In the Fall (c) copr all rights reserved 1995 by T.J.Hardman, Jr. HTML version of In The Fall (c) copr all rights reserved 1996 by T.J.Hardman, Jr and TJH Internet SP. No part of this work may be reproduced, copied or distributed without the express handwritten permission of the author, with the exception of on-screen viewing. This HTML version is replete with Altavista search-engine links as well as links to known sites containing relevant or instructive material. TJH Internet SP is not responsible for the content of those sites. Anyone charging any fee for this work (other than an internet access fee) is in violation of copyright law, and will be fully prosecuted. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to any persons living or dead are entirely coincidental. Some use may be made herein of real locations or institutions, but such use is entirely fictional in intent. Any use of tradenames or trademarks is completely accidental, and is not to be interpreted as any attempt to either disparage or recommend.
The spring sunlight slanted gracefully among the ancient oaks. The robin sang, and the thrush, and somewhere a squirrel chucked and cawed at an intruder. The deer's ears flickered to track the sound, and then swung about again as the arrow hissed true to the mark. It took three bounding leaps and then hit the ground with a thud. Boy stood, and marking the sound, began to trace his way towards the thrashing in the underbrush that was the doe's last dance with Death.
When the deer's throat had stopped pulsing, he waited another moment in a silent prayer, thanking the animal for its gift, and allowing all consciousness to leave it before he began to clean and skin it. He completed his task, finally, and slung the deer for travel. He was a good ten miles from home.
His homeward way led up from this hillside glade, across the ridge. He faced himself uphill, shouldered the deer with a grunt and began to march up the game trail. Below him in the dale to the left was the rubbled remnant of one of the old trails, the one left by the Before People. The old trail was a longer, gentler climb, but he'd have had to cross the valley, and pick his way among the grass and vine-hummocked decaying fragments of the tarry gravel the Before People had used to cover most of their trails. The weather had been fairly dry recently, and the game trail's soft dirt and last year's leaves felt good to his moccassined feet, laden though he was with the deer carcass.
At the top of the ridge, he followed the trail past the bare rocks that crowned the ridge. He never tired of this view, no matter that he'd seen it countless times. From this ridge, he could see the towers and bridges of the Before village.
He called it Pissberr. The Old Man had forbidden them to visit. It was, he said a dangerous place. Boy had scoffed at the idea, and then the Old Man had taken him from the small town where they lived to the outskirts of a nearby larger town, and there the old man had shown him some things. The Old Man was a very strange person, nearly a god to Boy and the other Talking Kids. The Old Man, it was said, knew everything. The Old Man denied that, with an odd smile that none of them had ever smiled, and so none of them knew that was the smile of a man who knew how inadequate was his knowledge, and who knew how much of what he did know he'd rather forget.
In the abandoned Suburbs, as the Old Man called them, were very nice houses, nicer by far than the cold old stone houses that they and the Old Man called Home. These houses, though, were very dangerous. They had thin walls, walls that could be opened with an axe and a minute's effort. Their windows were large, and glassless, and could not be easily closed. And the interiors of most of the rooms were visible through those windows, and from other windows in other houses! Strategically, this was madness.
The Old Man had shown him that in one room of one house, a person standing almost anywhere in the room could be hit with a bowshot from at least five houses. Boy, a sure marksman, wondered at the Old Man's underestimation. He could have placed the shot from any of forty windows in eight houses. The Old Man was not a mighty hunter, but he was indeed fairly wise as a strategist. They had grabbed what they had come for, photovoltaic cells from the roof of one all-glass house (insanity!) and had made their retreat.
He once asked the Old Man what it was that the Old Man did with these relics of the past. The Old Man had smiled at him, and told him to keep up with his reading, and one day he would know without being told. Boy rather doubted it. The Books which the Old Man gave him mostly told incomprehensible stories about the children of the Before People. Their lives were outside of his experience. There was little in common between this Pennsylvania forest teen and the suburban children of a technophilic age. Sometimes the Books did make sense, like the Robinson Crusoe book. Well, it sort of made sense, but he still didn't believe that there was a lake half as big as the world, or that people sailed boats bigger than houses. Really big canoes, maybe, but not that big. It was funny, though, the Robinson Crusoe book made more sense, so far as the living therein described went, but they spoke so strangely. The children in the other Books lived senseless lives with senseless concerns, but spoke almost like he did. But their lives!
Why would children complain about being allowed to be carried by a machine to a nearby place where a great variety of ready provisions were stored? Why would they complain about being required to attend school? Boy considered every moment he was allowed to spend with the Old Man as a privelege, and longed for the day when he would be allowed to visit the Library. It was an incredibly fascinating building, solid stone, what the Old Man called Granite, and the windows and all but two doors had been bricked up by the Old Man. Mystery was half of the appeal, though the Old Man's casual remark that there were thousands of books inside sent Boy into ecstasies of imagination. Boy often wondered what the Old Man was doing to provide light in there. The Old Man claimed that the photovoltaic panels they occasionally salvaged lighted the place, but he couldn't see how small squares of black opaque stone could transmit light through the slate roof of the old building. The Old Man grinned and told him to keep reading.
Boy tired of looking at the jumble of spring overgrowth and tumbled towers that defined the Pissberr horizon, and began to descend the trail to Home. Sunlight glinted off of the river, between the rusted teeth of bridge abuttments and girders. To the west of Pissberr, the light glistened bright off of the plastic coating of the great Ohio bridge, and he could trace the greenish- black ribbon of the Road which led from it past the hamlet of which Home was an outlying estate.
He had asked the Old Man how old the Road was, and the Old Man had said, it's forty-four years younger than I am. Boy decided that this meant it had always been there.
He picked his way down to the Road, and then gathered himself to cross it. For some reason, setting foot on the surface always gave him an unsettled feeling, as if something unseen waited beyond his ken, biding its chance to descend on him without warning or mercy. He placed his foot on the surface, which as always felt somehow soft through the soles of his moccassins, and then placed his weight fully atop the surface. Beneath the softness was a hardness that somehow felt harder than rock. He looked both ways, and then sprinted as best he might under the weight of the doe. He reached the other side of the Road, a good two hundred meters, and paused, gasping, after throwing down the doe. He drank greedily from his waterskin.
