Ben Dover's Arc

Chapter 88 of 150

Ben slept two hours and woke before dawn. The cart came at dusk. He had the day to fix the last hole in his plan: how to move the chest from Jack's wall to the shepherd's hut without leaving a track Cage's scouts could read. He found Jack in the yard splitting kindling. Ben laid it out. Cart on the road at dusk. Off through the alders. Chest under the trough. Walk to the mill empty-handed. Jack set the axe down. "You'll cut sign through the alders. Two men and a barrel-shaped chest through wet leaves? A blind boy could follow you at noon." "Then I don't cut through the alders." "You have to. The hut's back a hundred paces off the road." Ben thought. The chest was too heavy to carry clean. Any drag mark would point straight at the hut. If a scout swept the road ahead of him, the trail would be there when Cage's people came looking. He went inside. Millie sat on the floor by the double wall, feeding scraps to her small orange creature. It watched him with wide blue eyes and chewed. "Your winged one," Ben said. "How much can it lift?" "The crate. Once. Short." Millie scratched the little creature behind its ear. "Half a mile, maybe. Not two." "Half a mile is enough." He drew it out for her on the floor with a piece of chalk. Cart stops at the bend. They unload behind the split alder. The winged creature lifts the barrel-shaped chest over the alders and sets it down at the hut. No drag. No boot prints in the leaves. He walks in on the road side, clean, and slides it under the trough himself. Millie studied the chalk. "It'll hum on the lift. Wind's up out there." "How long in the air." "Two minutes. Maybe three." Ben weighed it. Three minutes of hum over open ground. Any scout on the ridge above the ford would hear it. But the alternative was a drag trail that stayed there until rain. "We do it at last light," he said. "Wind drops then. And if anyone hears, they'll look up. Not down at the hut." Jack watched from the doorway. "You're betting the whole set on a lizard-sized thing carrying a barrel." "I'm betting it on no track." At dusk they loaded the chest onto the cart. Millie rode in back with her hand on the wood. The little creature curled inside her coat. Somewhere ahead, the big winged one waited where she had whistled it that afternoon. The cart rolled out through Jack's gate. Ben sat beside the driver with his mother's small keepsake chest in his lap, nine coins short but still his. He did not look back. He had a way to reach the hut unseen. What he did not have, still, was any word from Marty.