7

Battle of Spirits

When Saber awoke the next morning to the vague sounds of fighting outside, his mind was in a whirl. He
was disoriented, confused. He was not sure where he was or what had happened, but his first thought was that they had gone to battle with one of the other villages in the Valley, and he felt fear. He sat straight up.

He looked around, and saw not his warm room in his home, but the strange surroundings of the little inn he had spent the night in. He felt a stab of homesickness already, but that was easily forgotten as his clearing mind registered the fighting outside. he remembered: the Berbils! The strange little people he had met the day before, he was in their village. Was it under attack? Maybe he had been wrong about the place being forgotten. But it had looked so desolate, so...

Well he wasn't going to get any answers hanging around. He stood, felt a vague nausea that he sometimes got in the morning before he had eaten anything, and took a deep breath of the fresh air from outside. Then he ran downstairs.

The female was not around, and so, clutching his duffel nervously, Saber stepped into the street. The boy's sensitive smell sense was greeted by smoke, and he heard the wailing cries from the strange Berbils as they ran to and fro, seemingly without purpose. He closed his nasal passage to the smoke, breathing from his mouth, and keeping to the buildings, skulked in search of the one that was called Robearbill to find out what was going on. He looked around frantically for some kind of attackers, but saw none yet. In fact, as he walked along the streets, all he saw were the Berbils running as if someone giant bird were swooping from the sky to attack them as they ran, but there was no one there.

With a deepening sense of nervousness, Saber finally saw the little Berbil, shouting directions to get the people out of their homes in case they were hit, and Saber ran up to him. "Robearbill! What's happening?"

"We-we-we-we arrrreee under attack!" He wailed, sending yet another Berbil to call for help. Saber had cringed at the sudden noises, jumped when one of the Berbils ran past him, but now, he sensed no danger, saw no danger. He frowned in puzzlement. "By who?"

"Muuuutants!" the Berbil moaned fearfully. He ran across the street to exchange a hurried command with the bluish one.

Saber looked after him in amazement. Mutants? Mutant whats? There was no one here but him and the Berbils!

The boy was tense, but as he walked almost dazedly through the little town, watching the Berbils in their full-fledged panic, he began to see things. He saw that three or four of them would react at the same time as if they were being attacked from above. He would see exchanges of words between Berbils about something that seemingly only they could see.

To his amazement, and a little to his disgust, he saw that the smoke he smelled was fire in some of the huts, but it appeared as if the Berbils were setting them themselves! Deliberately! A realization dawned on him.

This had happened before, when these "Mutants" Robearbill had spoke of existed, and his intuition the night before about the strange minds of these creatures being stuck in a time loop came back full force. They were acting out an event that happened probably thousands of years, maybe even more, ago. As to why they were setting fire to their own dwellings? They were probably the ones that had been hit in this attack, and they were recreating it. Saber felt sick and scared. The dual minds of these strange people scared him, even though they seemed, for the most part, like a peaceful people.

It was a half hour or so of this, Saber watched the Berbils acting out their strange ritual, and wondered how many different attacks they had in their memory. The huts were all patched, as if they all had been hit at one time or another; in this case set afire by their own citizens. None paid him any mind, as he played no part in this reenactment, he might as well have not been there at all so far as most were concerned. They simply played out their drama around him. He felt as if he were walking through a battle of spirits.

Later that night, after the one sided battle was over and many of the Berbils were cleaning up, Saber asked Robearbill about what had happened. He had been deeply unnerved by the experience, although everything seemed normal now...or at least as normal as these creatures got.

"Sometimes the Mutants attack our village," Robearbill explained. "They do it mostly just to cause pain, and panic. They are cruel creatures. Did they attack you, Saber?"

"N-no...Robearbill...there was no one there!"

"But therrrre was," Robearbill said. "They like to come and strafe our village, and laugh when we run for ourrrr livvves."

Saber gave up. He understood that he would never convince the little guy of what he was saying. He was part machine, like the machines that the villagers used to pump water, only these ones worked on their own. Part of them lived, but the parts that were machine stopped working right a long time ago. It gave him the creeps.

