Chapter 125

Episode 1: Nobody Knows Fweee! His short whistle disappeared into the sky far above him. The bird that had been soaring lazily over the flock of quee eating their grass made one final circle overhead and then began her descent. Her pale sand-colored wings propelled her swiftly through the air until she came to one-footed rest on the arm he extended to her. “Good girl, Pedryuvka.” When he raised his other hand, palm up, Pedryuvka pecked with her long beak at the scraps of jerky he’d sprinkled on his glove. His gloves were warm ones, made of queeskin and stuffed with grass. Ner and the others always said “Pedryuvka” was a funny name, but he’d thought it up himself, and he liked it. He was sure Pedryuvka liked it, too. Pretty sure, anyway. “Ishul, Ishul!” Speak of the devil. When he turned at the sound of his name, he saw Ner peeking out from the shadow of the wall, making a beckoning gesture. Ner, whose square winter hat was currently pulled down low over his eyes, was a whole two years younger than Ishul. Ishul was about to turn twelve. It was almost a year since his last birthday, when he’d taken Pedryuvka in. She’d been hurt, and the rest of her flock left her behind during their migration. Last year’s birthday present had ended up being permission from his parents to keep her as a pet, as long as he took responsibility for her himself. “The girl woke up!” Ner reported with shining eyes, as if he was sharing an important secret. Ishul hunched his shoulders, a little exasperated. Ner was childishly thrilled to have visitors from outside after they’d gone so long without seeing any, but Ishul knew the grown-ups weren’t happy to have them here. Outsiders invite disaster. Grown-ups said that all the time. “Let’s go check it out, Ishul.” “You go without me.” “Come on, let’s go!” Ner grabbed Ishul’s hand and pulled, ignoring his refusal. Ishul sighed. Guess I’ve got no choice. He raised his left arm up high above his head. “Pedryuvka, you keep an eye on the quee.” Flapping her sandy wings, Pedryuvka pushed off Ishul’s arm with her foot and took flight, soaring back up into the pale, sandy sky over the far-north tundra. The quee were relatively small plant-eaters with fur on their backs the color of burnt tea that was stiff and thick enough to line winter clothes with. The hair on their bellies was soft, and you could use it for insulation. They produced milk, and you could eat their meat, and you could make their innards into sausages, and they were strong for their size, so you could use the young ones for pack animals, too. Ishul’s tribe raised these quee, moving from ruin site to ruin site about once every six months to let them graze on what scant grass grew there. From what he’d heard, the ruined buildings they were living in right now had been built before the War started. The grown-ups and the First People never talked much about the War. They only told Ishul and the others the bare minimum, which was that there’d been a big war a long, long time ago, so to them it didn’t feel very real. But Ishul loved books, and he’d once read one that a traveler from Below had left behind, so he felt as if he at least knew more about the War than Ner and the others did. These ruins were from even longer ago than that. They used to be a prison camp for criminals who did bad stuff and got exiled here, or something, so there were a ton of little rooms with barred windows lining the winding hallways. It might be old, but it was still in decent shape on the inside. They’d settled down to live in one part of it, and used the crumbling outer wall as a fence to keep in the quee when they put them to pasture. These guests they’d supposedly picked up yesterday on a wild plain about half a day’s travel south of here had been assigned their own room in the ruins, one with a window that faced the pasture. The southern wilderness was close to the Below, so they hardly ever went there, but that day the First People had sensed a disturbance in a big magnetic field, and the radio tower had gone to investigate. Word was that they’d picked up these two refugees on their way back home. Ishul let Ner drag him along until they got to the guests’ room, where a tall, skinny boy and a little girl sat camped out next to the doorway. “Ishul, Ner, what took you so long?” the boy whispered anxiously, lifting his head. Little Litta hopped to her feet and ran over to them. Besides Ishul and Ner, there was Paul, who might be tall but was really a chicken, and his tiny little sister, Litta, who didn’t talk much. That was it. They were the only children living here, unless you counted the baby that had just been born a few days ago. The others pushed Ishul to stand in front as they peeked cautiously around the door frame into the room. They crouched behind Ishul and craned their heads around him to see in order from tallest to shortest: Paul, then Ner, then Litta. Ishul directed an exasperated look behind him and then peeked into the room again. It had been heated toasty warm inside. There was only one bed, covered with a quilt. Ishul saw a pretty ancient-looking radio by the head of the bed and a figure lifting her head from the pillow to sit up: a girl who looked a few years older than he was. He’d heard that one of their guests was a girl with the beginnings of frostbite. She seemed a little weakened, and he saw cracks in the fair skin of her cheeks. The only women he knew were tiny little Litta (though he wasn’t convinced Litta actually counted as a “woman”) and the grown-ups here, in other words his and Ner’s and Paul’s mothers, who were strong and wrapped in layers of fat on top of the muscle and had deep voices, too. So this slim and feeble-looking girl seemed completely mysterious, and completely beautiful. She was talking to someone, smiling softly at the person. When he followed her gaze, he saw a man perched on the edge of the bed. When Ishul saw what the man looked like, he was a little shocked. Now he understood why the others had been scared enough to call him over. He was really skinny considering how tall he was, with reddish, rusty-looking hair. A sore covered half his face so that it looked like iron rust had eaten its