention and the whining of the jitney's NeoSterling engine.

The medium-sized public transport van recovered as the front wheels gained traction on the rapidly dissolving crust of dirt that served as a road. For a brief moment almost a quarter of the jitney had hung over a two-hundred meter abyss, and this was not the first time such threat of catastrophe had occurred. The slow, careful - oh so careful - drive through El Distrito de San José del Alto had been beyond nerve-wracking. Dropspindle had distinct tooth marks on both of her forehooves, and Calloway had not chewed off his own fingernails only because there had been no moment when he could remove even one hand from the wheel.

"Huh! I guess ponies do have religion!" Calloway spoke, as best he could, through his own clenched teeth. The total concentration required just to avoid tumbling to their doom was enormous - and exhausting. Kotani had been told many things about native Equestrians, and among them was that they had no churches or religions. The very concept of human-styled faith was supposedly alien to them. Dropspindle's invocation did not seem to support that notion one bit.

Dropspindle removed a forehoof from her mouth. "What?" The alcohol engine of the jitney was screaming at the workload, and the sound of gravel and large rocks destroying the undercarriage was very distracting. Not as much as the ever-constant horror of the next ninety-or-greater degree narrow bend around a deadly cliff, but still fairly attention grabbing.

"Religion. Ponies have it." The front of the jitney tilted down, Calloway had misjudged the sharpness of the turn and the long untended goat-path that was somehow considered to be a road was giving way to hundreds of meters of oblivion. He slammed on the brakes, then reversed, trying to pull the van back from the brink. "WEIGHT! REAR! NOW!"

Dropspindle slid sideways out of the nearly useless-for-ponies seatbelt and dashed to the rear of the jitney. This had become a common tactic, one she was now overly familiar with. Her small weight was not great, but it had saved them several times already. She had also piled their supplies - water and food - in the middle of the van, to try to balance the load overall. The shout of 'MORE!' from Calloway caused her to half-crawl out the back of the jitney and hang with a hooked foreleg from the rail that ran around the top. In proper service, the jitney would normally carry fifty or more humans, most sitting on the top, clinging to that very bar.

The extra counterbalance worked, once again they had successfully not died.

The next section was a straightaway and wider than usual, so Dropspindle slid back through her loose shoulder-harness and sighed into her seat. The long, straight sections were a great relief. If only the entire journey could be like that. But the mountain road was very twisty and filled with curves, and the lack of maintenance had left the dirt-and-gravel path in terrible condition.

"No. We don't." Dropspindle had seen the natives go to their little church, she had been asked to attend. The humans had sat in rows and listened to another human drone on and on about bizarre and often very violent things. Skin boils and rape and things being unclean. Human hands being cut off and bears being used to murder children for insults about baldness. Yet the humans said this inspired them, and made them feel loved by some made-up human alicorn that openly stated he was jealous and wrathful.

The humans had sung praises to this creature, apparently to placate him so he wouldn't 'smite' them - deliberately and arbitrarily harm them - in horrible, awful ways. It seemed that the humans had invented a monster that they could fear, and work to calm down, in the vain hope of avoiding misery somehow. Of all the things that Dropspindle had witnessed on her visit to an alien universe, religion was possibly the most incomprehensible... and the most disturbing. For days after her visit to the human's church, she had felt nervous around the creatures. What their imaginations had conjured as their version of the princesses made her feel afraid of them. What must they be thinking to even invent such a cruel and capricious monster?

Worse, perhaps, was that she knew, beyond any doubt, that everything the humans believed in was a lie. As a unicorn, she could directly perceive magic. She could see the bright - oh, so bright now, like a third sun! - glow of Equestria in the thaumatic spectrum. Equestria was the only light in the human's dark universe. No magic existed there, no ethereal beings, no gods, no demons, no angels, no devils. Just atoms, devoid of thaumatism, empty, soulless. She felt as much pity for the naked apes as she did fear at the beings they made up to call to.

