The Almanac

by E L Stricker

  “You would have made a good Healer,” he said. “You have a quick mind, and you can still ask the kinds of questions that need to be asked.” Illya was not sure what to think of this. He didn't answer.

  “Try to be as good a Leader as you would have been a Healer,” Samuel said. He frowned. “It's a noble cause. Many a young man has lost himself when he was swept away by a noble cause.”

  “I know what I'm doing,” Illya said and hoped with all his might that it was true.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “A DEER, CONNA got a deer!” Molly ran through the open door, panting and out of breath, covered in mud.

  “Really?” Illya asked, looking up from the book.

  “Yes, yes, yes!” she squealed.

  Conna had gone out with the Patrollers to hunt that morning, after setting everyone else to digging the field.

  Illya closed the book and wondered if there had been flooding in the plains with all the rain. If there had, animals living there would have been pushed to the higher ground near the village. His people couldn't hunt in the lowlands because the area was too far out of their territory. There would be no way to return to the village before nightfall, and legends held that violent gangs of Rovers ranged out there, killing whoever they found.

  A deer. A truly lucky turn. With the timing of it, Illya couldn't help but feel it had something to do with the book. He ran his fingers across the cover. It had letters on it too, big letters that had taken a long time to read because they had extra curls and lines. Almanac.

  The book that would save them all. If Charlie’s injury had been a bad omen, then this was the very best.

  “Come on. They're already tying it up for roasting.” Molly grabbed his hand, pulling him up from his furs.

  The central fire was roaring. People streamed in from the field, caked in mud. The sight gave Illya a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had spent a day or so hovering at the edge of the field trying to look Leader-like but only succeeding in scowling with his discomfort. When Conna had suggested that he go work on reading the book and look at it for guidance, he had readily agreed.

  He was still sure that it was only a matter of time before they all turned on him.

  Molly scampered away to sit with her friends as soon as they entered the circle. The girls hovered in a little flock, watching as the women prepared the deer and set it on a spit to turn over the fire.

  Since he was the hunter who had made the kill, Conna was responsible for carving it. He stood near the fire, sharpening a metal knife on a stone. It was one of the new ones that Ban Johnsted had figured out how to make the year before. The other Patrollers clustered around, slapping him on the back, making observations about the deer's size and the spread of its antlers.

  “We should make a headdress out of these,” said Nico Myr, holding the rack up on Conna's head.

  Julian Reyes whispered something into Conna's ear and was rewarded with a roar of laughter. Illya, who was just far enough away that he hadn’t joined them yet, halted, fighting the urge to flee. He may be the Leader now, but it didn’t change the feeling that they must be laughing at him somehow. None of them had ever had anything to do with him before all of this had happened.

  The deer was a scrawny one, affected by the hard winter as harshly as the village had been. As juices dropped into the flames below the spit, delicious smells wafted through the air and reached his nose.

  Conna would cut off chunks and pass them out as they cooked. Usually, he would have started with himself and the other Patrollers before moving on to the rest of the villagers. Illya would have stood back with the rest of them. He thought of going to find Benja, but Conna saw him first.

  “Leader!” Conna said and motioned him over.

  “Almost done here,” Conna said. He poked the knife into one of the parts closest to the fire—a leg—then carved off a slice. With a smile that did not quite reach his eyes, he held it out to Illya on the end of the knife. Illya took it.

  “Look at the good luck the book has brought us,” Conna said in a louder voice so that everyone could hear. He slapped Illya on the back, and the villagers broke into a spontaneous cheer.

  Illya grinned despite his discomfort. With meat in his hands ready to eat, it was hard not to feel like everything was going to be all right. Conna carved a piece for himself next then for each of the boys around him, ending with his little brother Aaro.

  Illya looked around for Benja and found him on the edge of the circle, standing with his parents. Mud was smeared across his face and covered his clothes. He met Illya’s eyes for a moment then looked away. He was not smiling.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “WHAT IS IT?” Illya asked.

  People came to him nearly every day now with petty disputes and questions. It was as if they had decided he was truly their Leader and that meant that he should solve all of their problems.

  The man in front of him was mumbling something about a new fence his neighbor had put up between their huts. Apparently, they had very different ideas about where it should go. Illya wondered why on earth people couldn't solve problems like this on their own, not to mention why they thought he had any idea of what to do.

  The one thing that was saving him in this mess, though he had never thought he would say it, was Conna. Again and again, when Illya found himself floundering in front of the crowd, Conna managed to pipe up with a comment to save him. Just like on the first day, somehow, he always knew what to say.

  The plan was working. The digging was going well. It was hard not to feel hopeful when progress could be seen in the field every day. He had inspected it that morning with Conna, and they thought it might be ready by that afternoon.

  The man in front of him was droning out a list of grievances that his neighbor had committed in the past. The seeds sat in Illya's pocket, their fate fast approaching. In a few hours, they would be put in the ground. With his idea so close to becoming real, it was hard to focus on anything else.

