by E L Stricker
“The only way we can survive the winter will be by working together to gather as much as we can, we need a strong Leader!” Conna continued.
“I nominate Conna!” Dianthe yelled, somehow abruptly in control of her hysterics. The crowd was a chorus of “Yea!” and “Conna for Leader!” then “Down with the traitor!” “Throw him out!” and then, “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”
Illya jumped onto the stairs and ran, leaping off the far side. He pushed past the people there before they could make up their minds to organize. He broke free from the crowd in seconds and ran.
The village went past him in a blur. All the spots he had lingered over that morning were far behind him before he registered their passing. He flew past the huts, the field with its doomed plants, and the gates. He leaped over the bank outside the walls at the same spot he had fled from the Terrors with the book just a few months ago; before any of this mess: before the seeds, before Ezekiel Soil-Digger, before he had doomed the village, before the Almanac. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since then.
He thought that he had never run so fast, not even when the Terrors had been at his heels. Terrors had teeth and claws and hunger, but people had bows and arrows and rage.
Randomly, he weaved from tree to tree, trying to make himself a difficult target. He had a small head start. It took a few moments for the mob to realize that he had run and that they wanted to follow him.
He glanced back over his shoulders, remembered the Enforcers with their weeks of training, and decided it would be better to go for as much distance as possible. He cut through the brush, heading for the broad path, crashing through bushes, his arms pumping. His heartbeat pounded through his whole body, and he burst out onto the path in an all-out sprint.
His bicycle tracks from the day with Benja had long since washed away, but he could not help remembering that day, flying over the smooth surface, so carefree.
The bicycle was back in the village, still behind his mother’s hut in the magpie nest. He could have escaped the villagers easily on it, but there was no way he could turn back for it. No doubt it would be destroyed now, along with everything else.
He ran forever.
There was nothing left for him in the world but running. No feelings existed but fear and exhaustion. He breathed in and out: his lungs were bellows that drove him on as they pumped. His legs grew heavier and heavier, and he ignored it. On and on he went until he drifted into thought and realized that he hadn't heard anyone behind him for a very long time.
After a long while, he risked ducking behind a tree to look back. Once his inertia stopped, his lack of breath caught up to him. He gasped painfully and sagged against the tree trunk.
He had come a long way, driven by terror to unusual speed. He was just past the place where you would leave the path to find the second ruin. In about another mile was the third ruin: as far as you could walk in a day and still make it back before dark.
Beyond that were the places you could only reach with the bicycle; the spring he had stopped at with Benja, the ruins beyond it, and then the expanse of the old city itself.
Illya crumpled, if they were not behind him now, they would not catch up before he was farther away than they would ever go. The fear of pursuit had drained away, and he found that it had been the only thing keeping him upright.
After a while, he walked again. His legs shook and his vision blurred, but he still wanted to get past the third ruin.
As he went, he continued looking back over his shoulder compulsively, but a new fear started to grow. No one was following him anymore. Why would they? The sun would be at height soon. Even with the speed of his flight, he was not far ahead of the marching day. Soon, he would reach the point where a person would have to turn back to the village or be caught out at night with the Terrors.
He would not be able to turn back. He may have escaped, but he could never return. If he did, he would find himself full of arrows before he had even reached the walls.
Banishment.
The mob had called for his death, but the sentence he had given himself would be far worse. He had no people now. He was alone with no walls and no home to keep him safe. In a few hours, it would be night, and the Terrors would find him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
ILLYA GAVE UP. He knew that there was no hope of surviving the night. After sitting back against a tree for a while, flooded with gruesome thoughts for the better part of an hour, he let go of all of it. There was nothing more he could do. The feeling, though horrible, was oddly freeing.
He couldn't change any of it, not what was going on in the village and not what was going to happen to him. He had been living under the weight of guilt for so long that to be free of all responsibility made him giddy. All summer, he had held the survival of the village and the weight of being Leader on his shoulders.
The truth was out now, and there were no secrets left for anyone to find. No one expected him to save the village anymore or to bring it through the winter. No one expected anything at all of him anymore.
After a while, Illya got up. He walked through the heat, feeling it penetrate. It relaxed his muscles deep to the bone. He walked and walked, and the heat beat down. It moved past pleasant and soon he was stifled, closed in by his clothes. They were a barrier between him and the free air. He tore at them, leaving holes that did not quite accommodate the need to escape.
The leafy canopy of trees ended, and the bare spots on his arms began to scorch in the unrelenting glare. He was in a place he had never been before, having always stayed on the broad path whenever he had been this far out of the village. In a daze he wandered, eventually aware that the need to find water was becoming desperate. He walked and walked, it was mid-afternoon, and the sun beat relentlessly on his shoulders.
He heard the water before he saw it. A roar and a cool breeze directed him to turn through a gap in the boulders and trees.
The air was sweet and sharp, smelling of sage and sticky geranium. A giant waterfall crashed down a rocky cliff into a deep blue pool. It emptied into a stream, which he supposed would eventually feed the main river far below. He stripped off the remainder of his clothes and dove straight into the deep blue pool.
