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It was spring, but you wouldn’t know it if you hadn’t been paying attention to the date. The sky was perpetually gray, the ground was dry and dead, and everyone you met had a nervous fear behind their eyes. Things had gotten steadily worse during the month I’d spent wandering the island Muir. Shrines and historic sites were few and far between, and most of those were picked cleaner than a debutante’s teeth. That evening, with nearly empty pockets and an even emptier stomach, I’d wound up in a little backwater rest-stop town called Tikson.
The sharp wind sent dust hissing over my hands. I had to cling to my hat to keep it on my head and hold my collar turned up against the wind. Through the smoggy brownish-gray of the dust cloud, I could see the smoky outline of Tikson’s one and only inn, its windows glowing yellow in the semi-dark and its sign squeaking desperately on its hooks. I tucked my chin down and tramped my way toward it, my oversized coat flapping out behind me. A man emerged from a shop nearby and locked the door behind him, then pulled the brim of his hat low and hustled down the road. A woman leaned out an upper window and flung some bit of garbage into the wind, and it spun away into oblivion. Other than those two, there wasn’t a soul in sight. Everyone was hunkered down in their respective homely shanties, I presumed.
I jerked open the inn’s door and spun in before the wind could slam it shut on me. A handful of eyes drifted in my direction —a barmaid, a trio of old men smoking in the corner, a traveler with a pistol at his hip— but I wasn’t much worth looking at, so they turned back to whatever they’d been doing. The low hum of voices almost drowned out the howl of the wind outside.
Dust sifted off my clothes and settled on the floor, and I removed my hat to shake out my hair. I ran my fingers through it and grimaced. It was grainy and even more bushy and tangled than usual. I couldn’t be sure in this dimmer lighting, but I think the dust was turning it a washed-out dirty blonde, when it should have been more of a strawberry blonde color.
The door opened behind me, letting in a rush of wind. I skipped out of the way of two gruff-looking farmers, who stomped out their boots and went to sit with the cluster of smoking men. A long line of people stood waiting to get to the counter, a motley assortment of whoever the wind had happened to blow in. There was a long-bearded inventor from Argozon, a skinny man who looked like a lost schoolmaster, a family with three little kids who kept squirming around and earning pinches from their mother, and at least one wandering cultic priest. Seemed the famine was hitting everyone hard.
I fell into line behind a religious acolyte with a stooped back and a long gray ponytail. His red woven poncho hung directly in front of my face, and every time he shifted, its ornaments and sacred symbolic pins clinked together. If the sheer number of shinies was anything to judge by, this guy was accomplished in his particular religious sect. I spotted one antique pin that must have been almost three hundred years old, and my pilfering senses tingled. Trying to swipe it now would be a bad idea, though. People were already uptight from shortages and constantly feeling gritty, and if I got caught, I would be stuck in the middle of a busy room full of short-tempered small-towners. Forget pilfering, then. All I really needed to do was get something to eat and figure out where I was heading next.
The money I’d gotten from pawning that Feudal Era brooch from an acting troupe’s costume crate was starting to run low, but I could make it last another few days if I had to. That is, if the innkeepers didn’t keep jacking up the prices for food.
The antique journal I’d tracked from that Vanberg shipment had pointed out a few abandoned mansions and temples somewhere in this area, but I couldn’t remember exactly where they all were. Wish I could have taken the journal with me, or at least stolen a few pages. Who knew antique shops kept rifles under the counter? But if I could find one of those mansions, and if it had anything I could pawn, then I should be alright for a while longer. I just had to keep moving until this famine lightened up.
The line rocked forward a few steps. An old man at a table nearby leaned back in his chair, making it creak. “You hear about those panther attacks over in Little Fend?”
“Third time this month,” one of his friends drawled, taking a puff from his pipe. “Word is the forest fires have been drivin’ ‘em out.”
“The times make ‘em vicious,” a third man agreed. “Ever’body’s hungry, even the pan’ters.”
