Aur Child

Alai woke a few hours later. Cheery promises of intermittent drops greeted him, but he soon recalled the green glow. Sitting up, he looked over to his own bed. First awake, as usual. He rose from the bed, pulled on still-damp clothing, and stepped softly through the cottage. With a soft click of his tongue, the dog appeared by his side. He pushed his feet into his boots and they both slipped out over the threshold.

The dog sniffed excitedly about the courtyard, snorting back out briny mixes of sand and water vacuumed up from scattered puddles. Alai cupped a few drops of water dribbling from the overflow valve and pushed them into his mouth. A frown flashed across his face. Sneaking out when we should be celebrating.

He marched past the gate and along the trail that wound into the forest behind Crabber’s Point. The rounded roof of his neighbor, Bemko-Tiul, peeked out past a stand of pines further north. Beyond that, on the far side of the bay, sharp spires poked up into the greasy sky above Hill Village – the wind towers that harvested endless energy.

The dog, yellow clumps of fur already splotchy and darkened from brushing against wet surfaces, bounded excitedly around Alai, exploring wet grass and bush within a radius of discipline silently defined between dog and master. Alai had heard the breakers to his right when they left the yard, but the crash of waves dampened as the well-beaten path veered inland. He felt the heat of the day already accumulating, applying a clammy, humid film to his skin. At least the forest would spare him direct exposure from the sun.

He walked beneath tufts of green-needled pine trees and passed patches of red-flowing gum that crowded sections of the path’s edge. Every crisscrossing path he encountered spilled over with blooms and branches. Alai trod confidently along the trail he’d used for decades, this section no more than an arm’s width across. The dog forced him sideways, shoulders and sleeves daubed by protruding leaves, when she shot past his legs in exuberant bounds, leaving fresh scrapes in the slick mud lining the worn trail. The forest steamed with evaporating rainwater. It reeked from fallen organic matter reinvigorated by a rare drenching. The trail carried him south around a hill that rose up towards the beach, jutting out as the craggy, low-slung cape that was Crabber’s Point.

He kept his stride with stout legs and a strong frame. Sweat gathered on his thick brow. His bright, peering eyes gleamed within thoughtful, deep sockets against his dark complexion. His black, curly hair and broad nose further distinguished him as an obvious inhabitant of the Southern Continent, what mariners called a Southlander.

Alai stopped on a small rise where the forest’s brown and gray trunks, wider than a man’s embrace, fans of needles and bulbous cones, and shimmering leaves in shapes of diamonds and ellipses stretched out before him into the hinterland with few interruptions. Beyond that lay the unknown. Elders would say, “Those lands are the domain of other creatures.” And the rule they learned as children: Never lose sight of the wind towers.

He shook his head. Raise the subject with any villager, and they would shrug and say, “There’s no need to venture further.” Hill Villagers, as with all other peoples who populated these lands, were content with the coast and the sea. “The elders provide for us.” Of course, they were right. Unlimited energy, the ability to produce food in abundance despite the arid climate, and most important of all: safety. He could not argue that theirs was a peaceful life. He had had this conversation more times than he could remember. “The hinterlands are unknown and dangerous,” his fellow villagers would say, or decorate their dismissiveness with a brush of drama, “Strange things and dangerous places.”

No, the hinterlands were not to be explored. “Take to a ship if you seek adventure. Another losting, perhaps?” someone might tell him, proposing the time-honored tradition of freely leaving the village with no obligation to return. But Alai bristled at the thought. I don’t wish to escape. Curiosity. That was his vice. Besides, he had no desire to abandon the village, or his family, as his parents had done to him long ago.

So, his explorations of the forest had always been within sight of the wind towers. “Most of the time, at least,” he’d tell his neighbor with a flash in his eye. “You know, you can push quite deep before the very tips of the towers are out of sight.”

“Friend,” Bemko-Tiul had said to him with a smile revealing affection for his comparatively tiny neighbor, “You know what comes to a snout sniffin’ round a snake hole.”

But Alai had never encountered trouble. Nothing more dangerous ever crossed his path than the usual fauna; spiders, centipedes, and even snakes were no more threat than his boots could handle.

Alai scanned the forest for signs of the source of the green glow. The dog, oblivious of any hazard, hopped along happily, trailing her master to snort into a mesh of roots, and then racing past him to lead the way along the singletrack path. She pranced twenty or thirty meters ahead, stopped abruptly, turned around to confirm that Alai had kept his pace and direction, and then bolted further down the trail. The retriever’s whimsical smile forced him to grin.

