by Ivory Autumn
“Yeah,” Freddie yawned. “The Sontars are.”
“But Freddie...”
“Sleep!”
Andrew nodded and closed his eyes, only to open them again, upon smelling the faint smell of cedar-wood. He rolled onto his back and watched wide-eyed, as a mysterious cloud of mist, like yellow-brown smoke, skimmed through the trees, soared into the camp in the shape of an eagle, flapping its wings. It soared above him like a graceful ghost, only to suddenly fade.
~~~~
Chapter Three
Nookpot
If you were born with an instruction manual, just think how easy life would be. With an instruction manual you'd avoid lots of stupid choices---your parents would be so educated about you that they'd always understand you.
If everybody came with instruction manuals, maybe children with rotten lives would have a better chance at life. All teenagers would be angels. Parents would know just how to handle every situation.
Ah, if such a thing existed. Sounds nice, doesn't it? As a young adult, you would have life easy. At the fork in the road, when most are unsure where to go, or what college to go to---you'd just pause and simply look at the instruction manual of life---and there, staring up at you would be the answer.
That would be most handy!
But, unfortunately, you didn't come with an instruction manual, and your parents didn't know that the reason why you cried for hours when you were a baby was because you had a nasty sticker weed stuck in your diaper.
It's most likely that your parents don't understand you as much as you wish they did. It's also possible that you don't understand yourself all that much, either.
In all honesty, maybe the only physical instruction manual you have is old, wise people who've had a taste of life, or good books about great people. But maybe your life is devoid of such wise people, and you haven't found such a book.
Andrew felt that way. Everything he had to guide his life had been snatched away. He had thought the scroll his parents had given him would hold the answers he needed. But it wasn’t meant to be. Now he supposed he'd never know why he was so different from everyone else.
All he knew was that because he was different, no one, including the Sontars, liked him. Freddie and Talic were the exception that kept him sane when they were all forced onto huge cargo boats, where they were kept in the dark, like animals. The boats took them over the Harmon Lake, a weeks journey, to a place called The Frizzlers Slump Slave Camp.
The camp was located in the small hodgepodge village of Nookpot. Upon entering the town, Andrew immediately wished that he could be anywhere but there.
The village was a poor town, full of abnormal, revolting smells, and pieced-together houses. The streets were full of grime, and the smell of rot was very prevalent.
The biggest building there in the slave camp was a dirty building with miles of fence around it. Its tall walls and fences looked menacing and vile. A foul smell drifted about it like flies floating over something dead. The only nice thing Andrew could see was a tall green tree growing beside the gate of the slave camp. As he passed it, he reached out and touched the tree. Instantly, a Sontar cracked his whip across Andrew’s arm.
Andrew jumped, yelping in pain.
“Get back in line!” a Sontar barked.
Andrew held his arm and followed the rest of the slaves through the formidable gate, shivering with fear as the heavy door slammed behind them with an echoing clang.
Inside, the camp smelled even worse than the outside. The camp was a mass of small tents and hodgepodge buildings. Everything was disorganized, muddy, and dirty. There were huge black pits into which the Sontars were whipping the boys and girls. The children there were covered in black coal dust. Their tear-filled eyes were dazed and pleading.
Andrew turned away from their faces and tried looking beyond the misery, at the sky. But even the sky looked dirty. It was filled with a grimy haze created from piles of burning coal, that had been heaped around the camp.
“That's what we're going to look like pretty soon,” Freddie whispered to Talic and Andrew, pointing to a boy whose skin was completely black from working in the coalmines. His dark skin made the whites of his eyes look even whiter, and his sad expression looked so full of misery that the boys had to look away.
Sontar soldiers removed their shackles, then shoved the children brutally over to a strong, sweaty man with a mouthful of rotten teeth and bulging biceps that looked like they had been forged out of metal. The man stood in a little booth, leaning over a fire with a hot branding iron in his hand.