“Won’t be long til rain,” one of them mused. “The jade priest says those clouds are due to bust anytime now.”
“Jade priest’ll say whatever he has to t’get paid.”
“Still, this can’t last forever. It’s gotta rain soon.”
“Why can’t it stay like this forever?” a fourth man grumped. “Who’s to say this ain’t the end of it all?”
The acolyte in front of me turned to scowl at them, bringing his steel wool eyebrows low over his eyes. “Doubters!” he grouched at them, “If the world was ending, we would know it!”
The four farmers slowly twisted in their chairs to look at him. “S’that so? You got word from your gods?”
“The gods are particular in their signs.” The acolyte drew himself up, but his hunch didn’t allow him to draw himself up very far. “They are angered with the blasphemy and greed that plagues the islands. Until we repent, they will withhold the blessing of rain.”
“Withhold?” one of the men scoffed. “They’re not withholding. They’re scourging. First there was the earthquake that sank Vanberg’s southwestern port, then the typhoon that wrecked most of Flannagan Company’s ships, which ‘most all of us trade to, and then there was the lightning storm that burned up most our reserves. Now nothing can grow ‘cause the ground won’t stay put, and you’re saying this is all happening because the gods are throwin’ a hissy fit?”
“The gods are hardly so petty,” the acolyte sniffed. “This is exactly the kind of mockery that has angered them in the first place!”
I muted a yawn. I’d heard dozens of conversations like this in the past few weeks. Everybody had their own idea about who was to blame for the various mounting disasters. The two most popular scapegoats were some version of the gods and the oligarchic families on Bonjeri. It was only a matter of time before both the gods and the richies entered this stunningly academic conversation.
“Mister, I could understand one town having all these troubles, but this isn’t just Tikson we’re talking about here. It’s all of Muir. Heck, it’s all seven of the islands! Even Bonjeri.”
Yep, there it was. I wasn’t going to learn much by listening in. Did this place have any rooms left? I guess it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t be able to afford one, anyway. I thought I’d seen a barn outside, though. That could do in a pinch.
“You’d think the richies would have done something about it by now!” a farmer said. “Though I don’t guess they’re feeling it too bad, yet.”
“Probably got shortages on their crab cakes,” someone muttered.
“Aw, poor souls to suffer.” The farmer chuckled before turning back to the acolyte. “If your gods set the rain coming and get the crops back, I’ll start believing. ‘Til then, I’ve got better things to worry about.”
The acolyte shook his head. “Your lack of faith is saddening, friend. If the people would only entrust themselves to the gods’ care, the rains would return and all would be well.”
I sniffed a laugh. Entrust themselves or entrust their money?
The acolyte turned to me. “You laugh, child?”
“Huh?” I looked up. “Oh, nope. No laughing.”
He fixed me in a yellow-eyed glare, the corners of his nose curling out with a scowl. “Don’t lie, child. Lying brings the wrath of the medicine goddess, who punishes deceitful children by scouring their mouths with herbs. What cause do you have for laughter?”
I tucked my hands into my pockets. “Absolutely none. That’s a lot of pins, sir.”
“Yes, the mark of a long life full of service,” he said, stroking his poncho the way most men would stroke a long beard. His own beard was unfortunately sparse and stringy, so I suppose he had to make do. “Do you believe in the gods?”
“Not particularly.”
“Why not? Were you never taught?”
I shrugged. “Never seen anything to make me think they’re real.”
“Well, you are very young.” The wrinkles on his forehead scrunched together, and he stroked his poncho some more. “How old are you? You seem too young to be wandering by yourself. ”
Oh, good. I loved it when old, creepy-looking men started asking questions about my age. “Quit talking to me like I’m six,” I said. “I’m eighteen.”
He frowned. “You don’t look eighteen.”
I didn’t, and I wasn’t. “Yeah? Well, your breath smells funny,” I said.
One of the farmers snorted to himself.
