8

A First Lesson

After only a few hours of sleep, Saber awoke to the early dawn, shaking, like he did when he had a fever. Disoriented, he let his eyes wander around the forest, to the trees that surrounded him; and the pleasant sound of birds reached his ears. For a moment, he forgot, and sat up. A moment later he was back on the ground, a wave of nausea so strong it almost hurt him washing over his body, and he groaned. Getting slowly to his hands and knees, Saber crawled into the underbrush and threw up the water he had taken the night before.

He shook, sweating, as he knelt and finished, and then began to cry. He wanted to go home, to have his mother comfort him, but he could not have that. They probably were looking for him, searching in the valleys between the towns, asking the other villages about him. He wondered if they were worried.

Once he was sure that he would not throw up anymore, he crawled back to his pack and pulled his journal out. Taking the writing stick in one hand, he briefly wrote what had happened the day before. The script was shaky and almost illegible, but at least there. He shoved it back in and lay back down.

Saber lay for a while trying to shake the nausea, and finally it abated enough for him to stand. Dragging his duffel behind him, he began to walk, and hoped he was going in the direction of home. When he was sick, his directional ability never worked right, and he did not even know where home was now, but he was trying to get back now. Illness was not something that he had thought about when he left the Valley. And now there was a bitter taste in his mouth that he could not get rid of.

Saber traveled as far as he could, stopping every few minutes for a long rest. By the time the sun was on the norther, setting, he could go no farther. Waves of dizziness had assaulted him throughout the day, and now were too severe for him to walk. The boy staggered, collapsed in the thick forest, the duffel rolling a foot away, his waterskin falling from his belt to land next to him. Saber whimpered as the whole forest seemed to twist and recede from him as if he were suddenly very small and the forest loomed up, twisted, distorted, and he shut his eyes tight.

The boy's stomach was cramping up badly, and he cried out in pain as it did, curling up tight on the soft forest floor. He had finally placed the bitter taste earlier in the day: it was the same as was in the Berbils' fruit. Had they given it to him on purpose? No, he did not think that they had. Their whole network of overgrown crops was probably bad. Even if he told them what happened, they probably would not comprehend. But he was not sure that he would ever get back there. The boy was very frightened. He was afraid he was going to die. At one miserable point, he almost wished he would.

Throughout the night, and well into the next afternoon, Saber drifted in and out of consciousness, sometimes moaning or crying; other times when he was less cognizant, only thrashing in his sleep, or tossing and turning. Once or twice, when his stomach had calmed and his fever was not raging, he would lie still, whimpering.

It was almost sundown the next day when Saber awoke without crying out in pain or trying to throw up. He cautiously sat up, brushing the leaves from his skin and scant clothing, and brushing off the bugs that had decided to play on him. He was still shaking, but this mostly just from fear and the aftermath of being sick. He still felt woozy, but at least now he was not seeing things distort and twist in front of his eyes. He had missed two days in his journal, and had been unconscious for much of it.

Now, even as he had to lie back down, he pulled his journal from his pack once again. With a shaking hand he brought it up to date, using many colorful words. He was not strong enough to sit up for long but his mind had cleared, and he was feeling angry and homesick. He had never gotten that sick for so long before.

Scrawling out the last of the entry, Saber drank shakily from his waterskin, closed his eyes again, and went to sleep.

He awoke late in the afternoon to find that he felt better even than the night before. He was able to stand, even with the duffel. He moved slowly but he moved on, and he found that now that he was feeling better he still wanted to move on. He was lost now; he might be able to get his bearings later but he could not go home right now even if he wanted to. He almost felt proud. He had gotten through what he was sure was a bad illness by himself and he was all right now.

Although still he shook a little, and he had to go slow, he was able to eat a little bit that night from his supplies from home without throwing it up. Eventually the shaking stopped, and he was well again.

Saber traveled for several days through the woods. His food supply was gone,and now he had to worry about what he was going to eat. This was another problem than he had not expected to have, as he had not expected to be gone that long. But now it looked like he was going to be gone a long, long time. He had figured a week; and it was already more than that. He felt homesick, but at the same time he felt excited. This was what he had always wanted to do: to explore, to see new places, to not have to work so hard at the studies he hated so much to be something he did not want to be.

He was also running out of journal papers. He had written far more than he usually did in the face of these new adventures. The last thing he was running out of was water. "Great," he muttered to himself. He wished it would rain. At least then he could drink the rainwater, but it had been hot and dry the past few days.

It was the eighth day from his home when his last of the food supplies ran out, and his water was down to a drop, even having eaten and drunk only the barest minimum. He had been weak after his three days of sickness from the tainted fruit and had not eaten then, but still his supply had not lasted long. He had eaten berries and fruits along the way, ones that he recognized and that smelled right. Ones that also grew in his valley. That had helped with the food, but water he needed. He needed it badly. He had had none now for almost twenty-four hours, and he was starting to feel the effects.

But now as he walked, he thought... Yes! He heard it! He heard running water from somewhere!