As he scanned the edge of the Road, he glimpsed large motion in the grasses which grew tall to the edge of the unmarkable surface of the Road. He looked more closely, and it became visible as one of the Old People. He shouldered his load, and struck off through the woods again. The Old People rarely bothered one. The deer he was carrying was destined for the stewpot that fed both the Old People and the Kids. True to form, the Old female crashed through the woods parallel to the game trail (which was at this point more of a cowpath), finally emerging as he entered the cluster of old stone houses that were Home. It was Hope's mother. She joined a group of the Old ones who were all sitting around the stewpot, grooming each other. Two of the females were sewing rips in each others' dresses, and one late-twenties female held another's baby to her breast while that one cut her hair. Hope's mother cooed and jabbered (senselessly of course) to the crowd, and even Boy's own father, a grumpy old recluse, looked over to watch him carry in their dinner. Boy's father rose, yawning and scratching, and joined Boy at the dressing table. Boy thumped the doe's carcass onto the table, and his father grumbled and prodded the deer, and finally satisfied that there was nothing wrong with the skinning or the carcass, drew his knife and began to carve the meat into joints and parts suitable for the fires that the women tended.
Boy grumbled back, and then wandered off to the fireside. Granny, the oldest female there, his own mother's mother, stirred roots in her stewpot, occasionally making some odd sound or another, generally some vocal repetition of some forest noise. She seemed to be decocting some sassafras, boiling it endlessly as she added more sassafras tea to the thickening brew, slowly boiling away the moisture. He had to admit the stuff was pretty good when you had a sore throat. Granny was so old that she might even remember what it had been like right after the Before People died. The Kids always asked the Old Man what that time had been like, and the Old Man usually sort of choked a little bit, and changed the subject. He usually got a sort of funny light in his eyes, and you could tell that he was remembering the way things were, and sometimes, Boy thought he saw that light in Granny's eyes. Granny was by far the Oldest one, save the Old Man himself... but whatever secrets Granny had in her memory, there they would stay, for Granny, like all of the People except perhaps a quarter of Boy's generation, was Bewildered.
Boy considered "bewildered" to be a great word. He had never thought much about the fact that his parents, and most of his tribe, were Wild. It was simply life. Then one day the sounds that Old Man always made, repetitious sounds unlike the random voicings of his parents, began to make sense. A "tree" was a tree, and a "bird" was a bird, and the Old Man was "Wilson", now and forever, always.
He had begun to vocalize at birth, of course, being a hominid infant, heir to the specialized brain and throat designed around the articulation of speech. The difference the Wilson had noticed about this boy, and a few others, was that the vocalizations were consistent, identification of sound with content. The lyric babbling and muttering of the Old Ones was meaningless as music, which it sometimes was. Wilson often thanked whatever justice there might be that Music had not disappeared from the world along with the Word. The ordinary children responded to any child-call tone from any adult by looking about, and then coming immediately when they saw a parent's finger pointed at them, but this child responded to the word Boy, no matter what tone of voice you said it in, and so he was named, and he was the first.
Boy had finally realized that this simple thing, something he shared with Wilson and later a few others, was something beyond his parents abilities, forever. He did not love them less, but as he grew older and more independent, he took to accompanying Wilson more and more. His parents of course did not object, for Boy's was a fairly large family, and if an Uncle was available to teach a boy the tasks of manhood, bowmanship, stickfighting, hutbuilding, that was fine with them. Also, Boy's father had been also taught by Wilson, and the Old Man had said that he'd helped catch the group of five women and three children who had become part of the tribe, one of whom had become Boy's mother.
According to the Old Man, they hadn't been too hard to catch. They had begun to occupy the territory between the great river Wilson called Ohio and their own Home, and Boy's father and three others had waited with a bag of rabbits and furs, and had sprung upon the ill-clad women as they scavenged the edges of one of the decaying Suburbs. The terrified women had clung together, shivering (each with a hidden hand on a hidden knife, to be sure), and the men had opened their bag and displayed the food and rawcloth skins, and their sharp knives and stout bows, and the women decided that these might actually be rather nice fellows, and followed them home. Granny, not then so old or haggard, had led the defection. Though there was a spare not-unattractive woman in the crowd (which had flirted from man to man until the men had each selected one) she and Granny slept alone under the forested green night of Appalachia, for the Old Man took no women. Boy, by now old enough to have some interest in such things (Old Man said he was thirteen), asked Old Man Wilson why he didn't have a mate. He was the oldest, wisest man in town, surely he could point and a woman would come. There were extra women, as the men tended to die on the hunt or in battles faster than the women died in childbirth. Any of them would have had the Old Man in an instant, but they all knew by now to not try his patience. Wilson just hung his head, and said nothing when Boy asked him this, and Boy knew that look. It meant that there was something that the Old Man remembered all too well.
Wilson had named all of the people in the tribe that had one day moved into the territory he defended, but only in the last fifteen years had any ever become aware that they had been named. After Boy, two years later, Hope had been born, and by the time Boy was speaking childishly, Hope had earned her name. At first, she'd just been Jessi, but now, she was the oldest of the speaking female children. After Hope, it had been another four years before another child had earned a name, but since then all but three of the children had become speakers.
When your father was just a boy your age, Boy, said the Old Man, his father led him and a band of perhaps thirty across the Ohio, probably in flight from the elves of the west. There had been eight men and ten women of scattered ages, and a scattering of maybe twenty children from five to ten or so. Wilson didn't ever much count babes-in-arms, for so many of them died. They had been camped around Home for some time before they even knew Wilson was there in the Library. When he finally emerged, Boy's grandfather had of course challenged him, and of course, the Old Man, who looked barely middle-aged but had been in probably ten thousand vicious fights, had taken the headman's knife away from him, and then given it back. In the traditions of the tribe, such was an honorable defeat, and the headman had become the subordinate, cemented by Wilson's demonstration of his own grandeur when he feasted them all into one of the newly-unsealed stone buildings of Home. After these gifts of leadership, the providing of secure shelter and food, they were Wilson's friends for life. In this hard and brutal world, such friendship and leadership were vanishingly rare, and such a potlatch as Wilson had thrown was unknown. As time went on, and Wilson endured, he made them rich beyond wealth in the coin of the times. Wilson had antiseptics, bonesetting ability, and a stock of stainless-alloy sewing needles, not to mention a still. He also had the ability to make a crude penicillin. They came to revere him, awestruck parents presenting their children to him, and the children picked up on the parent's reverence.
