The Almanac

by E L Stricker

  “If anyone would have, you would,” he said and tucked the book carefully inside his own jacket.

  The people had lost interest and started to disperse. Grenya and Aunt Ada joined them, and they went together back toward home.

  Samuel soon turned down the path to his hut. Illya stopped and watched him walk away until Samuel looked back over his shoulder.

  “Tomorrow,” he mouthed and patted the outline of the book under his jacket.

  Suddenly, Illya didn't mind quite as much that he was going home to a tiny hut empty of food. His hollow stomach had been like a dark cloud over him, weighty with rain, but the prospect of exploring those pages broke through it like a ray of sunshine.

  When they stopped in front of his Aunt Ada's hut, she motioned for them to wait. A few minutes later, she came out and pressed a wrapped package into Grenya’s hands. Grenya unwrapped a corner and revealed a loaf of black lichen, already soaked, pounded and dried so that it wouldn't cramp the belly when you ate it.

  “Oh, Ada! You shouldn't. What will you eat?” Grenya said, the creases on her forehead deepening as she looked up at her sister-in-law.

  “Got a little more left yet.” Ada shrugged. Grenya raised her eyebrows.

  “Besides,” Ada said, “families have to stick together in these times.” Grenya's eyes shifted almost imperceptibly back toward the stone house. Ada shook her head.

  “She may be my sister, but you are still more our family than she ever will be, even with Victor gone. Take it,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ILLYA'S STOMACH, NOT filled by the watery soup of lichen and boiled bark shavings, ached through the night. His mind spun, refusing to settle. Images of the book and the brief glimpse he'd had of its pages wove through a dream of digging through endless mud. Before the sun had begun its ascent over the mountain behind the village, he folded his legs and sat up on his furs. He watched the window, waiting for the light.

  When dawn lightened the sky in blue streaks, Illya eased the door open, careful not to let it creak and wake his family. He crept outside into the sharp air, his breath clouding around him as he left the warmth of the hut. He hoped that the Healer was awake.

  ***

  “I thought I might see you,” Samuel said. “Does this mean you have decided to take on that apprenticeship?”

  “Uh...” Illya stalled, blushing. He tried to peek around Samuel into the recesses of the room behind him without being too obvious. The Healer had approached Illya's mother some time ago about Illya becoming his apprentice. Illya hadn't agreed because, though he was curious about everything that Samuel knew, settling into the path of Healer would forever keep him from becoming a Patroller. Patrollers hunted for big game and protected the village territory from Rover gangs. It had been a long time since a Rover attack, since Illya had been very small, but he could still remember their whooping screams as they had climbed the walls. His father had been a Patroller then and had shot a Rover man in the leg with a crossbow that Illya still had in the lean-to behind his mother’s hut.

  It was a foolish hope anyway. Conna Duncan, the current lead Patroller, had hated Illya ever since they were boys, when he had seen Conna crying beside the river with a set of black eyes his father had given him. Illya’s hobby of tinkering with Olders’ things hadn’t done anything to endear him to Conna further, or to anyone else in the village.

  Samuel chuckled.

  “I will propose a trade,” he said. “You look at this book, and I will teach you about plants.”

  Illya met his eye, wondering if he could be serious. Samuel grinned.

  “I am not going to live forever. Someone needs to know what I know,” he said. Illya's mouth dried, suddenly feeling like the cracked earth of the dust plains beyond the mountains. He swallowed and cast a quick glance back over his shoulder. The sky had grown pink, shot through with gold. The Patrollers would be at the gates now to leave for the hunt, desperate for the big kill that could make all the difference for the village’s survival. His cousin Benja would be there too; he had become a Patroller five years past. Benja was a good hunter and could climb trees almost as well as a squirrel, making him a perfect scout.

  Illya looked back at Samuel, watching his expression. The Healer's face was kind but far from pity; his eyes held a hint of a challenge.

  “If you think you can do it, that is,” he said, shrugging.

  Illya’s set his jaw against the sick feeling in his stomach.

