Hole in the Sky -4- Digging a Hole (Patreon)

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The first group of prisoners didn't impress on us what exactly they were to begin with. Twenty or so naked-looking people walking in a closely spaced line, heads down and moving slowly. A second similar group traveled alongside, their gait a shuffle—as if their ankles were chained together.

"They're women," said Dunn, who had one pair of the binoculars.

Doc passed the other pair to me. "My old eyes can't make as much out, even with these things helping," he said.

Hatton still had the scope on the rifle—good magnification but a poor field of view compared with the field glasses. I vaguely hoped he had his finger nowhere near the trigger of his .308 as I adjusted the binoculars to my eyes and took a look.

Two more caffles—that's the word for a group of people chained together, according to Hatton—two more groups had come into view. And Dunn was right, they were all women. Somewhat assorted in skin and hair color, from pale-skin blondes to blacks much darker than the General, but Mediterranean-types seemed to be in the majority—dark hair and olive skin.

And two more groups appeared, topping the small rise that must have been concealing them from us. Armed men walked alongside each chained group. More women.

We had no doubt that they were all women because they were naked. Their clearly visible breasts swayed a bit as they moved.

"Goddam," said Hatton.

"Uh-huh," agreed Dunn.

"That's more than a hundred of them," I said as two more groups of chained women appeared.

The first group reached the turning point in the line of march and now traveled across in front of us, as near as they were going to get, perhaps a thousand yards.

We started doing serious counting. Seven elephants, each holding a dozen or more people, mostly blonds and mostly men but some women. Two lines of soldiers, one on either side of the elephants, assorted types with a man on horseback accompanied by a pair of enormous dogs for every ten or twenty infantry, count the horses as they went by for an estimate, but the line went on for sometime. Then the women, in between the lines of warriors and following the elephants, apparently chained together at the ankles from the way they moved.

Six hundred women prisoners we eventually counted before another element of the parade appeared. Camels loaded with enormous bundles, then oxcarts coming behind them and lastly, with no military escort alongside, a ragtag of people, men, women and children. A few blacks but nearly all of them dark Mediterranean-types again, just trooping along in the wake of the other groups, some of them carrying bundles or leading donkeys or oxen or herding goats or pigs or followed by dogs dragging frames covered with goods.

"Camp followers," said Hutton. "Three or four hundred of them."

"Followin' the army, 'cause that's what it was," said Dunn. "Almost a thousand soldiers, six hunnert or more prisoners…. What the heck?"

"Why were there no male prisoners?" asked Doc. All of them being naked, we probably would have spotted any males among the chained together groups.

No one had an answer. ”What are we going to do?" Dunn wanted to know. It wasn’t an easier question.

Hatton and I glanced at each other and shook our heads. "I don't see we can do anything," I said.

"They're not traveling very fast, maybe a mile an hour or a bit more. They have to go as slow as the chained up girls and the oxen. They won't get to where they're going before dark. Assuming they are going to that town we saw last night…." The senator trailed off, unable to complete a useful thought.

"We've got guns," said Dunn. "High-powered rifles." Besides Hatton's .308, Dunn and I had a .30-06 each and Doc had a lightweight Winchester chambered for .300W. Those were our elk rifles, though none of them were exactly over-powered for bringing down the big animals. Besides those, I had a .375 and Hatton had brought a .400 Express, in case we ran into bear or moose we could bag.

Doc and I both had 12 gauge shotguns in the truck and we all had plinking/varmint guns in .22LR, or even .223. I had a pistol, too, a 10mm Glock for bear defense, and I thought Hatton might have a handgun of some sort. A machete, an ax, a couple of hatchets and entrenching tools and various knives pretty much completed our armament.

For four men on a three week long vacation, we were armed to the teeth, perhaps an expression of our sometimes questionable masculinity. Because this hadn't really been a hunting trip.

"You're bringing the guns up," said Hatton to Dunn. "What do you think we should do with them?"

"Ah dunno," the senator admitted. "Ah… Ah just don't know what to do about all those captives. What are they doin’ with so many women in chains?"

"Slaves," said Hatton flatly. "This is one element of a conquering army and they are taking their loot to sell. And one part of that loot is women."

Doc shook his head. "All those women, girls really, none of them looked to be more than maybe twenty-five and most of them looked like teen-agers. I couldn't see well enough to tell for sure…." He trailed off, too.

I blinked. "Suppose they conquered a large city, would they be able to drag off six hundred young women? And why no men? Aren't male slaves usually worth as much as women, if not more?"

Hatton nodded. "Men to work, women to breed more slaves because they can't do as much or as heavy of work." We all looked at him. He shrugged. "I know I'm something of an Oreo but I read a book or two on the subject every time Black History Month comes around."

We didn't press or tease him, everyone of us had our own demons and the mood didn't favor it. Frankly, we were all depressed by our feelings of inadequacy.

"Could we pick off the leaders at a distance?" asked Dunn.

"Maybe," I said. "But I've never shot at people and I'm not sure I want to start."

Hatton snorted. "I think I could do it, but I know what you mean. And how do we know which ones to shoot and how much shooting could we do before the rest come after us. The noise will tell them where we're shooting from, once they get over any shock."

Doc Abrough was quiet for a minute, then he said, "Shoot the elephants."

"We ain't gonna kill no elephant with a .30-06, even a small elephant," said Dunn.

Hatton and I looked at each other, thinking of our heavier weapons. But even a 400 Express didn't qualify as an elephant gun.

"You don't want to kill them, you want to panic them. Elephants are smart and they don't like to be hurt. No one made much use of them in war once firearms were invented because a panicked elephant is ten times as dangerous to its own side as it is to the enemy. And even with spears and bows… well, Mark Twain once observed that the odds in any ancient battle were with the side that had the fewest elephants."

