I woke up to find Percival Thorndyke gently nudging me with his foot. As I climbed to my feet, I was astounded to find that my young friend had found companionship in a lovely young female centaur.
“What is this?” I asked.
“This is Bella,” said Percival. “Isn’t she lovely?”
“Indeed,” said I, and the young filly blushed.
“We’re in love,” said Percival.
“How long was I asleep?”
“Let’s pack up our gear and be on our way,” said he. “We’re still looking for riches remember?”
“If you are looking for gold,” said Bella, “I know where the gold is scattered across the land. You can simply pick it up.”
“Excellent,” said I.
“Of course it is guarded by a monster,” she continued.
“Of course,” said I. “What kind of monster?”
“I don’t know, but it is fierce enough that the herd and the forest women both fear to go there.”
“We are not afraid, are we Eaglethorpe?” said Percival.
“Not as afraid as we should be,” I replied.
Leaving the shelter of the little wood, we started south once again. As we did before, we skirted the land between the swamps of the Amazons and the grasslands of the centaurs. This seemed like a strategy sure to defeat the designs of one or both of the groups, but it was not to be. We had gone no more than ten miles when we spied a group of twenty or so centaurs riding toward us, which is to say they were running, because they didn’t actually ride anything, not needing to because they had horse feet.
“They’ve come after me,” said Bella. “You must both run and leave me.”
“Never,” said Percival. “We must duck into the swamps.”
“I can’t go into the swamps,” she said. “I’m too afraid. Unlike a human, I can’t maneuver around the tar pits and over the quicksand. And centaurs are the natural prey of the frog-bear.”
“Fine,” said Percival. “Eaglethorpe, we must split up. I’ll take Bella and make a run for the south. We probably won’t make it, but I refuse to leave her. You cut into the swamps. They won’t follow you there.”
“I hate to part with you,” said I.
“I hate to leave you,” said he, and then smiled. “but on the other hand, attacked by twenty centaurs, I will almost surely be killed.”
“Good luck,” said I, and turning, rode into the swamps. Just before Hysteria and I plunged into the high grass, I looked back to see Percival and Bella, and of course Susan, running away, just ahead of the centaur horde.
It is an incredibly easy trick to get oneself lost in the nasty, filthy, leech-infested, horrible swamps of Ennedi, and so we did. I blame Hysteria. I gave her, her head, and she took us right into getting lost. And so we slogged our way through the fetid, which is to say stinking, swamps of Ennedi for more than a week. I ate all the food I had packed in my backpack and had to resort to eating mud fish, muck fish, and yes, even slime fish.
I have always been a gifted fish guddler. When fish swim into a shallow part of a stream or river, I am able to find them beneath a rock or ledge and tickle the fish into entering my grasp. This is actually a quite enjoyable pastime in some parts of the world, where trout or perch or catfish are the norm. But it is no fun at all to guddle mud fish or muck fish, and it is downright unpleasant to guddle slime fish.
During this entire period, Hysteria had nothing but swamp grass. And then, there was a pie. A pie on a rock in the middle of the swamp which turned out not to be real, which is to say the pie was not real, because the rock was real and the swamp was all too real.
So, here I have very skillfully brought us circuitously, which is to say in a circle, back to where we started. I was hauled down from the net and tied up by the Amazons, all my weapons were taken from me, and then I was dragged back to their Amazon city. They dragged me over rocks and through mud and kicked me every so often. I tried to avoid being kicked in the face or having the rocks I was dragged over hit me there either. I wanted to look as handsome as possible, for of the two possible fates of Amazonian prisoners, being made love to and then killed seemed the better choice.