A Girl From Nowhere

by James Maxwell

  “Here,” Abi said. “Take off those sandals and put these on. Let’s see if they fit.”

  Taimin slipped out of his crude sandals. He yanked on the left boot, feeling it grip his toes. “It fits well.”

  “And the other.”

  Looking askance at his aunt, he turned and examined his crippled right foot. Rather than the healthy, familiar shape, the outline was more like a right-angled triangle. The small toes were squished together, and the big toe stuck out like an anomaly. It was as if a foot made of mud had been flattened from above, which was exactly what had happened, except that it was his flesh and bone that had been forcefully reshaped.

  “I don’t know if I can,” he said.

  Aunt Abi gave him the look that made him feel like a stupid child. With a sigh, he inserted his crippled right foot into the opening and started to pull.

  She left him to it for a time, occasionally glancing at him as if measuring his level of determination. Finally, with a growl, she came over and started to push, pull and twist, regardless of his discomfort. “The leather will shape itself to your foot,” she grunted. “Provided we can get the boot on in the first place.”

  At last, it was done. Taimin looked down at his feet. For the first time since the death of his parents, he felt something akin to pleasure. He looked whole. He didn’t look like a cripple anymore.

  “Good,” Abi said. “Now stand.”

  Taimin rose to his feet. He wobbled but resisted the urge to grab hold of the table. He took deep breaths as he fought the pain and struggled for balance and control. He wavered, and nearly fell, but in the end he stood tall and looked at his aunt proudly.

  “Well done,” she said. “Now follow me.”

  Walking was altogether different from standing. Abi waited impatiently outside the front door, in the cleared area between the fence and the shack, while he bounced and jarred his way over to her.

  Abi indicated two hardwood swords at her feet. “Pick up a weapon.”

  Taimin crouched and grabbed the hilt of a sword. As he straightened, he lost his balance and leaned on the sword, and felt a strike on his head that caused him to cry out.

  “Never, ever, use your sword for a crutch,” Abi said. “It is your weapon, and your life depends on it.”

  Taimin put his hand to his head, rubbing the tender spot where his aunt had struck him. “I understand,” he said.

  “Now,” said Abi. “Show me your guard. Let’s see what Gareth taught you.”

  As the weeks became months, and months turned to years, Taimin felt the wound of his parents’ passing slowly heal, although he never forgot the manner of their deaths.

  Abi taught him all she knew, and whether she pushed him harder because of his disadvantage, or whether she was just instructing him as she would have instructed her own child if her life had worked out differently, he would never know.

  He learned to manage with his boots, and could eventually walk with only the slightest limp. He would have been useless as a swordsman if he couldn’t leap, or duck, or lunge, so he learned to move his body in deft, unpredictable ways. But he couldn’t run. When he tried, he lumbered at a pace easily outmatched, and never managed more than a dozen paces before stumbling. It was the best he could do, even with Abi pushing him, and eventually she understood that anything else was impossible.

  Taimin learned the limits of his dexterity, but to do so he had to defeat the pain. He felt the bones jangle together whenever he pushed himself. Controlling the pain was the key to his freedom of movement, and learn to control it he did, even if after hard practice it kept him awake at night, sweating and shivering.

  Abi taught him to wield a sword, and built cactus dummies for him to practice on. By the age of fourteen, he could block his aunt’s blows, and she had to actually work to make a strike. At fifteen he landed his first blow. Then he realized his aunt had been holding back after all.

  He learned marksmanship with a bow. At sixteen he could hit a nesting raptor from seventy paces. As Abi always reminded him, a good archer rarely went hungry.

  Even as his skill with weapons improved, Abi said there was more to survival in the waste than fighting, as important as it was. He learned how to make a sword from the limb of a basalt tree—the pale wood so hard it had to be burned from the trunk—and to construct a composite bow from firehound horn, spruce, and raptor sinew. He fashioned arrows with obsidian heads, learning to value each and every one and retrieve them whenever he could.