Hatton laughed out loud, Dunn chuckled and I smiled.

"Shoot 'em in the meaty part of their behinds and watch them run?" suggested Dunn.

Doc nodded. "And in the confusion, start shooting the guys on horseback, or the horses. You notice something about the horsemen? None of them have stirrups and those horses are all just ponies, probably none taller than fourteen hands or so."

Hatton snorted.

Dunn said, "Fifteen hands is five feet at the shoulder for you city folk. Kind of a minimum height for a real riding horse.”

Hatton snorted again. "The horses are small, I got that."

I'd noticed the horses, too, and the lack of stirrups. Hardly anyone could fight from the back of those animals without stirrups, though some Indians had managed it. But the Mongols had conquered most of their world with the help of that little invention.

And the smallness of the horses went with the idea that we were somewhere back in time. Bigger horses weren't common until the middle ages when Northern wild breeds were crossed with the already domesticated ones around the Mediterranean. Something similar happened in China and India with their horse breeds around the same time.

I felt ice around my heart thinking about time travel and the probability that none of us were ever going home again.

"Are we going to do this?" Doc asked.

"Hell, yes," said Hatton.

"Rescue the women? I reckon we have to try," said Dunn.

Doc looked at me. "Pete?" he asked.

I shrugged off the feeling that this would be a big mistake. "I'm in," I said.

"Then we need to plan how to do this," said Doc.

I don't know how exactly our aging small town baby doctor had become our military leader but Doc had ideas. And Hatton and I knew enough about such things, mostly from stuff we read, to see how it might work.

"Could we do it from right here?" Dunn asked, meaning our little hilltop above the camp.

We all thought about it for a minute or so. Hatton spoke first. "I know I can hit an elephant from half a mile but hitting the men at this distance…. I'm a good shot but none of us are military snipers and we don't have the kind of equipment those guys use."

Doc nodded. "And after we drive the leaders off, how do we get the women out of there from here? We have to be closer."

Dunn whistled, looking out at the caravan. "There's a passel of them spear carriers, too. What do we do about those guys?"

No one had a good answer. "We can think about it while we try to get closer," I said, heading down the hill toward the truck.

The plan evolved as we moved around the camp and packed up. One of us stayed on the little hillock to keep an eye on the slavers. That's what we had started calling them; it helped to have a name and a reason to want to kill them.

Everything packed in ten minutes or less, we piled into the big Lincoln and headed out: me, driving; Doc, shotgun; Dunn, behind me; and Hatton, behind Doc.

We all had our rifles in our laps or next to us and Hatton and I had strapped on our pistols, too. He'd swapped his .308 for the bigger 400, too, but I had stayed with my more familiar .30-06. I had more shells for it and shared the caliber with Dunn; trying to think ahead for when and if we ran low on ammunition.

Doc surprised us by unpacking and assembling a crossbow. It was one of the modern hunting rigs, not a replica of something people had used in the War of the Roses or anything like that. "If we need to shoot something quietly," he said when I looked the question at him.

"What kind of range does that thing have?" asked the general.

"I can generally hit what I'm aiming at up to about 50 yards. But I can scare the hell out of someone a lot further," Doc said. We all chuckled a little nervously.

"Uh, how much killing power does it have?" Hatton asked.

"I've taken deer with it, midwestern bucks up to 200 pounds or so. Wouldn't want to try to down an elk or a bear."

"No, no, you wouldn't," Hatton agreed thoughtfully. A man and a deer were about the same size.

"I've known people to hunt wild boar with these things," Doc added. "Seems foolish to me. Boar don't like dying without making a closer acquaintance."

The senator snorted, probably in appreciation of Doc's folksy tone.

I backed the SUV out of the little dead end we had camped in and found the true track Dunn had spotted earlier, the one that lead to a wider trail heading toward the town whose lights we had seen. It must be a fairly big place, I decided, to be lit up at night in what seemed to be a pretty primitive time. It seemed even odder now that the ruts were the right distance apart for our axles.

"Do you think we're in the bronze age?" I asked.

Hatton made a noise. "Those guys on horseback had what looked like iron-tipped spears, black metal with the edges polished."

Dunn agreed. "Yeah, but some of the guys on foot had big red axes, copper or bronze, I think they must have been."

Doc mused aloud. "Berber elephants, iron spears and bronze axes, no stirrups, North Africa probably…. Sounds like late Roman Republic. A couple hundred years BC." Before Christ. We all let that sink in for a moment.

Something occurred to me. "Isn't that the very time and place of the Punic Wars? Cartago delenda est and all that?"

"Mebbe so," said Dunn. "But what we saw makes no sense. The Romans took slaves when they conquered a city, but not just women; no one did that. And the Romans were not blonds ridin' elephants. I don't know when or where we would see blond people ridin' elephants except maybe the British Raj."

"Maybe we aren't on our Earth," Doc said.

Weirdly enough, we all felt the relief that thought brought. Being back in time carried a certain responsibility not to mess up the future—or something. But if we had traveled to another Earth, we were free of that worry and could do what we felt necessary. Without a word spoken of agreement, we all accepted the idea that we weren’t on our world.

"Still," Hatton pointed out, "a slave caravan of nothing but women makes no economic sense."

We argued that for a bit while I found the right track and got the big vehicle moving south, or the direction the compass considered south.

"Ain't they going to hear our engine?" Dunn asked as we crested a bit of rise and caught sight of the caravan again, still more than half a mile away on a parallel, something more like a real road and less of a hunting trail.

"They may, but what are they going to think it is?" Doc asked.

Hatton barked a laugh at that point.