But that wasn’t to be. This is what happened instead:
One day, as the children were playing and their parents worked in the fields, a general commotion arose in the center of the village. Voices called out, sounding surprised and upset. Neighbors hurried between houses, trading cloudy looks.
Milovasu left the children’s games and met his father and mother at their front door.
“Let’s go see,” said his father, and the three of them joined the rest of the village at the well, where the elders were just arriving.
The focus of the uproar was a man who looked as if he should be dead; his whole left side was covered in blood. He spoke briefly to the elders, then fell over and died.
The leader of the village raised his hands and made everyone be quiet and told them some terrible news.
The dead man, he said, had been a farmer down in the valley, on the lower part of the river. Three days ago, their village had been threatened by barbarian raiders, so he and his fellow farmers had armed themselves the best they could. They fought bravely and were slaughtered. The village had been burned and the survivors dragged away to be slaves. Only this one man had escaped to warn them.
The raiders were coming their way now.
In the wake of this news, silence.
Barbarian raiders were not a new thing. You heard about them, from time to time, in the stories of traders. They were the stuff of nightmares and worry, certainly, but they had not actually shown up within the lifetime of any of these particular villagers.
Except one.
Old Vashti, the most aged among them by thirty years. She might have been a hundred. Even Old Vashti didn’t know. She looked like an old stick that had begun to melt.
But she appeared strangely bright-eyed and clearheaded now, as she stepped up to speak. She also looked troubled.
“These raiders came when I was a child,” she croaked. “They’re bad people. They peel children like grapes and let the ants have them. They like to rape people for days on end, before and after they’re dead. The only reason I survived was because I reminded the chief of his mother, except that she wore a mustache. You can’t fight them, and there’s nowhere to run. My advice is to get a knife and stab yourselves to death.”
And Old Vashti took out a knife and did just that, right there in front of everyone.
A cry went up. It went on for some time and got louder and was about to become panic when a ringing sound, not unlike a bell, cut through the noise, subdued the cries, and got their puzzled attention. Looking around, frightened and annoyed, the villagers discovered that the source of the ringing was not a bell but little Milovasu at the nearby blacksmith’s forge, banging a hammer as hard as he could on the great anvil.
Several adults, including the village leader and his own parents, moved to snatch him up and put an end to this childishness. Really, at a time like this!
“Please,” Milo said. “I offer a suggestion. Something other than stabbing ourselves.”
Silence. They were ready, all of them, to hear options.
“Since I was even smaller than I am now,” said Milo, “the goat herders have talked about building a rope bridge across the gorge, so that the goats can easily graze the pastureland on the far side. It has never been done; I don’t know why—”
“Because we’re lazy,” offered Drupada, one of the herders.
“—but I don’t see why we couldn’t do this now and escape across the gorge, gathering the bridge up behind us.”
“That,” said Drupada, “is what inspires the laziness. In order to build a rope bridge, someone—not me—has to climb down into the gorge, down a half mile of slippery rocks, and risk his neck, taking with him one end of a very long rope, and then climb a half mile of slippery rocks up the other side.”
“There’s no time,” added one of the elders. “That would take a couple of days. The gorge is difficult.”
“What,” said Milovasu, a curious look in his eye, “if you didn’t have to climb?”
The whole village stared at him.
“Go on,” said the village.
“What,” said Milovasu, “if there were someone small enough, yet strong enough, that he could be thrown across the gorge, holding one end of a rope? Once he was on the other side, other ropes could be tossed back and forth and quickly worked into a bridge.”
The village stared at him.
“We’d need an awful, awful, awful lot of rope,” said Drupada.
The village burst into action.
—
By early morning, they had strung together enough rope to make a sort of tightrope across the gorge. They had also contrived enough rope for a handrope, as it were, on either side, all strung together with twine. All that was needed was for someone to carry, one way or another, a single length of rope over to the far side and pull the rest up behind him.
It would take the raiders days to follow, if they chose to follow, and by then the villagers would be well hidden in the mountains.
They took everything they could easily carry, which amounted to very little, and made their way through the morning mist, toward the gorge. Up at the very front walked Milovasu, his bare head and shoulders draped in orange blossoms. Beside him walked his friend Sanjeev. Behind them walked the coppersmiths and their assistants from the forge, bearing great coils of rope around their shoulders.
As they neared the gorge, the village leader slipped his copper armband into place around Milo’s biceps.
“Just for today,” he said, “you are our leader.”
Milovasu tried not to be overly proud, just as he was trying not to be overly terrified.
“A practical consideration,” he said. “The armband is much wider than my arm. It will fall off and be lost.”
Sanjeev removed the armband, wrapped part of it in twine to make it thicker, and secured it once more on Milovasu’s arm.
Moments later, they stood at the lip of the gorge.
There was no ceremony. There wasn’t time. Already, if you listened hard against the booming of the water, you could hear rough voices far away.
Umang, the strongest of the coppersmiths, built as if a bull had mated with a stump, stepped forward and checked to make sure that Milovasu’s end of the rope was secured about his waist.
“Are you ready?” he asked the boy.
“I’m ready,” answered Milovasu, frightened out of his mind, breathless, using all his mental strength to keep from pissing himself. The far side of the gorge was fifty yards away. It seemed to grow farther as he looked at it, so he didn’t look at it.
Then Umang took him by the wrists, swung him around in a fast, tight circle, and hurled him with a mighty grunt across the abyss.
—
It didn’t work.
Milo rose into the air, spinning just a little, arms and legs spread like a flying squirrel. But a boy is not a flying squirrel, and before he could cross over the deep and the dark and the roaring water, he flew down and down, the rope following him like a graceful knotted tail.