Saber did not eat supper at the little inn that night. He had eaten breakfast, and the food had had that same strange metallic/chemical taste of the fruit. He did not want any more of it. He felt queasy. He thought it to be fear, fear of what had happened, fear of what might lie ahead if such strangeness was here, so close to home.

He also felt a deep sadness for the little Berbil people. So forlorn all the time.

After writing every detail of the day in his journal, Saber fell asleep once more at the Inn. He had almost lost his nerve, and started on the path that would lead him back home. He could go home, take his punishment, and be safe. He could forget this isolated little group of people that had lived so long that their minds had begun to live past events as if they were real. He wanted nothing more to do with the strange minds.

But then he did think of what his parents would do. He would be thrashed again, they would have lost trust in him. He could imagine them saying when they thought he could not hear, "He was so serious about exploring, the little scholar did not make it more than a day before coming home." They would have been worried, but amused, too. He could imagine Iyen laughing at him, saying it figured he didn't have the guts to go any farther than a day's travel from the valley. That decided it. He would not go back. If he was to endure any punishment by his parents for this, he would make it worth it.

But he did not want to stay here any longer. The whole place had an air of sorrow, of weariness. He felt for the Berbil creatures, but there was nothing he could do to help. The next morning, Saber said his good-byes. The dozen or so Berbils that had greeted him at first were there.

Robearbill gave the young boy some supplies for his journey: some of the candifruit that had been freshly picked, some simple tools, an old bow and arrow that looked like it would break if he tried to use it, (and it did when he tried it out later) and a refill of his waterskin.

"Please come back and
We are Berbils from the planet Robear!
visit us again, Saber. We like to have visitorrrs."

Robearbill's halting speech was again doubled by the other track of speech inside his round head as he said his good-byes. Saber nodded and shook the little creature's hand as he slowly walked from the village along a road that was shown to him. he could tell that not twenty yards into the forest, it was overgrown enough to be unrecognizable, but he started along it anyway.

Saber threw the fruit away when he was out of sight of the strange Berbils. His nausea from the day before had not gone away, and he did not want the acrid-tasting fruit. Most of it was delicious, but that bitter undertaste left a bad taste in his mouth.

He found that the little hand tools the Berbils had given him were useless, and the brittle wood broke when he tried to use them. It had been a nice gesture, but useless. The only thing that he really used was the water, which tasted fair enough.

Saber traveled through forest until nightfall. By then he was panting heavily, when he should not have been. He had taken several rests to settle his uneasy stomach, but now there was no appeasing it. The boy threw his pack down, staggered a few feet to his left, and threw up what little he had eaten. He grimaced and turned away. He hated throwing up. He hated the way it made his stomach cramp, and seem to curl up inside his belly.

When he was sure he was through, he picked up his pack again. It felt like it weighed much more than it did, and he staggered again as he slung it over his back. Now he wanted to go home. He was ready to throw the whole thing in right now but he was two days from his home, if not more. He would be a long time getting back, and he had to rest.

Groaning, as the sun made its last brave show of the day through the leaves, Saber cast his pack to the ground again, and knelt in the cooler leaves. He was sweating, even though in the trees it was not hot, and still he breathed hard. With a small whimper, he lay on the floor of the forest, his mostly bare skin lying on soft leaves and grass. He used his duffel for a pillow.

He had taken Drii's blanket, his hintrin, and now wrapped it around himself as he curled up on the ground. He clutched the top with one hand, his belly with the other. He had already vomited up everything he had eaten, and now when his stomach seized, he brought nothing up. Only the painful dry heaves still wracked his body and he moaned miserably.

He cried for a while, and now only panted, curled up in the green blanket that his brother had given to him to take on the journey. Usually when he was sick, his mother was there with a cool cloth, or hot tea, or the herbs that the healer recommended, but now he was alone in the strange woods where none of his people had ever gone before.

Saber cringed at every noise of the night creatures. Cried out at every sound within ten feet. his vivid imagination saw all manner of monster lurking in the shadows of the night as he lay curled up beneath a tree, shaking with fear, and not just that.

For the first time since he was old enough to write, he made no entry in his journal, and only slept when his body was too exhausted to keep him awake.

Part 8: A First Lesson

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