Aluminum Leaves

by Marion Deeds

  “So they were born in this world.”

  “Of course they were,” he said, before he decided it wasn’t such a strange question. She hadn’t been born here, after all. “The fronteras, I never heard my father mention them. Those stories came from my mother’s people.”

  “Hokay,” she said. “Maybe your uncle can help us.”

  “How did you know that those stones were…what they were?”

  “Grandmother Dosmanos told me. She didn’t call them frontera though, but puertas. It means…”

  “Doors.”

  “Yes. They seem like the same thing to me, only smaller. Anyway, when the book came to our family to guard in the 1800s, there were five puertas in the book. Over time, three of them seem to have closed.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t know exactly. By the time my grandmother got the book, only two of the puertas still opened. One of the family theories about the book was that those five puertas gave glimpses into the linked worlds that have elemental beings, and ours. That’s just a theory though.”

  “Linked worlds?”

  Erin stroked the cover of the book. “Theoretically all the worlds are linked, in a vast spiral. Some say they spring from the body of a dead goddess.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “I don’t either, really. Some worlds are… They have things in common, they’re similar. We think the elemental worlds are an example. They share certain factors but evolved differently. The book speaks of an elemental world where humans have been taken over by some parasitic species, for instance. My grandmother said if we ever found that world, we should try to close the frontera.”

  “You can close a frontera?”

  “We think so. There’s part of a charm in here for closing one.”

  “How would you find it to close it?”

  “Well, that’s just it. No one really knows. Ours were mapped by the people who brought the artifacts. Somewhere there is a map of the linked worlds that shows all the fronteras, or at least that’s what we were told.”

  “Perhaps that’s the compass,” he said.

  “I think the compass works with the map.”

  “Part of a charm, you said. It is incomplete? Unfinished?”

  She nodded. “There are pages missing. We’ve never known how many.”

  “How could that be?” He waved his hand just as she raised her eyebrows. “No, I see. Someone who wanted to destroy the book.”

  “Or someone who wanted to steal it, but they couldn’t, and so they snipped out a few pages.”

  “That had to have happened in your world.”

  “It came to us this way.”

  “In the 1800s? Is that years?”

  She nodded.

  He felt dizzy. “You have eighteen hundred years of history?”

  “More than that.” She raised her eyebrows. “Don’t stare, it’s not that weird. Your world probably had recorded history back before whatever happened, too.” She closed the book. “Let’s get some sleep.”

  Erin lay awake listening to Trevian’s deep, even breathing. It was comforting, but it didn’t lull her into slumber. She didn’t know if it was an adrenaline hangover from the earth elemental’s attack or just the stress of the past two days. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw only the swirls and spirals that bordered the aluminum pages.

  There was something in the book about armor, no…carapaces. That was it, but it wasn’t complete.

  The border patterns were different on each page, and some looked as if they were part of a continuous pattern, as if something had been pressed onto a sheet of aluminum that was later cut into smaller rectangles, except that space had clearly been left in the center for the text. The swirls reminded her of eddies in water, of fingerprints, even of tree rings, although they weren’t that ordered. Not ordered, but not random either.

  She sat up.

  Trevian’s breath checked, then started up again, and he didn’t stir.

  She pulled out the book. She had looked at those borders hundreds of times, but maybe she’d never really seen them. Maybe she and every Dosmanos before her had been looking at them wrong.

  Now that she had a thought she wanted to follow, she didn’t know what to do for light. Finally, she pulled out her phone and, angling the screen away from Trevian, pointed it at the book. She could see the whorls and loops on each page, but she needed a way to look at many pages at once. Scooting out of the bedroll, she knelt on the ground and drew in the dust with her finger. The line held, but it was going to take forever to copy each page into the dirt.

  The phone slipped off her thigh, the bright screen facing Trevian. He grunted and opened his eyes. “What is it?” He sounded alert and calm.

  “Nothing, sorry. I was just trying out an idea.”

  He sat up. “What?”

  “What if these borders make up a larger image, a picture?”

  “A map?”

  “Maybe.”

  He pushed down the bedroll and crawled over to her. “We need a way to capture these lines, rather than drawing them by hand,” he said. “Why don’t you use your device for that?”

  “Because once the battery dies, we won’t be able to see them anymore.”

  “Ah.” He stood up. “We need light.” First he carefully scraped the dark gray ash out of the circle of stones of the fire ring. Setting that aside, he stood and went to the back of the shelter, returning with a handful of black porous rocks that looked like lava. Erin waited, curious, while he stacked them in the stone fire circle and shaved some curls off a few sticks. He used a stone-and-steel to strike a spark. They waited until the black rock caught fire, glowing with a bright green light. He went to his knapsack and reached down deep, rummaging through the bottom. Finally, he pulled out a sheaf of paper, like the one he had given her back at his camp. In the greenish light, Erin could see writing on some of the pages. Trevian paged through them, sorting them out, and setting aside ones that had blank spaces. He looked at the handful of papers, at the book, then, sighing, sorted through them again and added five more sheets that were filled with words.

  “Here,” he said.

