by Maggie Allen
“Without you, how would we survive? Who’d look after our p-suits?”
“You’re not so bad after all, a little weird, but okay.”
“Not a freak. We can hang out.”
“Where’s Mr. Jaqobi?” Doran asked.
“Twenty minutes ago, when they couldn’t raise you on radio, he and your father went off in the lorry to find you.”
Doran slapped his comm unit. “The fall must’ve knocked this out. Wow, my first radio glitch! And they missed me because I didn’t come back from the direction they expected.”
“What happened, man?”
“I made a detour to find Alexsi and bring him back.”
“Who?”
Doran nodded at the p-suit on the table. “Meet Alexsi Golaenski.”
“That old miner HomSap?”
“Yeah, that’s him. He came back with me. Showed me the way, you know.” Doran put his hand on Alexsi’s helmet. “This is one historical person I’m glad I got to know.”
Warboots
Eric Del Carlo
Eric Del Carlo’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds and many other venues. He has written novels with Robert Asprin, published by Ace Books and DarkStar Books. His latest novel, an emotionally charged urban fantasy titled The Golden Gate Is Empty, which he wrote with his father Vic, is forthcoming from White Cat Publications. Eric lives in his native California. Find him on Facebook for comments or questions.
Of a supple leather, yellow but not an aggressive yellow, more a wheaty shade, or like gold you might find digging in the Rubble if that gold wasn’t buffed to a high gloss. Pliant soles a finger thick. Laced with plaited goat-gut strong as a boat hawser.
Beautiful boots.
Meaningful boots.
Perfect boots.
Sholt meant to earn a pair. Most children who saw Warboots for the first time had the same aspiration, but such enthusiasms and cravings were tossed aside by the wild undulations of puberty, or deliberately canceled when the full effort of the thing was made clear.
But Sholt had never surrendered an iota of his early passion. And now it was just possible he would have his chance to obtain his long-held desire.
There was talk of war between the villages.
In Sholt’s ninth autumn the man with the Warboots had come. The boy remembered the time vividly; not so much the adult’s features or dress, beyond his remarkable footwear, but his decisive bearing, an unseen force he exuded. Sholt remembered too the way everyone deferred to him. And perhaps more than that: how the man remained calm and confident at the center of it all.
Young – or younger – Sholt had fixated on the obvious symbol of the man’s prestige, his Warboots. Sholt had heard about them, of course, but this was his first time seeing anyone wear the resplendent foot coverings. The boots took on a rich, profound significance for him. He stared at them in wonder. They were finely made, to be sure: firm yet flexible, durable-looking; far more elaborate than the simple sandals most villagers wore, those who didn’t just go barefoot all their lives.
The boots seemed to carry the man with a miraculous ease as he was shown about the village. His was a gliding stride, never a step misplaced, always seeming to arrive just a little ahead of everyone else so although he was being escorted, he really appeared to lead.
The man’s visit to the village in Sholt’s ninth autumn culminated in a talk he gave, with everyone gathered to hear. He spoke of war in general, then war specifically. It was a very exciting discourse. It only strengthened Sholt’s already potent resolve to win Warboots for himself. He would do it. He would wait and watch for the opportunity.
It had taken until Sholt’s twelfth spring, but now here was the first real possibility of war. He didn’t need to remind himself of the visitor’s inspiring depictions of actual warfare. That man with the Warboots had even spoken of the Great Rubblizing Event, the centuries-old cataclysm that had reduced the old civilization to pockets of Rubble, where ambitious diggers still sought useful scraps.
The broad purple lake had drawn Sholt’s village to it, first as an encampment for wandering hunters, then as an increasingly lasting community. The lake, with its easy access for small hollowed-tree craft, had attracted the other villages sparsely dotting its meandering irregular edge. Life swam and fermented in the waters, and a small portion of that, extracted by fisherfolk, was enough to sustain the villages. So, food was no reason for war.
Sholt’s village was a collection of huts, tidy enclosures which had grown more durable with the years. The culture was a bright embroidery of genuine history and myth, woven through with all sorts of rituals and ritualistic objects and sayings and wisdoms, all of which were meant to be used skeptically. Good sense and good manners informed the population, mostly.
Today sunlight streamed bright through shreds of cloud. The lake gave off its lush stink.
Sholt wore that sunshine across his narrow shoulders, left bare by his hip-wrap. Today could be very serious. War, the visitor had said, lasted until the goal that had prompted it was achieved or its attainment was proven to be impossible. A war could also end with the death or change of heart of its chief instigator, if there was one.
Walking among the huts, Sholt took the measure of the midday. He knew his home well. The villagers were generations removed from the roving breed who had hunted plains and hills, expending antagonistic energies in useful ways.
It might be said that over the years since settlement alongside the lake, the people of the villages had grown sedentary, if not complacent. The hunting instinct abided, that impulse toward aggression which had once been key to survival. But now the big lake, with its effectively endless supply of food, rendered that aggressive nature worthless. Fishers weren’t hunters. They didn’t need to be. A fisher only had to be patient.