The cold of it was sharp and unexpected. It stole his breath and made his body ache, but he relished it. Tiny bubbles, disrupted by his plunge, rose all around him, tingling his skin. He lapped great gulps of water and felt his mind clear. When he began to shiver, he swam to the shore and pulled himself out. The ache slowly receded from his hands and feet as he sat in the friendly sun.
It was not until dusk began to settle that fear crept back in on him. The shock of the cold water had brought him back to life. Now he realized that he wanted very much to keep that life after all. If he was going to have any chance of doing that, he had to find a place where he could defend himself.
After some debate, he scaled the cliff beside the falls, hoping that the Terrors would not come to higher ground. Fog drifted over the pooling water above the falls, deceptively still before the plunge, glowing pink in the setting sun. The temperature dropped as the sunlight fled with a visible speed from the far hillsides. He heard it then. The first yip yip yee sounded, way off in the hills.
A few moments later, an answering yip yip yip rang out. Fear poured over him as if it was a bucket of icy water. He gasped, breathing too fast, and tried to recover himself before he let his mind spin out of control.
The Terrors were out there and they were coming.
Illya had never actually seen them before. He had heard them every night of his life. A few months ago, he had nearly met them, but he had no idea of what they looked like. He realized he didn't have a first clue of what he was about to face.
Were there many kinds of beasts or just one? How big would they be? Could they climb trees? As the shadows lengthened, the woods, lovely in the afternoon, appeared sinister. He felt like the Terrors could be hiding anywhere, ready to jump out from behind a rock or tree at
any moment. He had spent his life in the woods and seen them through all conditions. He knew all their seasons; snow and rain and the heat of summer. He had simply never been out in them at night.
Everyone knew that the rules changed in the dark.
In the early days of the village, people had been attacked in the night. Many had been killed before they had come together to build great fires and walls to keep out the night.
Fires.
He fixated on that. Maybe he couldn't build walls or a giant fire, but he could build a small one. He didn't know if it would be enough. Either way, there was no other choice. He had to try something.
Try or die, right? He thought of Benja and felt a pang through his chest.
Would the villagers release Benja now that he was gone? Or would Conna make his family pay for Illya's crimes?
He closed his eyes. He didn't think Conna would do that; he was almost sure.
He shivered, shaking himself out of his paralysis. There was nothing he could do about it, and if he didn’t find a way to make it through the night, there never would be.
The yipping was growing louder. He searched for a defensible place for his fire, moving quickly, gathering the driest kindling he could find as he went.
He piled his kindling in an open area beside a tall rock outcropping. The light was nearly gone, and he shook off his habitual fear, forcing himself to keep working despite the urge to run for the safety of the gates. Samuel had said once that he could be the master of many things if he had the will to do it. He wasn't the master of anything really, but he was the only one out here who could be the master of himself. That was all there was left.
He took his knife out of his belt, thankful that he was in the habit of always wearing it. Carefully, he shaved kindling from a dry branch and made a little pile of it under a pyramid of small sticks. He struck the blade on a piece of flint stone.
His hands were shaking, and it took several attempts to make a big enough spark. Finally, his strikes sparked and caught the kindling. Illya dropped quickly onto the ground and pursed his lips to blow gently on the little coal. It flared hot, and the tiny flame shortened, gathering itself around its source. Then, in the absence at the end of his breath, it leaped up to catch the bigger sticks of the pyramid.
Illya built the fire up as big as he could make it, going as far as he dared into the darkness nearby to find bigger and bigger pieces of wood as it grew. He dug a trench in a half-circle around himself and built up fuel in it, spreading the fire into a ring on each side that was not guarded by the rocks.
The yips were still down in the hills, but in the dark, it seemed like the space between them and him had shrunk. He shivered, fumbling in his pile of wood, rejecting a stick with live moss on it. Too often he had crushed an infant fire with a green stick. He would use it later, when the fire was hot enough to ignite any fuel.
The fire grew, burning down into coals and flaring up again into a blaze to devour fresh wood. Finally, he settled back against the rock and relaxed a little bit. It was nothing like the walls of the village, but he had done all he could.
He realized that he hadn't eaten all day. It certainly wasn't a first, but it had been a few months since he had felt real hunger. He crept over and drank from the river but didn't dare to go farther than that. Deciding that it would be too risky to do anything more about his empty stomach, he built up the fire higher to take his mind off it.
The warmth bathed him. He stared out into the darkness, at first jumping at every little sound then fighting the urge to drowse off in the heat. After a long while, he came to the conclusion that it didn't seem the Terrors were determined to swoop down on him after all. His unease lingered, but he was profoundly exhausted, and eventually he couldn't fight it any longer.
***
Morning came.
The early sun shone through the trees onto his face, easing him out of his dreams. Illya blinked and came awake to find that the Terrors had not eaten him after all. The fire had gone out sometime in the night, and he had not woken to build it up again.