  “It's a deal,” he said and followed the Healer into the dimly lit room, shutting the door on the rising sun outside.

  Shelves crammed with cloth bags and clay jars covered the walls. Bunches of dried herbs hung from the rafters, filling the room with a dusty green fragrance: a memory of spring. There was a fire crackling in the pit, sending smoke up through a hole in the center of the roof and casting shifting light on the walls and ceiling. Illya scanned the rafters, wondering if there was anything good to eat up there.

  Samuel withdrew the book from a shelf corner and set it on a wooden table in the back of the room, motioning for him to sit down.

  ***

  Now that it was finally in front of him, Illya stared at the book for a long moment. The cover was the color of pale buckskin and was covered with swirling lines. He was surprised to find himself shaking as he reached to open it. He hesitated and drew his hand back.

  Among his people, it was believed that there were things a person was not meant to know. It was a gift of the gods that there were secrets in the world. When a person lost that gift: when he asked too much, he lost his mind as well.

  But the longing to see what was inside it was too powerful to ignore. Illya sucked in a breath of cold, smoky air and opened the cover.

  Charcoal-colored lines marched across the page in uniform rows. He traced his finger across the first row, wondering if they would brush away, but the shapes did not smear. Somehow, they seemed to be part of the paper. Grasping the edge of the paper with care, he turned it over. The markings alone were a wonder, but the next thing he came to was even better. A smiling man stood in a field with a basket full of plants. He looked like he was just beyond a window, not a hundred years or more in the past.

  Illya didn't recognize most of the plants the man was holding, though a few appeared to be bigger versions of things that grew in the woods. There was an onion in the basket. It was half as big as the man's head! Illya stared at the long, pointy green stalks and the white hair-roots below the round bulb and felt his mouth watering.

  On the next page was an array of shining colors, the colors of ripe crabapples and new leaves. There was clean silver metal and glass as clear as water. At first, Illya didn't know what he was looking at, but a few moments later, he recognized the shape of the objects. Cars.

  They barely resembled the rusted-out heaps that littered the broad path running past the village. Most of the cars he had seen had holes and missing parts; the victims of generations of salvage. Many had plants growing out of the windows. One even had a tree coming out of its front.

  Inside the cars in the picture, there were people. They were fatter than anyone he had ever seen in his life. Some smiled, but others stared blankly into the distance.

  Then there were more pages of the black shapes, some lined up in even grids.

  “A marvel, isn't it?” Samuel said.

  “They look like ants. A hundred ants in a row,” Illya said. He wasn't sure how many a hundred was, but he knew that it was a lot. He traced a line on the table with his fingertip, trying to make it as straight as the ones in the grid, and failed.

  “Letters,” Samuel said.

  “What?”

  “They are letters. They make up words that will tell you the thoughts of the person who put them down,” Samuel said.

  Illya shook his head. “Do you know what they say?” he asked.

  Samuel pursed his lips, still gazing at the letters. “When I was a child, there was a man who could read words.” He paused and frow
ned. “I never learned,” he said, looking away.

  Illya couldn't imagine Samuel as a child.

  “How long ago was that?” he blurted then cringed, his face growing hot. His mother was always telling him he had to learn when to hold his tongue. Samuel fixed him in place with a sharp look; then the corners of his mouth crept up. He chuckled.

  “Almost fifty years ago,” he said. Illya's mouth dropped open.

  “How did you live through fifty winters?” he asked.

  “There were fifty springs, summers, and autumns too,” Samuel said. “But not all of it has been as hard as now.”

  Illya dropped his eyes back to the book and flipped through it to cover his embarrassment. There were many pages of the letters, but scattered among them were more pictures, each one more fantastic than the last.

  He saw strange things mingled with others that he recognized. Fire shot out of the bottom of a cone-shaped thing that took up an entire page, standing stark and white against a blue sky. Tiny people watched the fire from the edge of the picture. On the next page, there was a fish. It was so ordinary compared to the rest of the wonders that Illya laughed out loud. It was a trout, something he saw every day in the river when the fishing was good. Below it was a salmon with a pointy face.

