Moon & Earth

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

FROM THE OLD FARM HOUSE that was Karlen’s shelter on the southern bank of the creek at Lekata, Javes and Tali made their way into the highlands in the company of the camel and the goats. The road wound slowly up the central plateau, and fields and paddocks along the side of the road were replaced by desolate forest.

The road was paved—the first part at least—and followed the telegraph line, but whenever they passed a weather station and Javes tested the line, it was always inactive. He had no idea if his message had even made it to Tiverius.

Since he had left Tiverius to go to Ysherra, everything he’d sent back to the capital seemed to have disappeared in a void. In Ysherra, he’d assumed that it was the normal state of affairs, but now they were coming into the northern central districts, and this was not an area habitually ignored by the capital.

Javes was beginning to worry whether they got his messages at all or whether the replies they had sent were reaching him. He worried if anyone had even sent replies. He began to worry that something might have happened in the capital.

The first night after leaving Lekata, Javes and Tali camped at the roadside. This far into the high country, where the soil was extremely poor, the vegetation consisted of hundreds of twisted and scrawny trees, mangled by drought and wind.

The weather was blustery, with a squally wind continuing well into the night. It made the flames of the fire dance so that the tree trunks threw long, flickering shadows over their neighbouring trees, making it look like the forest moved. The wind would sometimes whistle through the branches.

Tali was unfamiliar with the concept of forest and found it scary. Javes had to explain to her that it was just the wind doing those things, but he wasn’t sold on it either. He was trying to remember from geography classes at school just how big this forest was. On the way to Watya, the train had spent an entire night going through it.

“I don’t care what you tell me about the trees. I don’t like it,” Tali said. “Is there another path we can use?”

“We’re going to Velora,” Javes said. “It’s on the southern end of the highlands, and it has a station. Once we get on the train there, we’ll be in Tiverius in no time. This road is the shortest route to the station. The other roads are far longer, and they don’t take us anywhere near a station.”

The forest density increased as they travelled further south the next day. Scrawny trees made way for thick stands of tall, straight pine trees. This was logging country, and the road reflected its use by big trucks or wagons to carry logs from the forest to the towns along the railway.

They saw plenty of those trucks. You could hear the chugging engines coming from far off. The drivers usually greeted the two youths, but were too busy or going too fast to stop and offer them a lift.

Javes worried that they had seen so few other travellers on the road. Any small carts or travellers on horseback they had seen were locals—hunters taking pelts to tanneries, or mushroom collectors with their harvest on the way to market.

Javes warned the few on the way north about the floods, but most people already knew or weren’t going that far.

Javes wondered about all those people who had fled Lekata at the time they passed through. A whole convoy of people had been in front of them when they stopped at Karlen’s hideout. Where had they all gone?

“Is it still far to this next town?” Tali asked in the late afternoon on the third day.

“It’s a fair walk. We probably need to camp for two more days. Why?”

“There is bad weather coming. It gives me the chills.”

Yes, he could feel it, too. The breeze blew from different directions, one moment cold, the next warm. Low clouds chased each other through the sky, dropping occasional specks of rain.

The animals could feel it, too.

A pair of forest hares came out of the undergrowth, and charged down the road in the direction from which Javes and Tali had come. Javes grabbed his trap, but it was much too late, of course.

The hares were followed a moment later by a family of deer running in the same direction.

The goats were jumping around and bleating and head-butting each other. The camel reacted to that by frequently tossing its head which, in turn, would almost rip the rope from Javes’ hand.

“See?” Tali said. “Even the animals are scared.”

Javes would have loved to say something soothing, that animals didn’t have the same fears or that they were just cagey because of some predator in the forest, but every bit of his training about weather systems said that she was right. The warm and cold air, the changing wind direction, the low clouds were all classic signs preceding an old-style, sonorics-induced winter storm.

Yet there was nowhere to go and nowhere to shelter.

Javes pushed on as far as they could in search of a place where they could camp without the risk of a tree falling on them.

At dusk, when it was almost too dark to continue, they found the remnants of a wooden logger’s hut at the edge of what must have been a clearing, but was now a field of closely-growing pine saplings.

The wind whistled through the branches almost constantly. Wood creaked and cracked. Branches fell on the ground with soft rustling thuds.

A couple of mossy, half-disintegrated walls were all that was left of the hut. They offered little shelter against the weather.

Javes unpacked the canvas sheet. It flapped in the wind and he needed Tali’s help to hold it down. The logs were so rotted it was hard to find a place to tie the canvas down, but he managed to make a shelter big enough for both them and the animals.

They ate while leaning against the camel’s warm and furry side. Making a fire was out of the question, so the meal consisted of flatbread and dried fruit.

Javes slept for a bit after that.