He looked around at the sun on the trees, appearing so cheerful, so normal, that it seemed as though nothing had happened at all. He laughed out loud then pinched himself experimentally to check if he still existed. It was real, all of it: the forest, the sun of a new day, and him, alive in it.
A few coals of his fire still glowed under a layer of ash, and it sprang to life easily when he built up a section of the ring to warm his hands. He had camped at the junction of a small stream and the main watercourse. The water swirled as the energetic little stream met the ponderous flow of the larger channel.
It turned out to be a perfect place for fish. Before the sun was high in the sky, Illya had fashioned a fishing line from a carved wooden hook and a piece of string that he unraveled from his shirt. He found fat grubs and a few earthworms under a large rock on the bank, and it was not long before there were two beautiful trout roasting on a bed of coals at the edge of his fire.
Fortified with food, he took off in search of a cave.
It had not been difficult to survive outside. It was no different really than what everyone did in the village every day: making fire, finding food and water. He didn't know when he would meet the Terrors, but if he had made it through with nothing but a fire, his chances with a cave should be decent.
At midmorning, he sighted a cave in the cliffs far up the side of the mountain. He debated for a bit. It would probably be hard for a Terror to reach him there, but in the end, he decided it was too far away from the stream. It had been invaluable the previous night to get water easily. Besides, the morning fish for breakfast was something he would dearly like to repeat.
The second cave he came to was lower on the hillside but occupied, and he backed away ever so slowly from a sleeping badger. The next he found had recently been inhabited, perhaps by the very Terrors he had heard in the night. He shuddered when he saw the piles of bones in it, some of them with scraps of meat still on them that looked suspiciously fresh. With this image in his mind, he hurried, knowing it was more important than ever to find a secure place to settle.
The Terrors may not have bothered him behind his fire, but they had been close by after all. He would be foolish to relax now, just because he had gotten lucky once.
Then he found a perfect cave; it was near the water but just high enough to be dry. There were no signs of occupants, and it ended before it went too deep; big enough for him, but not big enough for anything else to hide somewhere inside.
He established a good stock of firewood then foraged for roots, greens, and berries. When he had enough food for a day laid by, he set to digging a fire pit at the entrance. With a roaring fire lit at the mouth of his cave, Illya finally relaxed.
As the days went on his food stores grew, and he became more accustomed to his new home. He started giving himself until he had heard the first yips before he piled on fresh kindling, blew on the banked coals, and stayed near the circle of firelight. With the stream nearby, he could fish just outside of the entrance to his cave and still stay near the fire. As the light faded across the water, gnats and flies could be seen flitting across its rippled surface. Fish would jump and bite at the flies then more than they ever did in the afternoon.
He was coming to realize that the villagers had let many things slip their notice for their fear of the dark. Fish bit the best at twilight, right as everyone would be leaving to go behind the walls, and also in the morning before they would think it was safe enough to go out.
One day, he saw a deer come to the river to drink as the light fell. It had been so long since he had seen any big game that he froze when he saw it. He watched it; with nothing but a knife and a new slingshot half made, there was no way he could hunt it. He was well hidden behind a screen of trees and had not built up his fire yet. The deer didn't seem to know he was there.
It drank from the river, looking up sometimes to stand perfectly still while its ears twitched. Illya bar
ely breathed, enthralled. He had wanted to get a deer for as long as he had been old enough to hunt.
They were extremely rare near the village, and every time he had caught a glimpse of one, it had been running away. He could see it breathing. Then the deer started up suddenly and bounded away through the trees.
He built up the fire and sat at the entrance to his cave, looking out at the reflection of the light on the water. The black field across the river had stars above it, and the water mirrored the moon in a silver ribbon before him. In the field, tiny lights winked in and out of sight in the brush, as if they were mimicking the stars above. He smiled. He had seen fireflies plenty of times before but never quite like this.
There was a rustling noise outside of the sphere of firelight. He squinted past it and saw the back of a small creature as it ran past. Relieved that it was nothing large or menacing, he stepped outside of the firelight to get a closer look.
It was a coyote. Illya had often seen them when he was out hunting. They were not usually dangerous, and the people usually left them alone because they were hard to catch and not good for eating.
An entire pack of them was beside his cave, sniffing and circling. He lunged quickly to chase one away from the pile of fish bones beside the fire. It scampered away, and he threw a rock at it.
By some quirk, his aim found a mark he had not intended, and the rock hit the beast squarely across the nose. It took off with a yelp, and the rest of the pack ran with it. Illya heard the familiar yipping of the Terrors sounding in the night as the coyotes retreated. Quickly, he dashed back into his cave, his heart pounding. He wondered if the little dogs would be attacked. For a long while, he squinted into the night, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on.
Once his eyes had adjusted, he could see the coyotes were clearly under the moonlight: light shapes retreating across dark fields. But no Terrors appeared to close in on them. He could hear the yipping getting fainter as the dogs drew farther away. For a wild moment, he wondered if the Terrors were invisible.