Their awe and trust only increased during the battle with the elves, who had made a foray deep into the Manrealm east of the Mississippi river.
The elves were very manlike, at first appearance. One could only discern them in aggregate, not in particular. A Man might have large ears, or ears that sat high upon their head, or eyes that could see backward, but Men generally couldn't use their little finger as an opposable secondary thumb, and until Boy and the other Kids came along, Men couldn't speak. Wilson was himself careful never to converse with any of the Kids when the Unspeaking were around, since most of the elder Unspeaking knew well that conversations meant elves were present. Inability to understand didn't seem to preclude the recognition of speech as speech.
Wilson had first encountered elves long ago. They were the descendants of persons who had been gene-modified by a partially- effective immune-enhancement process, and while they weren't aphasic, they weren't exactly what he, in younger days, would have called normal people. They regarded (not without some reasons) all of those stricken with the aphasic plague as inferior beings. Wilson found their manners when dealing with the Unspeaking to be abominable. Once, hidden in a spyhole, through a periscope he'd seen a party of elves come upon a mixed group of juveniles who'd been foraging for summer berries and grubs. They'd gone through the traditional peace rituals, and then began to harrass the juveniles.
The juveniles were, of course, task-active, in hot pursuit of tasty beetle larvae and berries. The elves, talking nonstop, decided to help the juveniles, assisting in the overturning of huge treetrunks which might hide several bellies-full of larvae. The system that the Men used to compensate for their aphasia was that everyone put a hand on the trunk, and all lifted, and whichever way it seemed to be going, everyone would assist that motion, until a fall-over point was reached, and then people would slow down, balance the weight, and all would lock eyes, and slowly release the control of the weight to one person, and then the crew backed off, and the controller would give it that last push, and scamper back out of range. With elves in the picture, it went about the same, except that at the balance point, one of the elves would rush in, add his weight, and knock the treetrunk past the balance point, generally onto the feet of whoever was in control, generally the person regarded as group leader.
Wilson watched "helpful" elves break one teen's toes, drop a rock onto another one's hands, and when the youths began to screech and moan at the elves, watched the elves kill all of the males, and disfigure the females. This wasn't hard, they'd already mostly incapacitated two of the three males, and at any rate, the juveniles were no match for experienced adults. Wilson zoomed the old surveillance periscope in tightly to try to lipread the elves' speech, and he kept seeing things that he perceived as statements like, yup, the big dummy's there, there ya go, drop it, thud! The elves never laughed, or perhaps it was the fact that all of their speech seemed to be a sort of controlled laugh, or happy expletive. Wilson had seen similar displays out west, which had gotten much worse as the population of men had thinned, and the numbers of elves had risen. Wilson had publicly done an excellent imitation of the aphasic people, and had mostly been left alone, but when he had listened to a gathering group of elves nonchalantly discussing strategy and assigning targets, openly describing roles in an upcoming mass-murder scheduled for the very immediate future, he had pulled a grenade from beneath his shapeless baggy skins, set the timer for two seconds, and tossed it to the elves, yelling "Catch!" Caught off guard by a man speaking, one of the elves actually caught it. The elf disappeared, along with most of his companions. At least, they fell to earth, and did not move. Wilson shot three of them fleeing, knowing full well that if the word of a speaking man got out, it was likely that wave upon wave of elves would return, seeking him until he could be found and killed, and probably indiscriminately slaughtering all Men they found until they felt secure.
Wilson wasn't going to hang around and see if he had gotten them all. He headed back east that very night. It was well that he did.
The elves came in the gloaming, that first useful light between the false-dawn and the true daybreak. Their bodies were shadows in the fading dusk, hidden by their rich golden tans. In the fall, they would have been nearly invisible against the yellow leaves of hill-Aspen so common in the Rocky Mountains, but here, their tans and buckskins clashed with the greens of the humid east. They were adapted for the worlds of sand and grassland, and in the forests near Home, the Men (despite their lack of communications and verbalizable strategy) had an advantage. The Old Man had been there to drill them.
The elves were very fast, and very strong for their size, but their much slighter builds made them no match for men who could simply grab an elf (once disarmed), pick it up, and rush it headfirst into a tree. The elves were much better with knives, but they also had a tendency to step right into pitfalls, and they didn't climb very well at all. They tended to favor dropping their knives, and climbing with both hands, in which case the men put their heads into trees; or, they climbed gripping their knives in their teeth, in which case a club in the teeth generally made them drop their knives along with their teeth. Also, they were rather unimaginative in strategy, preferring to rely on technique and the fact that their martial art was quite different from that of Men, making use as it did of vastly different articulation in the shoulder joints. The Old Man had seen this before, and wasn't surprised, and he managed to convey to the others the need to beware of bizarre strikes coming seemingly from nowhere. Also, he had a strategic advantage he was able to convey through drill. He hadn't lived this long by failing to plan ahead for all forseeable eventualities, and he had devised several fallback plans. The elves evidently hadn't expected to find organized opposition, and so when they were taken in ambush, they were quickly dispatched. Wilson wondered if he had allowed prejudice to motivate him to behave despicably. Perhaps these were on no evil errand - but when he looked in their packs and saw that each had a collection of at least twenty heavily salted baby scrotums, he decided that he might have not been severe enough. The leader of the elves had other trophies of even more dubious taste, and Wilson hoped that these were the result of a personal predilection for fetishes, and not a cultural norm.
In the search of their belongings, he also found a few items that he had not expected to find. There was an old child's beltcom, and a photovoltaic recharger. The child's beltcom had no real comm capabilities, but it did have a pretty good multimedia educator in it, complete with an elementary atlas. He traced all of the functions, and then decided that they had not been using this for anything other than the atlas, and tracing the command history-log, he discerned that they had only hit on that by accident. There was no method to their search, evidently one had noticed that the plug on the recharger fit the recharge socket on the com, and had hooked it up long enough to recharge the toy.
