The rucksack digs painfully into the back of Phạm Hồng Thu each time that her feet advance another step. The hairpin trail zig-zags as it follows its route through the hills - well, really mountains actually. Hundreds of meters below - at least as it seems to Thu - a river - she does not know its name - rumbles, the water like her running over the rocks, but with the distinction that water does not bruise itself against hard stone, and does not grow exhausted. A fistful of pebbles, displaced by her feet, fall into the void. She hears their sound as they fell, the stones plinking on the slope, the little hail storm further and further away until nothing comes to her ears, long before they find themselves in the river and swept away by it. Thu scrambles along the narrower and narrower trail. Despite herself, she laughs harshly. This, a trail! Maybe for the rabbits, certainly not for man or even a woman! But she doesn’t have the breath to laugh, and she places one exhausted leg in front of the other, her hands clinging to the slope, as if she is an arachnid, a spider having lost four legs. She had learned well not not look below, into the vertigo-inducing void.
Fragments of voices come to her earths, voices hard and irritated. A complaint, she thinks, when she heard “fucking whore” shouted hoarsely behind her.
“Come catch me!” She means it to sound strong, a defiant stand, but to her ears it sounds weak, the voice of a terrified, exhausted, and alone little girl.
“You can play at hide-and-seek as much as you want, but the wolves always win!”
This time she chose to conserve her breath. Unshaken she fled, in hauling herself over a huge rock on this imaginary trail. If they are going to catch me, at least I will have done my own combat! A glance, to look at the pursueers. A man is hardly one hundred meters away, and the sweat on her skin becomes cold to see him gaining on her. Two days already, since she had poisoned the commander, and the fatigue wears away at her body. She has already eaten everything in her sack, but even still it feels heavy, like a stone, and her stomach growls loudly, hunger eating her flesh like a real wolf. At least the little streams had slaked her thirst, but it was already a long time since she had seen whatever. Whatever, even if she drank a lake, her throat would still be burning regardless. Another hail of stones, to be eaten by the river below. Her knee hits a jutting rock, and a scream escapes her lips, pained and frail.
The sounds behind her become louder and louder, approaching closer and closer. Even the sound of their breath resonates in the springtime air, on this day where the wind rests.
“Stop girl! Don’t make this harder!”
“I would rather die!”
“Good, there’s a cliff here, fly into the gulf or die there! Are you blind and not just stupid, huh?” The men laugh.
“Well, you have rifles, shoot if my life means nothing to you!”
“The captain said to not kill you, nothing about if you kill yourself!”
Once again Thu takes a glance behind her. Perhaps ten or so meters now, her heart frozen at seeing her weak barrier disappear. Frozen - she remember when she had felt ice at Hanoi, so cold, and how her hands had shaken when she touched it. Feel like that, feel like ice, in her final act! Several seconds more, and she would be taken, alive. She had only one thing to do otherwise. She gathered the images of father, of mother, they who she had lost so long ago, and prepared herself in watching below the river rumble, bent her knees, and over the edge into th-
Two hands seized her left leg, and she slammed against the slope, her own hands a shield against the rock, but her breath knocked out of her anyway. Her face hit a rock, and she felt stunned, blood cooling from a gash on her forehead. A grip of iron gripped left leg, and she is dragged towards the ledge, like a puppet. “Or’ she thought, stunned, “a cadaver”.
“Hey girl, did you hear what we told you? The wolves win.” A hard kick to her side, and Thu feels something break with an awful thud. A rib? A ferocious pain torments her body. The man laughs, towering above her thin body lying on the hard and rocky ground.
Heh, good work Lộc, you’ve truly caught her like you had bet us! The dough will be yours, when we return. Don’t spend too much on alcohol like before, haha!”
A face appears above her. Hair long, thick, and blond, framing a white face with fully blue eyes, like the sky, and brown eyebrows above. Neither soft nor harsh, rather that they didn’t care about her. “Child”, he said, “you you know how to run, huh!’ his breath came quick and actively, a testament to the chase.
She spits at his face. He slaps her, hard. “My little girl”, he said laughing. “You should be content that we saved you! It’s not our problem if you fall and die. You are a little slip of a woman, but its still necessary to bring you back with us, and if I didn’t have such a soft heart I would push you into the river and we’d tell the commander that you succeeded in killing yourself.”
He sighs and glances behind him. “Well, we’re almost all here! What a shame to come so far and to return immediately!”
“You know”, interjected the man who had caught Thu, “It would be rather good for morale, if maybe you could leave us with the charming girl for a little bit of down=time? She isn’t bad looking, other than the blood on her head, but women don’t have need of that in any case!”
“You’ll have your amusement at your will, maybe, later. But not here”, declares the lieutenant as he stood up, “there are bandits in these hills, who can say if they will arr-”
A boom. She watches the man cease to speak, to hold himself upright immobile for an instant. A small drop of blood streams from his mouth, and then he fells into the void. The screams of men, the booms of rifles, and the muffled but audible splash when the dead body hits the distant water, these are the last sounds that she hears when she passes out, a smile on her bloody face.
***
When she wakes up, she finds herself in a bed. A small movement, and reeds crackle under her body, a white cover wrinkling. Ow ! Every bone hurtt. She moves her arm more carefully, delighted that pain does not flare up, and wiped away the sleep-sand of her eyes, rubs them with pleasure. brilliant sunlight streams into the chamber, on rows of beds.
A woman with a kind face sees that Thu starts to move, and she rushes over to her side.
“No no my young and brave girl, don’t move.” Her voice is sweet and she holds the haind of Thu and places it once more on the bed against her body. “Go back to sleep. Your body has need of rest, if it is going to become strong and healthy again.”
“Where am I?”
“You are with the army of the people, the red army of Vietnam, which fights for liberty, for a brighter future, for a more just and equal society, and for the noble eightfold path of the Buddha. Don’t worry. You are safe here.”
Thu closed her eyes, and once more the darkness returns.
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