6

Journey

Saber had climbed the fence with a great deal more ease this time, as his heart was not pounding with terror. The fear and sadness he had felt as he said good bye to his brother lifted, and he began to feel a deep excitement once more. He was really doing it! He was leaving the Valley! Something not even Iyen's father had ever done.

The natural direction-keeping sense in the boy led him unerringly to where he had seen the road before, and he stood there in the underbrush staring at the few inches of it for a long time. He had been listening for some time for the sound...but he had never heard it this day. Not yet. Cautiously he stepped onto the road.

The trees were still mostly all around, but the boy could clearly see that there was a road, and he stepped upon it, and began to follow it.

An hour later, Saber could see that the trees thinned still more, and his heart pounded in anticipation. What would he find? Would there be a village? Would there be Erthrins? Maybe ones that did not know that his village existed either? Would they be Bruters...or demons? He found himself hoping that it was none of the above. He wanted it to be something completely different here, many hours from his own home. It was approaching dark, and by now his parents would know he was gone.

He hoped Drii did not get into any trouble, but he also knew that the child would not tell. He also knew that if his parents realized Drii knew, and that he had taken such a promise, they would not make him tell.

"berberberber"

Saber froze. There it was! And he had nowhere to go now, so far away from home. He was on his own now, whatever this was, he would have to face it. Hastily, he flung the duffel from his back, searching for the dagger he had taken from his father's room. But it had gotten tangled in his clothing and he could not get it free in his haste, and so he simply picked up the pack, closed it, and intended to use it as a bludgeon if he needed to.

"berberber..."

"berberberber..."

"berber..."

Saber spun around as the noise droned up from all around him. Whatever it was, it hunted in packs! There were more of them! He gulped and had time to think that he would be dead before he even got a day away, but still nothing happened. Yet. He heard a rustling in the underbrush even as he glanced through the trees and saw something that made his heart leap with excitement: a building! Maybe whoever lived in it would know how to fight these.

However, he did not have the time to get to the building, as what had been surrounding him stopped making noise, and the bushes parted.

Saber screamed and fell back on his rear end, scrambling to stand, and skittering backwards. But then he only stared, clutching his duffel as if it were a lifeline. Shaking, he squinted his eyes and looked carefully at what stepped from the bushes, and some of his fear left. Some. What he was looking at was...a person, sort of. It was round shaped, smaller than him, although he had a feeling that it was an adult, and that led him to wonder there was even such a thing as an adult version. It was part metal! What kind of creature...

"Hello!" it said, the circle where its mouth should be lighting up like a blaze.

"Eyyyagh!" Saber recoiled about five steps. It talked! The two stared at each other for a long time, when others of its kind emerged from the bushes. Saber could see that their metal was not clean like the warriors' weapons, but dirty, dented, like the very old pots found sometimes around the Valley from his own ancestors. They were spotted with the red corrosion called rust that people who understood metal sometimes complained about, and in some cases, most of their bodies were covered with it. Some made screeching sounds like fingernails on the blackboard as they moved. They did not seem like they wanted to attack; he hoped.

Trying not to shake too much, Saber slowly took one step forward. Ten or so of the things were ringed around him in a loose circle, like a pack surrounding its prey, but what he felt from them was not aggression but curiosity. "By the sky..." he said in an awed whisper. These were the demons...spirits...whatever the adults in town said were beyond the Western Boarder? "H-h-hello," he said.

The little person had little round ears on top of its head, some flesh with coarse fur bushed from it, and a circle nose. It was the strangest creature he had ever seen! He was trying to decide if they were living or man made, or a little of both.

The little people erupted into a chorus of the "berberber" sound that he had been hearing, and figured this must be their natural sound. He heard a few other syllables, making it sound sometimes like "burbulburbulbur..."

The different colored one at the head of the group seemed to be the pack's leader, and it spoke again. It spoke in a voice that sounded like it came from inside its head, behind its blaze mouth, and stopped and started erratically as it spoke. He could hear a faint whirring in the background like when the few machines in the valley needed to be fixed, or a cart wheel needed oil. "What arrrre you?" it said. "We have not seen your kind herrrre before."

Saber was just amazed at first that the things talked, and coherently, but the young boy had finally decided that they meant no harm. He slung his duffel over his back again. By the looks of the jerky movements of the metal things, he could easily outrun them and probably just as easily defeat them even in a fight. "I-I'm an Erthrin," he said. The people smelled strange, like machine oil and dirty fur. "My name is Saber from the West Village...what...what are you?"

"We-we-we-we..." Saber blinked as it repeated this identical word over and over for a minute or two before resuming. "We are Robear Berbils, from the planet Robear." The...Robear? sounded as if he were reciting something for a ritual, as if he were reciting it for the thousandth time, and Saber had the sudden intuition that these creatures were very, very old. "I am Robearbill."

Robearbill? That was a strange name. Of course his own probably sounded weird to this Robearbill. Saber looked around, startled, as he realized the others had hemmed in closer to him, and a couple were reaching out hands to touch him. He recoiled, and was surprised to see that they did the same, stumbling back hastily. The boy relaxed and slowly approached, reaching out his own hand, ready to move it back if they either did not want to be touched or did something he thought to be a threat. They did neither. The bears felt cold and smooth, except for where the flesh was, and that felt hot, like an animal with a fever serious enough to be deadly. Were they sick as well? Or was this just their body temperature? "I don't believe it...my people think you are demons, but you're people!"