  All of his instruction centered on the daily struggle to stay alive. One year, Abi’s precious nursery was ravaged by plague beetles, and for six months Taimin hunted from dawn to dusk so that they had enough food to eat. He learned that survival in the wasteland meant focusing on the one thing no creature could do without: water. He became adept at finding water beneath ancient riverbeds and in the hearts of lifegiver cactuses. He used the tracks of the wherry and the firehound as a guide, following them to shallow pools in caverns where water seeped up from subterranean sources. Where he found water, he inevitably found food. Sometimes he had to escape becoming food himself.

  Always, his inability to run threatened his life.

  The homestead was protected by cliffs and close to the firewall, but the creatures of the wasteland still managed to harass Taimin and his aunt. Twice Abi and Taimin fought off curious wyverns, the big flyers a regular presence as a result of the homestead’s proximity to their nests. Raptors, scorpions, and snakes were a constant menace. Once a pack of firehounds called to each other in the night and kept the two humans in the homestead awake for hours.

  But there were also much more dangerous threats Taimin might encounter—potential enemies possessing intelligence. Abi made sure he knew about each and every one of them as she smashed her larger weapon against his hardwood sword again and again.

  “What’s a trull’s weakness?”

  “They’re slow,” Taimin would gasp. “They can be goaded to anger.”

  “Where are the soft parts on a bax?”

  “Under the chin . . . but not the throat,” he puffed. “Under the armpit . . . slanting down.”

  “How do you know when to fight, and when to run?”

  “I can’t run,” he would say. “I have to avoid battles I can’t win.”

  One day, he asked his aunt again how she knew all these things.

  “I can fight.” She shrugged. “It’s what I’m good at.”

  Taimin sensed there was a lot she wasn’t saying, but she was reticent at the best of times. He changed the subject. “What was that sword the rover had? The one who killed my father. It wasn’t made of wood.”

  Abi looked surprised. They rarely spoke of the event.

  “He had white hair—” Taimin began.

  “I remember,” Abi interrupted. “You don’t see steel swords very often, and you tend to remember them.”

  “Steel?”

  “It’s a metal. Red ore is dug up from the ground and when it’s heated to very high temperatures it melts. Coal is added to the melted ore to form steel when it cools. Steel is harder and can be made much sharper than the wood of the basalt tree.”

  “We already have coal. Should I look for red ore?”

  Abi snorted. “Leave it, Taimin. There’s more to it than my simple description. Steel swords are rare and valuable. Men will kill you for them. That rover probably killed someone to get his hands on that weapon, just like he killed your parents.”

  Taimin again experienced the frustration he’d felt that day. He now considered himself a man, and he wished he had been able to tip the balance in his parents’ favor. Sometimes he had vivid, savage dreams, where he took his vengeance upon two tall rovers with hard faces and pale hair. If he ever saw them again, nothing would stop him.

  Seeing his expression, Abi spoke. “Taimin, one thing you should know . . . Those rovers are probably long dead. Even if they’re not, you’ll never see them again. Here, close to the firewall, we have a life of safety, but also solit
ude. We might as well be the only people alive.”

  3

  Taimin dangled his feet over the edge of the cliff, close to the place where he had watched his parents die. Wyverns wheeled in the sky, high above the plain below. The yellow sun Dex hung low on the horizon, casting slanted morning rays over the towers of rock, clumps of green cactus, and dried riverbeds.

  He was nineteen. Eight years had passed since he had looked out over this same view and wondered what lay beyond the cactus fields. He had now followed the steep trail to the foot of the cliffs, and explored some of the caves at the bottom, but he couldn’t travel much farther and still make it back to the homestead before nightfall. He still knew little about the wider world.

  He looked down at his right foot, which appeared much the same in the boots as his left. He had outgrown the pair Abi made him after a year but she had made him another. This pair, he had made himself, with the skin of a wyvern he had hunted down on his own. Only just undergone metamorphosis from its wherry state, the wyvern had been uncertain with its new wings and fallen prey to his arrow.

  As he took in the view, Taimin dreamed.