The acolyte narrowed his eyes, but didn’t let the comment faze him. “Are you traveling with anyone? It can be dangerous out there, especially with this famine going on. ”
“The line is moving,” I said.
He looked back and noticed the three-foot gap he’d left. He stepped back to fill it. “I ask out of honest concern. You would be welcome to come with me.” He extended a wrinkly hand to me. “I would be remiss in my duties as a shepherd of the people if I let a little lamb like yourself come to harm.”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
I wrinkled my nose and looked down at his hand, then up at him, then back down.
“I would be willing to pay for your evening meal,” he offered. “Then perhaps we could discuss your faith in more depth.”
I hissed through my teeth. “Aw, see, I’ve got some really pressing stuff to do this evening. People to avoid, plans to make, things like that.”
The line had moved, and he wasn’t paying attention again. I cut past him and stepped up to the counter. “Hi. Can I get two loaves of bread and an apple?”
“Ten jungs,” the innkeeper said.
I inwardly winced. I had about eighty-six jungs in total, with no guarantees of acquiring more in the near future. I could get by on a partially empty stomach for a couple more days. “Just one bread, then.” I laid the coins on the counter.
“No, make it two bread.” The acolyte reached around me to put a few jungs next to my coins.
“One bread.” I swiped the acolyte’s coins back toward him. “Can’t you tell when you’re not wanted?”
“I can tell when I’m needed,” he said.
“Evidently not. One bread and an apple,” I repeated.
I heard the front door of the inn whoosh open, and out of habit I glanced over my shoulder. My heart clenched. A handful of traveling performers shook out their flamboyant clothing and abundant hair, the same acting troupe I’d pilfered a brooch from in the last town. One of them, a woman with a nose ring and thick black eye-paint, scanned the room, and I looked away quickly. Maybe she wouldn’t see me. Maybe she wouldn’t recognize me if she did. But my hair was pretty identifiable, and it’s not like I’d had a chance to change clothes.
The innkeeper set a flat loaf of bread and a wrinkled apple on the counter. “Anything else?”
“No thanks.” I tucked the bread and apple into my pockets and cut along the counter, planning to hide out in a dark corner until the troupe left. I made the mistake of glancing over at them once more, and the woman’s eyes fastened on me.
“You!” she cried, breaking from her group to run at me.
Welp, so much for a quiet evening.
I hopped up onto the counter, swung my legs over, and made a break for the back room. A barmaid and I collided, sending her tray to the floor and sloshing beer all down her front. I ducked through the doorway and into a closet-like room with half-stocked shelves of food. In the corner was another slim door. A broom closet? A lavatory?
A surge of wind made it rattle. An exit! I snatched a hunk of cheese off a shelf as I ran past and kicked the door open, and the gust flushed through my coat and nearly stole my hat off my head. The innkeeper’s footsteps thumped after me, and I made a break around the back of the inn. The growing dark would work in my favor. As I turned the corner, I made out the shape of a woodpile and some kind of shed alongside it.
Praying to no god in particular that the logs wouldn’t shift, I clambered up the side of the woodpile and got a knee onto the roof of the shed. I crawled over the top and clung to the side of the roof, just in time to see the innkeeper jog past, his arm raised to shield his eyes from the dust. He shook his head and scrubbed his eyes, then grunted and turned to head back inside.
Word to the wise: people rarely look up, especially when doing so puts more burning grains of dust in their eyes.
I waited a few minutes before allowing myself to climb down. It wouldn’t be worth it for the innkeeper to keep looking for me, but there was a chance the acting troupe might. I needed a place to hide. The barn I’d spotted next to the inn should work. I was already thinking about spending the night there, so why not turn in a little early?
I made a wide loop through the town to avoid any snooping troupes and came around to the barn on the other side. The wind picked up and slacked off in turns, sometimes flattening my coat against me and tossing dust and hair into my eyes, sometimes fading into a gentle breeze that whined eerily over eaves and weathervanes. A periodic banging helped me pinpoint the barn. Its side door swung in and out with the wind, banging against the doorframe and bouncing off it again. I caught it and pulled it shut behind me.
