Creative Commons – The Plainsrunner – Chapter Six

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 Six – Camping Out

After she set up camp, Sage ended up staying there longer than she should have. She just couldn’t think of what else to do. She knew it couldn’t last, of course. Her food would run out and she would have to find a way of getting more. She might be able to forage enough to get the plants she needed, but she would have to range pretty far to do it. She could also eat grass and leaves in a pinch. There was still enough of her grazing ancestors in her to digest a bit of that, but too much would end up blocking her system. And with her small, vestigial snout holding fewer and smaller teeth, she would have trouble eating that much anyway. She knew all that. She thought about it every long, empty day. Still, she stayed. She didn’t know what else to do.

When her food started running low she found herself thinking more about home. She would daydream about her mother’s home-cooking. The hot, satisfying soups. The sweet, chewy cakes. Her mouth would water over the memories that she could almost smell and taste. Then she would look at the dry, flavorless food that she was eating every day, and she would sink even further. That’s when she started going back to the village at night.

At first she hung back, just standing in the dark and looking. There were just a few lights inside the wall. She could see bits of the huts here and there in the soft glow in the compound. She could picture it all in her mind. The central common. The big village hut, where people met and the elders made their decisions, surrounded by the smaller huts where people lived and slept. She could see her hut. She corrected herself, stifling a sob. Her parents’ hut. It wasn’t hers any more. The straw in that corner was no longer her bed. She would never stand around the table again, regaling them with her adventures. She covered her face with her hands and cried harder than she ever had before. All the childhood drama and tragedy, so big and important at the time, was washed away by this overwhelming realization. Everything she loved, all the places, the things and the people, were lost to her forever.

Heedless of everything, with no thought for night fliers or night stalkers, she stumbled back to her camp in the dark. It would have been a good time for a predator to come for her because she wouldn’t have had the spirit to fight for her life.

In the morning she was horrified. She shuddered at the thought of how vulnerable she had allowed herself to be, and she swore that it would never happen again. She checked her defenses. She checked her weapons. There was her knife with the twenty centimeter blade of fine steel, acquired by her father from the hard, nomadic traders on one of their yearly visits. And there was the spear, with a thirty centimeter blade. She examined them thoroughly for wear and damage and sharpened them both to a lethal edge. As she worked, she talked to herself. She told herself to stop being a fool. She told herself that she wouldn’t give the elders the satisfaction of letting herself get killed right here on their doorstep. She told herself that the village wouldn’t be telling those stories about her. “It’s time to go,” she said. “Time to move on.” The glider vibrated on the ground where it sat with the rest of her gear, ready to be packed.

Sage was by the village wall in the dark of night. It was where she and Tallgrass used to meet when they wanted to sneak off on one of their adventures. She picked up small pebbles and tossed them over the wall and onto the roof of the hut where Tallgrass lived. She was pretty sure she was hitting it over the corner where he slept. She’d done it often enough before.

Finally she heard a knock on the wall and she headed toward the gate. It opened a crack and before she could speak, Tallgrass handed out a sack of food. He looked in her eyes, his face filled with friendship, regret and fear. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I knew you would come, so I saved this food for you. But you have to go.” There were tears in his eyes.

“Wait,” she whispered. “What’s wrong? I want to talk.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I have to go.” He looked really frightened. “They said anyone who helps you will be banished too.”

Sage pulled back and looked around. Her ears swiveled, listening as hard as they ever had for dangers in the night. She said, “I’d better go,” and turned her head to leave.

“Wait,” said Tallgrass. “Your father wanted me to tell you something.”

“My father?” Sage came back.

“Yes. In case I ever spoke to you, he said.”

“My father.” Her throat was tight.

“Yes. He said to tell you to go to the city.”

“The city?”

“Yes. He says follow the river and you should get there in about a month.”

“But the city is …”

“Bad. I know. But he says you’ll have a chance there. He says no one can survive on their own on the plains.”

Sage wanted to protest that she was surviving, but she knew in her heart that it couldn’t last. She saw her friend looking at her bandaged ear and knew that was true. She said, “You’d better get back before someone sees you.”

He glanced behind him. “Okay,” he said. “Good luck, Sage.”

“Thank you.” She hefted the bag of food, her mind spinning with things she wanted to say. Finally, with her voice trembling, she said, “I love you, Tallgrass.”

