Of The Last Millennium

by BlndDog

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

“Are you sure you have everything?”

“Yup. One tonne of food; one tonne of water; one tonne of giant sword thing. I’m all set.”

“You’re rather ungrateful, you know?”

“Yeah, well maggots in your back tends to do that to you.”

“I’ll take out the maggots tonight. It’s that or scraping your wounds with a wire brush.”

“It’s like they’re crawling under my skin.”

“Rain, shut up.”

The colt closed his mouth instantly and turned to face his sister with a hint of fear in his big green eyes. He had been like that since they came to the camp. Whenever Scootaloo returned to the tipi he inched towards his side of their spacious mat, and at meals he waited for her to finish first. On the second day Little Strongheart brought them separate bowls to dispel some of this tension. Although Scootaloo enjoyed her newfound power at first, her brother’s timidity was starting to annoy.

The three travelers, each with a considerable load, stood sandwiched between two large buffalos hitched to travois and draped with blankets that hung down to their ankles. In this way they were completely hidden from distant onlookers as they waited for the others to finish striking camp.

Bat ponies continued to come just as Chief Thunderhooves predicted. None of them had entered the tent, but every night Scootaloo awoke to the sound of a scuffle. Ninety-seven in total had been captured, and all were left to bake in the sun bound and blindfolded. Now the buffalos heaped the prisoners in one big pile, putting the fresher ones near the bottom. The twenty from the first night looked to be near death; flies frequented their eyelids undisturbed.

The buffalos were divided into three big herds. In the previous day scouts had been sent out to guard the road to the east; their hawks had been circling since sunrise. It was safe to leave.

“We are ready,” a female voice called from the back of the procession.

Scootaloo pulled her mask up to her eyes. With their drab brown cloaks and boots the ponies easily blended into the herd. The buffalos kept a quick pace, and Scootaloo had to run to avoid getting trampled.

“Break away,” Gooseberry ordered from a few rows forward.

A narrow gap opened between the buffalos in front. Little Strongheart picked up her pace; the two ponies had to sprint to clear the disintegrating formation.

The land was dotted with boulders, or so it appeared to Scootaloo until they stood up all at once and raised long wooden tubes to their lips. The scouts wore featherless headbands that covered their shiny black horns, and even their eyes were hidden behind painted grilles.

She heard soft puffs as a volley of darts took to the air. Ahead of her Little Strongheart was slowly pulling away; her pack might as well have been a bag of feathers. Scootaloo could not hear Morning Rain over the stampeding hooves behind her.

Far in the distance, the brown pinprick that was the young buffalo leapt into the air and vanished. Scootaloo slowed down instinctively, but the clattering of armor-clad bodies against hard ground pushed her back up to speed. The mask sank into her gaping mouth; she would have removed it had she been able to gallop on three legs.

The ground dropped away suddenly, and for a moment she hovered over a valley full of striated red columns. Panic took hold when her wings found resistance against the parcel on her back. She was falling out of control. The canyon was nowhere near as deep as Ghastly Gorge, but it was deep enough to hurt.

Scootaloo was intercepted by a brown blur halfway to the hard valley floor. The sudden change in direction knocked the air out of her lungs and left her head spinning as she was set down on a pile of rock flakes. A few seconds later her brother tumbled off the cliff at almost exactly the same spot, and Little Strongheart repeated her aerial rescue.

“You two rest here a bit,” she gasped between mouthfuls of water from her wooden canteen. “We will not be running anymore. Welcome to Rattlesnake Canyon.”

The ponies drank greedily, and then sat panting in the shade of the sandstone walls. Scootaloo had thought the cloaks rather heavy for the scorching desert days, but she quickly grew to appreciate it as she rested with her back to the wind. Grains of sand adhered to her sweat-soaked hood; better it than her mane. Morning Rain was coated in an even layer of sand, and Scootaloo guessed that she was similarly-adorned.

“What did I tell you?” Little Strongheart laughed. “If you don’t keep that hood up, your ears will fill up with sand in no time. Ponies don’t belong in the desert. Mules and donkeys, maybe, but not ponies. Those perky ears will be the death of you. Big eyes, too; you’re lucky we’re going through the canyon where there’s some shade.”

“Can you be quiet?” Rain hissed with his eyes rolled upwards. “Sylvanocians have big ears for a reason.”

