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 Five – Now What

When she reached down to pick up the blanket, Sage noticed a few drops of blood falling on it. My ear, she thought, recalling the day flier’s talon striking her. She didn’t remember any pain then, and didn’t feel any now. Must not be too bad, she thought as she rummaged in one of the panniers for first aid supplies. As she was pulling out the bag she remembered that it was her mother who insisted on putting it in there. She tried to reconcile that with her mother’s cool aloofness before she left. She hadn’t even come to the gate to say good-bye. Sage shook her head thinking she would never understand motherhood.

The medicine bag had a small mirror in it. Just the thing if you’re attempting first aid on yourself. She held it up and examined her ear. It was worse than she thought. The top of her right ear was split by a three centimeter tear. The ear was covered in blood and it had run all down that side of her head and neck. The good news was that the bleeding had slowed down already. The wound was just oozing a trickle now.

She got out her water bag and used it to rinse her ear. She could clean up the rest later. For now she just needed to get a good look at the tear so she could see what needed doing. She propped the mirror on the pannier and pressed the wound together, then she bound it so it would stay. It was more difficult than it had to be because her hands were shaking. Come on, she told herself. It’s barely a scratch. Just a bit of blood. Nothing to get all shaky about. You’ve had worse playing in the compound with the other kids.

She finally got it wrapped up and used the mirror to admire her work. She thought she looked ridiculous with a great white flag for an ear, and she was laughing at herself as she stowed her gear and put on the blanket and panniers. “Okay,” she said as she started down the hill, “fliers should have no trouble spotting me now.” When repacking the pannier, she had taken care to fix the rattle. At least, she thought, they might have more trouble hearing me.

She found the glider right where she thought it would be. She picked it up and found that it had no marks on it. Even the flier’s talons hadn’t managed to put a scratch on its smooth surface. There was no material this light that could do that. Maybe a glazed ceramic. Or glass. Like her mirror, or those few bottles and jars the village had traded for. But if the glider was made out of that stuff, then it would be far heavier than it was. As she was lashing it on she said, “So, who made you?”

She looked past the jumbled blocks and up the high cliff. She could see where she’d thrown the glider from, and she had a small pang when she thought about how close she was to following it. If the flier had hit her more squarely she would have been knocked over the edge. Then the flier would have plucked her out of the air and taken her back to its aerie. If she hadn’t died by then, she would have as it was tearing her apart to eat. She looked down at her hands and saw that they were shaking badly. Worse than before. Her breath was shallow, she could feel her heart pounding, and her legs felt weak and trembly.

She ran her eyes along the cliff face and soon picked up where the flier’s aerie must be. There was a lot of guano on the sheer wall below it, and she thought she saw some movement. Looking more closely she could see that the nest was occupied by at least one, and possibly two young fliers. They were waiting for the adult to bring them back some food. Sage shivered at the thought that it could have been her.

She found herself looking at the cliff above and below the nest, and she realized that she was trying to see if she could get at it. She was thinking about whether she could destroy it and kill these young fliers before they could grow up into big fliers. She shook her head and turned away. “You can’t do that,” she said. Glancing back she thought, it’s too dangerous anyway.

Now she didn’t know what to do. Should she go back up the Scarp and throw the glider again? She couldn’t think why. Maybe she should go for a run out on the plain. That used to be one of her favorite things. Running until she was panting in sweet exhaustion, and then trotting back to the village, to friends, family and food.

Her stomach jumped and her breath caught. Again it hit her: this was real. She would never be going back to the village again. This wasn’t just an adventure for a day or two. This was a life sentence. She wasn’t going to see her friends again. Or her family. And the only food she would have was what she had brought, and when that was gone, what she could find.

She turned her head toward the river, hitched her panniers for better balance, and started walking. It was as good a place as any to spend the night. She told herself not to think beyond that for now. Walking slowly toward her campsite on the river, she said, “What’s the point of thinking about it? What would be the point of that?”

If the glider vibrated, she didn’t feel it through the pannier.

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 Four – The Scarp

In the morning Sage broke camp and headed for the Scarp. She thought about keeping the campsite. It was a good spot. It had shelter in the trees and easy access to flowing water. It was easy to defend and there were plenty of resources close to hand. It would be convenient to set up a permanent camp and work from there. And, she admitted to herself, it was close to the village. That’s why she broke camp finally. She knew in her logical mind, even though her emotional mind still didn’t see it, that she was never going back. Even though she couldn’t let go yet, she knew that she would have to eventually. So she packed up her camp as a gesture to herself.

It was a stern gesture and she had a stern look on her face when she set out. Her head was up proudly and her eyes looked ahead with sharp anticipation. Her front eyes, anyway. Her side eyes ceaselessly scanned about her, behind her and above, sensitive to the smallest sign of danger. They were her subconscious safety system, for the prey half of her, while her forward looking eyes served the seeking part. The predator side of her. That side was looking stern, but also eager. All her life she’d been looking for adventure and now, as bad as it was, this would certainly be an adventure. So her stern eyes also gleamed with anticipation.

