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.

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.

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.

Today’s post will be chapter two.

The Plainsrunner – Chapter Two – Exile

They allowed Sage to stay for one last night, to prepare for her exile, and to say good-bye. Through the rest of the day and into the evening she went around to all of her friends, which was all of the young people in the village, and tried to talk to them. She couldn’t believe what was happening at first. It just didn’t seem real. But by the time the Sun was going down and she had talked to everyone who would talk to her, the reality was sinking in.

Some of her friends wouldn’t talk to her. Or couldn’t. Some of them were afraid. Banishment was rare, but they’d all heard the stories. Rare as it was, there were still people alive in the village who could remember the last one. And they all grew up with the fireside tales of the villains who had been exiled in the past. Stories of the crying and pleading in the darkness outside the compound walls. And of the silence that followed, which was worse than the crying. And sometimes of the gnawed bones found on the plain in the following days.

The stories were meant to frighten the children into compliance, and mostly they did. But to Sage they just seemed like stories. She could never imagine that anything she did could cause the village to do that to her. She wasn’t bad. She didn’t do anything to endanger the village. Never harmed the crops. Never left the gate open for the night stalkers to creep in. And really, the children who followed her on her adventures were never in any real danger. Not really. The day runners and fliers would never attack a group like that. She really hadn’t done anything wrong, had she?

You wouldn’t know that by the way she was treated on this day. Doors were slammed in her face. Parents of some of the children cursed her. Some of the children themselves turned their backs on her. Even when she wasn’t rebuffed, she was often treated coolly. It was almost as if she were already gone from their lives. As if she were already a dead person and they had begun to think of her in the past tense. Even with all that, though, the worst might have been the children who wanted her to stay. The ones who were just as bewildered and frightened as she was. Or the parents of some of her friends, who would grieve for her almost as much as they would have for their own children.

As bad as all that was, it was worse at home. Her mother was acting as if she weren’t there. She had given her up for dead and wasn’t going to expend any more feelings on her. Sage was hurt but not surprised. They’d never been close, and she was used to her mother being cool and distant. She wished it could be different now, in this extreme situation, but she dimly understood how it could make her withdraw even more. Her father, on the other hand, was very demonstrative. Almost embarrassingly so. He hovered, touching her, staring at her with tears glistening in his eyes. He kept trying to speak, and kept stumbling to a halt. He was roving around the hut, finding things to put in her panniers. More food. More clothing and blankets. Useless knick-knacks and childhood toys. She didn’t try to stop him. She thought she understood.

She was their only child. Her mother was shutting her out to minimize the pain of her loss. Her father seemed as if he was trying to fit a lifetime into one night. It was too much for Sage and she finally escaped into sleep some time after midnight.

In the morning, before the Sun came up, Sage was at the gate with her father. The elders were there to see her off, and no one else. She had a last look around the empty compound, and met the eyes of her best friend, Tallgrass, peeking out of the doorway of his hut. That’s when it really hit her, that this was real and she’d never see her friends again, or the village, or her father. She tried to choke it back, to not give the elders the satisfaction, but her face was streaming with tears as she hugged her father’s neck, feeling his tears mingling with hers. Then they opened the gate and slammed it shut behind her when she stepped out into the twilight.

She turned from the gate and stood looking out across the broad plain. To her left, running past the village and away, was the river. She could see its meandering path by the trees that lined it. In the distance to the right was the Scarp, seen from behind at an angle. She could see the grassy slope that climbed its back, its rocky side that got gradually higher, and the edge of its sheer face. To the right of the Scarp was the vast shortgrass prairie that stretched on until it fell over the horizon. She knew, because she’d been told, that it went on for many weeks’ travel, broken only by the sky-sweeping sentinel trees. Eventually it gave way to tallgrass prairie as the land rumpled up and broke into mountains. They said that the mountains reached so high into the sky that nothing would grow on them. Not even the toughest grass. She found that hard to believe, and did so only because her best friend Tallgrass said it was so. His grandmother came from the tallgrass prairie before she joined the village.

When she thought of Tallgrass, her stomach seized in a painful cramp. Banishment from the village meant that she would never see him again. Somehow that was different from not seeing her mother and father, though she didn’t know why. She would never see them again, either. Nor anyone else. Now the pain lanced through her chest and into her throat. Her breath started coming in spasms and she trotted away from the gate so no one would hear her crying.

She didn’t have a destination. That was another shocking revelation. She walked automatically, her ears swiveling of their own accord and her prey eyes seeing everything, while her mind struggled. Where was she going? What was she going to do? She hadn’t thought past this point. Hadn’t imagined that there was anything after banishment. But now here she was, out here alone with no idea what she was supposed to do next.

What did exiles do? The stories didn’t say. They told the banishment stories to frighten children into compliance, but they never said what the people did after they were kicked out. Other than to imply their deaths, no one ever talked about them after they were gone. They weren’t only banished from the village, they were banished from memory. They obviously didn’t hang around, or if they did, they didn’t live long. The stories of finding gnawed bones of exiles attested to that. But she suspected that part was blown out of proportion, once again to frighten the children. She suspected that they mostly disappeared without a trace.

Being snatched and taken back to their aeries by fliers could account for that. At close to a hundred kilos, a full-grown adult might be getting a little big for that, but it was not impossible, and it would explain some of the disappearances. It was likely that most of the exiles perished in some way. A solitary existence out here, without the support and cooperation of one’s clan or village, would be difficult if not impossible.

Once again Sage’s heart clenched. Her head drooped, muzzle close to the ground, while she plodded on unconsciously. She stared at the grass that passed under her hooves, her mind blank against the growing despair. How had this happened to her? How could they do this to her? What had she done that was so bad?

Her head came up so sharply that some of the goods in her panniers rattled. The artifact. Nothing else she’d done was worthy of this punishment. She had been out running alone in the morning many times before, and they hadn’t done this. All of her supposed misbehavior was far too petty to justify banishment. The only thing different this time was the artifact that she brought back. It must have made them more angry than anything else before. Or frightened. It must have frightened them. It must be a danger to the village for them to banish her from it.

She knew where she was going now. She headed for where she stashed it when they screamed at her to throw the artifact away.

rjb