Legend of Alm -The Valor Saga Pt 1 - Falling Star

by Graham M. Irwin

  Legend of Alm -The Valor Saga Pt 1 - Falling Star

  Legend of Alm -The Valor Saga Pt 1 - Falling Star

  PART ONE

  Midpoint

  LEGEND OF ALM

  THE VALOR SAGA

  PART ONE

  FALLING STAR

  GRAHAM M. IRWIN

  1

  “Get up!” shouted Balta Dain. “Get up and fight!”

  Anaxis Hume coughed and groaned from the dirt. “Why should I get up?” he asked. “You’re only going to knock me down again.”

  The crowd circled around the two boys taunted Anaxis and cheered Balta. “You belong in the dirt, Anaxis!” they shouted. “Kick him! Go on, Balta! He’s just lying there!”

  “Come on, Anaxis!” his one supporter in the crowd, Mills Ferta, called out. “Don’t just sit there, come on!”

  Anaxis sighed and pushed himself up on shaky arms. He wiped the blood from his chin and cocked his head at Balta. “Don’t you have anything better to do than pick fights?” he asked. “Have I ever fought back?”

  Balta grinned a crooked smile and kicked Anaxis back down. “Not right now I don’t,” he said with a cackle. “Besides, you deserve it. You’re weak and you need to learn to be strong!”

  “You’re not weak! Show him! Get up, Anaxis!” shouted Mills.

  The girl standing next to Mills smacked him in the back of the head and growled, “Shut up, Mills.”

  “Okay everybody, listen, I’m not getting up, alright? That would be stupid,” Anaxis insisted. “Balta would just knock me down again.”

  “Don’t you care?” Balta growled. “Don’t you even care that you’re so pathetic?”

  “No, I don’t,” Anaxis replied.

  Some in the crowd laughed, which made Balta turn a darker shade of crimson. He knelt down beside Anaxis, grabbed a tuft of his hair, and demanded, “What did you say to me?”

  “I said, no, I don’t care that you think I’m pathetic,” Anaxis answered.

  Balta raised both his hands into fists and then smashed them down onto Anaxis’s back. A clot of bloody phlegm flew out of Anaxis’s mouth.

  “Coward!” Balta roared, smashing Anaxis again. “You’re weak and you don’t care to become any stronger, so you deserve whatever you get!”

  Anaxis said nothing in response. He squinted and waited for another pounding, hoping Balta would soon grow tired of him not fighting back.

  “What’s going on here?” asked one of the crowd members’ parents, storming into the circle.

  “It’s stupid Anaxis Hume. I’m trying to teach him to fight back,” Balta said to the man. “But he won’t learn. He just keeps lying there!”

  “It’s pointless, Balta,” the man said. “The boy has no backbone to break. His parents are embarrassed enough already. Let him be. He’s not going to change if he hasn’t already. You’re wasting your time.”

  Balta looked like he wanted to fly at the adult, but redirected his angst to another bashing of Anaxis’s body. “Pathetic!” he roared. “You’re going to die alone, Anaxis, and no one will care!”

  Anaxis still said nothing.

  “Kids, come on,” the adult said. “There must be something more productive you all can be doing. Why aren’t you training?”

  “Fine. Whatever,” Balta said. He stood up and kicked dirt over Anaxis’s crumpled body. “I’m not going to care if he won’t. Come on, everyone. He’s hopeless. Let’s go. I’m done.”

  The crowd followed after Balta, leaving Mills to help Anaxis up.

  “That was a bad one, Mills,” Anaxis said as he got to his feet. “And it’s getting worse, because he’s getting stronger. I think he’s going to kill me one of these days.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Mills asked as he brushed dirt off his friend’s back.

  “I’m sure I’m not,” Anaxis answered, feeling around his body for the most serious injuries.

  “Why don’t you ever fight back?” Mills asked. “Like, even a little?”

  “It wouldn’t do anything,” Anaxis said. “They’d hate me either way. If I do, or if I don’t. My body will heal. Who cares?”