"We are Robear Berbils, from the planet Robear!" the thing announced again its cheerful, somehow dead voice.

A couple of them were touching him now, seemingly as curious about him as he was of them and he figured they had just as much reason to be. They had probably seen his people from a distance, but they had never approached. He asked why.

"We are peaceful," one of the others answered. "We do not go where we might frighten or harm someone." This one spoke almost normally, as it seemed to be in the least disrepair. "I am Robearbert."

"Peaceful? Boy...I bet the warriors would drop unconscious knowing that. They think you're death!"

"Would you like to see our village, Saber?" the lead one, Robearbill, asked.

Saber nodded eagerly. "Yes!"

"Follow us, please." The little person turned and waddled away, moving as if he was fulfilling a programming. There was a race of small canines that denned in the lowest parts of the Valley that lived a life exactly the same as its fellows. Its behavior was preprogrammed from birth...these Robears acted like that, only even more so. Saber was closer in this thinking than he thought.

The young Erthrin looked around in amazement as they emerged into a village smaller even than his own. It had narrow pathways and little round looking huts made of straw, most of which looked as if they had been destroyed and rebuilt many, many times. They were patchwork, really, not a shred of what they might have originally been made of remained. More Robears scurried around, seemingly without any kind of purpose, they only walked around. Some seemed to be gathering fruits of some kind from plants in fields around the tiny village, but they were not carrying them anywhere. They just kind of carted them around. "What...what are those Robears doing?" Saber asked.

"We are uuusually called Berbils," the lead one told him. "Those Berbils are carrying candifruit. Would you like some?"

"Well sure, if there is enough."

"There is enough," the Berbil said. "We Berbiiiils can-can-cannot eat. We raise our crops for our friends and others around Third Earth."

"Third Earth? I thought this was Fourth Earth!"

"It is. But to us it will always be Third Earth. The cataclysm did not destroy us. Therefore we are still in Third Earth." This was a bluish-looking one who called himself Robearbob.

"Right..." The scary thing was, it made a strange kind of logic. He tasted the candifruit, and at first thought it the sweetest tasting food he had ever eaten. But as he chewed, he realized it had a chemically taste,one he did not think was supposed to be there. He also saw no other villages as far as his eyes could see. "Who do you give it to?" he asked, discreetly hiding a grimace at the taste. Robearbill rattled off about a dozen names that rather jumbled in his mind and he was sorry he asked. He had a feeling that those people he mentioned did not exist anymore.

An awful stench greeted his nostrils as they passed what looked like the silo of a farmer, but smaller sized to fit the scale of these Berbils. He peered inside, and found that it was chock full of mostly mush. He gagged and staggered backwards. "That's all rotted in there!" he said to Robearbill, and even as he said it, others were putting the strange candifruit in the silo.

"That is where we store our candifruit to give it to our friends," Robearbill explained.

Well that reinforced his theory!

"Where are you travelling to?" the Berbil continued.

"Well, I don't know yet. I am just travelling. I want to explore and see new places!"

"Would you like a place to stay for the night? We have an inn for any weary travelers."

"Yes! I would like that very much. I walked all day." He had drunk half of his water already in the hot summer sun. He would have to find a river or a stream somewhere.

"Please follow me. The iinn is in
Oh, no, heeeelp us! We are under attaaaack!
the center of town."

Saber stopped and stared. All of a sudden, the Berbil had spoken in two voices, as if possessed by a spirit!

Even as he finished his first sentence, the second, seemingly a cry for help, had cried out at the same time. And Robearbill had seemed not to notice this lapse as he led the small boy to the center of town.

The inn was small, but he was a child, and it was all just fine for him. He had regarded the Berbil with a degree of caution since the strange help cry. The creatures seemed to be stuck, stuck in time. They seemed to be stuck in a single time loop, and although they knew that time had passed, their minds seemed to think they existed in the previous time. A time before the Great Cataclysm.

The innkeeper, a female,so he assumed by the flower in her hair, led him up to a room on the second floor as Robearbill said his good-byes and waddled home, Saber assumed. The room was clean, and he had an idea that the Berbils kept it that way even though it was never used. The village looked like it had once been open like his own, but as he looked out through the little glass-less window, he could see vines and trees had overgrown the fields, and most of the crops were small, withered, and he had no doubts they were tainted like the fruit had been.

To the sounds of the female downstairs cleaning a bar that had probably already been cleaned many times that day, as the wood was worn and pitted, Saber lay on the little bunk and wrote in his journal. He wrote of his journey here, of what had happened when he met the little Berbils, and what kind of people they were, recalling every detail he could. He wanted to remember this well. He described the town in depth, and even made a sketch, remembering the promise to his little brother.

He wrote his thoughts about the Berbils, and what happened. They needed repairing, and he thought there were none on this planet that remembered the little beings, if there even was anyone else on the earth. He had seen no signs here that these little people ever saw anyone else, they only thought that they did. But even as they dealt with him, they seemed more alive, eager to help, like they felt they had purpose. It was as if somewhere in the faulty strange metal electronics, they knew. They knew that he was the only real person that had come to their village, but the rest was so far gone they might as well have not. They were so very alone, and they did not even know it. It made him feel sad. Maybe his people could help them someday.

Having written enough to make his hand and fingers sore, Saber finally closed his eyes as the moon shone brilliantly on the Berbils' village, and fell into an exhausted sleep.

Part 7: Battle of Spirits

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