All the barn smells of cow, straw, and chicken litter were weakened by the dry scent of the dust outside. The only light filtered through in faint gray slivers between the boards of the walls, making it just bright enough for me to make out a number of wagons parked to keep the dust out of their loads. A cow puffed quietly in a stall near the back, and a couple of chickens clucked quietly.
I climbed up onto the driver’s seat of one of the carts and kicked my feet up on the armrest, taking a bite out of my apple. I plucked off my hat and whacked it against the side of the cart, sending up little poofs of dust, then absently combed my fingers through my hair as I chewed.
Coming to Muir might have been a mistake. The towns were spread out, the people were old-fashioned, and opportunities to recover lost bits of treasure were few and far between. I was still pretty wet behind the ears as a treasure hunter, but even with that and the rough times, I think I had a promising career of expedition and roguishness ahead. So far I’d mostly found knick-knacks and jewelry, but there was that one time I stumbled upon an abandoned shrine with a small chest full of gold. That had lasted me for months. Of course, there were dry spells where I had to pilfer a bit to keep my head above water, but surely those would disappear as I got better at the business.
I gnawed the apple as far down to the core as I could go, then ate that, too. Muir wasn’t great, but it was probably better than Vanberg. There were a lot more places for creeps to linger there, and creeps were definitely something a fifteen-or-sixteen year old girl like me had to avoid. Particularly when said fifteen-or-sixteen year old had no family or resources to fall back on.
So, the perpetual question: where to next? Without a definite target, I would probably end up having to trust luck to carry me someplace with resources to fill my stomach. Worst came to worst, I could pick up a job washing dishes for a couple of days while I got my bearings.
I decided to save the rest of my bread for later, and with nothing better to do, looked for a place to bunk down. The travelers lodging their wagons here would inspect their goods for tampering in the morning, so I didn’t want to lie in the backs of the wagons. Sharing quarters with the cow was utterly unacceptable, as I had no desire to be stepped or defecated on in my sleep. I ended up pulling out an old trick to sleep underneath the cart, hooking my arms over one wheel axle and kicking my feet up on the other. This accomplished, I tipped my hat over my face and waited to go to sleep. Usually I dozed off faster than Bonjeri gossip spreads, but that night it took some time. My brain wouldn’t stop coming up with things to worry about. Trusting to luck for my survival sounded nice and adventurous, but I really would have preferred to know where I was going. I’d managed to scrape by like this since I was only nine years old, though. No way was I going to let something as minor as a barrage of natural disasters get the best of me.
Eventually I dozed off, listening to the wind whistle outside and trying to ignore the dissatisfied gnawing of my stomach.
* * *
The downside of the under-wagon arm-hooking arrangement? I’m a sound sleeper. Hence, the next morning, I didn’t wake up when the wagon’s driver hitched up his donkeys and settled into the driving seat, but only when it started to move. This brought about a rather rude awakening in which I was dumped on the ground, almost run over by the cart's wheel, and bleatingly laughed at by a goat in a nearby pen. Such is the alarm clock of a seeker of fortune.
I took a moment to stick out my tongue at the goat, then chased after the cart and hopped up into the back. The lone driver didn’t notice me. A basket-seller, if the contents of the cart were any evidence. I pushed a stack of baskets aside, curled up, and promptly fell asleep again.
Rule number one on the road: sleep as much as possible, whenever possible.
Unfortunately, there is a limit to the amount of sleep one person can have. I woke up again, probably about midday, and decided it was time to strike out on my own. I scooted out of the baskets, hopped off the cart, and waved to the oblivious basket-seller’s back.
I set off down a side road of trampled dirt. The sky was still overcast, but the wind had died down to a gentle breeze that only brushed dust against my boots. I didn’t like the look of that sky. Not that it looked like there was a storm brewing, or a cyclone, but there was something foreboding about it. Something that made me want to find a cellar somewhere.