  He wanted to explore. He wanted to meet other people. Yet with his slow speed, any travel would be risky.

  He watched one of the soaring wyverns as it circled and looked for prey. Then he thought about the four-legged creatures the rovers had been riding on that fateful day.

  An idea struck him with force.

  He climbed to his feet as he recalled everything he knew about wherries. Wyverns laid eggs on the cliffs. The eggs hatched, and while the wherry young were small, the location kept them safe from predators. Then, when the wherries grew too big for the nests, the wyverns transferred them to the ground below so they could hunt. The strongest wherries, the healthiest, grew in size until they underwent metamorphosis. Wings sprouted from their shoulder blades and their strong forelegs shrank and tucked in under their bodies. They became wyverns, mated, and the cycle repeated.

  Wherries were as fast on land as wyverns were in the air. Taimin looked down at his foot. He couldn’t run but, with a wherry, he could ride. On the back of a wherry, he wouldn’t be a cripple anymore.

  Taimin wiped blood from his forehead and grimaced as he examined the smear of red on his fingertips. He had just lost the wherry as it darted from under his net, and then tripped and fallen hard. He now watched the four-legged animal bound away, scampering over the rocky terrain until it disappeared from view.

  Abi thought him a fool but left him to his own ends, muttering to herself as she trimmed the leaves on her plants, caressing them with a delicacy she never displayed in any other task. Now he was starting to believe her; after months of effort clambering around the rocky terrain below the cliffs, he hadn’t even come close to success.

  Shaking his head, he decided to give up for the day, and perhaps for good. He gathered his net and put it into his pack. As he scanned the irregular cave mouths that peppered the bottom of the cliffs, his gaze alighted on the cave where he had left four brown lizards he had killed earlier. He would collect them before heading for the trail that would take him up to the summit. Bow in hand, he walked warily, the way Abi had taught him, checking the sky and the rust-colored rock in all directions.

  He frowned as he approached the cave where he had left the lizards. He had hidden them well, but something else had drawn the attention of some raptors. Dozens of the lean, leathery birds had focused their attention on a different cave, and were darting in and out of the entrance. They shrieked at each other in the way they only did when they had some prey to torment.

  Taimin knew he had to be careful. If he couldn’t clear the raptors, he wouldn’t be able to fetch the lizards; the raptors would smell the meat and undoubtedly attack him.

  Raptors didn’t like darkness and they took turns plunging into the cave. They were small compared to wyverns, but they could still be deadly as a group. Their crimson eyes glared and leather gullets twitched as they shrieked. Blood stained their hooked beaks.

  Taimin reached for an arrow from the bundle strapped against the side of his pack. He kept a wary eye on the raptors and when a bird came screeching toward him he let an arrow fly. The raptor spun several times in the air as his shot took it clean through the wing.

  He retrieved his arrow and continued to watch the raptors dart in and out of the dark opening. More of them had blood on their beaks or talons. Whatever they had found, he soon wouldn’t be able to scare them away before hunger drove them mad.

  He shot at another raptor and cursed when his arrow lodged in its body and the bird fled, wounded yet taking his arrow with it. He decided to forgo the bow for his sword and crouched to make the exchange. With the wooden grip in his hands, he neared the mouth of the cave. If he could find out what was attracting the raptors, he might be able to drive them off.

  He batted away several of the birds. They became wary of his sword and regrouped to hover in the air, wings flapping as they cawed in frustration. He stood just inside the cave’s entrance, knowing he would be outlined in Dex’s bright light but risking exposure to give his eyes time to adjust. He heard the flutter of wings just behind his head and cut at the air to strike a screeching bird and cause the rest to scatter. Still unable to see what was inside the cave, he entered.

  There were hundreds of caves set into the cliffs and this one had the jagged walls and graveled floor he had seen before. He walked forward cautiously but shot a glance over his shoulder when he heard shrieking. At the mouth of the cave the raptors were screeching, trying to summon the courage to enter and attack.

  Then Taimin heard a different sound, somewhere between a growl and a whimper. It was accompanied by a scuffle.