Kotani swerved to avoid a boulder. "Yes you do! You just prayed to Celestia! I heard you!" Yet another big rock. This one was harder to get around, and the jitney scraped the wall of the canyon as the engine growled to push them past the obstruction. "'Oh Celestia save us!' Or something like that!"

"It's not the same thing!" Dropspindle had a hoof in her mouth again, another sharp corner was coming up - worse, the view was terribly clear about what the result of failing the turn would mean. "Celestia is real, and sometimes she listens!"

That was new. "Sometimes she listens?" The pony's god-queen wasn't very attentive. Real god was supposed to watch every sparrow fall, or something like that, wasn't he? Omniscient. That was the word. Sees and knows all.

"Yes! But not always. That's asking too much. She has a life you know."

Calloway had heard a lot of religious nutbars in his day, but that particular excuse for a god-figure not being available when needed was a new one. "What, she has bowling night? No salvation on weekends, she hits the bars?" The idea of the princess of all the ponies throwing back boilermakers every Saturday, maybe hustling pool and cheating at darts made him laugh. "Or maybe she does yoga on Wednesdays? Sorry, you had to die because, well, macrame class?"

Dropspindle understood she was being made fun of. When she had first arrived in Huancabamba she had been unable to tell such things, and there had been some bad moments for her. Humans didn't just tease, their humor went - as one nice weaver had put things - 'for the jugular'. That was apparently a large artery in their necks, and the statement referred to the slaughter of animals, even human ones, with the use of knives. Even human sayings were based on violence and horror. "You humans call on your gods, but they never answer. They can't, they don't exist - I've looked for them, they aren't there. But you tell yourselves, when you luck out, that the event was your god helping you. Then you use that to further delude yourselves."

The turn was very sharp, and the road very narrow, and for a moment it looked like they would plunge to their doom. Calloway managed, once again, to resolve the situation - he really was a pretty good driver, she had to admit. Dropspindle pulled her two forehooves from her mouth and studied the bite marks. "But if Celestia, or Luna intervenes for us, they are there. For real. Luna rescued me when I was a foal - I nearly fell from a clockleg - and I hugged her hooves. I was pretty young, but I remember it like it was..."

"Clock...leg? What?" Calloway tried to avoid the pit in the road, but it claimed his tire. He began rocking the jitney back and forth to get the wheel out.

"Clockleg. On a clock, there are three legs? Hours, minutes, seconds, you call them? I was hanging from a leg on the clocktower and..."

The jitney was still stuck. "Clocktower! Like... really tall? Big hands and you can see one half a kilometer away?"

"Hands? Oh." Humans were always on about their hands. It was some kind of obsession. Clock... hands. Crazy. Clocklegs looked like legs! "Yes. It was very tall and I was hanging from the big leg... don't ask how. I was a foal, I thought... I don't even remember what I thought I was doing. But, Luna happened to be listening - it was night, again, don't ask - and she heard me. I guess I screamed out pretty loud thaumatically - all the unicorns for several blocks around woke up! I still feel bad about that...

"Anyway, Luna appeared, right there, in the air. She took me in her hornfield and brought me down. I ran up all crying and sorry... I must have clung to her leg too long, because she had to ask me to let go. She was real nice about it, though."

The jitney was free. Calloway made a slow, sharp turn around the pit and again was forced to scrape the wall of the rockface. The van clearly had experienced such things many, many times before - most of the paint was missing on both sides of the vehicle. "So, did she buy you ice cream afterwards and mop up your tears?"

"She came and saved me. She held me and flew me down to the ground." That was enough. Ice cream would have taken too much time - being a princess must be terribly busy work. They probably don't get much rest... oh, again. Kotani was making fun of her once more. "Maybe we ponies don't have gods or religion - but we do have princesses, and they actually show up! Sometimes." There. That should show him.

Calloway was quiet for some time. Dropspindle felt uncomfortable. Had she said too much? Had she been too rude?

"You boast that you can call upon the gods! Why, so can I, or so can any man - but will they come when you call them?"

"What?"

