After the Apocalypse (4)

Wein's feet did not even touch the peak of the climb as he hurtled over the familiar rise and let gravity help him gain momentum on the steep plunge down the beachward side. Ahead he saw Susswan just emerging from the woods into the gentle sloping field of sun-parched yellow grass leading to the beach, three hundred yards further downhill. With only a few desiccated camphor trees among the well-cropped yellow grass, almost no obstacles lay between Susswan and the beach. Wein needed to catch him before he made it to the sand. After that he didn’t think he could keep up with the thief in the thick, loose going. Recklessly, he increased his stride.

Susswan was very tired and, having raced over a third of the meadow before the beach, he slowed to catch his breath. Once on the sand a little more energy for a dash would be helpful in escaping Wein. He decided he would put on the dash just before he reached the sand’s frontier, just past the last spindly camphor tree.

Behind him Wein had reached the open grass faster than anyone could have imagined using a sort of run-jumping downhill lope that the children following him considered virtually suicidal. He burst onto the yellow, brittle field much closer to Susswan than expected. Susswan more heard than saw his pursuer. The nearness both startled and horrified him. A quick peek over his shoulder at Wein’s blood-streaked face, teeth clenched and red, and Susswan switched his careful jog to a panicked sprint for the beach.

Wein had never been able to catch up with Susswan before, yet here he was making ground quickly. Lungs bursting, bones aching, muscles screaming for respite, Susswan made his last desperate bid for the open beach and relative safety. He was just sweeping past the last emaciated tree when a little brown equally emaciated leg whipped out into his path from behind its trunk. He was too late to avoid the obstacle. With a lurch, Susswan’s right shin connected with Cahya’s calf and he found himself making it to the beach at last, face first and spread-eagled in the soft sand. A sharp, “Ha!” escaped Cahya as she rose and came to the edge of the turf to confront him.

Winded by the chase and his fall, Susswan rolled onto his back, looking up at Cahya with her small fists planted on her hips, a look of satisfied and righteous anger causing her lips to pout and her eyes to squint. Wein arrived beside her, panting and wiping his bloody forehead with his shirt. To Cahya’s right the steep gully from which she’d emerged well ahead of Susswan slipped from the shadow of the one full and proper cloud in the entire sky. The gully and the cloud seemed to be laughing at the prostrate boy in the golden sand, panting for air.

As the village children began to gather round Cahya and Wein, smaller and slower ones still emerging from the forest’s edge, Cahya raised her bamboo cane menacingly and took two steps toward Susswan. He raised an arm to block the coming blow, holding it there as she paused and looked beyond him with her eyes widening and her mouth falling open in a surprised, “Oh.” Stopping, she pointed past him and yelled, “Ora!” in an almost-scream.

The children of west Flores are, for the most part, fearless little creatures; cobras, sharks and cyclones seldom faze them, but all who have wits hold a special horror for the ora, the gigantic lizards from across the strait on the island of Komodo which often swim over to Flores to hunt. Susswan catapulted from the ground in terror, twisting in the air like an upright cat and landing on his feet facing down the empty beach with his arms raised and his fingers splayed.

Contemptuously, Cahya stepped past him. Not even bothering to honor him with a whack from her switch, she leant down and snatched the little icon; the little ora icon, from the sand where it had landed after being cast from Susswan’s grip after she’d tripped him. She brandished the tiny wooden effigy of a lizard of Komodo at Susswan and the gathered crowd burst into derisive laughter, for the first time ever laughing with ‘The Ghost’ girl and not at her. To his credit, even Susswan broke into a sheepish grin as he realized the trick; the clever trick, this girl from somewhere else had played on him. She had been planning to hit him with the cane but in gratitude for his honorable acceptance of defeat she merely tapped Susswan ever so lightly on his nose twice with the ora and said, “Don’t ever try to steal from the Crone again, got it?”

Susswan’s grin grew bigger. “I never will, Cahya,” he nodded, making the children’s’ traditional promise sign with his pinky finger. This was the first time he’d ever called her by her real name. Cahya did not miss the significance of this moment.

As will happen, some teasing of the two refugees from Sumatra still took place from time-to-time, but it took on a good-natured reciprocal quality and Cahya and Gemi’s replies were accepted as fair points rather than whinging weakness. Cahya took their new status in stride, but Gemi was mesmerized for days by the unexpected full membership within the village ‘club’. He had done essentially nothing in order to earn this new respect so he continued to be haunted by a sense that this; like everything else in his life, could be whisked away from him at a moment’s notice. Cahya did what she could to overwhelm her little brother’s - who was not her little brother- well earned sense of paranoia.

Please continue reading this story in "After the Apocalypse" (5)

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