  “Do you suppose?” the man was saying. “Would you have a look at the ... Almanac?” He whispered the name of the book as if he was afraid to say it out loud then continued, “You know, see if it has anything to say about it?”

  Illya realized that he had no idea what the man had been saying for the past few minutes.

  “I don't really think. . .“

  Then he stopped himself. As tenuous as his position as Leader was, the last thing he needed to do was to deny the main thing that gave him credibility.

  “Well . . . alright then,” Illya said.

  He picked up the book and sat up straighter. Hoping that what he found would somehow apply to the man's situation, he opened it to a random page.

  “Hmm,” he said. The man's eyes widened.

  “What's it say?” the man asked.

  Illya held up a finger. Deciphering the letters was still a slow process. The man stared at him intently, his eyes trying to penetrate Illya's skull as if he could see the reading happening. A bead of sweat rolled down the back of Illya's neck. The words didn't make very much sense.

  Finally, he looked up and cleared his throat, hoping that the man would be so impressed that he wouldn't notice.

  “How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?” he read aloud. The man was silent.

  “Ah,” he said after a bit, looking at Illya with a somewhat frantic expression. “It has a . . . deeper meaning?”

  “Yes.” Illya coughed. “The words they used back then were different than we use now. We must look for meaning that applies to our lives today.”

  The man nodded. “Maybe it means that a good neighbor is as precious as a campfire,” he said, his eyes darting and nervous.

  Illya nodded. “Yes, I think you have it,” he said. A smile spread across the man's face.

  “The book has something to teach everyone. You are wise to see its message so quickly,” Illya said. Privately, he thought that he may have t
o ask this man again if he ever needed to find meaning in the book where there seemed to be none. Beaming, the man rose. He thanked Illya and shuffled backward out of the hut, ducking his head repeatedly in thanks as he went, so that he resembled a bobbing pigeon.

  With some reluctance, Illya forced his attention back to the passage he had been translating when the man had come in.

  “Finally, another unanswerable question,” he sounded out loud, haltingly. “Why is it that our feet smell and our nose runs?”

  Illya groaned and held his face in his hands. Except for the sections on weather and planting, a lot of what he had read had turned out to be very confusing. He flipped to the next page, just as there was a quiet knock on the door. Undoubtedly another villager with a stupid problem.

  “What now?” he snapped.

  “Oh . . . sorry. Never mind.” Benja had poked his head through the door and was now backing out hastily.

  “No, wait!” Illya got to his feet quickly. “I didn't mean that. I thought you were someone else.” Benja stopped and rested his hand on the doorframe, frowning.

  “Okay then,” Benja said. He stared down at the open book, and his eyes widened. It seemed to be forever since they had looked at it together and laughed over the fact that it was about chickens. Illya blinked, realizing that it had barely been two weeks.

  They stood in awkward silence, Benja looking at the book and Illya looking at him. Finally, Illya cleared his throat.

  “How've you—“

  “I just wanted to say it’s good. What you're doing,” Benja blurted out, interrupting him.

  “Oh,” Illya said. “Thanks.”

  He felt like squirming at the tone of admiration in Benja's voice. He needed someone to talk to, someone who wasn't Conna. He needed someone to tell him if he was going crazy or doing the stupidest thing in his life. He didn't need another villager to come stare at him. He needed Benja.

  His heart sunk into his stomach.

  “I wondered how you'd been,” Illya said. He looked down at the ground and dug his toe into the earth.

  Benja shrugged.

  “This has been really weird,” Illya said.

  Benja breathed in deep and let his breath out in a slow sigh.

  “Do you want to go fishing?” he mumbled.

  For a second, Illya started to say yes. He would have loved nothing more than to leave it all behind and sit by the river with his cousin, but then he remembered the seeds in his pocket.

  “The field is supposed to be ready soon,” Illya said.

  Benja nodded and turned away. “I know. I’ve been out there,” he said.

  “Will you watch the planting?” Illya asked.

  “Yeah,” Benja said. “Wouldn't miss it.” He gave Illya an awkward smile and left the hut, his shoulders slumped and his hands shoved into his pockets.

  Illya clenched his fist to stop himself from hitting the wall.

  ***

  It was eerie to walk through the village and find it deserted. It reminded him of the day of the flood, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that, like that day, something must be wrong. Everyone was finishing the digging in the field; a simple enough explanation, but in his dark mood, he imagined the spirits of everyone who had starved haunting the empty huts. In the distance, the Terrors had started to howl. The shadows of the evening took on a sinister cast. He walked faster, as if they could reach out and grab him.

  A clanging sound started nearby.

  With the setting sun behind him like a halo, Ban stood at his forge, beating a piece of glowing metal into shape. Slowly, a blade began to take shape under the pounding.

  Metal things were difficult to make, but Ban knew how to do it. It was another lost thing that they had found again, just like reading.

  For Ban, the knowledge had been in his family for years; he simply had to figure out how to use it. He had been taught by his grandfather, Martin, who had learned about blacksmithing from his own father. It went back in their family to the time of the Olders.

