by E L Stricker
Illya swallowed. He wanted to scream, but he pressed his lips together to hold it in. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so helpless before. Molly was wasting away before his eyes, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He dropped his eyes and stared at the floor.
Turning his back to them, he pulled his furs up around his shoulders and opened the book.
He stopped for a moment, his fingers hovering over the page. Those who lost the gift would hear the hidden voices of the world pouring into their thoughts, whispering secrets, driving the person to do mad and dangerous things. To lose the gift was a Calamity of its own. Anyone touched by madness would be cast out of the village for fear the contagion would spread.
He traced the shapes of the letters with his finger. Rachel, Benja's older sister, had lost her mind years before. It had been so long ago that he barely remembered her. Illya listened for the voices to come pouring in on him. He knew he had seen enough in the pictures earlier that they could come at any moment. He held his breath.
None came.
He gazed at the letters, wondering what they meant. There was a round shape that could represent the sun. S could be a snake or maybe a rope.
Samuel had held no fear of the book, Illya remembered. The Healer knew more than anyone in the village. If anyone were to lose the gift, it would be him. Still, Illya felt more than a little uneasy as he looked at the letters. To try to learn what they meant was surely taking it too far. They said that Rachel had been thrown out of the village at night when the voices had come and was never seen again.
But knowledge was a gift too. How else could they know what to eat or how to make fires? He blinked.
There was nothing among the shapes that he could see that could represent food. Even his people had ways to mark down what was food and what was not. An entire wall of the stone house had the shapes of the plants that were edible and the plants that held malice carved onto it. If these letters were the shapes of important things, there seemed to be a lot missing.
Across the room his ma sighed, putting aside another jar. She reached for the last one on the shelf. Their stores were gone. He knew better than to hope that she would find anything inside it.
She pulled out several handfuls of shavings from the inner bark of a birch tree. He swallowed. More bark. It was not good for much besides making you feel full for a little while, and he wasn't sure if that was better than nothing at all. She positioned a pot of water over the fire on a grate that had come from one of the rusted-out cars along the broad pathway.
He blinked, trying to clear his eyes as he looked back down at the page. The firelight had left spots in his vision, blurring the letters. When they came back into focus, he noticed something. There was a C at the beginning of a line, then another, smaller one, a few words later. He looked again to see if other shapes repeated. There were many repetitions. Sometimes there were even two of the same shape in a row. In one place there were two circles. Why would you say “sun” and then “sun” again?
He laid his head back and rubbed his hand across his eyes then looked back at the page. C could be a shield—that could mean battle. He tried to guess the meaning of each shape, looking for clues for what the words might say. Shield first, then an arm over a fat belly, a hill, raised arms, sun, cup, spear? It didn’t make sense.
He squinted at the page, trying to let the lines of each word blend into a recognizable shape, but it was useless.
He shook his head, shutting the book, and put it aside more roughly than he meant to before joining his family. They sat near the fire and chewed on the softened bark slowly, sipping the hot water to wash it down.
***
“The first plants you must learn are the malice plants,” Samuel said to the group of wriggling children in front of the wall. Illya chased one of the littles across the snow and picked him up by the waist, returning him to the others.
“The shoots will come soon, and do you know what will happen to you if you pick the wrong kind?” Samuel said. They sobered, with wide eyes and serious nodding heads despite the chaos of a few moments before. Every one of them had already begun to learn this. Its importance had been impressed on them since the first time they had been able to grab things and put them in their mouths.
“When the people came out of the cities, they had no wall like this. They had to find out all of this for themselves. They left it for us so that we would not have to do that,” Samuel said.
Illya remembered the first day he had been shown the wall as a little himself. From Samuel's description, he had pictured the cities as being underground. He had laughed at the thought of the people coming up out of them, blinking in the bright sunshine like moles coming out of their holes.
“Who has seen this one?” Samuel asked, and several of the littles raised their hands.
“Lace top,” a little boy said, and Samuel gave him an approving nod then moved on to point out some less common plants. These littles would see them again and again until they could recite what was on the wall without looking.
Illya could close his eyes and think his way down it. The fern fiddlehead was at the top, then the red-stemmed creeper beside the spotted mushroom, then blue cones, hood-flower, the lace top, and many more.
Some plants held malice all the time, and some only when they looked a certain way. This might be when they had flowers, when their shoots grew bigger than your little finger, or when they grew thorns. The pictures on the wall showed all of these things too.
“How did the people find them?” a little girl asked. Her belly was swollen too, just like Molly’s. Her eyes looked too big for her face, ringed with dark hollows.
“They learned by eating the plants to see what would happen,” Samuel said.
“They ate all the malice plants?” the lace-top boy asked. Samuel nodded.
“Why didn't they die?” he asked.
“A lot of them did. That is why the wall is such a gift,” Samuel said, and the littles stared at it open-mouthed. Illya’s thoughts drifted, as they often had in the past days, to the book. What was it hiding? Did it have secrets in its pages like this? Things that could make their lives so much better that someday people wouldn’t be able to imagine how they had lived without knowing?
