The Temple was warm and dry, noticeably different from the cool mist that lingered around the village outside. Its metal walls were simple and bare, with no adornments. The single, central chamber was large enough to host everyone in the settlement, with cushions positioned at intervals across the stone floor. The ceiling was high and tapered, while the wall opposite the entrance held the enormous knowledge board, with its single button positioned centrally just below.
Eva sat cross-legged on the floor, having pulled a cushion beneath her, and was busy playing a game with Erik. The boy being only six years old meant that it wasn't an especially difficult game for her, but she made sure to occasionally let him win. It involved a sequence of hand movements and claps, in synchronisation with the other player, until one risked breaking the pattern and 'attacking' the other. Erik was fast and energetic, as with all tiny people, but his aim was often amusingly poor. Eva tried not to take too much pleasure in outwitting a child. Still, he was already more coordinated than she ever had been at his age. Maybe when he got to fourteen he'd give her more of a challenge.
"Stop getting so excited," she said, laughing. "You make such a big deal out of it I always know what you're about to do."
He emitted a grunt of frustration. "It's so hard! I'm no good at this."
She ruffled his hair. "You're better than you were last week. All you need is practise."
"That's what you always say."
Even on a pleasant late-spring morning she liked coming to Temple, before anybody else was there and away from the village meetings. It was the hub of the tribe but she preferred it when it was just her and the bare walls. And occasionally Erik. Reaching out to the wall, she pressed the button with one finger. The board lit up, casting the room in a soft, white light.
"Have we unlocked anything new?"
The board displayed several symbols, representing different areas of knowledge: farming, hygiene, sociology, construction, language, cooking, medicine, astronomy, physics. Everything they'd ever needed to know. The telltale exclamation point was absent from any of the sections.
"Nothing today."
Erik huffed. "Not been anything new for year. A hundred twenty hundred years."
She smiled. "It's only been a few weeks."
"Wait, what?"
"It feels like ages because you're small."
"You're small."
"I'm short," she corrected. "You're small. A mini person." She looked up at the board. "You want to look at anything again?"
"Astronomy!" Erik shouted, pointing. The board responded, the other symbols fading away as the moon-and-stars enlarged. A simplistic representation of the solar system appeared, showing each of the planets. "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune," he recounted.
"Are you reading that or doing it from memory?"
"Bit of both."
She squeezed his shoulder gently. "Well done, Erik. Which one do you want to learn about today?"
Erik narrowed his eyes and pursed his lips as he thought hard. "Ooh, I know," he said, "how about we do Earth?"
"We never do Earth!"
"Literally!"
The board responded, zooming to an image of the green and blue Earth, as it might look like from space. "Earth formed more than 4.5 billion years ago," the board said, its voice like a warm cup of tea. "It has a radius of over 6,000 kilometres and its gravity is 1g: the baseline for all relative gravitational measurements. Life first appeared four billion years ago, becoming multicellular around 1.5 billion years ago. For 174 million years dinosaurs were the dominant lifeforms, until the mass extinction 66 million years ago. There have been multiple mass extinction events on Earth, as demonstrated by the fossil record."
"I love dinosaurs," Erik noted. "I wish they were still around."
"So they could gobble you up?"
"So I could ride them."
"Have you ever noticed how there's far less detail about Earth than there is about Mars, or Jupiter, or the sun? You'd think there'd be more about the planet we're actually on."
"Oh yeah," Erik said, frowning, "that is weird. It's because the other planets are more exciting. I want to go to Mars. Or maybe the moon."
"Nobody can get to other planets," Eva said, shaking her head ruefully. "That would be pretty amazing, though, right?"
"The moon is pretty close. We can see it at night."
"It's still reeeeeally far away, Erik. So far you can't even imagine it."
"We could build a ladder," he said, then jumped to his feet and climbed onto her shoulders. "Or we could do this, but with everyone in the village."
"Perhaps I'll make a scientist out of you yet."
Erik's eyes lit up. "Like you!"
She hauled him off her shoulders and wrapped him up in a warm embrace. "You'll never be as good as me."
"We'll see about that!"
One of the doors to the room swung open, splashing sunlight across the board. She pressed the button again to shut it down and turned to the doorway. Framed by the morning sun stood Ramin, still easily identifiable even in silhouette thanks to his halo of curly hair.
"They're back," he said. "Time to pay our respects to our great and glorious hunters."
*
If Eva was the nascent scientist of the village, then Ramin was the philosopher. At least, that's what he liked to tell everyone. They made for an odd pair, him a year older and never happier than when espousing a new theory to anybody within earshot; her quiet and considered, more concerned with sifting through hard evidence and observations than theoretical musings on the state of the universe. That combination, Ramin always insisted, was why they'd been fast friends for as long as they could remember. Now fifteen, he couldn't remember a time without her.
Not that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. They would both strenuously deny that if ever accused of such an embarrassment. It seemed silly, having been best friends for so long, for it to be anything else. It would get in the way. She emerged from the Temple, holding Erik's hand, her short-cropped hair spiky and striking out at random angles. The little kid followed her around everywhere she went, seemingly drawn to her calm, assured, analytical way of being. Most of the other younger kids gravitated towards Harry or Tommy, inevitably, but not Erik.
"Hey Erik," Ramin said, "I thought up a new puzzle for you."
"Okay."
"It's the depths of winter. Snow everywhere. It's freezing. We have hardly any food left. In fact, there isn't enough food to go around. If we split the food evenly between everyone in the Cragside, then nobody will have enough, and we'll still all starve. Or, we give the food only to half the people in the village. That way half of us survive, but half of us die. What would you do?"