"Henry The Fourth. Shakespeare. Sort of. I may not have remembered it right." Calloway slowed the jitney, and carefully maneuvered a switchback that bent around upon itself. They were still a long way from properly down the mountains. He was starting to become concerned that the Barrier would easily outpace them. "Human writer. Wrote famous plays."

Dropspindle clung to her belt straps. The road was very steep now, so much so she was afraid of slamming into the dashboard. "What... what did you mean by that?" Was Calloway insulting her again, or...

"I think it would be nice to have something out there that would actually come and help in person. You go right ahead and keep praying - or whatever it is that you do - to your pony princesses. Or gods. Or whatever they are. Real is real. I don't care where help comes from, as long as I... as long as We... get helped."

So far, that inclusion of 'we' was perhaps the nicest thing Calloway had said to her. Maybe he wasn't just mean jokes and not taking anything seriously. Dropspindle didn't regret trying to save him - trying to help is never something to regret - but she had been wondering if the risk she had taken would ever be appreciated. Or that she would ever be seen as a full partner in this mutual venture of survival.

It was nearly midnight when they pulled into Jaén. The aged and crumbly map that Dropspindle had snatched from a rack in the cafe suggested the trip should have been only two and a half hours long. Things had clearly changed - that or they had indeed taken a wrong turn somewhere. The so-called road they had traveled had seemed much worse than the one suggested by the map. The bumpy, tumble-bumble, terrifying, plummety-slope part where Dropspindle had lost part of her breakfast wasn't even suggested by the map at all.

Jaén was hot. Unbelievably hot. It was 43°C at night. The capital city of the province was also brightly lit - not with electricity, but with the daylight of Equestria, shining through the Barrier wall that divided the sky in half. It was still coming, relentlessly, and it never rested, and never stopped. Well, that last was not entirely true - sometimes the expansion did pause; in the early days it regularly did - but that was years ago now. It was unlikely that respite would come from the Barrier taking a break.

Calloway slid his slimy, sweaty way out of the driver's seat. They had pulled up next to a solar-powered motel, drawn by the glow of electric light in a city otherwise nearly devoid. "They must have air conditioning. They've got to have air conditioning. Please, god, please let there be air conditioning." His words sounded dry in his throat, and exhausted, and beyond stressed.

Dropspindle half fell, half walked down the jitney steps. She found herself on her foreknees a meter and a half from the van. Her normally smooth coat was spiky and ragged with sweat. She watched a trickle of the stuff run down her right forehoof to briefly stain the ancient, scalding, concrete.

"You okay?" It was obvious she wasn't, but neither of them was thinking clearly. Calloway ran his hands under Dropspindle's barrel and lifted her up. He groaned as he did so. "Can you walk? Make it to a door? Go for 101... right there... I'll... get a key."

Dropspindle stumbled through the baking oven of a parking lot and somehow made it to the door of room 101. She stood there while the heat competed with the breeze to see whether she would live or die. The heat felt mean, like mocking humans, but the breeze was hardly any nicer what with it's rude hot breath huffing down her...

The sound of clicking and shoving shocked her from the strange and timeless place her overweary head had become lost in. The door opened and she fell onto ragged carpet that smelled like dog urine, human urine, and several kinds of smoke.

She was barely aware of being dragged into the room, the door being shut, or the rattle of a machine starting up. She felt herself being lifted and clumsily dumped on something soft. A bed. It must be a bed. Calloway collapsed face down beside her, breathing heavily. He had removed his shirt and pants, and his skin glistened with human oil.

"Oh... god. Sweet Jesus but that... that damn road down the fu...nnnn... SNERK! Sngrrrrggrrr..."

Dropspindle watched the dripping human snore for a while. The cold air from the rattling machine made her feel utterly drenched, but also significantly better. Her coat was soaked with her own sweat. She wriggled so that her hindquarters faced the breeze and lifted her tail to let the air flow under as well as over her body. She imagined herself literally steaming. The room quickly filled with the smell of sweaty pony and equally sweaty human. Somehow that was better than the smell of the room itself.