“What are these?” Samuel asked, indicating the carvings. They were separated from the malice plants by a wide groove running down the center.
“Those are the ones we eat,” said the lace-top boy. Illya swallowed. Half of the littles gazed at the carvings with wide, longing eyes. Some looked away sullenly.
“Yes, you probably recognize many of them. There are a few that do not grow anymore, or if they do, we have not been able to find them.” Samuel pointed to the first ones in the list.
“This one was called corn, the next one is wheat. They grew in the dust plains to the east before the seeds died,” Samuel said.
“I never saw anything like that,” one of the older ones said, crossing his arms.
Illya thought of the letters. He had stared at the first row so many times that he could have written them out in snow.
C, a, n, y, o, u, i, m, a
Repetition again, he realized. The shape a after C was the same as the a after m.
He thought through them a little farther: there was g, then i. Another repetition. He began to wonder how many letters there were in all, once you accounted for the fact some of them were just the same ones over and over.
“I never did either,” Samuel answered the boy with a sad smile. “But maybe someday we will find them again.”
***
That evening, Illya joined the people beside the central fire, more to distract himself from hunger than anything else.
The villagers milled around like a hive of bees with no queen to follow: directionless and afraid. The fragile ties between neighbors were strung taut, like bowstrings, and there was the sense in the air that at any moment they could snap.
“Only thing for it is to leave.” Illya overheard
a man nearby speaking in low tones to several of his friends.
“Things never used to be like this,” said Charlie Polestad. “I remember when Dane—”
“Will you shut it about Dane Marshall? It’s not going to bring those days back,” the first man, Eddie Matheson, said.
“Marshall was the best Leader we ever had. Nothing’s gone right since he was killed. Ever since Elias—“
“Keep your voice down, Mark,” Eddie whispered.
“She talks about curses, but nothing has been more cursed than this village under that man,” Mark spat, in lower tones, jerking his head toward the stone house.
“Can’t leave anyway. It’s no good out there either,” Eddie said after a brief silence. “And them Terrors are hungry too.”
“Not like you'll pop over the hill and find spring in the next valley,” Charlie said. He shook his head. “My ma's weaker than I've ever seen her. We haven't had more than bark in a week or more. She can't even get out of bed now.”
There was silence at this. No one seemed to know what to say. Illya snuck a look past his shoulder at the men. Charlie hung his head and scuffed his foot on the ground.
“It’s not right,” Mark said. “Old Marieke starving when there's some that have plenty.” He looked again at the stone house. Illya had not seen any of its residents—Elias, Impiri, and Sabelle—for several days, not since before the riot at Samuel's. If they were holed up inside with stores of food while the rest of the village faced the disappearance of the roots, things could go bad, and quickly.
“They don't have any more than the rest of us,” Charlie said, his face sagging. He rubbed his hand across the back of his neck.
“What we should be doing is weeding out the weakest, the ones who won’t survive anyway, give the rest of us a chance.” Jimmer Duncan strode up and joined the men. Charlie turned on him.
“You take that back,” he said. He cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders back. His jaw was hard, and his eyes were fierce. Jimmer, taller than him by a head, lifted his chin and looked down at Charlie.
“Won't help them if all of the rest of us starve too. S 'not like we would be killing anyone, just sending them to find a new chance somewhere else,” Jimmer said.
A cry tore from Charlie’s throat. He flung himself at Jimmer, pounding the bigger man with white-knuckled fists. Illya's stomach rolled over. All he had eaten that day was bark and not the friendliest variety either. His stomach had been cramping with the effort of holding it down even before he had heard the talk.
Jimmer hardly flinched at Charlie’s blows. Soon, the other men succeeded in separating them. Illya retreated, realizing with a chill that went right through his bones that Charlie had been the only one who tried to shut Jimmer up.
The weakest.
That meant the old, the very young, and anyone already close to starving. That meant Charlie’s ma, old Marieke.
It meant Molly.
CHAPTER FOUR
AT HOME, ILLYA watched his sister sleeping peacefully in his mother’s arms. After a long time, he buried himself in his furs and lost himself in the book, trying to tell himself that it had been nothing but idle talk. He stared at the pictures, dreaming of how the people in them had lived, how they had always had enough to eat. You could see it in the roundness of their cheeks, their height, and the strength of their bodies. They had never talked about tossing starving elders or littles outside the walls to be taken by Terrors; he was sure of it.
He chewed on his lip, gazing for perhaps the hundredth time at the basket of plants in the smiling man's arms. He traced their shapes then the shapes of the letters below the picture. Illya counted the characters in the passage, accounting for when they repeated. He found there weren't very many at all.
Painstakingly, Illya scratched each shape into the mud that covered the wall beside his bed with a sharp twig.
