But when Rigg’s hand clutched at the man’s forearm, trying to get through him to the forearm of the boy, the man felt him and seized the opportunity. His right hand came up and caught Rigg by the wrist with a grip as much stronger and thicker than Rigg as Rigg’s grip would have been stronger and thicker than the boy’s wrist.
And the weight of the man began to drag Rigg forward.
Rigg’s right knee dipped into the current, and if the man had not had such a tight hold on him, he might have been swept away; at it was, it spun his body so he lay on his side. But that took his knee back out of the water, so once again his body was a bridge between stones.
Still the man’s weight dragged at him. Rigg momentarily lost all thought of the boy—he couldn’t save anybody if he himself was dragged off the cliff.
Rigg clutched at the man’s fingers with his other hand and pried his little finger up and bent it backward, backward. All of this took forever, it seemed—he thought of the movement, and then, slowly, his hand obeyed, reached out, clutched, pried, pushed.
The man let go. With agonizing slowness his right hand slipped away from Rigg, his fingers sliding over Rigg’s skin. Just as slowly, Rigg righted himself so that he could once again try to reach out for the boy; but still the man’s left hand covered the boy’s right.
Just as Rigg’s hand once again settled over the man’s left wrist, trying to get past him or through him or under him to reach the boy, Rigg saw the boy’s fingers lose their grip and slide away from the rock, slowly, slowly . . . and then they were gone.
In fury and frustration and grief at his failure, Rigg raised his hand to strike downward at the man’s hand. It did not enter his mind that he was preparing to do murder. In Rigg’s time the man was already long since dead, no matter what the outcome here; all Rigg knew was that because that man had suddenly become visible and tangible, Rigg had not been able to save the boy—a boy he almost certainly knew in the village, if he could only place him.
But Rigg never got the chance to complete the action of striking the man. Instead time sped up again, became normal, the man simply disappeared without Rigg seeing whether he fell or somehow managed to clamber back up onto the rock, and Rigg’s fist struck only stone.
A moment later, Rigg heard a scream. It couldn’t be the boy—he would already have been so far down before the scream began that he could not have been heard where Rigg was, and the scream went on much too long. Yet it was not a man’s scream—the voice was too high.
So there was someone else on the shore, someone else who had seen the boy die. Someone who might help Rigg get himself back off this rock.
But of course no one could help him. It would be insane for anyone to try. It had been insane for Rigg to try to save the boy. For here he was, his body bridging two stones, barely out of the water himself, and if he even bent his knees he would be carried away by the torrent.
He inched backward, trying to get his knees back onto the rock where his toes were. Already his arms and shoulders were aching with the strain of holding himself like a bridge. And no
w, when he might have used the slowing of time to help him pay attention to even the slightest move he made, his fear gave him no more than the normal degree of heightened concentration.
Yet after a while his knees were on the hind rock, and he was able to rise up on his hands till he was as high as he could get above the water, and his fingers still had enough strength in them that he could shove himself up and back, and . . .
He shoved, rose up, and then teetered for a moment that felt like forever, unsure whether he had pushed too lightly and would fall forward again, or pushed too hard and would tumble off the back of the rock.
But he found his balance. He stood up.
A rock hit him in the shoulder just as he was standing up. For a moment he lost his balance, could have fallen, but he recovered and turned to see a boy of perhaps his own age, maybe older, standing on the first rock from the shore, where the dead boy had started his fatal journey, and he was preparing to hurl an even bigger rock.
It was not as if Rigg had anywhere to hide.
So he had no choice but to try to slap the rock away with his bare hands. Rigg quickly discovered that his own slapping motion caused him to lose his balance as surely as if the rock had hit him. Somehow, though, he managed to twist himself and turn his fall into a lunge that got him, barely, onto the next rock back from the falls.
“Stop it!” cried Rigg.
But the rock-throwing boy couldn’t hear him. Only the boy’s scream had been loud enough to be audible over the roaring of the water.
Now Rigg recognized him—this was Umbo, a village boy, son of the cobbler, who had been his best friend when they were both much younger, and Father had kept him longer in Fall Ford than in recent years.
Now Rigg realized why he had known the boy who fell—it was Umbo’s little brother, Kyokay, a daredevil of a boy who was always getting into trouble and always taking insane chances. The boy’s arm had been in splints, healing from a break, during the time Rigg and Umbo had been friends, but even then he would climb impossible trees and leap from high places onto rough ground, so that Umbo constantly had to go and stop him or rescue him or scream at him.
If I could have saved Kyokay, it would have been a gift to my friend Umbo. A continuation of the many times I helped Umbo save the boy back when he was even smaller.
So why is Umbo trying to kill me by throwing stones? Does he think I made Kyokay fall? I was trying to save him, you fool! If you were there on the bank, why did you let him go out on the rocks? No matter what you saw, why didn’t you try to find out what really happened before you passed a death sentence on me?
“People are never fair, even when they try to be,” Father said more than once, “and few are the ones who try.”
Rigg made it back to the rock where he had been when he first saw Kyokay. If I had just stayed here, he thought, and let the boy take his chances and, of course, die, Kyokay would be no more dead than he is now, and I would have been so far from him that no one could possibly have blamed me for his death.
And I’d still have my furs, and therefore I’d be able to take money with me on my journey to wherever in the world my mother and sister might be.
Umbo was still throwing rocks, but few of them came close now, and with so much rock to stand on, Rigg could dodge those easily. Umbo was weeping now in his fury, but still Rigg could not hear his words, nor hope to be heard himself if he tried to answer. Rigg could think of no gesture that would say, “I did nothing wrong, I tried to save him.” To an angry, grieving boy like Umbo, a shrug would look like unconcern, not helplessness; a bow would look like sarcasm instead of respect for the dead.