The Almanac

by E L Stricker

  “Got a few things, drawings all folded up. My granddad gave 'em to me,” Ban said. “There's one that might help.”

  Illya sat up straighter. The song had finished, and nearby Sabelle had dropped Conna's hands. She was retreating to the edge of the circle, where Martha and Josie were sitting. Illya felt a little bit better.

  “Show me,” he said.

  ***

  Ban's hut was full of broken parts and pieces. There was scrap metal for his blacksmithing and many other salvaged tools and Olders' things. Illya whistled; there was even more here than he had collected in the lean-to behind his mother’s hut. She had always affectionately called it his magpie nest because he had hardly ever gone out to explore the nearby ruins without coming back with something for it.

  Firelight glinted off the piles of metal stashed in every corner and on the shelves, turning the hut into a jungle of twisted shadows. If Impiri had ever been in this place, Illya would have gotten knocked down to a much lower spot on her priority list.

  “Wife thinks I'm crazy hanging on to all this stuff,” Ban said in response to Illya's raised eyebrows. “She says she still likes me fine though.”

  Ban grinned and led him to the table, where there were several pieces of paper spread out. Illya picked up the one on top, fingering the now-familiar smoothness with his fingertips. It was browned and creased through the middle.

  “Your granddad saved these all this time?” he asked.

  “Yep, been stowed away in there,” Ban said, pointing to a case leaning against the table made of what looked like leather. The clasp was broken, and Illya could see divided fabric slots inside. It had letters stitched into the top. REB

  The paper was a drawing. The markings on it were faint, and some of them had worn away completely, but Illya could still see the essence of what it was.

  A wheel. It was tall with cups around its edge. A crude sketch of a man stood beside it, showing that it was twice his height. It sat partially submerged in a pond, with arrows indicating that it would rotate. The cups on the ascending half were full of water. They would hit a bar and overturn into a trough at the top. Faint letters across the bottom of the drawing said, “Old-Fashioned Noria Wheel.”

  “A water wheel,” Illya whispered to himself, amazed at the simplicity of it.

  “Yeah,” Ban said. “We would still have to figure a way to get the water from the river to the field, but at least this gets it up out of the river,” he said.

  Illya looked at Ban, his eyes wide.

  “I know how to do that,” he said.

  “You do? How?” Ban asked

  “Impiri!” Illya exclaimed, getting excited. Ban stared at him, appearing thoroughly perplexed. Illya laughed out loud.

  “Something she showed me. She wanted me to see how it wouldn't work, how we are going to fail . . . but we don't need a pump after all! We just need pipes!” he said. Ban was still staring at him with no comprehension. Illya knew he was babbling, but he couldn't help it.

  “This wheel is tall,” he said. “Water will run down from it, like down a hill, if it has a path.” Ban nodded, he raised his eyebrows.

  “There is a stack of pipes in the cellar. All we have to do is run them from this trough down to the field, and as long as it gets lower as it goes, the water will carry itself.”

  Ban's eyes widened with comprehension. “We have it then,” he said. “The water will carry itself!” He slapped his hand down on the table.

  ***

  “We just have to carve wooden pegs to join these pieces,” Ban said. They had assembled the most likely people they could find to help build. Ban drew a schematic of the water wheel with a set of downward-flowing pipes into the mud of the riverbank.

  He stood back and looked at his drawing with satisfaction and a fascination that Illya recognized. He had it too: it was the same thing he felt whenever he read his book.

  “We can make these cup pieces by soaking wood and bending them into the shape we need around stones,” Ban said, glancing at Illya as if for confirmation.

  “That’s good, excellent really,” Illya said. He took a breath, making a decision.

  “From now on, you will be called Ban Builder. Everyone should do what he says; this water wheel is going to make all the difference,” he said. Ban nodded, his face flushed.

  He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants.

  “Right then, so what's left is to get the materials,” Ban said.

  They dispersed. Though it would have made more sense to leave him to fishing, Illya had asked for Benja to be among Ban's helpers. He wanted to talk to his cousin more than ever.

  “Hey, there's some stuff in the cellar we need,” he said, drawing Benja aside. “Help me?” Benja raised both eyebrows.

  “Course,” he said and hesitated. “I'll get someone else to help? Not like a Leader to carry things around, from what I hear.”

  “I haven't forgotten how to work,” Illya said.

  Conna wouldn't have liked it if he was there, but he was not. He was way across the village, busy drilling the Enforcers, who had started having daily practice sessions in the open space beside the field.

  Once in the cellar, Illya hoisted one end of a pipe onto his shoulder. Benja took the other end. It was heavy, and he was sweating by the time they got it up the stairs and out into the light. The pipe was rusted, but the spot they had been stacked in was one of the driest in the cellar room. The rust was not as bad as Illya had expected it to be. They went back again and again, taking many trips before they had all the pipes stacked alongside the river.

  “Some of these are going to leak pretty bad,” Benja said, brushing at a spot rust, which revealed a hole all the way through the thickness of the metal.

  “Maybe Ban can patch them,” Illya said doubtfully. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the edge of his shirt. “There should be enough, even if there are some we can't use.”

