In Her Name

a flicker of knowing flared into a low blaze, and she saw Reza in her mind, saw his limp body, trapped against an outcropping of ice somewhere below her.

Gathering air in her lungs until she thought they might burst, she thrust herself down a final time, her body following a set of directions her mind did not understand, but dared not ignore. She swam beneath the ice, entering a world of complete darkness, where not even the brightest light could shine through, had there been any such light remaining in the world above. She knew that if she did not find him now, both of them would be dead, food for the swimming things that teemed in the river during the spring season after the spawning.

Her fingers touched something. Desperately, she latched onto it, for there was nothing else to sustain the hope that dwindled with the last of the oxygen in her burning lungs. She grappled with the unseen thing, and finally was rewarded as Reza’s lifeless form came free from the inverted ridge of ice where he had been trapped by the slow but irresistible current.

Perhaps infinity was a concept best not dwelt upon by a young warrior still untested in battle, but Esah- Zhurah thought she came to understand it well as she struggled through the water toward the surface. Distance and time merged into numbing agony and fear as she fought for every stroke against the current that had helped her find him, but that now threatened to doom her to the same fate. She clamped her arm harder around Reza’s chest to keep his armored body from sinking like leaden ballast. She turned to look at his shadowy outline, wondering if he could even still be alive.

No matter, she told herself. She was determined not to leave him behind. Not ever.

The flame that had burned so brightly within her, the power that had somehow shown her where to find him, was flickering like a candle flame surrounded with mist. Her heart was beginning to slow as her body temperature fell, and the numbness in her limbs was overshadowed only by the intense burning in her cramping muscles as their strength swiftly ebbed.

A hideous apparition suddenly flew at her face from the darkness, teeth bared behind savagely drawn lips, ebony eyes bulging from its unearthly face. Claws appeared, reaching for her…

Esah-Zhurah almost screamed into the frigid water at the sight, but her panicked brain understood – barely in time – that it was only the corpse of her magthep. Its struggles against the water now over, its ragged shell was bound for the ocean that lay far beyond the great wastelands.

Just then, her head shot through the water into the frigid air above, and Esah-Zhurah gasped at the shock of it, the taste of life in her mouth. She fought to get Reza’s head above the water, even though she knew he was not breathing, and had not been for she did not know how long. She tugged and pulled with her legs and free arm, propelling herself toward the craggy outlines of the ice rim.

But it was not enough. Just at that moment, her struggling legs failed.

As her head went under for the last time, her free hand touched something, and instinctively she grabbed hold of it.

The rope!

Biting her tongue, the pain forcing one last surge of adrenaline into her arteries, she managed one more kick, pushing her head above the water.

Managing to loop the rope around her free wrist, she screamed a last command to the faithful beast above before the water jealously pulled her back. “Goliath, drakh-te ka! Pull!”

Nothing happened. As she began to sink, her legs having given their last, she sucked in one final breath before her head went under

Her arm was nearly pulled from its socket as the slack in the rope suddenly vanished. Obeying the command that Reza had once taught him as a useful trick, Goliath hauled them out with his mammoth strength, running headlong away from the fissure. Esah-Zhurah clung desperately to Reza as the two of them swept through the water like porpoises, leaving a rooster tail of icy water showering behind them.

Ahead of them loomed a wall of ice, the edge of the collapsed ice dome through which Reza had fallen. The top of the ice was nearly a meter above the surface of the water, and Esah-Zhurah visualized the two of them being smashed senseless against it as Goliath pulled them blindly onward.

She opened her mouth to tell Goliath to stop, to slow them down before they hit. But a monstrous roar drowned out her voice as the entire ice dome around them collapsed into the water. They were now surging toward a part of the fissure that was in the shape of a V, spearheaded by the rope that had sawed through the thinner ice under Goliath’s power. A tidal wave crashed over them, and then they were smashing through sheets and blocks of jagged ice. Frantically rolling to one side, she tried to use Reza’s armor as a shield for her own body as they scraped and bucked over the razor-edged floes. Had her arm not been entwined with the rope, she would have lost her grip and fallen back into the water.

Then they were free, their bodies plowing through the snow as Goliath pulled them at a full gallop. Esah- Zhurah let him go for a while until she thought it might be safe to stop.

“Goliath,” she called wearily, hoping the animal would hear her through the still howling wind. She had visions of herself and Reza, frozen to death, twirling on a rope behind the animal until it, too, finally died of exposure. “Kazh! Stop!”

The rope went slack.

Esah-Zhurah wanted to lay there in the snow and rest for a long while, but she knew that to do so would have brought Death calling. Reza lay next to her, his body still. She had to act quickly. She gained her feet, staggering like a drunkard, and was met by Goliath’s steamy muzzle. Petting the beast with dead hands, she worked her way to the saddle and grappled with the lashings that held the shelter, slashing the frozen bindings free with her talons. It fell into the snow. The small brown roll, about the diameter and length of her thigh, immediately began to grow, quickly assuming a hemispherical shape that was nearly as big around as Goliath was long. A tube extruded itself from one end as the whole thing changed color from a leathery brown to a heat absorbing black. As an afterthought, Esah-Zhurah pulled the saddle from Goliath’s back, leaving him free to seek his own shelter.

She pulled Reza into the tube, the shelter’s sphincter-like entrance dilating open to accept them as if they were crawling back into the womb, then closing behind them. Groping wearily in the darkness of the vestibule with her numbed fingers, Esah-Zhurah cut away Reza’s frozen armor, the ice shattering as she peeled it away like the hardened chrysalis of some exotic species of insect. She tore at his clothes, quickly throwing everything to one side in a frozen heap. Then she dragged him into the main part of the shelter and turned him on his stomach. Doing what he had once shown her, she straddled his back and began forcing the water from his lungs with her hands, pushing down with all her weight on his back.

Beneath her, she could hear the sickening gurgle of water as it gushed from his mouth onto the floor of the shelter. Push, release, push, release, until the water fell to a trickle, then stopped. Then she hurriedly turned him over. She bent down, putting her ear to Reza’s naked breast, listening for a heartbeat through the pounding of her own that reverberated in her ears. For eight beats of her heart, there was nothing. Then, she heard a faint lub… dub through his flesh.

The sound energized her with the power of hope. She bent over him, praying that she could remember the things he had taught her when she was learning to swim. “Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” he had called it in his native tongue. She had laughed at him at the time, finding the thought of doing such a thing to another Kreelan – let alone a human – repugnant.

But the humor of that day was now replaced by desperation as she took his head in her hands. With one hand cupping his head and the other clamping his nose, she put her numbed mouth over his and began to force air into his waterlogged lungs. She took another breath, then blew again. Her body shook from sheer exhaustion and cold, and her heart beat so fast that she knew it must soon burst. But she refused to give up.

Suddenly, he began coughing. He spouted water everywhere as his lungs received a signal from his dazed brain that they were to begin functioning again, and they sought to clear out the last of the offending fluid. Esah- Zhurah shuddered, praying her thanks to the Empress.

After a few minutes, his breathing became ragged but steady. Undoing her own armor and shedding her clothing, she held him close, wrapping her quaking arms around him. Beneath them, the shelter absorbed the icy pool of water from Reza’s lungs. It left behind only a soft, dry bed that already had begun to warm them, reflecting their flickering body heat inward.

Cradling his frigid body to give it what little warmth her own had to offer, she spiraled into a dark, dreamless abyss.