Wilson had not carried a beltcom in a great many years. Comspace had become silent, mostly, except for the whispering of static ghosts, with the groundbased mainframes going offline en masse at the end of the collapse. He tried the few comlinks on this one, and as he expected, not even the children's educational com was online. No surprise there.
He led the men in a clean-up, disguising the scene of battle, burying the fallen elves, all of them, in the pits that had trapped them. He disposed of the trophies in solemn ritual, and then they made their way home.
Boy, having delivered his deer, sat to one side of the largest of the houses that Home comprised. From his hiding place within his pack, he drew forth a cherished Book. He carefully hid the Books which the Old Man gave him, not wanting a repetition of the incident where the woman who'd been getting her haircut had gotten ahold of one of the Books, called "People at Work". She'd run, cooing gleefully, to the fire, and her happy noises had attracted everyone in the area to come and see the new treasure, whatever it might be. Even Granny had hobbled forth from her place by the stewpots, where she also tended the hissing still, and the cool- cellar full of brewing beer and the bubbling antibiotic vat. It was a book about the Before times, with pretty pictures on every page, and it had been passed from hand to hand, and totally destroyed as every hand that touched it tore from it a page of pretty pictures. The pages had soon fluttered to the ground, their novelty lost, and Boy had scurried, crying, to gather the pages from the breezes that stirred them about the grounds. The Old Man had said little to him, other than telling him that while that was not a very important book, so far as he knew, it was the only one like it, and they certainly weren't making any more books. Boy had run home, howling as if whipped, and he hid from Wilson for the next few days, until one day Wilson had shown him that book, with the pages re-attached somehow, all save a few. It was still pretty rough-looking, but the Old Man told him that it was not the appearance that counted, but the information within. Boy had been greatly relieved, nearly bursting into tears at having been forgiven by his tribe's only near-god.
Granny -- as usual warming herself by the fire, no matter the early fall humidity and heat -- had looked over and seen them, and had hobbled over. For some reason, the Old Man was always uncomfortable around Granny, and he started to leave, but one of Granny's rare voluntary vocalizations made him pause, and as she came, she pulled from an apron pocket neatly folded scraps of brightly colored paper. She peered at them for one last time, and as she gazed at them, Boy saw that odd light of remembrance come into her eyes, and into Wilson's eyes also. She started to turn away, and then paused, to pull one more scrap of paper from the apron, which she unfolded. It had some incomprehensible picture of the old time, a clean white room filled with all sorts of shiny tables and tools, with boxes with pictures and writing on them mounted on the walls, and a bright light overhead. Men and women wore green costumes and white masks and gloves, and gathered around a table where it seemed someone lay mostly covered by a blue cloth. The masked people held odd tools. Granny looked at the picture, and shivered. She handed the picture to Wilson, and pointed at one of the gowned women in green, and Wilson nodded, and handed the picture back to her, and helped her back to her fire where he sat with her for a long time.
The Book that Boy now held was called "What's Inside of Me?" It was about a little boy who wanted to know what was inside of him. Boy knew pretty well what was inside of him, having seen the aftermath of a few skirmishes, pretty much the same thing as was inside of the deer he cleaned. In the book, though, it showed a boy going to a Doctor's Office (whatever that might be), where a smiling woman dressed in pink clothing took him to a room with a huge machine, and sat him on a table, and somehow made the machine show him pictures of what was inside of him. It showed various parts, and named them. Boy was fascinated to find that there were very many kinds of guts, each with their own name. He was puzzling out the pronunciation of 'intestines' when a shadow crossed over him. He looked up at the Old Man.
"Nice bag, Boy," said Wilson, quietly, scarcely moving his lips as he danced a pantomime meaning roughly the same thing. "That doe should feed us for a few days."
"Yup," said Boy, likewise quietly, nodding his head yes.
"How do you like the book?" Wilson signed as they spoke, a dance of the hunter.
"I like it. Some of the words are pretty hard, though. What's this one, Intuh-Stines?" Boy rose, and pantomimed query of destination.
"Uh, in-TEST-ins. Figure out what they do yet?" Wilson pantomimed "the woods".
"Uh, food goes there after it goes through the stomach?" And what do we hunt? mimed Boy.
"You got it. Chewing prepares food for the stomach, and the stomach prepares the food for the small intestine, and they prepare the food for the large intestine." Wilson mimed a scouting of the ground.
"Okay. So what does the liver do?" Boy nodded assent.
"You'll just have to keep reading. But later. For now, let's just go out and check traplines." Wilson turned away as Boy began stuffing the Book into his daypack.
"Sure," said Boy.
Wilson led Boy into the woods along the edge of the Road. Boy asked Wilson why it was that the Road had not decayed like the other trails of the Before People. This was Boy's most oft- repeated question, and Wilson had developed a litany of sorts to respond to this. Wilson saw the Boy's lips move as Wilson spoke, and knew that the boy was memorizing this. Wilson told him that the Road was special, the last of the monuments that the Before People had left, the great project that had caused the enemies of the Before People to bring them down.
"But if the Before People had such skill and power to build something as forever as the Road, who could bring them down?" asked Boy.
"The Before People who lived in this land were all one people, but there are other lands, other people, who had different ways of life, different ways of looking at the world. They were rivals to the Before People, and had great powers like the Before People had. The Before People had skills to work with matter, to shape dead things such as rock and stone and wood and the parts of those things, and they shaped those simple dead things into complex dead things, called machines. They used their machines to build great cities, and they worked with their machines to make these great lands feed a thousand people where we can now feed one.
"In these other lands, where the Rivals lived, they did not have such skills, instead of using great machines, they put people to work, for people feed themselves, and produce more people to do more work. They relied so much on human labor that they overbred, and they exceeded the ability of the land to feed them. Plagues overtook them, especially the plague of War, and when the plagues had gone, those who remained looked to the west with hateful eyes.