  He moved deeper into the cave, sword held out in front of him. Hidden by shadows, a large shape twisted and growled at his approach, causing him to raise his sword, but then the shape gave a sorrowful whine. Taimin moved to allow light to pass his body. His eyes widened.

  He was looking at a wherry—a male—with the typical strong legs, soft, wrinkled skin, and floppy ears. The raptors must have hounded him, forcing him into the cave, where he had obviously been penned for a long time. Taimin’s heart went out to him; the wherry was young and would have been frightened as more raptors joined in and braved the darkness to peck at his soft spots.

  The animal was in a bad state. Blood ran in rivulets down his leathery hide, contrasting with his sandy color, and as Taimin came closer the wherry looked up at him with pitiful eyes framed by long eyelashes.

  If the wherry ever underwent metamorphosis and became a wyvern, his floppy ears would straighten. The jutting ridges at his shoulders would erupt into wings, and his legs would become smaller. But given his size, Taimin wondered if he was a runt, one of those that never changed, spending their entire lives in wherry form.

  Taimin glanced back at the mouth of the cave. It was late in the day and he knew he shouldn’t stay out much longer. He wanted to help, but he also knew that the wherry was a dangerous creature. The animal was obviously exhausted and starved. But he weighed perhaps five times what Taimin did, and his teeth and claws were sharp.

  “Shh.” Taimin made soft sounds as he approached, but he wasn’t taking any chances and still held on to his sword. The wherry tried to snarl but it finished in a whimper. Taimin saw peck marks on his belly, neck, and beside one of his drooping ears. The blood attracted flies, and Taimin waved them off, relieved when the motion didn’t enrage the animal.

  Deciding to take a risk, Taimin leaned down and laid a palm on the wherry’s neck; the creature stirred but didn’t have the strength to fight. Making low tones of encouragement, Taimin held his breath as he put down his sword and continued to hold a soothing hand against the animal’s skin. The wherry lowered his head to the ground, and Taimin became more confident.

  Taimin watched the wherry’s sad eyes as he slipped his pack off his shoulder. He froze as he saw a hind leg twitch, but it was just the creature stretching. He grab
bed his water flask and poured some water into his cupped hands. Trying not to show his fear, he brought his hands close to the wherry’s strong jaws. A moment later the wherry was lapping from his hands, his tongue gliding over Taimin’s palms to get to every last drop.

  Taimin glanced at the cave’s mouth and breathed a sigh of relief. The raptors had given up. The wherry gave another whimper.

  “Wait here,” Taimin murmured. “I’ll get you something to eat.”

  As Taimin left the cave, he saw the exhausted wherry follow him with his eyes. He already felt responsible for the animal’s fate. He wanted the wherry to heal and be well. Some food would lift his spirits.

  Taimin smiled.

  “We’re going hunting,” Taimin called to his aunt.

  Taimin held the reins as Griff trotted beside him and grinned with pent-up excitement. Abi grunted in reply, completely focused while she checked the boundary fence.

  Taimin didn’t know why he had chosen the name, it just seemed to suit. Griff was too big to sleep in the house, so Taimin had built him a stable alongside the shack. Even so, Griff preferred to sleep on the threshold, much to Abi’s annoyance as she kicked him out of the doorway each morning.

  “That wherry runt,” Abi called him, which was true; Griff was much smaller than the wherries that belonged to the rovers. He tired quickly with Taimin on his back and cast reproachful looks over his shoulder every time Taimin climbed up. Nonetheless, when the mood took him he could bound along with speed.

  Taimin patted Griff’s flank as he and the wherry left the homestead behind. He glanced back one last time at his aunt, and with a start realized that her once-red hair was now entirely gray. When had that happened? While he had grown, Abi had seemed to shrink. She hadn’t, of course; he had just become bigger. Taimin could now best her with a blade, although she was still his superior at tracking and archery. Their relationship had changed. Abi now spent more time with her plants, while Taimin roamed the plains, hunting with Griff.