“Is that what you call them?” the buffalo said. “In any case, you have nothing to worry about. Sound travels up and down this canyon; it never leaves. You can’t see it from ground level either. And what if they somehow wander in here? There are a hundred caves and overhangs, and I know them all. And I am safe to assume that these bat ponies will need water eventually? Well, they will not find any without a guide who knows where to look. I think you will find these next few days to be quite uneventful.”

They took up their loads again and proceeded down the valley at a slower pace. Little Strongheart’s long legs and springy steps meant that she was the only one that was not running per se.

Scootaloo had to adjust the sling of her sword constantly, and in the end left it dangling at her right side where it was utterly inaccessible should she need to draw it quickly. She and her brother were proficient with their new recurved cleavers in the sense that they could draw without cutting themselves in half.

“It’s all for show,” Dawn Runner had explained when he first brought them the weapons. “Better for clearing paths and splitting firewood, these things. Take care not to hurt yourselves.”

The long shafts of the scythes had been replaced with curved, rope-wrapped handles like the end of an umbrella. The shape and balance of the blades had not changed at all; Scootaloo nearly got a faceful of needles the first time she took a swing at a cactus.

Hanging from the same harness, the filly also carried a tiny axe of sorts. A “tomahawk”, according to Chief Thunderhooves when he passed it under her cloak that morning. It was a last-minute gift, and Scootaloo was not quite sure how it looked or how it worked. Nevertheless she appreciated its lightness compared to the mountain of other gear heaped on her back.

Though no two pillars looked the same, Scootaloo soon lost track of distance and direction. Her line of sight never extended more than twenty metres or so; for most of the day she had nothing but blurs of brown and fleeting glimpses of a tail to guide her.

“I can’t go slower,” Little Strongheart called near noonday. “You two should pick up your pace; you might as well be going backwards!”

The trail consisted of a single layer of fine pebbles over a rock bed; perfect for rolling ankles and breaking up bare hooves. Morning Rain skinned his knees at the first incline, but one glance from his sister convinced him to keep quiet.

They ran through the brief midday heat, until Scootaloo rounded a stone mushroom and nearly ran headlong into their guide.

“That took you long enough,” the young buffalo commented when Morning Rain appeared. “I didn’t want to stop for lunch until we got to a gully, and here we are. Take a break, you two.”

Rain fumbled with the lid of his canteen; Scootaloo offered him some of her water when it looked like he was about to cry.

The dense, greasy lumps of dry berries and straw made the ponies very thirsty. They each tried to eat big mouthfuls at first, only to gag on the leathery mass as it dried out their mouths. Initially it tasted like a spicy campfire; the strong flavour of dry wild strawberries came through as she chewed, making palatable the starchy chokeberries and saskatoons. Their guide didn’t try to hide her smile as she watched the ponies’ many faces of surprise and displeasure. Both canteens were empty when they finished, but their cakes of food seemed no lighter than before.

Scootaloo looked around for something fresh to chew on, but all she saw was sandstone and pebbles. Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t seen anything green since they dropped into the canyon. Not even chunks of dry wood or dead tree roots. She licked the sand and grease off her lips and silently wished for more water.

The “gully” was the saddest little trickle Scootaloo had ever seen: one inch wide and barely half an inch deep, its crystal-clear flow was less than what a single storm drain in Ponyville could pick up after a light spring shower. A kind of basin had been dug out in its path to form a useful pool. Little Strongheart took their empty canteens and slowly sank them in the pool; their three containers completely depleted its buildup, drying up everything downstream.

After one last quick drink the children packed up once again. Despite her earlier assertion Little Strongheart seemed just a little slower in the afternoon. Scootaloo looked up as often as she could, but there was no sign of their pursuers.

She did not see Rainbow Dash either.

As the day progressed their route seemed to curve gently northward. Near nightfall the canyon grew very narrow all at once. The trail ran straight for one hundred metres through what looked to be a crack in a rock wall, and at one point the two sides of the cliff formed a complete arch. Although the sky was not quite dark, the filly could barely see her feet as she emerged from the bottleneck.

Little Strongheart was gone.

Scootaloo turned around, but the pass behind her had faded into fuzzy patches of grey and black. Something seemed to be wavering just at the edge of focus; she wanted to believe that it was the flapping of her brother’s dull cloak.

“Scootaloo, why are you just standing there?”

The filly jumped at the sound of the voice beside her. At first she thought that a boulder had spoken. Then the boulder flicked its ears and cracked a mischievous smile. In the desert buffalos could be as discrete as bat ponies in the night.