Parables saturating village culture warned of nurturing the outdated antagonistic instinct. But Sholt’s village had fables and stories about every subject, traded endlessly among the inhabitants, and the meanings and imports often got lost amidst the proud panache of the storytellers.
Faces lifted and offered benign or friendly expressions as Sholt passed. The village numbered less than two hundred, and of course he knew every single person. There was solidarity here, and camaraderie, a sense of everyone working with everyone else to keep the place functioning and healthy, a worthwhile community.
The evidence of his fellow villagers’ contributions to that community was everywhere to be seen. The huts were sturdy affairs. They no longer blew apart in spring storms. Women and men had discovered and decided on better building techniques. Drinking water was plentiful. Someone, now an elder in her forty-third summer, had figured out how to strain the lake water. Even the yeasty taste had eventually been filtered out. Boat-building had reached a level of new sophistication, the pinnacle of the skill, it seemed. Village craft were fast and sleek.
Then of course there were the arts. So much singing, so many new songs and dances. And tapestries, and fancy wraps for those who wanted to look gaudy, and paints for faces and bodies. Many of these expressions instantly found ritualistic significance, as well. There was enjoyment in putting esoteric meaning to some showy object. You could attach stories to these works, even harmless little rites.
Sholt’s own offerings toward the village’s betterment were strewn throughout the surroundings. His contributions were artistic in nature. He had a talent for dipping a reed’s sharpened point into liquid clay and tracing lines and waves and every sort of shape onto any available surface, creating images of breathtaking originality. He didn’t draw faces or animals or landscapes, as some others did. His scenes did not exist in any real sense. He coaxed them from the depths of his thoughts, from beyond thought, even. He felt, when he did it right, that he was transcribing dreams.
He saw examples of his work from the past few years marking the upright beams of huts, decorating tools and cookware, adorning the backs of moll
usk shells. Anyone could ask him to make one of his special works. That was how the village operated. Everyone’s abilities were available to everyone else.
The work gave him pride. It increased the prestige of the village as a whole.
That communal pride was a pleasant thing. It was reflected in the amicable greetings he received as he made a circuit of the lakeside village. Today, however, there was something undermining that harmony. He sensed the discordance, like notes that didn’t belong in a cheerful song. People moved with a certain tension, with jerks and brusque gestures. Eyes darted too quickly and in unexpected directions. Teeth gnawed lips. People paused in mid-task, in mid-word. Those pauses were fraught with impatience, with anxiety.
The folk of his village were waiting for something, eager for it and uneasy about it.
Now it was Sholt’s turn to pause, but he did so for a different, though familiar, reason. His hesitation was diffident, and when his eyes darted away, his lips also curled in ironic self-derision.
Alkin had stepped out of a hut, almost directly into his path.
Sholt brought his gaze back to her. “Hello,” he said, pleased the simple greeting come out steadily.
Alkin’s normally bright smile didn’t quite surface on her face. It struggled onto her lips, then sank like a flower sucked under by marsh mud. She shared in the general tension, Sholt saw. In her arms was a basket full of eel-skins.
“What have you got there?” he asked, testing his voice further. Sometimes, in Alkin’s presence, he stammered or simply lost the sense of his words.
She was his age, lithe, with taut, slim muscles. The wrap she wore covered her torso. Her shoulders were painted pink. He realized he had seen this same coloring several times today. “Halz,” she said, glancing down into her basket, “has an idea for sashes, with the dried skins. They’d be worn like –” Using just her pink shoulders and her chin, she managed to convey how the skins would be worn, looping under one arm and draping across the chest. New sartorial accessories were always welcome. But Sholt guessed these sashes had a different purpose.
The man in the Warboots had spoken of uniforms, an ancient affectation. Different costumes worn by the competing sides. The notion had intrigued Sholt deeply.
“You’ve got a lot there,” he said.
“Halz said we might need even more.” It was her voice that quivered now. She was excited and frightened, Sholt noted, just like everybody.
If war came, she would go. He wanted to say something direct to her, for once, but bashfulness overtook him whenever he dealt with Alkin. There was nothing in village culture that said he should stammer and stumble in her presence.
If she went to war, he would fear for her.
The direct words he wanted to summon failed him yet again; he merely smiled and stepped out of her way and went on his own.
He found Halz next.
A site of Rubble lay two days’ running from the lake. The area was roughly the same size as the lake itself, spread across an open plain, its borders delineated by generations of diggers. Halz was a digger. The decayed accoutrements of the previous civilization engrossed him, and such items were only to be found buried beneath layers of dirt and stone.
Sholt came upon the older, larger boy next to a fire that burned hotly in the midday. He had scraps and length of metal and metaplastic laid out on the ground before him. His heavy hands worked diligently with the pieces. Sholt watched as he ran a sharpening stone along the edge of a narrow section of dull, sturdy-looking metal, which he then plunged into the fire’s fiercest embers.
Halz was sitting on the ground, his meaty thighs bunched beneath him. Apparently he had been aware of Sholt’s presence all along, because he looked up with an unsurprised smile. His eyes were as dully colored as the salvaged metals, but like that metal, he had put a threatening edge to them.
“Hello,” Halz said, making the greeting first.