  “Anything that shortens that distance will help,” Benja said. A line of people still tromped past them with skins of water, keeping the field damp as the heat of the day intensified.

  Illya felt better than he had in a long time. Action was going a long way toward easing his guilt. If all went well, there would be a few days of wood soaking, then the building, which couldn't take more than a day or two. In all, it should be less than a week and the people would be relieved of the carrying.

  As they lugged the pipes one by one through the heat, Benja and Illya fell back into their old habits of laughing and joking, pushing each other to work faster. Out from under Conna's scrutiny for once, he had felt like just another villager. It was a glimpse of another life; one he hadn't realized how much he missed.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “THE SEEDS HAVE sprouted!” Conna grasped Illya's shoulder and shook it for emphasis. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and blinked at Conna, not sure if he had heard right.

  “They have come, just like you said they would. Illya, we have plants!”

  He heard laughter drifting through the air.

  “Really? Sprouts?” he said.

  “Come and see,” Conna said.

  It was like spring had come new. The people laughed and celebrated. Some nodded to Illya as they passed. He saw new respect in their eyes, and his heart swelled.

  Charlie Polestadt was crouching down at the edge of the field. He stood up and stuck his fists to his hips.

  “Look!” he called, as they neared. “You can see them, you can see them all!” He pointed down at the earth. At first, Illya didn't see anything. He reached the edge of the field and dropped to his knees, putting his face close to the ground.

  They were there. Overnight, tiny green sprouts, some with opened leaf buds, had emerged from the furrows.

  Illya was overwhelmed with the urge to laugh and cry at once.

  “It's working.”

  “I know it's working!” Charlie slapped him on the back. “Always knew it would.”

  “We all did,” Con
na said.

  Charlie's broad face was sunburned and lined with fatigue from hard work but was full of such undisguised joy that Illya couldn't help feeling it himself. Even Conna seemed proud. Tears prickled at the corners of his eyes. He blinked furiously. It would not do to cry, not at all.

  Until this moment, there had been no way to know if the seeds would sprout at all. Now there was a carpet of green at his feet.

  ***

  In the days that followed, the village was a changed place. People who had regarded him with suspicion before were open and relaxed. Impiri, slaving over the cooking fires, seemed afraid to say anything at all. More and more people came to his hut to get a closer look at the book and hear words from it.

  A week after the sprouting, the plants had doubled in size. The people worked harder than ever to keep them watered. But, finally, the Noria wheel was nearing completion. Illya had continued to help with the building. He woke with the sun each day to make time for reading before the day's work started. He was determined to be the best Leader possible, and he was sure that in the book's pages he could find the answer to any problem if he just looked hard enough. The book had proved its wisdom. The days of hesitation and worry that he would lose his mind were over.

  When he had read as much as he could without his eyes blurring, he joined Ban and the other builders at the river. They spent a sweltering morning pounding pieces of carved wood into tight-fitting notches. Assembling the wheel went quickly once all of the pieces had been constructed, and by afternoon it was complete. All that remained was to put it into position.

  Two towers had been built on the riverbank: stacked stones inside a wooden frame. They were nearly the height of a man. Five men lifted the giant wheel and positioned it between them, placing the center shaft on grooves across the tops.

  As soon as they lowered it into the river, the wheel started spinning, pushed by the current. It picked up cups of water, and, just as in the drawing, overturned them into a trough at the top. Ban had salvaged a few things from the nearby ruins to aid in the construction, but, in the end, most of the wheel had been built out of wood from the forest.

  This was a fact of which Illya was extremely proud. He loved the idea that his people had found a way to do something like this without help from Olders' things. The world of the Olders had been full of marvels, but you never knew if anything they had made would ever be found again.

  The Noria wheel stood at the height of two men. It had to be tall to deliver the water to the top of the long network of pipes, which sloped downward from the river to the edge of the field. Eight spokes joined together at the hub, the other ends linked by smoothed pieces of wood joined into a circle. The notched joints, which had been tight when the wood was dry, had swelled and become unbreakable when the wood absorbed the river water.

  Illya stared as the river pushed it around and around. Water rushed from the trough down the pipes, some dripping out of small leaks where they had rusted through but most of it flowing past. When it reached the end and spilled out onto the field, everyone broke out into cheers.

  Illya's heart felt light as a feather rising on a draft as he jogged to the field to watch the water flooding out.

  It poured and poured. For a while, it soaked into the thirsty ground, but after some time it began to pool.

  The wheel was too efficient. They would have to leave it out of the river much of the time or the field would become a swamp.

  It was a slight setback, but Illya could not help feeling delighted. He hadn't needed to worry if it would work or not: it was working too well. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and watched as Ban bustled around excitedly, pointing at parts of his construction and making a new drawing in the dirt.

  “I think we could build those parts higher,” Ban said, indicating the tops of the stone columns.

  “We need platforms that a few men can stand on. Then they can raise it out of the water when it needs to stop.”