His letters came out wobbly and large, very different than the neat little shapes on the page. Some of them seemed to just be bigger versions of the same thing. He put the big C under the smaller one, and the same with M, U, and O. Then he decided to take the big ones away from his list altogether, guessing that all of them were bigger versions of the others, even though they weren’t all obvious. He counted the letters, stumbling a few times when he got past ten but eventually getting what he felt was a good estimate. There were about 30 of them. That wasn't so many.
c a n y o u i m g e r l h t w r s ? p d k f b j q x ! z
The list was actually simple, condensed out of something impossibly huge.
When he realized the audacity of what he had done, cold sweat broke out across his forehead. Holding himself perfectly quiet, he listened to the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls and waited for a sign that he had lost the gift, and his mind with it: the first whispers coming from the things around him. Slowly, he shifted his eyes from the ceiling to the center of the room, and the blackened clay pot over the fire pit, wondering if it would start speaking and what it would have to say.
No voices came.
He let his breath out. From outside came the patter of rain. He squinted up at the window, trying to see the drops through it. Firelight glinted off the jars and bounced into his eye, making him blink.
Mason jars.
That was a word: their name. It was something everyone knew, although no one could have said why or where the name had come from. And he remembered an oddity that had always puzzled him. He got up and crossed the room to run his fingers across the familiar bumps on the side of a jar.
He had always wondered why they were there. Until now, he had thought that the bumps were a decoration. But now he saw that they looked just like the letters in the book. He whispered the word.
“Mason.”
It had been right in front of him all along!
M A S O N
The bumps had warped with age, but they were the same on all five jars. Five letters and five sounds. Illya wiped at his forehead with his hand, trembling. The letters were sounds. That was the answer.
Not only that, he knew what five of them were.
CHAPTER FIVE
ILLYA WORKED IN the dim light of Samuel's hut, retrieving bunches of herbs from the rafters and grinding them into powders.
“What is this?” Samuel held up a dry sprig with oval leaves, gray with age but still giving off a pungent scent.
“Bayberry,” Illya said.
“Uses?”
“To fight the small calamities, to bring sweat, and to start the upchuck.”
“Yes, that's right. Now, when you have its bark, it works well as a poultice for sores, and when you have the fruits, you can boil them to get wax for candles or to seal cloth against water.”
Illya nodded. He focused on his work, relaxing in the rhythm of the grinding and the cadences of the Healer’s words. He wondered if he would ever know enough to trace the shapes for all of them.
He had squinted at the book by the light of his family's fire late into the night, until his mother had woken up and scolded him for piling logs on. The light had died away gradually after that, but by then it didn't matter. The letters he knew were all through the book, and by the time he had to put it away, he had read “man,” “son,” “on,” “an,” and “am”. It was like a doorway had broken open and light from beyond was shining through the crack.
Illya had done something that no one else had in living memory, but the scope of what remained to the mystery was still daunting. Samuel’s words hummed and drifted in and out of his ears; each one made up of different sounds, each sound with a letter that he could find, if only he could push the door open a little wider.
“Stoneroot will have to be replaced next, though you won’t like grinding it,” Samuel said. “Still, it’s worth the effort. There are many uses for the stoneroot. Most important, it is good to calm the cough that comes with the small Calamities,” Samuel continued, and Illya put the information into his mind, next to the qualities for bayberry.
&
nbsp; “They'll come soon now. Cold time is shifting into the damp time. Best thing we can do to keep them from spreading is to stop the cough,” Samuel said.
Germes, tiny spirits that flew on the wind, went into wet places and brought Calamities and the 'fection. Everyone knew that. They would get into a nose with a drip or uncovered eyes. The cough made stronger winds for them to sail on.
Calamities. Stoneroot. Grind. Written words had different lengths. He had seen that quickly enough. Hearing them, it made sense. Spoken words were made of different numbers of sounds too. Now he had a new idea.
There weren't very many words with only one sound or even two.
There was “I,” and “a.” Illya tried and couldn't think of any others that only had one sound. He halted in his work when he realized that he already knew a. It was part of mason. That meant he would be able to find I, another letter.
Six.
The two-sound words would help too. Many of them could be the key to new letters, and, if he could work out enough of them, he might be able to fill in the gaps in the longer words.
Samuel took in a sharp breath. Illya heard a jabbering, like a flock of crows, distant but growing louder.
There was a shriek and what sounded like someone crying.
The sounds grew closer and closer. Illya and Samuel held perfectly still, as if moving could attract the attention of the crowd outside, despite the walls that surrounded them. Samuel snapped the bayberry twig in half in his fingers but seemed not to notice. His face was white.
Then there was a whoop, and the voices began to recede.
“Something's happened,” Illya said, rising to his feet to look outside. Samuel held up his hand.
“I have to see,” Illya said. He turned back to the door and eased it open.
There was a crowd, but it had moved past them, towards the central fire. Where the day before the men had been a mob, full of rage and desperation, this was a very different scene. They were laughing. It was the first laughter Illya had seen on their faces in months. Happiness shone in their eyes like rising sunlight and spread across the hills of their cheeks.