“Hello. I saw Alkin with her eel-skins. She mentioned you.”
“Sashes. Just a thought I had.” Halz too bore pink shoulders and a chest painted blue. Sholt wore no body coloring today. He preferred a simple look.
Halz liked Alkin, Sholt knew. And maybe she liked him. Again, Sholt had never been able to speak to the girl about it.
“You want to fancy something up?” Halz asked.
“Sure.”
The bigger boy picked up one of the implements he’d been working on. It was a segment of metaplastic, this a cloudy orange color, half as long as Sholt’s bony forearm, with a point at one end and the other wrapped in tough crawlerfish skin.
“I tried to make it like the tools the hunters used to carry,” Halz said, holding up the instrument. The boy, a year older than Sholt, had something of that streak of hunter aggressiveness in him.
“I can decorate the blade, if you want,” Sholt said.
“That would be good.”
It was the smallest of the implements laid out near the fire and the sharpening stones. It was the one Halz probably thought scrawny, sensitive Sholt could handle, should he decide to join in the coming war. If indeed war did come.
Sholt held the edged tool, weighing it, learning its balance. Halz wasn’t this potential war’s instigator. It had no single instigator. War was approaching like a mood, like a seasonal change, a gradual gathering. Sholt had already planned to be a part of it.
He left Halz and walked toward the lake’s edge. He wore sandals, but he stepped out of these before he crossed the mud and got into a small, untended dugout. He set the weapon down and took up the broad, hardy, veiny fireleaf that served as a paddle. He would not wear those sandals again. He would have his Warboots, whatever the cost.
Halfway across the lake he had scooped two handfuls of the reeky surface froth and plastered it over his long, dark hair, raking the strands back severely. By the time he put in to the far shore, the pasty stuff had set. It was how hair was generally arranged in this village on the opposite side of the large lake.
There was little design variation in the dugout canoes each village fashioned from downed trees, so his landing at an empty point along the shore called no attention. He slipped Halz’ edged instrument into a fold of his hip-wrap and made his way, barefoot, toward the enemy village.
The villagers here weren’t enemies, not yet. No one had given voice to this war. But acquaintance had become rivalry. The two villages were of course each aware of each other, with knowledge of the other’s strengths and artistic resources. Sholt’s village had many proud artisans and artists. So did the inhabitants of this village on the opposite brim of the lake.
Villages didn’t have names; you named people and animals, not places. But it might be, with five distinct populations now settled on the lake’s edge, that one day names would have to be applied. What a strange notion, but Sholt could foresee it. Presently, you just called a place by how it related to your home – its direction, its distance.
He walked into the foreign village now, head down, moving quietly. Even so, he studied his surroundings with avid interest. There was a kind of general communication among the lakeside villages. Fishers met out on the water. Sometimes parties foraging for timber encountered one another in the forested tracts. Information was exchanged. So were boasts. It was how the rivalry had come about.
The huts here were of a slightly different construction, though Sholt, not being a builder, couldn’t see precisely how the enclosures varied; only that they seemed wider across their fronts, with colorful shells epoxied to the support beams. The shanties were laid out as randomly as they were in Sholt’s home village.
Yet this wasn’t his home. He was keenly of this fact. The sense of alienness suffusing the scene was almost too much to bear. It shook him at the roots of his being. He had never traveled to another village before, never been to any strange place. But he had come here today, because it was absolutely necessary that he do so.
He hadn’t decorated himself in any ostentatious way, and so he moved in nondescript fas
hion among the first people he encountered. No one gave him a glance. Everybody appeared busy with tasks. He sensed the urgency of these activities, and he thought he discerned, beneath that urgency, a familiar thrum of tension, of anticipation.
These people too, it seemed, were readying for war.
He walked a dozen more steps, coming to a place where a cooking fire trailed threads of smoke, before someone turned, glanced his way, peered more closely, then gave a loud cry of alarm.
Sholt halted. Immediately he was surrounded, though none of these foreigners came within reaching distance of him.
“I’m from across the lake. My name is Sholt.” It was a monstrously strange thing to have to tell people his name. But he was again pleased that his voice didn’t quaver. It was even steadier than when he had spoken to Alkin earlier. For a moment her image filled his head, all the limber lines of her, the softness of her face. Then she vanished, and he saw only these others, many adults, all staring at him in astonishment.
“You...” a woman said, gesturing in confusion and unease, “you shouldn’t be here.”
“That is true.”
A man with a heavy brow made more prominent by his raked back hair edged half a step closer to Sholt. He was knotted with muscle, and had an implement in hand, something for digging or maybe smashing. The handle was elaborately carved, a skill this village was known for.
“What do you want?” the woman asked, and something in her tone seemed to cause the muscular man to retreat back into the rank encircling Sholt.
An uprooted stump sat next to the cooking fire, where a pot simmered with sharply scented contents. A fireleaf rested atop the stump. Maybe these people used the leaf in their cooking. Again this was a strange and alien thing to Sholt.
“I can do this,” he said, and he crossed toward the stump and fire. Movement rippled among the onlookers. He felt the tension acutely now, the peril. Violence waited. Anything might tip it into motion.