Morning Rain staggered out of the growing darkness soon after, and Scootaloo was relieved to see that nothing else moved behind him. Little Strongheart led them into one of many small caves at the base of the cliff. Its interior was pitch black, and the two ponies were hesitant to enter knowing what real monsters may lurk in shadows so deep.

They dropped their bags near the cave mouth and lie down side-by-side facing outwards. Scootaloo could barely make out the opposite cliff. Their little slit of sky was fading quickly, though the stars had not yet appeared. Their guide was rummaging in her bag behind them, and presently a sharp scrape and pop alerted both of the ponies.

Little Strongheart stood with half her face illuminated, holding a very long match between her teeth.

“Come over here, Rain,” she instructed, waving him over with one newly-polished hoof that flashed in and out of her ring of light.

True to her words, the buffalo proceeded to pick the fat white grubs out of the colt’s back. Scootaloo looked on from a distance, her disgust slightly outmatched by morbid curiosity. The maggots squirmed frantically in response to the light; Little Strongheart removed them one by one and collected them in a wooden bowl. Rain hissed whenever she touched his back, but she was more than strong enough to hold him down.

In the end his wounds looked surprisingly clean; surely they would heal properly this time around. He chewed on a dry poppy bulb as new stitches were put in, falling asleep before the match finally burned out.

“How are you doing, Scootaloo?” Little Strongheart whispered after emptying the bowl of maggots outside.

“I guess I’m fine,” she sighed without turning. “Just a little tired.”

“You’ve been looking up an awful lot. Are you still worried about Rainbow Dash?”

“She should have arrived yesterday.”

Her sinuses tingled as she continued to stare into the inky sky. She had practically begged the buffalo chief for a fourth day, clinging to the notion that her sister was just traveling slower than expected. But there had been no rainbow streak in the sky at sunrise, and no new ponies in the camp except for a handful of sylvanocians.

What’s taking so long, Dash?

“Don’t worry about her, Scootaloo,” Little Strongheart said. “I know Rainbow Dash too. Maybe not as well as you do, but I know her. She supported the buffalos’ cause in our conflict with Appleloosa even though she had only known us for a short time, so have no doubt in your mind that she will come for you.”

“I know that,” Scootaloo retorted. “Rainbow Dash is my sister; of course she’s coming. But what if the bat ponies have her? Princess Luna told me that she’s alone, and there are lots of bat ponies, and…”

“She will be okay,” Little Strongheart said flatly. “Her safety is not your responsibility. You are already taking care of a younger brother, and that is more than enough for you. Besides, if Rainbow Dash cannot look after herself, don’t you think that you’d be better off without her anyways?”

Scootaloo’s blood boiled at that suggestion, but she was too tired to argue. Her hateful glare was completely lost in the darkness; she wasn’t certain if she was even facing the buffalo at all. She slept with her hood up and her chin resting on her bag. The gentle current coming through the cave entrance would alert her of unfamiliar scents; even a bat pony was bound to smell bad after a day in the desert.

#

The cave was pitch black when Scootaloo awoke. Her heart pounded in her ears, and she hardly dared to breathe.

She had heard something.

“Mmmmm…”

Scootaloo kicked with her booted back legs, skidding noisily across the hard cave floor. She scrambled to stand even as her sluggish mind matched the voice to its owner. Her muscles were burning as she settled down again. In her panic she had inadvertently moved off her warm patch of ground. She sucked in her belly to avoid the icy stone slab beneath her and balanced awkwardly in a low crouch.

The sound returned. It was not nearly as loud as she thought initially, but its spirited persistence made her whole body cease up in fear. Her close-fitting hood, good though it was at keeping sand out of her ears, prevented her ascertaining the source of the noise. She thought it came from behind her. In her mind she saw tiny sharp claws scraping against sandstone. Many claws worked frantically without rest.

Desperately.

Hungrily.

The whimper died in her throat. Scootaloo squeezed her eyes shut and hid her head under her heavy pack. She weighed down the edges of her cloak beneath her hooves, adding some reassuring tension on her back and sealing off any openings through which a bony claw might reach to drag her into the night. What she really wanted was a heavy winter blanket.

The wind picked up, producing a low, steady tone as it blew past the cave's mouth. She could hear the scraping no longer.

Scootaloo didn’t know when she fell asleep again.