"They had their own scientists (which are the people who learn about the natures of things, especially the hidden natures). Some of these survived the plagues, and they wondered at the causes of plagues, and with their hateful eyes searched deep into the hidden natures, and they learned to make their own plagues. They believed that the Before People -- who had sensibly avoided plagues, indeed had allowed the Rivals to overbreed so badly by giving them preventatives to plagues -- had cast this plague upon them, and they did in return cast plagues upon the Before People. The Before People sent machines against the Rivals, and destroyed them as they destroyed us, though we sent them gifts of fire and a great smashing of their lands. They will bring no more plagues upon us, for if any of them live to carry on for the Rivals as we live to carry on for the Before People -- whose grandchild you are -- they live in pain and suffering, for the fires we sent to them burn for half of forever. We live well enough here, for the forests are green, and the grass grows well for the deer, and the bird sing their names for all to hear. Grain and meat abound in these lands, but in the Rivals' lands, those who live must eat sand."
Boy tried to digest this, and then asked, "But how is it that the Road endures but the other trails do not?"
"Our scientists looked deep into the hidden natures of matter, and there they discovered ways to make matter hold more tightly to itself. Great amounts of energy, manpower, and material were used to create this enduring work."
Wilson had explained some of these concepts to Boy, who understood that all energy was originally sunlight, but that it could come in a variety of forms, and could be applied in a number of ways.
"But why go to so much work just to have a place to walk? Especially since we never walk on it if we can avoid it?"
"We never walk on it, boy, because one never knows what else may travel upon this Road. When first it was built, this Road was intended to carry food for as many people as there are rocks in the creekbed by Home. For so much food and other goods to reach the people before it spoiled, great machines travelled this road, very quickly, covering in a half-hour's time the distance you could run in a day. These machines were almost the size of the houses we live in at Home. If one of them were to strike you, there would be nothing left of you. These machines had minds of their own, in the last days, and had no person controlling them. Sometimes when the Bewildered wandered onto the roads, one of these machines would kill one or several and in its simple way merely continue on to its destination. The deaths of the hapless Bewildered were so horrible that for three generations now, mothers who live near the Roads take their babies to the Roads and scare them, to make them afraid, so that they will not die... but the machines have not run for years, and so this is a tradition with no purpose."
"Why don't the machines run any more? Are they all destroyed?"
"I don't think so. Remember how I told you about energy? How it is sunlight, changed into many different forms?"
"Yes," said Boy.
"In the final days, the Before People had learned to create tiny suns, and to keep them in bottles, and these bottled suns gave energy to the Roads, and the machines took the energy from the Roads, and thus they moved. The Roads are dark now, with no energy. They were themselves built to last five hundred years, but the tiny captive suns, or actually, the bottles that contained them, were really very delicate, and required constant care. When most people could no longer speak, those who cared for the bottled suns could no longer keep those suns contained, and once the fires were extinguished, they could not be re-lit."
"Why not find one of these sun-bottles and light it yourself?"
Wilson stopped dead in his tracks, for this was a new track, and he had no ready litany. Wilson well knew that Boy must one day tell these tales to a new generation, and it would be better that the tale be told both as accurately and as generalistically as possible, for he knew that one day this might well be a new Genesis in a new Bible... and he wanted it to be both memorable and useful.
"I have told you that all of the things you can see are made up of things so small that you cannot see them? Water is made of two portions of one kind of these tiny atoms, and one portion of another. The bottled suns require the most pure fuel of the smallest parts of the most pure water, and we have no way to make such pure water, and no way to separate the parts. Even if we had the purest fuel required for this, it takes the power of a bottled sun to light the fires of another, and so far as I know, there are no such burning captive suns."
They had drawn near the next little village down the Road, a small hamlet where the neighboring group of Bewildered kept their camp. They were not so well organized as the people of Home, but they did fairly well by themselves. Wilson made frequent visits, but this was the first time Boy had been allowed to come.
Boy knew enough to cease speaking. No use getting attacked for being elves. Wilson did the traditional loud moan, which attracted the attention of the locals. The men who were present snatched up their arms, and rushed to meet them, drawing to a stop some fifteen feet away from Wilson and Boy. The largest of the men walked slowly forward, and recognized Wilson, and they shook hands. Boy they'd never seen before, and inspected him closely, circling him slowly. Wilson waved at Boy, and Boy opened his pack and drew out a small glass jar (jars were everywhere, you just had to go look for them, open them and clean out whatever foul waste was rotted therein) filled with Granny's Sassafras cold-remedy, and gave it to the closest man. He opened it, sniffed, and hooted amiably. Granny's Sassafras was reliable trade goods hereabouts. In the absence of shouts and the clash of arms, the women of the camp (who had suddenly vanished) began to peer from their hiding places. One, a girl of about Boy's age, was one of the first to come forth.
As Boy expected, the camp contained about fifteen women, five men, and a rowdy pack of children. All of the women had babes-in-arms, some carrying them on cradle-boards, some clutching them to their breasts. All of the women with babies eyed Wilson and Boy with open suspicion. Most of the adult women remained in the camp proper, occasionally screeching at the youngest of the child-pack. The mid-kids, old enough to wipe their own noses, but not quite old enough to be allowed into the deep woods, numbered about twenty, and they gathered about the strangers. There was only one male of Boy's age, perhaps two years older, and he slowly limped over, one leg badly healed from some childhood mishap. He bore with him a nicely tanned and worked quiver, which he presented to Wilson. Wilson accepted it with much ceremony, also examining the youth's leg. Boy rightly assumed that most of the males of his age or older were out hunting. This one must be learning the tanner's skills (and probably many others as well) as a trade for his inability to quietly stalk game.
Standing between the mothers and the mid-kids were the female youth of the village, eight in all, assessing Boy with calm eyes. Seeing his age, four of them departed, leaving the field until more appealing game should show itself. Of the three who remained, one hid behind the others, giggling, and the third, a rather gangling girl, remained aloof, but present. The one who had been the first to appear, leading the women's emergence, stood regarding him with bold eyes. Boy did his level best to refrain from fidgeting, instead watching Wilson and the village headman doing pantomime dances. Still he felt her eyes upon him, and when he looked around, the other two had gone, yet she remained. She continued to study him intensely. She was about his own age, perhaps fourteen, clad in an oversized oft-mended dress that had long ago lost its pattern, which hung loosely over the beginnings of curves. Her hair and eyes were as dark as winter's night.