  Illya and the workmen looked over the drawing then spread out to collect more stones. ***

  Any remaining vestiges of doubt left among the villagers were gone with the sprouts and the success of the wheel. Illya no longer hesitated before giving a new edict, and he started feeling like he had been meant to be the Leader all along.

  “That book is something, isn't it?” Samuel's voice interrupted his thoughts one morning as he sat outside his hut reading. Illya looked up, squinting to make out the Healer's face from the bright sunlight that surrounded his head. He grunted in response.

  “People have been talking. They're calling you a prophet,” he said.

  “So?”

  “Are you?” Samuel asked.

  “Maybe I am,” Illya said. He believed it at that moment. Everything was changing. Everything was getting better, and it was all because of him and because of the book. Samuel laughed.

  “Maybe you are, but perhaps you are not.”

  “I'm the only one who can read,” Illya said.

  “And what do you read?” Samuel asked. “It's just a book. We might not have anything else like it, but, still, it's just a book.”

  “It has the wisdom of the Olders.”

  “And they were just people.”

  “At least they knew how to live,” Illya snapped.

  “Fine. You are a prophet,” Samuel said. “Just make sure that when you save us all, you don't destroy what we have in the process.” He frowned, his eyebrows drawn together. Illya met his gaze without flinching, his eyes hard like stones and his insides boiling.

  “I know what I'm doing,” he said.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A THUMPING SOUND interrupted a particularly good dream involving a sun-lit raspberry patch. Illya blinked himself awake. The sun was not even up yet, was Ban working in the dark? He shook his head. That couldn't be right; they had finished the wheel and hadn't started any new projects. Ban had been working to refine the operation of the wheel. Maybe he was devising a lifting system. Still, even if there had been work to be done, he couldn't think of any reason why Ban would do it alone, in the dark.

  Illya lay quiet, wondering if he was imagining the sound. The gates were still closed.

  No one could be out there.

  Nearby, his mother and Molly continued to sleep undisturbed. He shook his head, but the sound did not disappear. It was real, and it was coming from the direction of the river. Illya crawled out of bed and pulled himself to his feet.

  Easing the door open so as not to disturb his family, he tiptoed outside. The village slept. Dawn was not far away, but no promise of light was visible yet on the horizon. The clanging continued, regular and unrelenting. It sounded like a rock slamming against something.

  He ran towards the sound, his heart lurching, not bothering to stay quiet now that he was outside. The gates were open.

  He hesitated. Making a split-second decision, he turned, not back but along the north path. Most of the huts on this side of the village were abandoned. Conna and Aaro had moved away from their father, into one of the most intact ones, the night after Illya had become the Leader. A few of his Enforcers had since settled in the huts nearby. A little distance away from the rest of the village, the Enforcers’ camp had taken on a kind of glamor.

  Illya had not yet decided whether he should join them out there. So many things had changed in his life that he was reluctant to give up that last vestige of normalcy: home with his family.

  He rapped on Conna's door. After a few moments, it was opened by a bleary-eyed Aaro.

  “Whaz goin' on?” Aaro mumbled, blinking. Then he frowned, his eyes sharpening.

  “Hear that?” Illya asked. “It's coming from the wheel. I need backup.” Conna pushed past Aaro, his hair rumpled and eyes bloodshot.

  “Get some of the others,” he said over his shoulder to his brother.

  “Let's go,” he said to Illya and took off up the path towards the gate.

  Illya sprinted after Conna through the open gates. If any Terrors were
out in the dark, they could be prowling through the entire village by now. He shuddered.

  The wheel was still safely up on the riverbank. Two figures stood over it, working on something. Neither of them was Ban.

  Conna broke into a new burst of speed. One of the figures dropped something on the ground and ran. The other either had not noticed them coming or didn't care. When they got close enough, Illya saw that he was wielding a large rock, repeatedly smashing it into the wooden joints of the wheel.

  Conna reached the man first and tackled him. They fought, a blur of hair and limbs, until Conna had him pinned. He grasped him by the shoulder and flipped him over so that Illya could see his face.

  It was Piers Malkin, Jimmer Duncan's friend. His face contorted with hate.

  “Sabotage,” Illya said, almost disbelieving the word as he said it. If he hadn't seen it himself, he wouldn't have thought it possible. Everyone had seemed so content lately and so impressed by the book. Besides that, weeks of work had gone into this wheel. Who in his right mind would try to undo it?

  “What of it?” Piers spat at him.

  “You won't get away with this,” Conna said, breathing heavily. There were shouts behind them. Aaro had rounded up the rest of the Enforcers, and they were streaming out of the gates towards the river. Dawn was coming now. The sky had begun to lighten over the flats to the east.

  “We will lock you up until we figure out what to do,” Conna was saying. Already he had bound Piers' hands and feet.

  “What happened?” Julian gasped, slowing to a jog as he reached them.

  “He was trying to break the wheel,” Illya said, still stunned. He crouched down and examined the wood. For all the banging, they had only managed to separate two joints. Some of them had been dented but held. Ban had done well when he had designed the fittings.

  “There were two,” Conna said, finishing off his knots at Piers’ wrists. He pointed towards the forest. “The other one went that way.”