#

Dawn found Morning Rain and Scootaloo huddled in the cave entrance, holding each other so tightly that they could have been mistaken for one pony. Their gear lie inert exactly where they had left it the night before, and neither of them had made any move to retrieve it.

The colt sobbed hysterically as he clung onto his sister, who barely had her own breathing under control. She too hid her tear-streaked face, but could not stop herself from stealing the occasional glance into the small stone chamber.

A low mound of blunt sandstone chunks marked the spot where Little Strongheart had slept. Long double streaks on the cave floor ended at the edge of the rubble, serving as the only evidence of the buffalo’s final struggle.

Not visible from the front was the part of the pile where the two children had excavated in hopes of uncovering their friend; the part that fell away at the colt’s first tentative push, dozens of blocks tumbling down an endless black shaft.

#

They waited until midmorning with Morning Rain facing the cave while Scootaloo watched the canyon. Little Strongheart did not return, and finally they had to accept that their guide was gone for good.

The ponies retrieved their supplies without once turning their back on the mound of rocks. They stayed shoulder-to-shoulder throughout the operation, and only ventured inside long enough to grab an item with their teeth before backpedaling out again. Scootaloo’s pemmican bag was not closed properly, but she was perfectly content to escape the cave with less than a third of her food intact. Most of Little Strongheart’s stuff was left undisturbed, except for her water flask which Scootaloo took in their last run.

They dragged the loose gear a good hundred metres down the valley before either of them felt it was safe to stop. Scootaloo looked over her shoulder every few seconds as she hastily packed. Both children kept their swords lying on the ground within reach; Morning Rain even took his out of its burlap scabbard.

They topped off their canteens from Little Strongheart’s and drank what they couldn’t carry. Scootaloo was reluctant to part with the extra canteen, but it proved to be too large and awkward. They hid it inside a crack in the southern cliff before continuing east.

Scootaloo did not need a guide in front of her to keep up her pace that day. Her brother followed right on her heel, and even passed her a few times. Finding the right trail was not the problem; the canyon turned gently and grew narrow in places, but it never branched. The challenge was finding water. To that end Rain had memorized Little Strongheart’s map in surprising detail, and their canteens were never dry for more than five minutes. They skipped breakfast and lunch, instead chewing on pemmican whenever they waited at a waterhole.

The canyon seemed to go on endlessly, and the cycle of run-drink-refill took a heavy mental toll on the children. Swords came out whenever they stopped, and every change in the wind had them craning their necks every possible way.

Late in the afternoon Scootaloo finally decided that enough was enough. They had reached a scorching, open area where the canyon became more like a crater full of round, crumbly hills. Even the flat cacti grew in the shade, and big sun-bleached stumps clung onto cracks in the base rock by the tips of their dead roots. They stood unearthed by centuries of dry hot winds, like giant spiders waiting for giant flies.

“I’m going up there,” she said, pointing to a dome on the north side of the depression. “If anything is following us, I’ll be able to see it.”

“I’ll come with you,” Morning Rain said shakily.

“You can’t even walk right now,” Scootaloo pointed out, patting his bandaged back to emphasize her point. “You need to rest as much as possible. Watch my stuff, and stay in the shade. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

Scootaloo wanted to doff her cloak, but the sun beating down on her exposed face was already bad enough. She had to squint lest the glare blinded her.

She always had a clear line of sight to her brother. He was lounging with his head uncovered as to stay visible. His brown cloak broke up the lines of his body, so that his face seemed to be floating amidst the rocks. Seeing that she was watching, he waved at her with a nervous smile on his face. Scootaloo returned the gesture before turning to face the bulge. It was a lot bigger up close, and steeper too. Weathered sandstone was slippery wet or dry, and it was soon apparent that she could not climb directly.

The north cliff did not look to be such a treacherous climb; more of a ramp than a cliff, really. Scootaloo could even see some dimples and cracks that would make excellent holds. She glanced one last time at her brother, who was now cradling his open pemmican bag between his front hooves.

The filly rounded the base of the hill, and immediately felt a calloused and mud-caked paw on the back of her neck. Her mask was pushed off her nose, replaced seamlessly by a cool wet rag so that she had no chance to cry out.

The last thing she remembered was a sharp organic tang in her nostrils, like the fumes of cheap gin left to bake in summer heat.

Author's Note:

This chapter was longer in my initial plan, but I didn't want to blow past two convenient stopping points.

So what do you guys think? Leave your comments below!