Wilson and the headman stopped dancing, and Boy returned his attention to them as Wilson returned from the dancing. The Old Man motioned for him to get out another few jars of Granny's Sassafras, and Wilson also dug deep in his own pack. They again faced the group of village men, and Wilson drew forth from his pack a small brown stoneware jug which he opened to sip. He coughed slightly, and passed it to the village headman, who drank and also coughed. The men of the village drank each in his turn, and the jug was even passed to Boy. He drank, and nearly spit out the fire that burned his mouth, but swallowed and felt the fire turn to warmth as the moonshine killed the burning it created. He felt a presence, and turned to find the bold girl at his back. She was holding out her hand for the jug, and flustered, he passed it to her. She took a large gulp, and swallowed fiercely, and then began to cough and sputter. The village men, who had watched aghast as Boy handed her the jug, burst into gales of laughter. She glared at them all, but stood her ground, wobbling a little. Wilson grinned at Boy, and elbowed him in the ribs, and the men all laughed louder. The bold girl continued to glare, but decided to glare from a sitting position.
Wilson shook hands all around, and then pointed at the sun, and waved his arm in the direction of its travel three times. The village headman grunted assent. Wilson took Boy by the shoulder, turned him towards the woods, and marched off, leaving Boy to follow. He cast a last glance around him, especially noting the appraising if wobbly look of the bold girl, and he waved to the men and then followed Wilson into the woods.
When they were out of earshot, he asked Wilson, "What was that all about?"
Wilson showed all of his teeth, but it wasn't exactly a grin. "We're going hunting, boy. Three days from now, we'll meet back here, some from our village, some from theirs."
"What're we hunting? Bear?"
"We should be so lucky. Bear are easy compared to this. The village has lost a lot of infants recently, and the only tracks are those of a very large man."
"What can this be?" asked Boy, afraid he already knew.
"Looks like we're going to have us an ogre-hunt, god help us."
The small stream ran winding, burbling, down the green parkway that gave way to the young woods on the low hills of the enclosing valley. The Men (and the few Boys who were considered of an age for dangerous sports) crept quietly down from the crest, winding their ways towards the small stone hut that sat where this small stream joined to one slightly larger. They encircled the hut quietly, and two men crept to the door of the shambledly constructed dwelling. One readied a spear while the other cautiously pushed aside the foul skin which hung as a door. There was nothing living inside. The man emerged, shaken. His demeanor fiercened as he hurried back to the cover of the bushes. His partner also returned to cover with a new determination.
Wilson and the boy watched the two men carefully. The first pantomimed, cradling his arms as if carrying an infant, and then he pantomimed a fierce biting. He pointed and thumped at his own ribs, counting them, and pointed back at the hovel. The other scout nodded agreement. Each member of the party scanned the faces of their comrades, and they all nodded at once and melted into the woods, following the hoot of one who had found a quite recent trail.
Four hours later, they marched silently, but not so silently as they had earlier stalked the camp of the person Wilson named Ogre. They were now on the endtrail of the person's recent passage, and while they had no wish to alarm the prey, they also wanted to make good time. They fairly flew along this game trail beside the small stream, moccasins slopping mud as they crossed small springflows, or softly crunching pine-needle carpet as they spread out among the piney scrub that grew near the border between the stream's floodplain and the sides of the steepening hills. Scouts had moved up to cover the crests on either side. One stopped, and pointed as he began to fall back to cover. His partner, a bit further along and down the hillside, crept up to the brink. He pointed back at them and began to point out approaches. Wilson quickly pointed at Boy and at three other youths, and bade them follow him.
As the men swarmed slowly up the hill, Wilson led the youths, of whom Boy was the smallest, further down the stream. The hills on either side became rather steeper, and with more rock exposed they became palisades, and later precipices. The valley cut by the stream became lower, wider, more fenly. They followed the leftward curve of the palisade, sticking to the game trail now. Wilson looked back to see a man circling along the brink, motioning them on. Wilson sent the oldest of his crew to the fore, and they followed behind, until he slowed, and then stopped, and motioned for them to come to his rear. Wilson peered around the edge of the concealing bush, and grimaced.
Five bark-and-bough lean-to huts lay in the clearing off of this game trail, and three nearly-complete stone huts circled a small fire, which licked miserly at a small bundle of twigs. The inhabitants of the camp were not immediately visible. They waited in silence. Soon, they heard a stirring in a lean-to, and shortly thereafter, a female emerged, and stretching grandiosely, scratched her behind. She finished her yawn and smacked her lips a few times, and then wandered over by the fire. She seemed to be young, no more than a teenager. She rooted around in the ashes of the fireplace, perhaps looking for scraps. She found nothing, and consoled herself by feeding the fire a twig or two. The fire licked at her fingers as they lingered to gather a bit of warmth. Wilson looked back to catch the attention of the man on the cliffside, and Wilson swept his hand to indicate his group, and thrust his flattened palm to the ground, to indicate they'd remain there. He pointed at the man on the cliff, and waved approach paths, and an encirclement. The man pointed elsewhere, and then began to signal. Wilson heard answering small sounds in the brush. He waited until they ceased, and then he pointed back to the man on the cliff, and indicated that he should close in to occupy their position. He joined them five minutes later, and Wilson led the boys farther back down the game trail, and diverted them off to the streamside where they began to rock-hop toward the nearby river.
Near the river, they slowed to creep through the thick brush which lined the banks. Upstream, the Ohio brawled through a rocky bed, and downstream, they saw the rusted pilings and spalled concrete of one of the Before People's bridges. At the footment of the bridge, they saw two large males fishing, with another male sitting in the shade of a tree, crunching bones in his teeth. Four females busied themselves with the cleaning of the catch, such as it was. It was mid-afternoon, and there were but fifteen medium bass hanging on the bushes near the fishers, certainly not enough to feed so many. Boy looked closer, and could see that the rocks which lay scattered about the bridge footment were of the same size and quality as the rocks of the stone huts they'd seen, rocks which had evidently once topped the scattered foundations which lay under the overhang of the footment. He peered closer yet, and saw among those foundations a scattering of bones.
