Creative Commons – The Plainsrunner – Chapter Eight

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.

Please let me know in the comments whether you’re enjoying this. It will help me to decide whether to do it again.

rjb

Chapter Eight – Concentration

Sage was able to catch a fish most days. She had hooks and a small net in her gear. She could set the net in the river in the evening and usually pull a swimmer out in the morning. Sometimes, if she camped a little earlier, she liked to stand on the riverbank in the evening and drop a line in the water. She didn’t always catch one, but she always enjoyed those moments of peace and contemplation.

She liked the crepuscular light, and she particularly liked the hiatus between day runners and night stalkers. This was the time of the twilight animals, and none of them liked to eat Plainsrunners, so Sage could relax and watch the light change as the Sun set behind her and the first few stars rose over the horizon across the river.

She got in the practise of having her glider on the riverbank beside her. Since it was a quiet time, that meant it was a time for thinking about things. She thought about the village, but only briefly. It hurt her too much to think about all she had lost. She would quickly move on to thinking about the city. That never got her very far because she knew almost nothing about it. There were the stories told by the elders and other grownups, but they all seemed to be cautionary tales, meant to frighten the children. Other than that, there were the stories told by the traveling traders, but the children were never allowed near enough to hear very well. And what they did hear always sounded outlandish anyway, and then grew more so in the childish retellings.

The other thing she wondered about was the glider. When she first saw it, it was circling down out of a clear blue sky. How did it get up there? It had no wings. It couldn’t have flown itself up. She was pretty sure it couldn’t have been carried up there by a flier. The one she had seen hadn’t been able to get a grip on it. She couldn’t think of anything high enough that it could have fallen from. The sentinel trees were tall, but not that tall. When she first saw it, it was much higher than the tallest sentinel tree she had ever heard of. But what about those mountains out west across the plains? The ones that were so high that nothing grew on them. They might be high enough. But no. She had seen it gliding. It came almost straight down in a helix. And anyway, it came down too quickly to have come that far.

Maybe it was carried by the wind. It was light enough, and she could tell by the clouds up there that the wind sometimes blew pretty hard. So maybe it came from those mountains, got carried by the wind, then fell out of the sky over her. She pulled her line out of the water and threw it back upstream, the bobber making a splash. Then she reached down and put her left hand on the glider and said, “What are the odds of that, though?”

The glider vibrated, but didn’t have an answer for her.

“It could happen,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s too likely. Do you?”

Again, the glider was noncommital.

“You’re right. It’s all speculation.” She reset her bait again. “It’s no better than the old legends, is it?”

A fish struck hard and her mind snapped back to its present location. She set the hook well and in a minute she had a nice fat fish that she could cook up for dinner.

With all the walking she did every day, it was very tempting for her mind to wander the same pathways it took during the evening fishing. She didn’t allow it, though. She knew from being taught, and from experience, that survival depended on constant vigilance. It would only take a moment’s inattention to fall prey to a runner or a flier. So, when she was close to the trees, or any kind of cover, she had her spear in one hand and her knife in the other. When she was out in the open, she was alert to the slightest hint of movement in the sky. And of course, she remained aware of both possibilities even while concentrating on one of them. That was the problem: concentration. It was exhausting to be so alert all the time. Lapses in concentration due to exhaustion were the main reason why no one was able to survive forever on their own. In a group they could swap off keeping watch, and their chances were much better. But alone it was only a matter of time before you became too tired to keep it up.

Sage got lucky this time. She was crossing a wide, grassy span between two bends in the river. It must be five kilometers, she thought. The Sun was warm, and the breeze gentle, pushing waves and ripples through the grass. She had just cantered for a while and was walking to cool down. Her mind went back to the glider and its role in her banishment. She was pretty sure it hadn’t blown here from the mountains, and she didn’t think it had been lifted high into the sky by a tornado, either. Although it was very light and there were stories about stranger things happening in tornadoes. But the glider was stranger than that. Its surprising lightness and the strange symbol. She had a thought that startled her. What if the legends had some truth in them? What if they’re true? she thought, and she looked up.

That’s when she caught a glimpse of the day flier bearing down on her from behind. They always come from behind, she thought, as she instinctively broke left for the trees. They were too far away to do her much good, but with day fliers it was always best to get off the flat plain if possible. To get close to something that stuck up into the flier’s path. Its instinct was to avoid things like that because it wasn’t very maneuverable in close quarters. Its mass and momentum worked against sharp changes of direction, so if the trees were too close or too tall, it might not be able to avoid them.

The flier banked ponderously to follow her turn, but it was too late. She had seen it too soon. It began to flap its large wings to regain enough height to get back to a thermal. But it gave a horrible shriek and snatched at her with its talons as it did, slashing her ear. The other one this time. She stopped and stared after it, touching her ear and looking at the blood on her fingers. She gave a disgusted sigh and dug out her medicine bag.

“You’re really beginning to annoy me,” she said to the flier as it found lift and laboriously began to climb.