  On the next page, a grinning man held up a catfish as long as his arm. Illya recognized its pouting lip and whiskers. His stomach growled. A fish for breakfast would have been a miracle right now.

  He turned the page, and there was a picture of a pair of people kissing. Illya snapped the book shut. Heat blazed in his ears and prickled along his jaw. He looked up and was relieved to see that Samuel was sorting through the pots on the far wall with his back turned. Illya’s mind went to Sabelle and the way she had looked at him the night before, her eyes dark and blue, like deep water. He opened the book to the kissing page again and stared at it in fascination.

  Kissing hadn't changed at all since then, though he was hardly an expert. He had never kissed anyone.

  “Kissing and trout!” he said out loud, forgetting for a moment about Samuel. He cringed, hunching his shoulders, and glanced back at Samuel. The Healer was watching him, and his eyebrows had climbed nearly to his hairline. Samuel opened his mouth, but anything he had intended to say was abruptly cut off by angry yelling outside and a pounding at the door.

  “Open up, old man!”

  “We know you have food in there!”

  Samuel frowned, and his eyebrows drew together. With slow deliberation in each movement, he walked to the door and opened it. A crowd comprised of what seemed to be half of the men in the village had gathered outside. They pushed and shoved at each other, trying to get into the hut.

  “Everyone is starving.” Jimmer Duncan shoved a smaller man out of the way to cross the threshold of the door.

  “Are you so out of touch you can hoard all this stuff and not feel nothing about it?” he said, pointing at the herbs hanging from the rafters.

  He lurched across the room, and Illya caught a whiff of the brew that some of the men drank on his breath. Illya stood, knocking his chair over in his haste. He grabbed the book from the table and stuffed it inside his jacket before flattening himself against the back wall.

  “It ain't right, really,” said Piers Malkin, almost apologetically. “The roots are all gone, we just been out to dig, and there's nothing left out there.” Samuel met this comment with silence.

  “You can’t keep all this stuff from the rest of us, even if it’s supposed to be medicine,” Piers continued.

  Jimmer, meanwhile, started smashing the clay pots against the floor, evidently hoping to find them filled with food. Powdered herbs spilled out of the shards in heaps and wafted into the air to mix with the smoke from the fire. Illya’s nose tickled as he inhaled the dust. More men crowded into the hut, shoving each other. From outside came the sounds of a brawl and the crunch of a fist slamming into someone's nose.

  Samuel stood by, seeming unruffled. He stepped back as a pot smashed at his feet and pressed his lips together as he regarded the new pile of gray-green powder on the floor.

  “By all means, help yourselves,” he said.

  Jimmer growled, having emptied all the shelves and found nothing. He started stripping the herbs from their ties on the rafters.

  Conna Duncan pushed past two men who were fighting over a jar, just inside the doorway, and grabbed Jimmer's arm. Jimmer rounded on him, swinging his fists. Conna ducked and sidestepped the fist in a well-practiced move.

  “You watch yourself, boy,” Jimmer said, snarling.

  “You don't even know what that is,” Conna yelled back.

  Illya bit back a yelp and dodged as Piers shoved Conna into the wall beside him. Conna recovered his balance then glared at Illya.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked, reddening. He turned and lunged at his father.

  “Oh, he is welcome to eat those,” Samuel said. With a swiftness that belied his age, he reached out and snatched a dried plant from another man who was about to stuff it into his mouth.

  “This one, though, would steal your breath and put you far beyond my help. I wouldn't recommend it,” Samuel said. He turned back to Jimmer, who had just swallowed his own handful of herbs, and smiled.

  “That one wasn’t nearly so deadly, but judging the amount you just ate, you'll soon be running for the trenches with your pants around your ankles and your bowels in a cramp. Don't come to me, for I fear I won't have anything left to give you,” Samuel said, shrugging, with a gesture at the mayhem that had been made of his once tidy hut.