  “Shouldn’t you? I don’t know that people hate you as much as you think, Anax. But I do know that they don’t go after me like they go after you,” Mills said. “You ever wonder why that is?”

  “Well,” Anaxis said as he started to limp away from the bloody, sweaty patch he left in the dirt, “I’m taller than you, for one. And I talk a lot in lessons. I’m always proving them wrong. No one likes that. You mostly keep your mouth shut.”

  “So why don’t you? You said it yourself; no one likes always being proven wrong.”

  “I can’t keep quiet. I bring it on myself, I know. It’s my fault. I don’t really care, though. What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, right?”

  “I don’t know, Anaxis. You could avoid a lot of pain if you didn’t instigate so often.”

  “I like making them upset,” Anaxis said. “It’s so easy. Bunch of idiots. Maybe I hate them as much as they hate me. Maybe even more. I know it drives Balta crazy that I don’t fight back. His little brain’s too puny to handle it. Probably thinks about it all night long.”

  “You really think that’s winning?”

  “I don’t know that I could ‘win.’ But I do know he gets all red and shaky. He wouldn’t fight me so hard if I didn’t get to him.”

  “Yeah, but what good is that to you?” Mills chuckled and shook his head. “You’re nuts, Anaxis.”

  “I know. Oh, well. Hey, you want to get something to eat at my house?”

  “Okay,” Mills said, checking over his shoulder to make sure there was no lingering threat.

  “And I’ve got something to show you, too,” Anaxis said. “Been working on it for a while now.”

  The cliff dwelling where Anaxis and his family lived wasn’t far away. It was one of the bigger dwellings in Talx, and the Hume family had occupied both it and a prominent place in village life for nearly five hundred years. The years on planet Valor were short, on account of its quick transit around the star Arum, but five hundred of them were longer than most other families had called the village home. The Humes were historically some of the best hunters in Talx, and so were integral to planning and execution of the annual cannar hunt, which was coming up soon. While Anaxis’s older sister and brother had both participated in the hunt before, this year was to be Anaxis’s first. His whole family had been preparing for weeks, and trying to get him excited, but he found it difficult to share their enthusiasm. Though he appreciated the hunt as necessary to survival, the prospect of participating in the mass slaughter turned his stomach. He wanted to make his mother and father proud, to live up to the family’s reputation, but a part of him secretly wished he might break a leg or get deathly ill so that he could avoid the event altogether.

  “Is your sister home?” Mills asked as he and Anaxis arrived at the cliff dwellings.

  “I don’t know,” Anaxis said. “Isn’t she a little old for you, Mills?”

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t look,” Mills said.

  “Gross. She farts in her sleep. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Gross, Mills.”

  Anaxis pushed aside the heavy, cannar-leather flap hanging over the entrance into the main chamber of his dwelling and let Mills enter first. A glowing firepit in the center of the circular room cast the pair’s shadows around the walls as they crossed to a stone table cut from the bedrock. There was a bowl of kug fruit and a basket of owry nuts sitting out on the table, which the boys started to eat.

  “Ku
g season!” Mills said happily, juices flowing down his chin. “I love this time of year. Did your mom make jam yet?”

  “I think she’s doing that today and tomorrow.”

  “Steal me a jar?”

  “Of course.”

  Anaxis grimaced and gagged as he swallowed a kug. He then stuck a finger in his mouth and poked at one of his teeth. “I think Balta knocked one of my teeth loose,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” said Mills. “Does it hurt?”

  “Sort of,” said Anaxis. “Not too badly. Yet.”

  “You’ve got to get it taken care of before it gets infected.”

  “That would require telling my parents I got beat up again.”

  “You can’t just ignore it, you have to tell them.”

  “I’ll see how it feels tomorrow. I hate that look my dad gets in his eyes when I tell him I got beat up. Again. And how my mom won’t look at me at all.”

  “You could tell them you fell down.”

