At which moment the cat yanked down hard on the woman's cloak and she tightened her grip on my wet hand, but it was no use, the great cat was too heavy, too strong.
With a final scream, the woman slipped out of my grasp and, with her child in her arms, she fell off the rim of the roof and out of my sight.
It was then that I did the unthinkable.
I leapt out over the rim after her.
To this day, I don't know why I did it.
Maybe it was the way she had held onto her son that made me do it. Or maybe it was the look of pure fear on her beautiful face.
Or maybe it was just her beautiful face.
I don't know.
I landed rather unheroically in a pool of mud that lay in front of the citadel. As I did so, a spray of brown wetness splattered all over my face, blinding me.
I wiped the mud away from my eyes.
And immediately saw no less than seven rapas standing in a close semicircle around me, staring at me with their cold yellow eyes.
My heart was pounding loudly inside my head. What I intended to do now, I surely did not know.
The woman and the boy were right beside me. I stepped in front of them and yelled fiercely at the phalanx of monsters before us.
'Be gone, I say! Be gone!'
I extracted an arrow from the quiver on my back and slashed it back and forth in front of the giant cats' faces.
The rapas didn't seem to care for my pathetic act of bravado.
They closed in around us.
Now truly, it must be said that if these fiendish creatures had looked large from the roof of the citadel, up close they looked positively massive. Dark, black and powerful.
Then, and abruptly, the rapa standing nearest to me lashed out with its forepaw and snapped the sharpened point of my arrow clean off. The big creature then lowered its head and snarled at me, tensed itself to launch and then—
Something dropped with a loud splash into a muddy puddle of water to my right.
I turned to see what it was. And I frowned.
It was the idol.
It was Renco's idol.
My mind spun like a windmill. What was Renco's idol doing down here? Why would anyone throw it down into the mud at a time like this!
Whence I looked up and saw Renco himself leaning out over the edge of the citadel's roof. It was he who had just thrown the idol down to me.
And then it happened.
I froze.
The noise was like nothing I had ever heard in my life.
It was only a soft sound, but it was utterly pervasive. It cut through the air like a knife, piercing even the sound of the falling rain.
It was similar to the sound a chime makes when it is struck. A kind of high-pitched hum.
Mmmmmmm.
The rapas heard it too. Indeed, the one which had only moments before been readying itself to attack now just stood there in front of us, staring in a kind of dumbstruck wonderment at the idol which now lay half- submerged in the brown puddle beside me.
It was then that the strangest thing of all happened.
The pack of rapas around us slowly began to move back wards. The rapas were stepping away from the idol.
'Alberto,' Renco whispered. 'Move very slowly, do you hear. Very slowly. Pick up the idol and go to the door. I'll have someone let you back inside.'
I obeyed his command to the letter.
With the woman and child beside me, I scooped up the wet idol in my hands, and with our backs pressed firmly against the wall of the citadel, we slowly made our way around its circular outer wall until we were at the doorway.
For their part, the rapas just followed us at a careful distance, entranced by the melodious song of the wet idol.
But at no stage did they attack.
And then all at once the large stone slab that acted as a door to the citadel was rolled aside and we all slid in