  Ban looked up from his work; the clanging stopped.

  “Leader,” he said.

  Illya felt his cheeks redden.

  “I'm sorry; I was going to the field,” Illya stammered.

  Ban turned back to his work with a grunt. He pumped the bellows so that the embers under the forge glowed hot then returned to shaping the bright metal.

  The raw material was scarce. There was not a lot of metal around that hadn't been claimed by rust, but it didn't take very much to make a knife. Ban would put a piece of scrap right on the fire and work the bellows until the metal was red as a coal.

  It had taken Ban's family a hundred years to find a way to make one thing that could replace something the Olders had left behind. The knives were a single tool, yet the Olders had used countless things like them. It made Illya's head swim to think of the extent of all that his people had lost.

  The planting was about more than their survival, Illya thought, feeling the seeds in his pocket.

  They had to make a new world where it was possible to do new things, where they didn't simply scrape by in the same miserable cycle day after day, season after season.

  “Have you been out there then?” Illya asked.

  Ban stopped and glanced at him, a slight frown on his face.

  “I was,” he said. “Your Conna wanted more of these.” Ban held up the glowing blade with his tongs.

  For some reason, the sight of the blade made Illya uneasy. He turned away and looked towards the field.

  The diggers were making their way off the field to rest at the edge. They leaned on their digging tools and shovels, some no more than chips of wood wedged into crude tree-branch handles. The people laughed and talked, looking happy.

  The Patrollers who had been out gathering started coming in from the forest with armloads of shoots and stalks. Nico, grinning, carried a basket brimming with new mushrooms. Everyone was working hard so that the dream of planting could have a chance.

  His people deserved more than just survival. They deserved to thrive. It didn't matter how he felt, how awkward being the Leader was for him, Illya realized. He could lose a hundred friends and it would still all be worth it.

  He wasn't doing this for himself. It was for the people who had put their faith in him. It was for his mother and sister, who could not make it through another hungry winter. It was for Charlie, who had come back to dig the day after being hit, even though there was still a lump on his head the size of an egg.

  Conna was right. He had to do whatever it took.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IMPIRI, ELIAS, AND Jimmer came out of the stone house and walked to the edge of the field. Impiri crossed her arms across her chest; she shook her head as she talked to Elias. After a few minutes, Sabelle came out and joined them. She stood back from her parents. Like them, she was conspicuously clean of mud. She examined the field with a slight frown then crouched down and ran her fingers through the soil, her lips parting slightly.

  It was time. Illya approached, feeling the eyes of all the assembled people shift to him one by one. The field looked just like the pictures in the book, soft and level with no weeds or rocks.

  Next year, if this worked, they could extend it to the edge of the forest then maybe even start another on the other side of the village.

  Next year.

  He couldn't help smiling at the thought. Until now, no one had been sure there would even be a “next year”. He felt their eyes on him, especially Sabelle's. His belly clenched with nerves in a way that was becoming all too familiar. He repeated the thought to himself with each step.

  Next year, next year, next year.

  Then he was there, in the center of a ring of people. They stared at him expectantly, waiting for him to speak. He cleared his throat and opened the book. Conna had suggested that he read to them. It had taken hours of practice to make sure it would come out smoothly.

  “Prepare the soil to the depth of two to three feet by tillin
g; break up large clumps until you can run your fingers through it.”

  Reaching down, he picked up a handful of wet dirt. He smiled and let it trickle through his fingers to fall to the ground. The people cheered. A lot of work had gone into making this field, and they were proud of it.

  “Remove all the rocks.” He nodded toward the stones they had piled into a large cairn at the edge of the field.

  “Maybe someday we will be able to build more stone houses with those,” he said. He glanced up and saw Impiri's scowl. She did not appear impressed with the idea at all.

  “What's it say next?” asked a young boy standing beside his father in the crowd. His little face was streaked with dirt, and he leaned on a makeshift shovel, looking much like a miniature adult. Illya smiled at him.

  “Plant seeds along furrows. Depth and spacing vary according to species,” he read.

  “What's a species?” the little boy asked. Illya opened his mouth then stopped. He was about to admit that he didn't know, but Conna spoke first.

  “We have seeds to plant. Let’s go make furrows.” The people cheered again, and the little boy sulked. His father placed a hand on his shoulder, and he didn't say anything else.

  “The furrows are troughs in the soil, like long valleys. Make them as long as the length of the field,” Illya said, closing the book and using it to point. “They should be as deep as one of your fingers and as far apart as the length of a man's arm.”

  The book gave a general range for depth and spacing but recommended that they follow the “package instructions.” Illya didn't know what those were, but he was fairly sure he didn't have them.

  Planting at the depth of a finger was a pure guess. He hoped that it wouldn't prove to be a terrible mistake, but there was nothing left to do but try and see what happened.

  The people spread out across the field with their tools. Sabelle picked up a stick and moved to join them. Impiri caught her by the elbow. Sabelle jerked away from her mother's grasp and went to dig beside Benja.