  “It’s disappointment to them either way. Humes don’t fall down, you know.”

  “Are they really so hard on you?”

  “You don’t understand what it’s like being in this family. Proud warriors, strongest in the village and all that. You don’t know what it’s like to be the weird one.”

  “Sure I do,” said Mills. “That’s why we’re friends.”

  “True enough.”

  Just then, Anaxis’s sister, Illox, appeared at the top of the ladder leading up to the sleeping quarters.

  “What are you wimps doing?” she asked loudly as she descended.

  “Hi, Illox,” Mills said, swooning.

  “Don’t eat all the kug,” Illox said, swiping one of the fruits from her brother’s hand. “Mom and Dad worked really hard to pick it.”

  “I know,” Anaxis said, trying and failing to steal the fruit back. “I was there, remember? We’re only having a little bit.”

  “What happened to your face?” Illox asked, her mouth full of stolen kug.

  “I fell down,” Anaxis answered.

  “Yeah, right. You got beaten up again, didn’t you?” asked Illox.

  “No. Yes.”

  “Wow, Anax. What is that, three times in the past ten days? Are you going for the record? You’re ridiculous. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know,” Anaxis answered.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Mills said in his friend’s defense. “Balta bullies him for no reason.”

  “Wah, wah,” Illox mocked. “Life is a bully. You have to defend yourself or you’ll get stampeded over. The faster Anaxis learns that, the better.”

  “You don’t think I know how the world works?” Anaxis asked.

  “Do you? Because if you did, you’d come train with me and Mom and Dad. You’d try to get stronger, so you can fight back. You wouldn’t waste all your days reading and stay up all night looking at the stars.”

  “But I like reading and looking at the stars.”

  “And you like getting beaten up, too, I guess.” Illox took the bowl of fruit from the stone table and put it up on a high shelf. “You two have had enough to eat. Save the food for people who need it.”

  “What, we don’t need food?” asked Anaxis.

  “To sit around and do nothing all day, no, you don’t need as much as those of us who actually do something with our lives,” answered Illox. She stretched, causing Mills to blush and turn away.

  “Really, Illox? What are you doing today that’s so important, anyways?” Anaxis asked her.

  “I’m getting ready for the Hunt, like normal people,” Illox answered. “You two want to come to the training circle with me?”

  “Not really,” said Anaxis.

  Mills couldn’t bring himself to speak.

  “You need to train, Anaxis, or you’re going to disappoint everyone,” Illox said, turning to leave. “Again.”

  “Yeah, well. It was nice to see you, too, Illox,” Anaxis called out the entryway after his exiting sister.

  “She’s so incredible,” Mills said, collapsing after Illox had gone.

  “What are you talking about? She just ridiculed us both,” Anaxis said. “Did you not hear her?”

  “I don’t even care,” said Mills. “With a body like that, she can say whatever she wants.”

  “Ugh,” Anaxis groaned. “It’s hard to respect you when you talk like that, Mills.”

  “I’m not looking for respect, Anax,” Mills said with a grin.

  Anaxis spit the pit from his fruit at Mills, who deflected it.

  “Go ahead and spit your pit,” Mills said. “I’m too fast, to get hit.”

  Anaxis laughed. “Poetry.” His eyes went big and he asked, “Oh yeah, I almost forgot, you want to see something cool?”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Mills, still lost in his Illox fantasy.

  “Come on, it’s up on the roof.”

  Three levels of ladders later and the two were on the top of the rock overhang that protected the row of cliff dwellings below from sun and sandstorms. There was a small box garden on the smooth rock, and to the left of that, a cloth covering over what Anaxis had invited Mills to see.

  “What do you have for me this time?” Mills asked.

  “It’s one of my best inventions yet. I’ve been working on it for weeks,” Anaxis said.

  He lifted the cloth up to reveal a bumpy, round piece of transparent material fixed into a crude, metallic holder.

  “Look!” Anaxis said, beaming.

  “Wow!” Mills exclaimed. He stared for a moment and then his brow furrowed. “What is it?”