“Get’em over here, quick!” the man ordered, placing his foot on a stool, and waving the hot iron in the air. “And hold em down.”
The boys struggled against the Sontars, as a red-hot iron was placed onto the heels of their feet, searing the number 4998, into Talic's foot, and 4999 into Freddie's. The man was about to do the same thing to Andrew’s foot, but the Sontar captain stopped him.
“No. This one’s special. We need to be able to tell him from the rest of the children so we know who he is when the soldiers come to take him to the Fallen One. Mark him with this.” He handed the man a different sort of iron. The iron bore no numbers, only three star shaped symbols. The Sontar grasped Andrew’s hair, and yanked his neck back, exposing his skin, as the man with the hot iron loomed over him.
Andrew screamed, as the markings were burned into the skin under the side of his jaw, the smell of burnt flesh permeating the air. After it was finished, the burly man pushed Andrew away, into a long line of limping children, where they were handed a dry lump of moldy bread, and a small flask of dark river water to share. Freddie, Andrew and Talic were then shoved into a dumpy tent with little more to offer, than protection from the wind.
They huddled together, feeling miserable, tired, and frightened.
“Oh, my foot,” Talic moaned. “It'll never be the same again, never! What girl will ever look at a guy with a disfigured foot?”
Andrew grimaced, carefully feeling the burned skin on his neck under his right ear. “Maybe a girl who likes numbers?”
“Hah, very funny!”
“Well,” Freddie suggested, “from the looks of it, everyone our age is going to have numbers stamped into their feet.”
“Not everyone,” Andrew murmured, feeling irritated that he had been singled out again, and openly branded as DIFFERENT.
“Least you will be able walk decent,” Talic said, envying Andrew. “It’s going to take a week for me to be able to walk normal.”
“Yeah, but what I’d give to be the same as everybody else,” Andrew let out a bitter laugh and tossed the moldy bread they'd been given, to the ground in disgust. “Even the bread here is awful. What are we going to do?”
“Don't throw it away,” Freddie exclaimed, grabbing the discarded bread. “It may be all we'll get for a long time.” He picked up a rock and hammered the bread until it broke into small pieces, and handed bits of it to both of his friends.
“Great.” Talic puckered up his small nose, glaring at the pieces of dry bread like they were rabbit droppings. “I can put the rocks in my mouth and break my teeth out.”
Freddie patted his friend on the back. “Lighten up, my friend. Put the bread in your mouth and wait for your spit to make it soft.”
“What happens when you don't have any spit?” Talic wondered. “Then what?”
“Then give it to me and I’ll spit on it.”
“I can’t believe you just said that. Gross!”
“Sorry. I wasn’t serious.”
“Yeah, me either.” Talic turned away from Freddie. “You’re disgusting, you know that?”
Freddie laughed, and lay down on his back. “Coming from you, Talic I should take that as a compliment.”
***
Days of endless monotony and work followed the poor boys in the coalmines of Nookpot, until they could no longer distinguish one day from the next. Andrew had thought that he would soon be summoned away from the mines and taken to the Fa
llen One, as the Sontars called him, where perhaps his questions about himself would at least be answered before he died. However it seemed that the Sontars had forgotten all about him. Perhaps, Talic and Freddie were right, perhaps he was just like everyone else. The longer he worked in the mines of Nookpot, the more he could not tell himself apart from anyone else there. Their skin become dirty and dark, so much so that the soot obliterated the markings on Andrew’s neck, as well as the diamond marks on his hands, making him look like every other boy there. Dark, miserable, dirty, and hopeless.
On a gray dismal morning, Andrew awoke to a loud sound outside his tent. Freddie and Talic were still sound asleep. They were so tired, that Andrew did not wake them. Curious, Andrew peered outside, and gasped.
Everywhere was in chaos. Sontars were cracking whips and children were running about in an uproar. It appeared that a mine in which many children had been working had collapsed.