He said, “I love you too, Sage.”

She turned and walked into the darkness, heading for her campsite on the river. She heard the gate close softly behind her, and the wooden bar slide into place to lock it. It was as if it had slid like a spear between her ribs and into her heart.

“The city,” she said to the darkness. “Father wants me to go to the city.” It was as if he said he wanted her to open the gate and let the night stalkers into the village. The city was a mysterious place to her. If anyone ever spoke of it, they did so with fear and contempt. Evil things happened in the city and evil people lived there. They forgot about the old ways and the old laws, and they did things that were much worse than what she had done, and would get them punished with far worse than banishment. It would never have occurred to her to go there, even to survive.

As preoccupied as she was, she only heard the rustling grass at the last second. She reacted instinctively, wheeling her haunches around out of the way. She felt her skin tear as the night stalker’s claws raked it, but it couldn’t hang on. She realized her knife was in her hand, and the sack of food in the other. In the darkness she could tell where the predator was mostly with her ears and her nose. At best she could see only hints of shape and motion.

The night stalker had better night vision than she did, and she knew that it would be able to use that to its advantage. Her only chance was to keep it from getting behind her, to hold it off and hope it got impatient enough to make a mistake. She threw the bag of food at it and heard it hiss and growl as it tore at it. There wouldn’t be anything in there to interest it for long. The bag would have mostly dried foods for the trail, and not much of it meat. She didn’t want to buy it off, only to distract it long enough for her to draw her spear.

Now she was more dangerous. Now she at least had a chance, however slim. As the night stalker sensed this, it changed from attack mode to stalking mode. It made feinting advances, repelled by her thrusting spear as she vaguely sensed them. It was a standoff for now, but she knew it was only a matter of time before it wore her down. If she could see, it would be a different matter, but she couldn’t, and that disadvantage would kill her.

There was a flickering in the darkness, then the area lit up as a torch spun down and hit the ground five meters to her right. The night stalker shied away from it as she moved toward it. She sheathed her knife and picked up the torch, all the while staring at the snarling animal.

It was edging sideways, its six legs bent in a crouch. It was built low to the ground, with a wide, flat body. She could see its scales glimmering dully in the torchlight. What most drew her eye was its face. It had a huge head with a gaping mouth full of teeth. All four of its eyes glittered on the front of its face. Predator eyes.

It was obviously afraid of the fire. Its eyes kept shifting between the torch and her face. It couldn’t get any closer, but it couldn’t leave either. It had felt her skin tear under its claws and it was full of the lust for her blood. It couldn’t come any closer, but it couldn’t go away, so it sidled around her, saliva dripping from its snarling mouth.

Sage had the torch in her right hand and her spear in her left, and she kept them both pointed at the stalker as she turned. Her heart and breathing slowed now that the odds were evened up. Before she had been almost certain to die soon, and now she had a chance. With time to think, though, she realized that this couldn’t go on forever. She didn’t think the torch would last until the morning light, and she didn’t know if she could concentrate for that long anyway. All it would take was one lapse and the animal would be on her.

“We’ll have to change things up then, won’t we?” she said. The stalker cocked its head curiously at the sound of her voice.

She thrust the torch at its face, and when it backed up, she moved forward and jabbed at it with the spear. It batted the spear away and she lunged with the torch, making it scramble backwards. She’d timed it so she had it between her and the village wall, and now she kept moving at it. The spear, then the torch, then the spear, then the torch again. Talking the whole time. Telling it she was going to kill it. Telling it exactly how it was going to die.

It glanced over its shoulder at the wall, saw how close it was and let fear take over. Hunger and blood lust lost out to self-preservation. With a final frustrated hiss, it turned and ran off into the night, its six legs a scuttling blur.

She watched it go, both relieved and disappointed. The torch and spear drooped toward the ground and she straightened up out of her combat stance. Her vision lost its narrow focus, and she began to notice the small night sounds again. She looked up at the village wall and saw a silhouette against the faint glow of the compound. She couldn’t see, but she knew it was Tallgrass. She raised the torch in thanks. He raised his hand. They looked at each other for a long time, then he dropped out of sight. She stared at the empty space, then she stuck the spear in its sheath and gathered up as much of the sack of food as she could find. Clutching the torn sack in her left hand and the torch in her right, she headed for the river, stopping to scuff out some smoldering grass on the way.