It took an hour at an easy canter to get to the base of the Scarp, and another hour of climbing to get to the top. As she climbed she listened for the rattle in her right pannier. It was only occasional now, but during the canter it was persistent. She thought she knew what it was and she had a pretty good idea what it would take to fix it. She certainly wasn’t going to put up with this forever and she was planning to repack it when she stopped at the top.

She snapped out of her musing and stood still halfway up. She thought she’d caught something in her peripheral vision and she stopped to make a complete scan. She scoured the grass all around her for hundreds of meters and saw nothing. No telltale shape of a day runner’s head peering through the grass. Nothing moving where it shouldn’t be moving, and nothing still where it shouldn’t be still. But that was just precautionary. It was something she did regularly anyway. The real purpose of this scan was to search the sky. She hadn’t been able to identify whatever it was that caught her attention, but she knew it had been in the sky.

She did the usual: pick a spot and take it in, then pick another spot, and so on. It didn’t take long before she found it. Less than a thousand meters up, circling in a thermal, was a day flier, its four meter wings spread to catch the updraft. She felt a chill in the scales over her ribs, where its talons would grip her as it carried her away.

It must have just started its ascent, catching the first thermals of the day. That was just about right, she thought. With the time she’d spent packing and then traveling, the eastward facing Scarp should be heating up nicely by now. The day flier would have spread its wings in its aerie to absorb the Sun’s heat, then leapt into the rising air when the time was right. It was still close enough that she could make out some details on it. The gleam of its scales as it banked and wheeled in the sunlight. The heavy talons hanging below it. The big hooked beak for ripping the flesh from its prey.

Sage kept an eye on it as she returned to her climb. She was wary but not too worried. Even though it had enough height to swoop on her now, she didn’t think it would. Day fliers were creatures of habit and they liked to ride a thermal as high as it would take them before beginning to hunt. If it came after her now, and missed, it would have to go back to the cliff and start over. It might even have to walk if it lost lift and had to land. They couldn’t launch themselves into the air from the ground. They needed to be able to soar to carry their weight. So it would have had to walk, and they hated to walk. They were awkward and ungainly on the ground, and vulnerable. On the ground they could be attacked by day runners, or even a Plainsrunner with a spear.

The slope continued up all the way to the edge. As Sage thought about it, she imagined the earth tearing loose and heaving upward. She thought that the land might have been flat here, unbroken like the rest of the prairie, and then this piece thrust up at an angle for some reason. She couldn’t imagine the reason. Why would the land, which was to her the very essence of permanence, break like this?

She was thinking about that when she reached the edge. She had stayed near the left side on the way up and now she was standing on the highest part of the Scarp. In addition to the long, gradual slope behind her, the surface descended gently to her right. Stretching her neck out over the edge, she could see tumbled rock piled at the bottom of the cliff, almost three hundred meters down. She knew those blocks of broken cliff were bigger than the huts in her village, but they looked small from up here.

She wasn’t afraid of falling since most of her weight was planted on four sturdy hooves well behind, but it was still a thrill. Her healthy imagination had no trouble seeing the edge crumble and those broken rocks far below rushing toward her. She snorted and shook her head, then backed away.

As she removed her panniers and blanket, the skin on her face and neck remembered the warm wind they’d felt coming up the cliff face. She knew this was the same wind that blew the day fliers high up into the sky, and she thought about the one she’d seen earlier. She took the time for a thorough scan, but saw nothing on the ground or in the air.

The glider was lashed to her right pannier. She untied it and lifted it free, still a little surprised at its heft. She trotted back a ways, then turned and galloped for the edge. When she got close she planted her feet and threw the glider as hard as she could out over the prairie far below. It caught the air and its front end pitched up. Then the thermal caught it and pushed it upward. She could see when it fell off the rising air not far above her. It completed one and a half turns before skidding on the grass not twenty meters away. She trotted over to retrieve it.

When she threw it again she gave it a downward trajectory. This time when it pitched up it only made it level out. It immediately went into its turn, which brought it back toward the cliff, but it veered away before striking it. In her mind’s eye Sage pictured how the updraft, or any wind, would push on things. She remembered the feeling of wind in her face as she ran across the plain. She recalled seeing the waves in the grass after someone ran by. Something clicked as she realized that the glider was pushing air before it and that’s what turned it away from the cliff. The air pushed on it, but it also pushed on the air.

With her mind joyously reveling in its discovery, she watched the glider rise slowly on the thermal, all the while circling downward. Then it fell off the rising air and began a slow, measured descent. It wasn’t like a day flier that could sense where the updrafts were and stay on them.

Something caught her eye. Some vague change in the light. And her ears picked up the faintest rushing sound. She didn’t turn to look, and that saved her life. Instead, she hunkered down and backed up as quickly as she could. The day flier screamed as it passed over her, but all its grasping talons caught was one of her ears, which it tore. She rushed back to the edge, while rapidly scanning for a second flier. It was rare, but sometimes they hunted in pairs.

She was in time to see the flier swoop heavily and grab her glider. It dropped it quickly and Sage thought it must be too slippery to hold. Its slight weight would also be disappointing to a ravenous raptor. The flier let loose its horrible, grating scream again and wheeled away to find another thermal.

Sage’s eyes went back to the glider, which was again circling serenely toward the ground. She watched it all the way down, marked its location, and went to get her blanket and panniers.

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.