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