way into the skin, his left hand was wrecked, and his right arm was missing. The empty sleeve was jammed into the pocket of some weird-looking black outfit that Ishul had never seen before. The most shocking thing of all was that he had almost the exact same air about him as the First People. “I heard he’s related to the First People,” breathed Ner behind him, sounding strangely proud. He loved to play informant. “But he’s not like them; he didn’t run away like the First People! He fought in the War…” Ner whispered with something like reverence, and swallowed. He fought in the War…Unconsciously holding his breath, Ishul examined the man. He sure didn’t look tough enough for it. Paul was tall, too, and Ishul himself was pretty good in a fight. In a stick fight, he could even hold his own against a grown-up (he thought). And Ner was quick and light on his feet as a cat. The girl seemed to be doing her best to start up a conversation with him, but he just sort of let the chatter wash over him while he smoked. Look at that guy, being all gruff with a sick girl, Ishul thought, feeling displeased with him. It didn’t help that Ishul was already a little enchanted by the girl. For her part, the girl settled her eyes on the man’s lips around the cigarette and stared at them as though she wanted to say something. The man gave her a look that said, What? She blushed and shook her head furiously, looking down. When she touched the tips of her fingers to her own lips and darted a glance up at him through her lashes, he pulled back a little and avoided her gaze as if he was sort of scared for some reason. What the heck was that all about? Apparently this exchange passed for communication between the two of them, but Ishul and the others couldn’t decode it at all. The girl pouted a little, and leaned forward in bed and started to edge toward the man, then abruptly fell back on the sheets as if she had lost control of her muscles. All the kids gasped in unison and then slapped their hands over one another’s mouths before they could cry out. They kept on peeking. The man’s face changed, and his hand groped uneasily around the surface of the bed almost as if he’d lost sight of where she was. When she put her own hand over his and whispered something, he looked so relieved…He gave a faint, soft smile that was totally unlike the gruff expression he’d had so far, and he helped her back up as carefully as though she were a precious family heirloom. The girl looked relieved, too, if a little shy, as she leaned against him. She pressed her ear to his chest as if to say I’m right here. The children stood stiff as boards with their hands covering one another’s mouths to keep quiet, just staring at them. They couldn’t make out what the guests whispered to each other, but it wasn’t too hard to tell how much the two meant to each other. They seemed connected, sort of like a parent and a child, and also sort of like what Paul and Litta were as brother and sister, and at the same time like nothing Ishul recognized. Like they had some bond between them that Ishul and the others didn’t know about yet. “What are you doing?” a voice behind them suddenly demanded, and they literally jumped. Ner’s mother, a stout woman in a leather vest and a heavy skirt, was looking down at them with a steaming stew pot in her hands. At the sound of her voice the pair inside the room noticed them, too, and turned their faces to the door. Ner turned pale. “N-nothing!” There was no way that would fly with her, though. She glared not only at Ner, but at each one of them in turn. “Why aren’t you watching the quee?” “We are. Run!” On Ishul’s signal, they all whooped loudly and shot past the large woman, fleeing down the hallway at full speed. The grown-ups weren’t even pretending to welcome their guests. The girl spent most of her time sick in bed with weakness and mild frostbite, so they were all taking turns looking after her, but it wouldn’t be inaccurate to take that as an expression of how much they wanted her to get well quick and get out. The adults, and particularly the First People who were the Elders of their clan, didn’t welcome outsiders. The First People had lived in secret ever since they’d fled from Below during the War, so they didn’t like visitors who could end up involving them with Below. When he got a little older, Ishul wanted to go have a look at the world Below. Supposedly there were lots and lots more people Below than in their tiny closed-up world here. He’d never told anyone how he felt, though. They were bound to get mad at him, and if he was unlucky they might even keep a guard on him to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid. “You’ve been Below, right, Pedryuvka? What was it like?” he asked the one-legged bird perched on his left arm pecking the jerky in his right hand. Engrossed in her dinner, Pedryuvka didn’t answer. The grown-ups were busy with the fields and the flock, and aside from the women doing bare-minimum caretaking like making sure they had food and heat, there weren’t many adults who went near the guests. In their tribe, the men worked in the dinky little fields that were a good walk from here, and the women and children took care of the livestock. They’d lived here in the northern lands for a hundred years now, ever since the First People. The First People shut themselves up in a room deep in the ruins and almost never came out, though, so Ishul’d only met them a few times. But that man visiting—he was one of the First People’s race. The adults didn’t call people like him by their nickname, but Ishul had read it in a book: They used to be called “Demons of War.” Things got started two days after they’d arrived. Ner was the one to think up the plan; it was the kind of little prank he was always pulling. Ishul was the one who actually made it work and gave the orders while they carried it out, though, so it would be fair to call him the ringleader. Ner’s ideas were always full of holes, after all, and he’d never be able to pull them off if Ishul didn’t lend a hand. This plan was…well, it wasn’t anything special, really. First, Ishul would use Pedryuvka to distract the girl while the man wasn’t in the room.