Erik's eyes bulged and his mouth dropped open in protest. "That's so mean!"
They walked through the village, away from the Temple, past the yurts towards the kitchen and firepit. Some were emerging from their yurts, stretching in the morning light, while others were returning from the fields, having been up early to work.
"You have to pick one," Ramin said, enjoying the boy's shocked reaction.
"I'd find more food."
"That's not an option."
"Eva could figure it out," the boy said.
"Ah, but Eva isn't part of the dilemma."
"What's a dilemma?"
"The problem. The puzzle."
"You said it was the whole village, though. We'd figure something out together."
Eva elbowed him in the ribs. "He's got you there," she said, winking.
"Six year olds don't stick to the rules," Ramin said, shrugging.
Dropping down from one of the watchtowers on the edge of the village, Rufus ran over to join them. "Good morning, brainy team," he shouted, mock-saluting. "And what conundrum are you scaring the child with today?"
"I'm expanding his mind," Ramin said.
"By giving him more things to worry about? Let me guess, you posed a life-or-death situation in which there was no way of winning?"
"Maybe," Ramin said, "maybe not."
"Looks like they got something," Eva said, pointing ahead.
Harry and Robin had returned carrying a deer, which they'd tied to a wooden pole for easier lifting. They reached the edge of the firepit and dropped it to the floor, both of them evidently relieved to lighten their burden. Never one to shy away from praising himself, Harry clapped and held his hands aloft, leading the cheers that rippled out through the village, as everyone converged.
The firepit was beside the lake, with the yurts built slightly higher up the gentle hill that led to the steeper cliffs. The lake curved around the treeline and the road that wound out of the village and into the wilds. The firepit was the centre of the community, being where they gathered for meetings and feasts, the roofed kitchen being adjacent to it. The only exception was in the winter months, when they'd sometimes retreat to the warmth of the Temple.
"Had a few problems," Harry was saying, loudly. "Got chased by a wolf. Big one, too. Nothing we couldn't handle."
"You should have seen it!" said Robin excitedly, gesticulating wildly. "It was super big, and snarly, and chased Harry right off the cliff."
There was a snort from one of the benches, upon which Tilda was stretched out languorously. "Of course it did. And how come you're not a smeary mess on the ground?"
"I handled it," Harry said, smiling his crooked smile. "You should have seen the other guy."
Tilda raised her eyebrows in sceptical disbelief, rolled her eyes, then turned away, signalling the end of that exchange.
"Excellent job, Harry, Robin," said Tommy, emerging from one of the nearest yurts to examine the hunt's prize. At sixteen he was the joint-eldest in the village and the de facto leader of the community, though there was a never-resolved tension between him and Harry that Ramin presumed would come to a head sooner or later. "We'll get it prepared for this afternoon." He raised his voice and shouted across the firepit to those gathered on the other side. "Niko! What are the chances of us rustling up some fine vegetables to go with this?"
"Still a little early in the season, Tommy," replied the other boy, "but we can rustle up some good leaves, beans, a bit of broccoli."
Tommy nodded. "That sounds good to me. I'll meet you over in the fields shortly."
As the crowd dispersed, Ramin and Eva wandered their way over to the lakeside, Erik trotting along absentmindedly behind them and busily distracted by the spring flowers bursting everywhere from the ground or birds fluttering overhead.
"Looks like another big feast," Ramin said with a sigh.
"Another triumph for Harry," Eva said. "Woo."
"Has he ever failed?"
"Not that I can remember. He always gets what he wants."
Ramin knelt down and splashed a hand in the water. It was icy cold. Even at the height of summer it rarely warmed up to the point where swimming became comfortable. Eva said it was because they were too far north: he believed her, but didn't have the energy to try to understand the reasoning.
"The number of feasts we have, I'm still don't get how the ecosystem replenishes itself so easily," Eva said, sitting down on the dewy grass.
"Is this the same thing you were saying six months ago?"
"Yes, but that I'm still saying it makes my point. We never venture out beyond the crag, right? Harry and the others hunt within a really small radius from the village. But they never fail to bring back a prize. One that will feed the whole village for a week. Just like Niko and his team never have a harvest fail."
Sitting down heavily beside her, Ramin tapped his hand on her knee a couple of times. "Maybe we're just very good at what we do."
She glanced over at him, her face a picture of cynicism. "Don't you ever feel like we're having a bit too much fun?"
He laughed. "I thought I was supposed to be the morbid philosopher?"
"I think maybe the animals are migrating up from the south, so supplies are being constantly replenished. That's my best guess."
Erik ran past, splashing through the shallow water on the lake's edge. "Like me!" he shrieked. "I came from the south, right?"
Splashing a hand through the water after him, Eva called out, "We don't know where you came from!"
"Maybe Niko grew you in his vegetable patch," Ramin said, grinning at the younger boy, who shot him a grizzled look of defiance.
"Well, maybe we should go explore down there," Erik said, sticking his tongue out. "That's what the Temple said, anyway."
Unsure of whether he'd heard correctly, Ramin looked at Eva, who returned his confused frown. "What?" they both said in unison.
Erik looked momentarily mortified, as if he'd been caught stealing something, then he jumped around and hopped in the water, making a big splash, before shouting "Nothing!" and heading back up to the grass to practice cartwheels.
"That was peculiar," Ramin said.
"He's six. Six year olds are peculiar."
"Too true."
Thanks for reading! What do you think of the new characters? Where do you think the story might be going?
Votes and comments very gratefully received. I'll post chapter notes later today.