The Sontars herded the children, who were trying to rescue the victims, away from the collapsed pit, threatening to kill anyone who dared help them.
Andrew clenched his fists, angrily. The poor children trapped in the pit, would all die if not helped soon. He waited until all grew quiet, then stole away from his tent to the opening of the collapsed pit, in hopes of finding some survivors.
He carefully glanced into the collapsed mine. Coal dust still hung in the air, causing him to cough. Holding his soiled shirt over his face, he wormed his way through broken boards and over mounds of fallen dirt. The pit stunk like wet coal and moldy earth, with water dripping from above. He made his way under fallen planks and over rocks until his way became completely obstructed by fallen earth and stones.
There was no way he could dig through the mass of debris by himself. All those poor children would die.
“It isn’t fair!” he cried, flinging away stones and dirt, until his tired muscles ached and his skin was black. Too tired to do anything else he collapsed on the heap of rubble, exhausted. He wanted to die, wanted the horrible world around him to disappear. Didn't anybody care about all those children? Perhaps, he thought, the children trapped behind the rubble were better off, anyhow.
Dejected, he absently pulled himself up by a low-hanging tree root that hung down the side of the cave walls. The dangling tree root suddenly gave way at his touch. Andrew fell back, pulling the trees root with him, and pulling down a cloud of broken earth and loose stones.
He covered his head with his hands, as earth and rocks crashed around him. When all became silent, he sat up, groaned, and brushed the dirt away, coughing as the coal dust settled. The tree's long roots that he'd held onto had mysteriously disappeared, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the cave walls.
He stood slowly, and called down the hole that had been created from the vanished root. “Hello?” His voice echoed eerily. The coal dust hung in the air like dark vaporous ghosts, frightening and ominous. Andrew held up his hands, hoping the light from his palms would illuminate the darkness.
After a long silence, a loud exclamation of joy filled the air, resounding in magnitude as hundreds of voices joined with it.
Andrew stood back, and watched in amazement as the children who'd been trapped in the cave, came from the hole and ran past him, fleeing from their death trap, like black bats who'd been disturbed.
He followed the children out into the light, feeling happy and joyful. The children had been saved, and he was their hero for once in his life!
~~~~
Chapter Four
The Trolim
The Sontars cracked their whips, quickly collecting the freed children, questioning them, trying to get them to reveal who had saved them. But no one dared tell. Because Andrew had saved them, they respected him too much to have him killed on their account. Because they refused to cooperate, the children were made to work double time.
“It’s time you dirty brats learn the meaning of work,” a merciless Sontar cried, shoving Andrew and the freed children onto an unstable platform. The platform was lowered slowly immersing them in a black sheet of darkness. Once at the bottom, Andrew stood, blinking as his eyes grew accustom to the darkness. The smell of coal dust was stifling. He shivered in the cold. Gloomy torches lined the walls of the dark endless tunnels, where Sontars stood ready, watching the children like hungry vultures.
“Over there!” a Sontar ordered, pointing down the tunnel. “Start shoveling coal into the bins, you worthless shadows.”
The children were handed small shovels, then they were pushed like cogs of a machine into a long row, where they shoveled the dirty coal into little carts.
As Andrew worked, he thought wistfully of the tired children who had just escaped from being suffocated to death, only to be suffocated by another power. Was there no end to this? If the children were too slow, the Sontars would crack down hard on their backs with stinging whips.
Row after row of children shoveled coal, up and down, in and out. The repetition was mind-deadening, and the strain on their already tired shoulders and arms was too much.
Andrew's mind grew numb. How long had they been working in this horrible, black pit? Here, it was always night, always cold, always damp.
When Freddie, Talic, and Andrew would pass each other, each would whisper some words of comfort, like, “You're looking fine,” or, “Keep on going. They'll give us a break soon,” or, “Remember how nice the sun looks?”