  Jimmer's face blanched. He clutched his belly and pushed his way past the people in the doorway. The mob fell still in the wake of Samuel's comment. He looked around cheerily as several men dropped what they had been eating and spit mouthfuls out onto the floor.

  “Oh, cheer up. You should all be fine,” he said. “Except for you perhaps, Martin. Do come right back if your face starts swelling.” Samuel squinted at Martin for a moment then nodded as if satisfied.

  The men, almost as one, started to stumble backward out of the hut, muttering apologies. A few clutched their bellies the way Jimmer had done.

  When all that remained of the raid was a floor covered in clay shards and herb dust, Samuel looked up from the mess.

  “First lesson, Illya,” he said brightly. “The amount of a thing eaten is what makes the difference between a poison and a cure.”

  They spent the remainder of the morning cleaning up and assessing what needed to be replaced. Samuel took the opportunity to cram Illya's head with information about the best times to gather the herbs and the way to process them. He included a sizable dose of the many properties of the plants as they swept them up.

  By the end of it, Illya felt like he couldn't fit another fact into his mind.

  It became evident to him that Samuel wouldn't be able to repair the entirety of the damage for a long time. It would take a full year at least because many of the plants only grew during particular seasons. He wondered aloud how Samuel could be so relaxed about it all.

  “There are few limits to what desperate men will do, and hungry men are desperate men,” Samuel said, meeting Illya's eyes with all trace of joviality gone.

  “We are fortunate that they left when they did, but I fear that the worst is still coming.”

  Illya noticed a slight tremor in the Healer's hands as he replaced a rare whole jar in its spot on the shelf.

  “Maybe, because of today, they will remember to fear this place when that time comes,” Samuel said, gazing at the jar.

  CHAPTER THREE

  IT WAS NOT until he returned home that evening, after an unsuccessful afternoon of foraging and fishing with his cousin Benja, that Illya realized he still had the book tucked in the inner pocket of his coat. His fingers lingered on the unfamiliar outline, then he carefully drew it out. Had Samuel meant for him to take it? Why hadn't the Healer, who noticed everything, noticed that it was gone?

  His litt
le sister Molly was sitting on the dirt floor of the hut with her skinny arms wrapped around her knees. She was as thin as he had ever seen her, but her belly was round. It was almost like the fat people in the pictures, though Illya knew that it was not the same thing. Most of the children in the village started to look that way at the end of a hard winter.

  “I'm hungry,” she whined. Worry twisted his gut. The lichen from Aunt Ada was gone, and he had nothing to give her.

  “I'm sorry Mol,” he said. She looked up at him and started whimpering as she rocked back and forth. Her cheeks were hollow; the shadows under her cheekbones were deepening by the day. He looked at her bony wrists and knobby knees and felt sick.

  “Maybe I'll catch a fish tomorrow,” he said, forcing brightness into his voice. “A big, fat one. Maybe I'll even get two.”

  Molly didn't answer but tucked her head down into the circle of her arms, pressing her forehead to her knees. His mother met his eyes from across the room. The crease in her brow deepened, but she said nothing.

  He got up and put some more sticks on the dying fire. Crouching onto his hands, he blew at the base of it until the coals were hot, and flames rose tall to catch the fresh kindling. The firelight brightened the room, lending a cheer despite the hollow worry. It softened the misery in Molly's face and flowed over Grenya's back. It glinted off the warps and ripples of the glass jars that were wedged into the mud of the wall to make their single window.

  Illya was proud of those. He had been the man of the family since his father had died, and he had rebuilt the hut himself season after season, reinforcing it and improving it with salvaged things. He had found the jars, rare and whole, in a nearby ruin a year past. Because of his find, his mother was the only one in the village with a glass window. Not even the stone house had any left.

  He watched her pull a clay pot down from the shelf below the window to look inside. She put it aside and reached for another then another. The knot in his stomach pulled tighter with each one she set away.