After some unknown time, Dropspindle awoke. It was still dim out, still the half-light of Equestrian day shining through the Barrier into earthly night. She had been dreaming about the little nibble-manicured park beside her home in Surcingle. She had been wandering through the lovely oak trees - that was the humanese word for them, 'oak', and had been trying to coax the attention of a little animal. A squirrel, perhaps. It was fast, and kept running away, hiding from her. Funny little thing. Little blue squirrel, always running away. Always peeking back.

Water. Oh, sweet Celestia how she needed a drink! Dropspindle carefully worked her way off the bed, trying not to disturb Kotani. He had stopped snoring, and had curled into a fetal position with his thumb to his lips. The poor human was beyond exhausted and heat stressed besides. Dropspindle made her way from the bed to the countertop beside the toilet chamber. Human structures were so strange. The device they did their business in looked as if it had been designed as the perfect pony drinking fountain. Ugh. She would never make that mistake again. Oh, how they had laughed at that when she had first come to Huancabamba.

The sink was inset into the counter. Dropspindle used her forehoof to knock the handle. Water poured from the tap. Her muzzle was instantly under the stream and she lapped at the deliciousness of it for some time. It was astonishing how good the water tasted, even with all the metallic overtones and chemical scents to it. Eventually, she felt sated.

She looked around and found cups. Remembering she had a horn - goodness, but the journey had been difficult - she took one in her hornfield and filled it. She walked to the low table by Kotani's side of the bed and put the cup down. If Calloway awakened, there would be water immediately available to him.

Dropspindle moved to the window, her coat no longer dripping, just faintly, uncomfortably damp. Her back and tail itched from it. So did her flanks. Having a sweaty coat was not fun. She reared up and placed both forehooves on the ledge for balance. With her hornfield, she took hold of the curtain and pulled it partway open.

Over the buildings, past the jitney, beyond the low hills that led to the tall mountains... the Barrier rippled. It was many kilometers away, but this fact did not seem to diminish it in any way. They had bought at least a night of rest, she felt reasonably certain. The Barrier had not yet cleared the visible ridges of the near mountain face. It was a wall of distorting light well behind the peaks. As long as that was true, they had time for rest.

She returned to the bed and half-jumped, half climbed onto it. She studied Calloway's exposed flesh, his back, his arms, his legs. No spots, no patches. The Barrier was being very well behaved. This close there was a very reasonable chance of being exposed to a zone of intense thaumatic flux. Somehow, through some providence, they had managed to exist within a cancellation shadow the entire drive. That good fortune could not last indefinitely. They would need to gain some serious distance on the Barrier if Calloway was to survive.

She turned around on the bed and searched the drawers by her side. The only thing in them was one of the human's black books of false magic and empty promises. She had been hoping for a couple of EPK flasks. The PER must not have made it all the way to Jaén. Or at least not to this motel. Supposedly, the Ponification for the Earth's Rebirth liked to secretly slip Emergency Ponification Kits into places that humans frequented, or so she had been told. They would leave pamphlets too, advertising the joys of Conversion. A weaver had told her all about it. She had heard a lot of strange things during her time with the Peruvian weaving community. If there had been even one EPK in the drawer, Calloway would have had some insurance against thaumatic flux and the Barrier, too.

Better to be a pair of lost little ponies in Equestria, than one utterly alone pony and a pile of ashes. But even together, it was still a pretty horrible fate. Alone in the Exponentials. The thought made Dropspindle shudder.

Eventually she calmed enough to lay down again. She needed sleep, they both did. Calloway was dead to the world. The poor creature must be so utterly worn out. He had fought the wheel and pedals of the jitney for hours and hours and hours. He had gotten them down, though. He had gotten them safely to Jaén.

Dropspindle tried to curl up against the hairless human, but the strong stench was too much. Humans had quite a strong, and - to be honest - unpleasant odor. They didn't smell like spices or flowers at all. She turned over, so that her nose faced away, and wriggled her body so that her back touched his. She pressed into him. Better. Much better.

Ponies never liked to sleep alone.