While Andrew had been working, every so often, he'd notice something lurking in the shadows of the cave that would lash out and whip one of the passers by. Weeks of passing by this certain dark wall, where an unseen enemy awaited, had taken its toll on Andrew. It angered him as he stared at the dark corner, wishing that the rocks from above would crush the unseen tormentor.
The hidden creature stirred at Andrew's hard gaze. Andrew smiled to himself, glad that he was causing the creature discomfort as he continued to gaze in its direction. As the minutes passed, the creature grew more irritable and more agitated. Without warning, the thing jerked from its always hidden position and cracked its whip across Andrew's arm, yanking him to the ground.
“Stare at me again like that,” the being cried, “and I'll whip you so hard that your flesh falls from your bones!”
“I wont’!” Andrew yelped. “I promise.”
The being laughed in short hiccupping gulps, “you...he...ha...he...better...not, you black beetle!” The being turned and passed in front of a low-burning torch, silhouetting the creature so that its ugliness was visible to all.
Those who hadn't seen the creature before, let out a low gasp and stopped in their tracks, staring at it with fascinated disgust. It was a Trolim, a creature they’d only heard about in old story books. It was a small being, with transparent, purple skin, big bulgy eyes, and hair like coarse sagebrush, with big ears that drooped down almost to the floor.
The creature greatly disliked being stared at, for when eyes were upon him nothing was hidden---even its repulsive, little heart thumping against its chest was visible. Clear purplish slobber dribbled from its mouth and its eyes bulged.
“Stupid slaves!” the Trolim screeched, turning to face the gaping children. “Stop looking at me! STOP!”
“Why, it looks as naked as a fish egg!” Talic exclaimed, not even thinking.
Before Talic had a chance to expound any further, the Trolim let out a horrific squeal and cracked its whip over Talic's back so hard that it made him drop the bucket of coal he'd been carrying. The Trolim raised the whip again. “I’ll kill you, boy!”
Something snapped inside Andrew. Without realizing it, he found himself running towards the Trolim in anger. This was the last straw. There were only so many things a boy could take before he broke. No one hurt his friends. No one!
Before the whip cracked down on his friend, he caught it mid air and yanked the Trolim away from his friend.
“Get back in line, you dirty soot-slave!” the Trolim cried.
Andrew smiled, feeling suddenly powerful. This litt
le beast actually looked afraid of him. Andrew didn't care if he got into trouble. Right now, he didn't care if he died. He'd had it with the dirty little monster. Andrew smacked the creature in the belly with his coal shovel, knocking it against the wall. Its belly jiggled up and down like clear jelly in a jam jar.
“Help!” the Trolim screamed, its transparent body glowing as orange as a pumpkin as it stood by the torchlight.
The Trolim hissed and showed a mouthful of sharp little teeth that dripped in purple spit.“Touch me, you die!”
Andrew shook his head and raised the shovel high. Before he brought it down, the Trolim let out a yelping screech, clambered onto Andrew's back, and sunk its sharp teeth into the soft skin of his neck. Andrew cried out in pain and anger, ramming his back against the side of the tunnel. The Trolim's body bulged, like a frog egg being squished between two fingers. Andrew rammed his back against the back of the wall again, and again, only to have the Trolim dig its teeth further into Andrew’s flesh.
“Let go!” Andrew yelled, grabbing the Trolim by its white tail. “Get, off, me!”
Unexpectedly, the Trolim's whole frame quaked as if he'd been shocked by Andrew’s touch, causing Andrew's arm to feel extraordinarily strong and hot, as if an electrical current had ran through it.
“Awwwgggggg,” the Trolim screeched. “Helpppppppp!”
Andrew let go of the beast's tail, and the Trolim fell to the ground, twitching and moaning. The Trolim's tail had turned as shriveled as a dark piece of dry jerky that oozed purple goo.
Andrew dropped to his knees, holding out his hands, staring at them with amazement. The electricity that had run through them felt powerful, so much so that it had burned his palms, causing large blisters to form over the glowing diamond marks.