  “It’s glass,” Anaxis answered proudly.

  “The whole thing?” Mills asked, picking up the object and looking through it at Anaxis.

  “The whole thing. It’s the biggest piece I’ve made yet,” Anaxis said proudly. “Definitely the biggest in the village. I had to use a bunch of my smaller pieces, to focus enough sunlight to the point where it got hot enough to melt the sand together into the one big one.”

  “Where’d you get smaller pieces smooth enough to do that?” asked Mills.

  “I found a lightning strike,” said Anaxis. “There were a bunch of glass shards left where it struck. All I had to do was dig them out of the sand.”

  “Wow,” Mills said, turning with the glass to view the desert landscape stretching out from the village through it.

  “Careful,” Anaxis said. “It’s pretty fragile.”

  “I bet it is,” Mills said, setting the glass back down carefully. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m going to use it in the Hunt,” Anaxis answered.

  “Oh? Howso?”

  “Watch,” Anaxis said. He picked up the glass and angled it about in the sunlight until it focused the rays in a bright spot on the ground below. “See that bright spot?”

  “Obviously.”

  “I’m going to steer the cannar with it.”

  “And how are you going to do that?”

  Anaxis directed the light up Mills’ body and into his eyes. Mills groaned and put up his hand to block the light.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” he asked.

  “See? Nothing wants bright light in its eyes,” Anaxis said. “I’m going to use that to coerce the herd toward the hunters. And prove to everyone that thinking and reading and science are good for something.”

  “That’s not a horrible idea,” Mills said.

  “Gosh, thanks.”

  “Have you told your parents about it?”

  “No, I want to surprise them,” said Anaxis. He carefully put the glass back down. “I just can’t wait to see the look on my father’s face when I make the Hunt ten times easier.”

  “Yeah… I hope it works,” Mills said.

  “No harm in trying, right?” Anaxis asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  Just then, the voice of Mills’ father came across on the breeze, calling him home.

  “That’d be my dad,” Mills said. “I’ve got to go.
”

  “Okay, friend,” Anaxis said. “See you tomorrow at lessons?”

  “As always,” Mills said. “Later, Anax.”

  “Later,” Anaxis said as Mills disappeared down the ladder.

  Anaxis worked for a while longer with his lens, making sure the metal bindings were fastened as tightly as possible, and smoothing the glass as best he could with a shearstone. When he heard his parents get home, he covered the lens back over and descended into the house.

  “Who’s that?” his mother asked as Anaxis came into the main chamber.

  “Looks like Anax,” said his father.

  “Hi, Mom, hi, Dad,” Anaxis said.

  “Where’d the fruit go?” asked his mother.

  “Illox put it up on the shelf,” Anaxis said. “She said Mills and I should save it for people who do something.”

  “That wasn’t very nice of her,” said his father. He took the fruit down and tossed a piece to Anaxis. “Where is your sister now?”

  “She went to the training circle,” Anaxis said.

  “That’s good. Why didn’t you go with her?” asked his mother.

  “Mills was here. I wanted to show him something,” answered Anaxis.

  “The Hunt is nearly upon us, Anaxis,” his mother said. “When was the last time you went to the circle? Have you been doing anything to prepare?”

  “I have,” Anaxis answered.

  “Really?” his father asked, surprised and intrigued. “What have you been doing?”

  “You’ll see,” Anaxis answered with a coy smile. “It’s a surprise.”

  “No, have you done any training, is what I meant?” his mother asked.

  “Well, not physically, not traditionally, but, I mean…”

  “How are you supposed to participate if you have no idea what you’re doing? I hate to say it, but I fear you’re going to make a fool of yourself,” his mother said. “And of our family. Anaxis, when are you going to grow up?”

  “I’m growing every day,” Anaxis said. “Like everyone my age.”

  “You know what your mother means,” said his father. “You’ve got a responsibility to your family and to the village. The Hunt is our most important ritual.”