Creative Commons – The Plainsrunner – Chapter Three

Announcement

I have decided to release The Plainsrunner under a Creative Commons license – Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA). To celebrate that, I am going to publish it here serially, one chapter at a time.

rjb

Chapter Three – The Artifact

It was down by the river, right where she put it. They told her to throw it away, but she could never do that. Instead, she put it under some bushes and carefully memorized the location.

She took off her panniers and set them carefully by the tree she used to mark the spot. Then, after taking a slow look around for danger, she crouched down and pushed the bush aside. She was surprised by how relieved she was to find it still there, and by how light it was when she pulled it out. It looked like metal, and all the metal she had handled before was much heavier.

She hunkered down by her gear to examine it, turning it over easily in her hands. She ran her hand over the smooth curves on its bottom and edges, and imagined it slipping smoothly through the air. She hefted it for weight and balance and thought she could feel a slight bias to the bottom and one side. That probably explained the constant banking turn it was in on the way down.

Remembering how it kicked up dirt when it struck the ground, she closely examined the bottom for scratches. There were none. It was perfectly smooth to the eye, and to her sensitive fingers. She tried marking it with her thumbnail, then with one of her front hooves. When those did nothing she pulled the knife out of its sheath on her right front leg and gave that a try. Nothing left the least mark. She pulled the knife back and checked its edge, in case she’d dulled it trying, but it was fine.

Sheathing her knife, she turned the thing over. As she did she remembered that she was going to name it so she didn’t have to keep calling it “artifact” and “thing.” She was looking at the flat top of it as she thought, at the markings there. She ran her fingers over them and could feel that they were engraved into the surface. Not deeply, but just enough to feel. And they were colored white, which stood out well against the metallic gray. She wondered what could possibly have cut this hard stuff. She took her knife out again and found that it couldn’t mark the white part either.

A small noise had her on her feet before she had time to think about it. She had her knife out in front of her as her eyes and ears scoured her surroundings. She looked up and saw a little tree dweller looking down at her, its scales catching what morning sunlight got through the leaves. It scolded her as if it were her fault that it dropped a nut, then went back to work.

Sage laughed at herself for being so jumpy, then reprimanded herself for being negligent. She’d been so engrossed in the study of the glider – that’s it, she thought, the glider – that she lost track of her surroundings. She may have been banished by her village, but she didn’t want to justify their judgement by letting herself get killed in the morning of her first day of exile.

She set her panniers up as a makeshift barrier and then backed up against the tree. Then, with her round ears swiveling and her head popping up often, she got back to examining the engraving on the glider. It was simple, just three circles, with the two small ones partially embedded in the big one. She looked at the angle between the two small circles and thought it was a little more than a right-angle. She shook her head. It didn’t mean anything to her. Well, maybe it sort of looked like a simple face, with the two small circles representing her people’s round ears. She snorted. Simple is right. Even a child wouldn’t draw a face that simply.

She sighed and settled back, scanning the riparian habitat around her. Trees were growing right to the river’s edge, their branches reaching out over the water. Between their trunks were thick bushes, which thinned out with distance from the riverbank. The trees also got sparser and scrawnier with distance, until they gave way completely to grass about fifteen meters out. It was nice, she thought, and decided that she might as well make camp here. It had water and good shelter. And it was close to home.

Sage didn’t get much sleep that night. It was the first night she’d ever spent alone outside the compound, and she was too scared to sleep much. Not that sleeping outside was unheard of. It happened all the time. People often had to spend nights in the open when traveling between villages. Or on hunting expeditions, or forays to gather other resources. Small parties might have to be out for many days at a time, so they had to know how to keep themselves safe.

She had the equipment for it. The village hadn’t thrown her out with nothing. She erected the perimeter barrier that would deter intrusions into her camp. It wouldn’t keep everything out, but it would slow down anything trying to get to her long enough for her to react. If she weren’t alone then they could have one person on watch while the others slept. If a night stalker tried to get at them, the barrier would slow it down, alerting the watcher, who could kill it or at least hold it off until the others woke up. Sage didn’t have that luxury, so she stood watch all night and only nodded off occasionally. She spent the night with her knife in her hand and her spear within reach. She kept a fire going and saw many nocturnal eyes glowing at her from outside her corral. She wasn’t sure any of them belonged to a night stalker, but she wasn’t sure they didn’t either.

In the darkest part of the night, when dawn seemed impossibly far away, she put her free hand on the glider. It still fascinated her, but right now it filled her with regret. If she hadn’t seen it, and especially if she hadn’t taken it home with her, she wouldn’t be out here alone in the dark now. She would be home with her family, safe in her hut, sleeping without fear. At that moment she resented the glider. She blamed it for her trouble. It was the glider’s fault that she was out here, awake in the middle of the night with a knife in her hand.

She snorted softly. She knew better than that. She was out here because of what she did, and nothing else. They had all tried to warn her. Her parents, the elders and others had tried to tell her that her disregard for the rules would get her in trouble. And it had. Many times she had been reprimanded and punished for her actions, and each time it worked for a while. It never took, though. To her the rules seemed arbitrary and pointless, and she couldn’t follow them just because they told her to. It could have gone on like that forever, with her breaking the rules and them punishing her for it, if only she hadn’t brought the glider home. Their fear of it frightened her, and almost made her fear it. But it didn’t. It only made her more curious. She looked at her hand resting on the engraved symbol on its back.

“What are you?” she asked, her voice nearly a whisper.

It vibrated gently and briefly under her hand, and she sprang to her feet and backed away, her knife in front of her. She stood like that for a full minute while her heart and her breathing slowed toward normal. Her legs were quivering, ready to take her away from here, and her hooves did a little dance of their own volition. After the minute, when nothing happened and the glider just sat on the ground looking like an inert piece of metal, she moved back toward her resting spot. With a last careful scan of her surroundings, her eyes and ears practically burning with intensity, she hunkered back down beside the glider.

Carefully she put her hand on it again, forcing it past the doubt and fear. It was still, just like before. She took a deep breath, trying to calm the tremors inside her, and she spoke again. “What was that?” she said.

It vibrated again, but she forced her hand to stay put. There was a slight delay between speech and vibrations, so she didn’t think it could be sympathetic resonance. Further experimentation showed that there was a small, predictable pause after she spoke. More experimentation showed that it reacted only to speech, and not to any other noises she made.

Sage, exhausted but far from sleep, stared at her glider. She almost hated it for getting her into this trouble. She almost wished she had never seen it. Almost. But she could feel the little smile stretching her face. She delighted in the frisson of mystery and excitement that infused her body and mind. She patted her glider affectionately. “What in the world are you?” she asked it.

It vibrated under her hand.