THE STONE KING -- book two of The Chronicles of the First Age

Chapter Sixteen

The sun had sunk low in the sky, dusting the thin clouds with a dirty orange that clashed with the faded, pale, blue-gray, when Baru began to consider where he might camp for the night. On the edge of the blight, firewood was plentiful, taking him only moments to gather an armful and find a depression among the hills to start a fire. He had spent all afternoon looking for anything that moved so he could kill it and eat it. All he had left was a handful of keleos nuts and a growing hatred of keleos bread. He considered this as he sat in the spreading shadows, sawing with a fire bow, waiting for his bit of dried moss to ignite. At times like this he could feel the weight of his family and friends' memories fully upon him and the loneliness became an almost tangible companion.

It turned out that it took a long time for a village to die. The weight of all the years of marriages and births and deaths built up a tremendous inertia. Even after the harvests started falling off and the herd's birthings diminished, the memories of past harvests and past herds pushed the villagers on until their hands literally had nothing to do and they stood staring at an empty horizon, wondering if the whole world had died around them.

Baru blinked back tears as he continued sawing on the fire bow. His daughter had died a little more than a year ago. The yotare said it was the cough that had killed her, but there was no doubt that hunger had weakened her so that any slight malignant vapor could overpower her. His wife followed soon afterward, literally. She just got up one day and walked off into the blight. Baru had himself been sick, but when he found the strength to stand, he followed her tracks until the howl of the wolves had driven him back. After that, he just circled around and continued walking. He had stumbled on his own korion by accident days later and found it deserted, the last of his neighbors either dying or following him into oblivion.

When he stumbled upon the border of the blighted lands, he thought he must have fallen dead, unnoticed, and come at last to the green fields of paradise. He found other koria outside the blight, but the people were suspicious and unwelcoming. It seemed other hungry and desperate men had come that way taking food and, sometimes women or children when they could get away with them. Baru found himself lurking at the edge of their fields like a ghost, sneaking up to their houses at night, stealing vegetables right out of the garden or chickens from their coops if he was stealthy enough. He always fled back into the cursed lands where pursuit was short and reluctant.

Then the koria started building walls and food, outside of harvest time, became even scarcer.

Baru carefully pounded his keleos nuts into an oily paste and spread it across a rock heated in his fire. As he waited for the small flat-bread to cook, he looked back at the day bleeding out its last red drop of light on the ragged black edge of the horizon and saw something move. Baru held his breath and considered which way the wind was blowing. There was no breeze in his hollow between the hills and he saw no movement in the spines of the dead plants rising above them. He crept around the hill, his spear lifted high enough to not drag, his dinner forgotten.

He heard quiet movement and a low grumbling and readied his spear, prepared to throw himself as soon as he stole within sit of his prey. Something moved and a silhouette with the sharp upward curving horns of an antelope rose above the hill, standing confidently against the fading glow of light. Baru raised his spear and flung himself forward with a bestial cry. The figure turned and screamed at him, "Asophra!"

Baru's legs nearly gave out beneath him. He stumbled to a halt on the side of the hill. Beneath the horned head spread broad shoulders. A well-muscled arm raised something long and sharp and pointed it at his face. Other shapes moved in to surround him. These were clearly men though their clothes were so ragged that they almost seemed covered in dull furs or downy feathers. The moons chose that moment to rise in the east and the object in the nightmare's hand flashed with a silvery light that danced on the metal tip before his nose.