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 Nine – The Day Flier

Sage bandaged her ear. “Great,” she said. “Two white flags now.”

As she packed up the medicine bag and stowed it in its pannier, she said, “This can’t go on.” She was touching the artifact, which vibrated. “You’re right,” she said to it. “Sooner or later that flier is going to get me.” The glider vibrated again.

She thought about it for the rest of the day, not forgetting to keep her eyes, all four of them, actively scanning the sky for the flier, and any ground cover for day runners. She thought about it while she was setting up camp, with its barriers and its fire. She thought about it while she was fishing, trying to catch that night’s meal.

Maybe if she moved faster. If she did more cantering, even galloping, and less walking. She pictured it, then she shook her head. The flier could fly faster than she could run, even at her fastest gallop. And it could still pick her off, too. All the running would do was make her more tired when it caught her. So that wouldn’t work.

She reset her bobber upstream. Maybe if she traveled at night. Set out when the day fliers were heading back to their aeries, and travel all through the cool night. She shook her head and snorted. Yeah, right, she thought. Then I’d only have to worry about the night fliers and stalkers. Both of which can see in the dark, while I can’t. I’d be worse off than I am now. She reset her bobber and watched it spin in an eddy before heading downstream.

How about between them? she thought. In that spell between the day predators and the night predators. There were a couple of hours each morning and evening, in the twilight between darkness and light, when none of the big predators were active. That was tempting. She could travel safely, without having to worry all the time. Then she shook her head again. She’d have to set up camp twice a day and there would only be a few hours a day when she could cover the huge distance she had to go. No. It would take too long.

“But it would be safe,” she said.

No. It would just mean more time for things to go wrong.

She tossed her bobber upstream again. She was beginning to think there were no fish in this part of the river. How about the torch? she thought. I could travel at night with the torch. That would keep the predators away. And I’d be able to see.

She shook her head again and sighed. The torch couldn’t be guaranteed to last all night. When it ran out she’d be helpless. And even if it did last one night, she’d have to replenish it for the next night, and the next. That meant having to gather and prepare the materials. Pitch and tallow. Maybe if she had rendered down that young day runner when she had the chance. She sighed again. Her best bet was to travel by day, as she had been doing, and find some way to deal with the day flier.

She reeled in her line and gave up on the fishing. When she pulled it out of the water she saw that the bait was gone. Great, she thought. I wonder how long it’s been like that. She trudged back to her campsite, stowed her fishing gear, and built up the fire. Then she dug out some of her dried food for her evening meal. She automatically estimated how long it would last her, which wasn’t long enough. She ate with loud crunching and stared into the fire. She had to think about things. Her food. Her predicament. The day flier.

Food she could deal with. She’d gather more. She knew about lots of plants and roots and fungi that she could eat. And she could kill or trap some small animals. And if it got bad enough, she could eat the next day runner that tried to eat her. She shuddered and spat in the fire. Maybe if she cooked it long enough, or smoked it hard enough.

As far as her predicament was concerned, she soon realized that there was no point in thinking about it. She was banished and if she wanted to survive for any length of time, then she had to get to the city. She didn’t know anything about the city, other than the stories she’d been told of evil, doomed unbelievers. If she could believe the stories, then she’d be better off to be killed and eaten by a day flier than to set one foot in the city. She shrugged the front part of her shoulders, where her arms were separated from her front legs. All she could do was try to get to the city and deal with what she found when she got there.

As for her current problem – the day flier – she’d have to deal with that now, and the only way to do that would be to kill it. She watched the flames dance. She was standing between the fire and the river. That meant that anything trying to get at her had to get past the barrier and the fire first. She knew that nothing dangerous was going to come out of the water behind her, and she was also safe on the land side. That knowledge allowed her to sleep. Perhaps not deeply or for very long stretches, but at least she could get the sleep she needed. But it wasn’t coming tonight.

She was trying to think about how to kill the day flier, but she couldn’t think of a safe way to do it. The only way it was going to get close enough to kill was if it was after her, and the only way that was going to happen was if she was out in the open, exposed. She couldn’t lead it into a trap because she would have to go on ahead to prepare the trap, then come back and walk toward it, hoping that the flier would attack at just the right moment. She couldn’t stand out there, ready with her weapons, because it only ever attacked from behind. She finally realized that she was just going to have to carry on normally, and keep herself in a state of constant readiness. Once she admitted that, a plan began to form. As risky and terrifying as the plan was, it was enough to allow her to sleep.

Sage practised all the next morning. The timing was going to be everything. She had to plod along looking as if she wasn’t paying attention, while maintaining a vigilance as sharp as the edge of her spear. She carried it in her left hand, low and close to her body, careful to make sure that the Sun wouldn’t glint off the blade. She wanted the flier to think that she was careless and unprepared. From its perspective she would look like the perfect prey, decorated with a dirty bandage on her right ear, another on her rump, and a bright white one on her left ear.

Every few hundred meters or so, during the cooler part of the morning, before the flier had enough altitude to come after her, she practised the maneuver. It was a vigorous move that required her to commit herself completely to it, physically. That meant that before anything happened she was already scraped and bruised. Each time she did it, she knew that she was going to hurt the same scrapes and bruises again. Her body wanted to stop, or at least let up a little, but she forced it to continue, again and again, until she felt ready.

After that she plodded along, trying hard to look like easy prey, but moving her head enough that she could keep the sky behind her under constant surveillance. Finally, just before noon, she spotted it. It was almost invisible, showing her its thinnest profile. And it approached in such a way that it didn’t move against the background. It was just a thin silhouette getting gradually larger.

She had to control her instincts. Don’t turn the head to get a good look. Don’t run. Don’t dodge. Don’t twitch. Don’t give it any reason to think she was anything but easy pickings. Indistinctly, she saw it pitch up a little, its big wings catching a little more air. At the same time the four sets of talons came forward and the head came down, the beak agape.

At precisely the right instant she dropped to her belly, flattening herself as much as possible. At the same time she brought her spear up, its blade angled back at her attacker. In an instant it was wrenched from her hands. She heard a loud crack, then the flier screeched in frustration, rage and pain, and she was driven forward, her face pushed into the dirt.

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.