  He came over and lay a blank page over the page of the book. He scooped up a handful of the ash and began rubbing it over the paper. Erin didn’t think it would work, that the paper was too thick, but soon the swirled pattern emerged through the dark inked words.

  They took turns until they had twenty-two papers with the border patterns. Even with the bright glow of the rocks, it was not easy to make out details, and tipping the papers even slightly threw a deep shadow across the pages.

  “In the morning,” she said, stretching and yawning.

  He nodded.

  They both lay back down. Erin tilted back her head so she could see through the door of the shelter. The clearing, the woods, looked like night anywhere. She could pretend, for a minute, that she was home, at summer camp or a trip with her family. She shut her eyes and tried to stop thinking about that.

  The next morning, they arranged the patterns as best they could. It seemed to Erin that they were guessing on several pieces, and the gaps caused by the missing pages were obvious. The pattern snaked in a series of expanding coils. She used a smudge of ash to mark each opal, with an X for the two that were puertas.

  “What does it mean?”

  “I think it’s the map of the labyrinth,” she said. “All the worlds that have portals, fronteras.”

  He knelt and began to pick up the pages, stacking them carefully. “What can we do with this?”

  “I don’t think much, without the compass. But it’s information, right? Maybe your uncle will have an idea of what it means.”

  They ate some jerky and dried fruit before they left. Trevian put the sheets at the bottom of his knapsack. Erin started to speak, to protest, and stopped herself. She was trusting him, and besides, she had the book. She could recreate the map if she needed to, if it turned out the swirls really were something mor
e than an elaborate decorative device.

  The sun was slanting through the trees when they left the travel house and started down the narrow trail. “I thought we were going south,” she said, the sunlight warming her back as they tramped downhill.

  “We are.”

  “No. The sun’s behind us.”

  He glanced back. “Yes.”

  She caught her balance and focused on her feet for a few steps. “The sun rises where, now?”

  “In the north.” He didn’t add “of course,” but given his tone of voice, he didn’t need to. After a few seconds, he said, “Where does it rise in your world?”

  “In the east.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t even imagine.”

  She thought about his expression, “the world turned,” the rippling light in the sky, the disruptions in the earth. Had this world experienced a violent polar shift? She remembered from science classes that the poles shifted all the time back home, but not dramatically. This was a ninety-degree shift. She couldn’t picture anything like that outside of a bad science fiction movie. Had that caused cataclysms? Destroyed cities? Had the elementals caused it in some way? Or had the shift been the thing that awakened the elementals? She thought of the coin he’d shown her. “That coin, the White Bluffs coin. There were numbers on it.”

  “The year it was stamped,” he said.

  “Your world’s been like this for three hundred years?”

  Without looking back, he nodded. “We know there was a period of great distress and confusion that lasted many years before people banded together and reformed towns, cities, and governments, and a few years after that, they started stamping coins. So probably a little more than three hundred years.”

  “But you don’t know exactly what happened.”

  “The world turned, and the elementals awoke. The marvels of the Ancient failed, or were destroyed. I know what every child knows. It’s never been of interest to me.” He slowed and turned sideways. “I never thought I would be explaining it to an out-of-worlder.”

  “No, I guess you wouldn’t. I’d be in the same situation if you’d come to my world.” She shifted her knapsack and touched the strap of her bag. “Will we make it to this little town today?”

  “Mother willing,” he said. “Probably mid-afternoon if the weather holds. We need to exercise care. This is an area with lots of earth ripples; there are shafts, holes, crevices in the rocks. Some are hard to see.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  They walked without speaking. The trees grew sparse, and more red and gray rocks thrust up from the earth. The gray ones looked like slate. As they descended, gnarled bushes and small plants appeared, growing out of cracks in the rocks. When the sun was overhead, they stopped on a curve and sat, eating flatbread with more dried fruit. Erin was glad she’d filled all of her water-bottles back at the spring because she didn’t know when they would find water again.

  “The way gets steeper now, if I remember,” Trevian said. “This used to be the north passage. It was wider, and traders picked up goods at Merrylake Landing and headed north to the towns and the capital. But the part of the pass collapsed during an earth shudder, and the new trail is much steeper. There is no more trading in Merrylake, so it doesn’t really matter.”

  “Is it completely deserted?”

  He moved his shoulders. His gesture for a shrug was different from hers, more of a roll backward than an up-and-down jerk. “Close to it, from what I hear. Two years ago, there was a fair, but it was tiny. And after that, the lake fell even further, and the docks were taken out. Most people moved away.”

  “Why would your uncle pick that place?”

  Trevian shifted his hat farther back on his head. “A person could make a lifetime occupation of wondering why my uncle does things. Perhaps he prospected something here. We had cousins here, thirty years ago, so perhaps some family feeling brought him here.” He paused. “More likely, the tale of a charm or an amulet. There was always talk of a hidden cache of Ancient, like the one they found before I was born. It enriched the entire town. No one’s ever found this second trove, though.”

  “If he’s a prospector, I’m surprised he didn’t come to you.”