Walking more quickly now, Saber headed for the sound and was very surprised to find not a stream, but a river easily thirty times as wide as any warrior's height. Letting out a delighted laugh, Saber ran to the water's edge, sniffed it to see if it was safe, and drank long and deep. He drank until he felt dizzy and almost fell in.

Then he lay back on the bank of the river with a silly grin on his face. Saber thought about the stream he and his brother swam in often and that naturally enough led to thought about his family. He felt bad worrying them, he honestly did, but he had always wanted to be an adventurer, an explorer, and no one understood. Not even his friends his own age did. They all did as they were told, as their people wanted them to, and since most of them trained to fight, they were happy! But he did not.

The only one that ever came close to understanding how he felt, the need for adventure was old Nenda, the chief of the Bruter village on the other side of the valley. But he had strengthened even in that short time since he last confided journeying to the Western Boarder. He had gotten through a crisis on his own, something that he would not have thought he could do before, and something that no one else would have thought the young scholar-to-be would have been able to do either. And he had been away from home a long time, in unfamiliar territory. Even in the short time he had been gone he had experienced much.

After lying down for a while and simply enjoying having water, Saber stripped his clothing off; his headband, armbands, and the belt he was using to carry some of his things. He jumped into the calm waters, laughing as he surfaced, shaking his long hair of the water and sending it flying in shining droplets. He had been outside continuously in the hot summer weather, and been running out of water. It simply felt good to be able to have so much he could swim in it. He liked to swim, and it was one of the few physical things he was good at.

And it felt wonderful to not be sick. He would not eat something again without checking it first.

The young traveler played in the waters of the great river for nearly an hour, then got out to lie in the sun, letting its rays dry him off. He was in no hurry. He was eager to see more, yes, but he did not have to be anywhere, he didn't have to make it home by dark, and he had all the time in the world. This was ultimate freedom. No school, no obligations, nothing. And right now under the warm sun, it felt great.

Once he was clothed again and on his way, Saber walked along the banks of the river. The other side, so far as he could see, was more of the same: a high bank lined with trees. The middle of the stream was moving slowly, lazily, as if it too had nowhere to go. He had seen a few ripples here and there but not seen any fish.

He had never been good at fishing anyway, and so did not hope to catch one. He just wanted to see what they looked like a week away from the Valley. He was seeing things no one ever had before. Before, the valley had been his world.

The boy was walking along, feeling better than he had since he struck out, and daydreaming as he walked. He was imagining what lay ahead. He did not notice when something slide by languidly in the water not ten feet from where the small boy walked.

He knew it a moment later, however, when he turned to face a splash and a dozen rows of needle sharp teeth coming straight for him. Saber screamed in utter shock and startlement, and fell backwards on his rear in the mud. "What is that?!" he shrieked, even though there was no one to answer.

The thing had leapt for him, saw that it would not be able to reach with this jump, and with an impossible feat of gymnastics whipped itself around to land several yards into the river. Saber's brief glimpse of it had shown it to look like a great gray fish, with the huge legs of an insect sprouting unnaturally from its sides, and a mouth full of sharp teeth. He scrambled to his feet and took off running into the trees. He looked back once, panting, to see the hellish thing jump once more and disappear now that its potential meal was gone.

Saber was shaken after that. He stayed far away from the river, close enough only to keep it in his sight as he followed it. He'd darted in once to fill his waterskin, but that was it.

As he began to relax and recover from the near miss of the great killer fish-thing, Saber began to wonder if this was what the world was: this endless vista of trees and river. He had seen nothing else, and wondered how long he would have to travel before getting into different lands, if there were different lands. He knew of the rocky wastes to the north, the great firepits and the demons with their powers but that was all he had seen. Was there such a thing as other lands? Were there yet other things he had never seen before? He saw nothing else during the whole day, but right before nightfall, when it was still light enough to see, he saw something that made him gasp.

Even at this distance, he could tell that it was broken, but even so, what an object! What a great, massive thing it must be, like the plaything of a mythical god's child.

It stood high up, into a mountain; it was another wonder to the young boy used only to the forest, and the two cliffs that bordered his valley, and he could not clearly see what it was. The top was cracked, and trees grew everywhere, nearly obscuring it. Vines covered the great thing, and Saber could see that he was many days away from it. But his heart raced. He was sure it was manmade, and the few glimpses he could catch through the mountain and the trees. The rest looked like forest; only forest, and was easily ignored for the stone wonder in the distance.

He suddenly had a destination.

With a wild surge of anticipation in his mind and his heart, Saber made his journal entry on the last parchment, describing what he saw, what he smelled, what he heard. "I will try and get to this great...thing by the time the week ends," the child wrote. "And maybe I'll find something else to write on because my parchment ran out!" Closing the homemade booklet, Saber made his bed in the warm leaves in that wooded valley, with a spectacular view of the stars spanning above him. Gazing at these as he often did at home, he fell asleep with a great feeling of contentment.

Black Widow Shark
shark

Part 9: Dark Observances

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