Green Comet

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.

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

Sage finally leaves her home territory and sets out on the month-long trek to the city.

Chapter Seven – Going South

Sage didn’t sleep much the rest of that night. She built up her fire and extinguished the torch, then tried to occupy herself with repacking her panniers. If she was going to take a long journey, then she wanted everything to be right. An unbalanced load could lead to trouble. She might end up hurting herself by trying to compensate for it. Not to mention the danger of chafing. What took the most time was deciding what to leave. Some of the things her father had added were not useful, only sentimental. They were still hard to leave behind.

She checked and double-checked her blankets for holes and worn spots. They protected her skin from constant rubbing by the panniers. She wouldn’t be able to make very good time if she had to deal with open sores on her back. At the least it would make her go through her medicine bag too quickly.

With that thought, she took out the bag and did another inventory of its contents. Tonight’s injury had caused her to dip into it again. More of the healing paste and more bandages were gone. She could clean the bandages and use them again, but once the paste was used up, it was gone. She sighed, put everything back in the bag and stowed it in the pannier. She knew this wasn’t about her supplies, or about how well they were packed.

In the morning she would be setting out for the city. Even if she survived the month-long journey, and even if there was something for her when she got there, she knew this meant it was real. She was really leaving the village for good. She would really never see her family again. Never see her friend Tallgrass again. Breaking camp and heading out down the river was acknowledging that the banishment was real and final.

She gritted her teeth and choked back the tears that were trying to fall. She refused to cry now and she swore that she would never cry again. They might be able to banish her, but she wouldn’t let them break her. She prepared everything for her departure, then as the sky slowly lightened, she carefully honed the edges on her knife and spear.

The rising Sun was on her left. The city was to the south, about a thousand kilometers if the traders were to be believed. She was walking now, taking a breather from the canter she had started out with. She had wanted to gallop, to get away as quickly as she could, but after a few hundred meters had settled back into an easy canter. Now she was walking, her breathing normal and her eyes scanning her surroundings with constant vigilance.

Following the river did not mean walking along beside it as it meandered across the plain. That could double the distance or more, and it wasn’t easy going in amongst the trees for someone of her size. That was for small creatures, like the little fliers that flitted among the trees, or the buzzing insects that they pursued. It was for the little animals that scampered among the bushes and along the branches of the trees. But she was a plains animal. She was meant to be out running in the grass, with the open sky above her. She would spend the night in there, camping by the river, but in the day she would travel in straight lines from one bend of the river to the next.

In the daytime she had to be alert for the day runners and the day fliers, but at night she only had to worry about the night stalkers. The night fliers wouldn’t be a problem because the trees over her head would protect her. One out of four isn’t bad, she thought. And as long as she had a fire going, the night stalkers tended to stay back anyway. So, she told herself, it’s really two out of four. So the times of greatest danger were when she was crossing the open ground between river bends, and when she was passing close to the trees and the cover they provided for lurking predators. She laughed to herself. “Pretty well all day, then,” she muttered.

She was approaching the trees now. She stayed about ten meters away from them, so if a day runner wanted to ambush her, it would have to cross open ground to do so. At those times she kept her knife in her right hand and her spear in her left.

It burst out of the bushes after she made her closest approach. Its run was timed such that it would be coming at her as she was walking away. Typical, she thought as she turned to face it. They always like to come at you from behind. It was similar in appearance to a night stalker. It was low and wide, with six legs and a big head full of teeth. There were some differences in its proportions and in its colorations, but it was clear that these animals were close to each other on the tree of life.

As she turned, it practically ran right into her spear. She adjusted the aim slightly and thrust the point into its neck where it joined the shoulder. She felt it sink in deeply and she gave the shaft a few tugs back and forth to increase the damage to its innards. It gave a loud, hideous scream and, with its legs churning and its teeth gnawing the spear, it died.

Sage had a quick look around to make sure nothing was trying to take advantage of the confusion, then she carefully approached the body. She kicked it a couple of times to make sure, her knife at the ready, then she began to work at getting her spear back. Its jaws were clamped on it, but its bite was not strong in death, so she was able to get it out of the mouth without too much trouble. Then it was a matter of working it out of the body. Since the spear point was a simple blade, it didn’t have any barbs or protrusions to snag the flesh, and it came out quite easily. She only had to work against the resistance of the wound seeming to cling to the weapon. She always wondered why it did that. Why did a dead body seem to clutch at the weapon that killed it?

She got a good look at the body now, lying in a mess of its own blood. She could see that it was quite young. It was smaller than a full-grown day runner adult. Sage thought that must be why it did so poorly at attacking her. She had another good look around. A day runner this young and inexperienced should really still be with its mother, learning how to hunt. She looked carefully, but there were no other day runners around. As she crouched to wipe the blood off her spear in the grass, she said, “You poor thing. Your mother’s dead, isn’t she?”

It didn’t have anything to say. It just sprawled there with its tongue hanging out in the dirt. “Now what?” she said. “Am I supposed to eat you?” Her mouth twisted at the thought. She knew that predator meat was not very good. Her people didn’t eat it if they didn’t have to, but she had been given some during ceremonies. It was supposed to make her think about the web of life and where everything was on it. Mostly she just remembered that it tasted really bad.

She thought about it. Her natural abhorrence of waste made sure of that. She put her hand on her knife as she visualized how to butcher the carcass. Then she would have to smoke the meat and cure the hide. She’d have to make camp here for days, then she’d be left with a lot of stuff she didn’t want and couldn’t use. She lifted her hand off her knife and headed to the river to wash her spear. She’d leave the day runner for the scavengers.

Sage walked on for a few more bends of the river before making camp for the night. She didn’t want to be anywhere near the carcass and the activity it would stimulate. She also didn’t want to be reminded of her wastefulness. She was walking away from resources when she was facing a month or more where she might need them, and there was the sense bred into her that Plainsrunners should show respect for the life on the land. If she was going to take that life, then she shouldn’t just leave it lying on the ground. These thoughts turned in her mind through the dark night.