  “Uncle Oshane says that people value what is hard to acquire. The sacrifice of a claim and a two-day expedition through the countryside makes this something of a quest, in his mind, I suppose.”

  “Well, he sounds fun,” she said. She could tell from Trevian’s puzzled expression that he didn’t know how to read her tone. She stood up. “There’s a saying where I come from. ‘We’re on the downhill slope.’ It means the final leg of a journey or a project.”

  “The downhill is the most difficult,” he said.

  “Yeah, nobody ever mentioned that in the saying.”

  Chapter Seven

  Three hours before sunset, they stopped on a rock outcropping overlooking the narrow valley. Trevian thought he’d known what to expect, but he was shocked. Cracked mudflats stretched nearly to the eastern mountains, and the remaining water at the east end of the lake was covered with a dense grayish scum. Only a handful of sprites flitted across the surface. He blinked, trying to impose the shimmering expanse of water that lived in his memory over this image, but he couldn’t. Erin stood behind him, unmoved. She had no comparison. To her it was simply a place.

  “Wetlands? Marsh?” she said.

  “No, this is Merry Lake.”

  “Hokay. How is your leg?”

  “Better,” he said, although it was stinging.

  He looked west, where the town had stood. The hulks of the old warehouses, made of Merrylake stone, still stood, hollowed out and crumbling. There was no sign of docks or piers and for good reason. Wood was precious, and he imagined that people had dismantled the docks and paid to have the lumber hauled to a new town. Closer to the center of town, some of the old buildings still stood. He could see where an earth shudder had shaken and collapsed the counting house, the registry building, and the banks on either side of it.

  “Do you know where your uncle is?” Erin said.

  “I can find him. I’m sure.” Trevian cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled a greeting in the direction of the ruined town. There was no response.

  He started down the last stretch of trail, a steep pitch that had him leaning backward, pain pinching the front of his thighs. Erin followed more slowly, gripping the boulders now and then for extra support. She carried the pouch with the book in it as well as her knapsack, and it seemed to weigh her down. She was breathing heavily when they reached the valley floor.

  “This doesn’t look much like a trading center,” she said.

  He nodded, his eyes scanning the ruins for movement. He hadn’t thought much beyond coming here. He had no idea where his uncle would be staying. He recalled the letter, and his uncle’s allusion to the place where he had made the decision to be himself. That could be the stretch of flat land west of town where the fair had been held, or the sheriff’s house where he had left Ilsanja, arranging for her safe escort back to White Bluffs while he went north into the mountains to search for Ancient. The house was on a slight rise, to the west and north of the town.

  It seemed likely that his uncle would know the story, since probably every citizen of White Bluffs knew it. Ilsanja was a Fiterole, the daughter of his father’s partner and the second richest man in town. Trevian was the son and firstborn of the richest one. Everyone had known of their pledge. They were the scions of two boss families, destined to be the jefe and jefa of the growing city, an emblem of its new wealth and status, as fancy and glittering as its canal and its four-story buildings. And the last night of a Merrylake Fair, Trevian had abandoned her to go search for copper. Surely everyone knew of the scandal, and even though Oshane rarely came into White Bluffs, it was clear he had ears and eyes there.

  He pointed. “Let’s head that way,” he said.

  The stone-paved roads were pitted, and they had to skirt piles of rubble wh
ere the road had buckled in a few places. Erin said, “Are you sure this is stable?”

  “It looks like the latest earth ripple was severe,” he said.

  She muttered some numbers. He thought he heard an eight and a name, but he didn’t understand, and she didn’t explain. Some prayer, or comment, about earth shudders, he assumed.

  “Are there animals?” she said. “Scavengers?”

  “I’d expect rats and kiotes. Some pigs, maybe, gone wild.”

  Closer to the center of town the stone houses stared, vacant-eyed. They both stopped once, heads turned at a sound to the south. A door banged and a child came out of a house two streets over. Seeing them, it turned and ran back inside, shouting, “Ma!” A woman came out, one hand behind her back, the child peering around her legs. Trevian cut between two houses and approached them. His chest filled with a familiar, pleasant sense of warmth. He stopped before he crossed the street to their side, keeping a respectful distance.

  “Good day to you,” he called. “We seek Oshane Langtree.”

  “Don’t know him,” the woman said.

  “Is there a registry, still?”

  She gave her head one sharp shake. “No longer. You prospectors?”

  “Yes, but we’re here seeking my uncle.”

  She came out onto the stone steps. “I don’t know a Langtree by name, but there’s an old hermit living in the house up by the hill. The sheriff’s house, they call it.”

  “You’re not from here, then?”

  “No. We got drawn in by those rumors and tales, you know the ones. They found a great cache of Ancient here thirty years ago, and ever since then there’ve been stories.”

  “I’ve heard them.”

  “It’s not much of a town,” she said. “There’s about a dozen of us. We protected each other against the mestengos, but even they don’t come here much anymore. For such a trove of mystery, you’d think at least some of them would be true copper-hunters, but I don’t know a single one. There must be one though—the town is warded at night. Dios help you if you’re out prospecting past sunset, ‘cause you won’t get back to your house.”