Farm fields made patchwork of the landscape on either side of the road. A little ways further on, in a seam of brush and scraggly trees between fields, I spotted a crooked, broken-off pillar of white stone sticking out like a bone in graveyard dirt. I took a brief venture off the trail to get a closer look. The pillar itself wasn’t terribly remarkable, scratched and rain-worn with time and rashy with dead old creepers still clinging to it, but it definitely wasn’t the kind of stone you’d find naturally around here. Muir architecture was generally made of wood, brick, or the local granite, designed for function over showiness. Fancy white stone like this would have been imported for a Feudal Era plantation villa or an expensive religious shrine.
Kicking through the grass, I found more stone of the same material laid out in heavy tiles across the ground. I squatted down and checked all around the edge of each tile, testing to see if any of them lifted up. No hidden compartments, nothing re-sellable to be found, but that little piece of ruins was still a good sign. At some point in time, there had been wealth in the area.
I headed back to the road, and only a couple minutes of walking later I spotted the nubby outline of a town in the distance. My hopes rose, but as I drew closer and closer and the town looked smaller and smaller, my hopes sank back into disappointed pits.
The town at the end of the road was depressingly barren, barely more than a tiny cluster of cabins around an old broken fountain. At one house, a woman and her daughter went lethargically through the motions of beating the dust out of their rugs. Here and there, skinny farmhands leaned against a wall or sat on a fence, staring into space. A dead-eyed man pushed a wheelbarrow of rocks. The only ones who didn’t seem reduced to a bleak stupor were a pack of little boys running around and waving sticks as swords.
As I wandered into the wide ring of buildings, a wrinkly old lady on her porch caught sight of me and set down her knitting, frowning at me in a sort of pinched way. “Young lady, you ought not come out dressed like that!”
That told you a lot about the area. On Argozon, steam engines and some flickering electrical lights are common, and girls sometimes wear trousers. If they happen to be female engineers, trousers are practically dress code. In other places like this backwoods Muir village, steel plows are ‘in’ and anything other than conservative is downright scandalous. On Vanberg, of course, anything goes. I missed that. Granted, Vanberg has issues with trafficking, pirating, and clandestine debauchery, but the general attitude there is much more relaxed. My ensemble on that particular day included patched trousers, an oversized men’s coat, and well-worn boots, most of which I had swiped from laundry lines or unattended luggage.
I tipped my hat to her and flashed a grin. “Thanks fer the advice, ma’am, I’ll take it into consideration,” I drawled.
Her lips thrust out and her eyes narrowed, giving me the traditional old lady grimace of disapproval.
I strolled away and scanned the town. The fountain featured a battered figure of a hawk atop a pedastal, the tips of its wing feathers broken off and its smooth whitish stone now streaked with hard water marks. The fountain pool was made from more of those white stone tiles, plastered across the bottom with dried-up scum. Two circuit priests in red belts, wooden sandals, and dusty, once-white robes had evidently decided to visit that afternoon. Holy symbols in hand, they made themselves busy by stopping each passerby and attempting to persuade them that their wealth had caused the gods to become angry, and if they would only humble themselves and give up all their valuables to the priests, then the gods would become happy again.
This didn't seem like a good place to look for treasure. I would have settled for some bronze coins or a tarnished ring or something, but the only metal lying around was that man’s rusty wheelbarrow. I plopped myself on the ground alongside one of the cabins and munched on my hunk of bread. I would probably have to walk back to the main road and follow it to another town. Bummer. I should have gone to Inashi. There were plenty of orchards and fishers all over the island, and I might’ve been able to sneak into one of the academies and pinch some food without raising suspicion. From what I remembered when I was little and used to attend one of the boarding academies, the boys did it all the time. Maybe I really should work my way back to the coast and hop a boat.
My thoughts were broken by the sun exploding.