They stayed there for perhaps an half-hour, and then began to creep towards the fishers. It was slow going, trying to keep silent while negotiating the thick weave of vines and brush, but they eventually crept within one hundred yards. The fishers' lookout seemed to be pretty derelict in his duties. Perhaps he was distracted by his crunching of bones. As they crept closer, Boy was able to better see the objects of their stalk, and he grew ever more disturbed as they came into better view.
The bones in the foundation appeared to be the bones of men, but such men! The rib cage was huge, and the long bones of the legs, scattered as they were, seemed to be short, thick and twisted. The fishers themselves were quite large, with the females standing over six feet, and the males approaching seven feet in height. They were very powerfully built, and would have more so had they been eating enough. As it was, they were certainly fearsome, even sitting. Even their backs seemed to bulge and flex as they moved. It was their heads that boy found so alarming.
Despite their otherwise relatively small heads, they had very large undershot jaws, and as one snarled something at another, Boy caught a glimpse of long lower incisors. The other snarled back, and both of them made scary faces at each other, rising to bluster and scowl. They cursed each other (and they did indeed, speak, Boy noticed, though not well, and not in any wise that he could understand) prodigiously. Eventually they stopped glowering at each other, and resumed fishing. The females, who appeared to be simply very big women with bad teeth, began to catcall both of the males, who studiously ignored them.
"Fish, fish, fish! You sorry bastards! We're sick of fish," one said. Boy noted that he could understand her with relative ease. Her teeth did not protrude so much as the males' teeth, and she could articulate better. She had an odd way of pronouncing things, slurred and garbled, and she placed her accents differently.
"Yah," jeered another, "When's the last time we had real meat, huh? Woun'ta had that unlest Bitsy done got it."
"Bitsy," sneered one of the males, and Boy could understand it this time, "Bitsy bitch. Gon git us kilt."
"You skeered-a Men?" said the second female, and she began to laugh scoffingly. "Men ain't shit. Caint do nuffin. Pussy-ass muhfugs."
One of the males yanked his pole, and began to grin. A large fish broke the surface about thirty feet out, and the male began to fight it. The other male said, "Ah hapns ta lahk fish. Whatch got thur, Bobby?"
Bobby fought the fish, dancing a little jig on the shore. It appeared to be a whopper. "Damn he's puttin' up thuh good fight! Gaff him fer me, huh, Roy?" Roy dropped the bones he'd been crunching and lumbered towards the shore, carrying a rusty piece of the steel rod that Wilson called "reebar". It had been curled into a hook and filed to a sharp point. Bobby dragged mightily on the line, and a huge bass flopped near to the shore. Big as he was, Roy sprang right quickly into the shallows, and whacked with the rebar, and drew forth the skewered bass, and whipping the rebar about, flung the fish at the females. One of them snagged it out of the air by the tail, slime and blood and all, and whacked it headfirst against a rock. She grabbed up a rusty knife and hacked at the fish and began to clean it. One of the other females turned towards the path back to their camp, and Boy followed her gaze to see another female, an older one, hurrying down the trail, followed by the teenster they'd seen in the camp. The old female carried a Manchild.
The toddler still squirmed, feebly, under the stifling hand of the old female. The three females by the river halted their tasks, and the males drew in their lines, and stood glowering at the females. Wilson tapped Boy and the others on the shoulders, and indicated that they should spread out back towards the camp, and be ready to fire. From the expressions on the faces of all, they needed no encouragement. The youth nearest Boy bore the most hate-filled look that Boy had ever seen. The youths departed, and Wilson began to creep forward.
The old female placed the infant on the ground, while the remianing females circled around. One said, "Inni cuuuute!?"
"Precious," said another, and they all howled with glee.
"Such a widdwe man!"
"Oooh, I could just eat him all up!"
"Hey, I found him!"
"Share and share alike," said another. The males gathered the fish, and began to lumber, noisily, to the camp. They seemed to want no part of this, but they also were doing nothing to stop it.
"Wanna keep him?" asked the teenster, rather hopefully.
"Whatever for?" asked the oldest one. "They ain't good fer nothin', jes' another mouth to feed. He's plenny fat aready, we don't need to plump him up. B'sides, I'm sick t'death of fish, and the onny good Man's a dead Man." She grinned as if she'd told some hysterical joke, and all but the teenster laughed. The hag gathered up the infant, and led the others back towards camp. Wilson and Boy began to creep up to their rear, blocking the way to the river. Boy noticed that two other men from the village were also doing the same thing on the opposite side of the old bridge footing.
The males reached the camp, and began to build the fire a bit. One pulled from his bag a filthy grille, and placed it over the fire, and tossed a few fish on top. As the females arrived, he turned and said, "Bitsy, where'd you get that thar child?"
"Same as the last one," she said, still grinning. She set the toddler down, and he tried to gain his feet and flee, but the teenster bent over and grabbed him up. Boy thought that her back bent oddly, and her long fingers seemed to spread from somewhere around the wrist, splaying her hand oddly, and more largely than Boy would have believed possible. The teenster held him to her breast, almost comfortingly, and she backed up away from the controntation, directly towards Wilson and Boy! They exchanged quick glances, and began to gather themselves.
"You damn stupid bitch, they gonna come lookin now. One missin kid's a loss, but even a Man can figger out somethin's huntin when they start missin ever day!"
"Welp, we caint take him back now, and waste not want not! I aims ta eat him, senst you caint get no meat."
"Caint get no meat 'cause you done pult up all th' traps! I seen you Bitsy, seen you pullin traps, you jes like eatin babies is all."
"Caint leave them traps out you dumb shit, Men gonna come along and find 'em and then they'll come lookin for us then, too. We can stay here longer huntin' than trappin'."
"Well, I fo'bids it. This th' last one, Bitsy, if'n I has to kill ya here an now."
The hag pulled an eighteen-inch Bowie knife from within her filthy rags, and sneered, "You jes try, Bobby, you jes try. I shoulda culled you when you was a teener, you wussy l'il shikepoke!"