At first, it was quite warm, but it got much colder during the night. He had to use both blankets. Tali was shivering so much that he put his arms around her and held her close. At first, the nutty scent of her hair disturbed him, but he kept thinking about how frightened she had been when he found her.

The wind swelled to a roar. Occasionally, it lifted the canvas and made it flap, letting in a waft of freezing cold raindrops.

Only when the storm abated and quiet returned did Javes fall asleep. Tali was a warm presence against him. He had the camel at his back and goats around his legs. He was sure the blanket would need washing, but for now, they were warm.

Morning dawned pale and blue and without a sound.

Javes crawled out from underneath the shelter, looking straight at the grey sky. That was strange. He swore they’d been in a pine forest.

The tall trees of the forest had been reduced to a mass of mangled, splintered and broken tree trunks as far as the eye could see.

“It looks like a dust devil came past here,” Tali said next to him.

She was right. Not only that, but . . .

He left the shelter, stepping over fallen branches to a patch of bare ground. His boots left dark footsteps on the ground.

Snow.

He bent to touch the ground, and yes, it was snow. His hand left a dark print in the thin layer. It was already well on its way to melting. But had snow ever fallen in this area? He didn’t think so.

“Can we keep going?” Tali asked.

“I don’t know. I hope so.”

Javes looked at the devastation behind the hut and the sea of mangled wood downhill from where they stood. The entire valley floor was covered in fallen trees. Not a single tree still stood upright. Trunks had split, branches torn off. The air was full of the scent of fresh pine resin.

He couldn’t see the road. They might be able to keep going. Just as well they didn’t have a cart.

“Do you think any people lived here?” Tali asked.

“I hope not.” They would not have survived this.

They packed up and ate a quick breakfast. There was no time to make a fire, especially since all the wood was wet and fresh.

Their progress that day was painfully slow. Javes had hoped to reach Velora today, but it became clear they would need at least one more day.

It took them most of the day to reach an area where they could walk at something resembling a normal pace, without having to clamber over tree trunks, without the camel’s rope becoming entangled in branches.

They were tired, scratched from climbing over fallen trees, and filthy.

At midafternoon they came to a hill from which they could see across farmland. The town of Velora would be in the dusty air at the horizon.

A sense of relief washed over him. The trek through the central highlands had been much harder than he had expected. Tomorrow, or at least the day after, they could get on the train.

“Let’s stop here. We have plenty of wood. Let’s cook a nice meal tonight.” The past few days had been harrowing enough. “We’ll get on the train tomorrow and then we’ll be in Tiverius soon.”

There was a copse of trees halfway down the hill. A few had fallen over, but most still stood. More importantly, a little creek with clean water ran through the gully at the back of the stand of trees.

Javes hobbled the camel so that it could graze and set up the cloth for their tent. Tali went to the creek to fill their water bags.

Javes watched her from under the cover of the tent. She swung the water bag and if he listened carefully, he could hear her singing. She had become so much more confident and less skittish and he hoped that her newfound confidence wouldn’t be damaged once they got to the city.

It was hard to predict what the future would hold for her as a northern girl in Tiverius. He found that he’d come to appreciate her quiet presence, her keen eye for the animals and the things they could eat or sell. She was also—he hated to admit it—quite pretty. If she were his sister . . .

Wait—he could say that she was his sister. That would stop the odd looks people gave him.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” She ducked under the tent cloth and poured water in the blackened pan.

“I find it hard to believe that you’re only thirteen.”

“Nearly fourteen.”

“Still. My life was very different when I was fourteen.”

“Oh? How?”

“I didn’t know very much.” He’d been silly, childish, immature compared to Tali.

“I thought all children went to school in Tiverius.”

“Of course I went to school, but school doesn’t actually teach you anything.”

She laughed, a sound that had become more frequent the further away they had travelled from Ysherra. “If school doesn’t teach you anything, then why does everyone in the city go to it?”

“You don’t learn any of the . . .” He was going to say important things, but that wasn’t it, either. Reading and writing—not Tali’s strong points at all—were important. They just weren’t the only things that were important.

“Yes?” She prompted.

“You learn reading and writing at school. You don’t learn much about life, about helping your parents, about carpentry, about . . .”

“Milking goats?”

“Yes, milking goats.” She used to laugh at his ineptitude at milking goats when he first came to Ysherra.

“But when you go to the weather boxes and send the messages, that is when you use what you’ve learned.”

“Yes.”

“I want to learn that, too.”

“Sure, you can.”

There was wood to make a fire, and they ate well from their supplies, supplemented with milk and some mushrooms that Tali had found.

They would usually go to sleep soon after dark, lacking the warmth of a fire, but the fire was warm, so Javes made tea and they both wrapped themselves in blankets and sat talking, while holding steaming cups of tea.