The teener stumbled backwards towards Wilson, nearly at the edge of the clearing where they hid in a vine-coated honeysuckle. Bobby grabbed up the gaff from where Roy had flung it. He swung it through a vicious arc, and began to approach the old hag. She crouched lower, and began to circle with Bobby. The other females moved towards the remaining males. Boy noticed that the old hag had her other hand concealed inside her garment, and wondered at this. The Bowie was a mighty blade, but he couldn't see how the old hag could hope to prevail against a male who must be twenty years younger and twice her size.
Bobby closed the distance from the old hag, swinging overhand with the gaff. It cut viciously through the air, but the old hag pounced aside with remarkable speed, and cast something from within her garment. At the same time, the other females obstructed the views of the remaining males, and began to tussle with them. While they were so engaged, Bobby drew back for another swing, and began to step into his rush, and whatever she'd thrown at him got into his eyes, and he stopped dead still and began to bellow. The hag leaped forward, and stabbed overhand, her blade entering Bobby's mouth on a downward arc, filling his throat, stopping his scream. The hag gripped the handle with her other hand, and jumped past Bobby, yanking with all of her two hundred pounds. The Bowie described a circle within Bobby's throat, and his head came clean off as the hag completed her pass. He fell to the ground, fountaining blood, clutching at nothing in his final foot-drumming spasms. The other males didn't seem to have noticed, as they were all bent over clutching their groins.
Wilson leapt up, and took two crashing steps through the brush, and he laid his odd two-sectioned club against the head of the teenster. Her eyes rolled up, and Wilson caught the toddler as she slid to the ground, and passed him to Boy as Boy also leapt from the bushes. Boy dropped to the ground, and held the screaming child as all hell broke loose around him.
The teenster slid to the ground bonelessly as arrows flew about the camp. Each of the ogres was transfixed by at least one arrow. The old hag, who had begun a gloating dance about the clearing bearing Bobby's severed head, was hit with five arrows. Men leapt in from the brush, hewing about with their own Bowie knives, and made fairly short work of one of the males and two of the females. The remaining two females backed up against the remaining male, drawing their own Bowies, then all received the full flight of the second bow-volley, and wild-eyed men moved in to lay them low.
Soon, the only sounds were the dripping of spattered blood, panting men, and a screaming child who quickly quieted when the youth who had been next to Boy at the river ran to hold him. His sobs deepened, but were quieter, and the youth who held him also sobbed the deep gasping tears of relief. Wilson stood by the huts, and began to pull stones from their structures, toppling them. He was quickly joined by other Men, who also destroyed the lean-to huts. Above the coppery smell of bloody death rose the smell of scorching fish.
Behind him, the teenster began to moan. Relieved of the child, Boy turned his attention to her. She was a bit bigger than Boy, perhaps five foot ten, and probably weighed about the same. She hadn't been eating all that well, he guessed, for she had skinny forearms and ankles. She wasn't particularly horrible looking, though her jaw protruded more than that of any person he knew, and her lips were full and red and when her eyes opened, they were clear and green and intelligent, if full of the fear of imminent death. Beneath her short matted hair, her tiny ears sat high on her head... the sign of the modified, Wilson said. She struggled to sit up, but fell back, holding her head. Boy wasn't sure if he'd have clubbed her or not had she risen fully. Beneath her torn rags, her bosom heaved pinkly, and Boy guessed her age as being about his own. She looked at him, fearfully, and rolled onto her back, and spread her legs a bit and panted. Boy took a risk.
"Don't move, don't try anything," he said. She blinked twice, and said, "You can talk!"
"And stay quiet!" he hissed, quietly. "Don't talk, and whatever you do, don't talk to me!"
"Are you goin ta kill me?"
"Not right this second, okay, and shut up, dammit!"
Wilson returned from his task of scattering the camp, and saw Boy crouched next to the teener. He whispered to Boy, "I think we can take her prisoner, if we play this right. But don't be too surprised if the other men have other ideas." Wilson doffed his pack, and withdrew a rope from within. He motioned to Boy to tie the teenster.
Boy moved behind the teenster, whose eyes grew wild, and when he took her by the arm to secure her hands, she whirled about and caught him unawares with a nice round kick to the head. He dropped to the ground for an instant, and then sprang back to his feet as she completed her motion and rose to flee. He tackled her about the waist, and they crashed to the ground.
She spun beneath him and scratched for his eyes. Boy had never been the best of the fighters in his own village, and this girl fought very dirty. He replied in kind, jamming his elbow into her throat, and she slapped at him. He was able to pin her by locking her arms to the ground, with his shoulder pressed into her throat, clinching tightly to keep her teeth away from his neck. She was able to nip him a little, but that was all. She still resisted, locking her legs around his middle, trying to squeeze the breath out of him. Her legs were long and pretty strong, but not enough to keep him from breathing. He continued to clinch her, and she continued to squirm, and an erection came, responding to the squirming warmth of her crotch pressed against his. It was maddening. He didn't know whether to stay and hold the pin, what he really wanted to do was to leap up, away from her and her dirty fish-smelling rags, and also his erection wanted him stay, and to go further. He felt his back curving, his hips thrusting forward. The teenster continued to squirm, but she seemed to be tiring. Her thrashing had settled down to a periodic jerking, her hips grinding against his own. He heard feet all around him, and looked up. The men around the circle were grinning beneath their blood and grime, and they made lascivious thrustings of their hips. Boy realized that in looking up he had exposed his throat, but the teenster hadn't bit at him, and in fact, she had the oddest of measuring looks on her face. He continued to hold her, and she continued to grind her crotch against his, and held her gaze steady on his, occasionally glancing fearfully at the men surrounding them. She smiled a small smile, and boldly ground against him, lowering her eyelashes in an oddly appealing way, and Boy stifled his arousal, and released the girl and backed away. The men looked disappointed, and began to grumble. Boy grabbed up the rope, and resumed his attempt to bond the girl. She didn't resist this time, and the men began to nudge each other as Boy secured her.
When he was finish, most of the men had drifted away, carrying whatever small booty they could find. A few ate fish from the fireside. The toddler and the youth were gone with the main body of men, and those who remained were all from Home. When they saw Boy standing with his captive bound for travel, they all rose, and began to work their way towards Home.