With sweat steadily accumulating in his clothes, Alai arrived at an intersecting trail fringed by tangled groves of thorn and an occasional patch of wild berries that twinkled like red stars in the brush. Opposite the trail, the creek, normally clear, swelled in a milk-tea rush towards the ocean. Alai stopped, anticipating relief from the creek’s cooling effect. Instead, he found it to be even warmer and more humid. The dog came to a stop and sniffed at the air.

Alai looked beyond the creek to the narrow strip of land that ended abruptly at a sheer face of porous, craggy limestone. The cliffs rose straight up twenty or so meters. Like Crabber’s Point, but much higher and more treacherous, this rock extended out into the sea in a crumbling mess of jagged towers. Above all others, mariners were well advised to keep clear of the serrated Sharkjaw at their peril, no matter the conditions.

Alai gaped at the creek, spilling over its banks in several places and washing out portions of the trail as both continued in parallel towards the shore. Some trees, recently collapsed along the overflown bank, were being dragged through the flow, their roots pulled taut like the sheets of a close hauled five-master merchant ship.

The dog stepped to Alai’s side with her snout pointed left and let out a shallow growl as she locked up her frame. Alai felt himself instinctively stiffen. The creek in that direction cascaded in a twist down an elevation drop, throwing foam against the banks. Logs and trees were jammed along its section. The smell of charred wood reached his nostrils, and a peculiar heat seemed to push him back.

He slowly shook his head. Further back behind the thrashed creek, thin streams of smoke rose from the disturbed bank and, tangled in a partially submerged branch, he thought he saw a flag of clothing flapping in the gushing stream.

Alai wiped the sweat from his brow. He spoke quietly to the dog, “Whod’ve been out here last night?” With his first step forward, a shrill tone, quickly ascending in its pitch, pierced his ears, followed by a loud pop like a bicycle tire inflated to bursting. Alai had just enough time to locate the source of the sound in the lower branches nearby to see a puff of powdery grey dust before the area cleared to its previous state. At his signal, the dog ceased her barking, but his pounding heart still deafened his ears. He thought of his wife’s words the night before. “…never expected the blessing of rain to bring me the strange sensation of fear.”

With timid steps, Alai approached the shredded garment and descended the slope of the brewing bank. He let his boot slide down the mud into a resting position against a gnarled root. Heat flushed his face. Beads of sweat broke out across his forehead as he reached out for the cloth. To extend himself in this way over inexplicably hot water was imprudent, but he managed to grab hold of the cloth – its weak threads shredding away from the branch with a yank.

With a firm footing back on the trail, his fingers juggled the fabric as he examined his find. The keen nose of the dog sniffed at the fabric from below while Alai inspected it from above. Squeezing out the waterlogged rag, he studied the dense weave of red and grey threads. Some were stiffer than others, like impossibly thin wires. An oddly heavy fabric, a kind of wool, but thicker than any he had seen before. Besides the material, the pattern also puzzled him. The weave looked like nothing used by villages on this coast, and nothing he recalled seeing on his earlier lostings.

Someplace ... very cold? he thought. Where they say the water changes to rock. But he had never travelled that far north. And those people almost never travelled this far south. Never past the Red Kingdom. Looking up the creek towards the smoke, he folded the fabric and pushed it into his pocket.

The dog stalked beside him with a smothered growl in her mouth, lips curling to reveal her fangs. Alai scanned the creek for what the dog had sensed. His mind raced with thoughts of what kind of person might have been here.

Then, he stopped and stared at a new scene ahead. The creek bounded over two deep gouges, several strides wide, charred in black and smoldering about the edges. For Alai, intimately familiar with every corner of this forest, the scene was nothing less than a foreign land. Eddies swirled around the deepest parts of the two craters, bubbling pools a meter deep obscured by steam. A stench of burnt wood and exposed mud soaked the air; smoke slithered up into the branches from several steaming pockets of soil. It looked as if two enormous trees had been ripped out of the creek bank and tossed out of sight. Many other trees lay toppled, all leaning away radially from the creek bed. The storm had been intense, but this is more, he thought, than what lightning might do. He stepped between the rocks and debris strewn beside the creek. Chunks of earth littered the trail. In the creek, a rapid of sorts had formed over the newly made craters. Alai could feel the pull of cooler temperature just upstream.

Alai could not imagine the force required for this to happen. Now he shook his head more firmly. This couldn’t have been a lightning strike. He pressed against the shred of fabric in his pocket. No, this is where I saw the green glow. The dog’s growling had increased and again she stiffened in her stare towards the near side of the creek. There, Alai caught his first glimpse of what seemed to be an object covered in folds of shimmering fabric that flickered as he approached. Only a corner poked upward from its position lodged in the mud along the creek bank.

Trembling, Alai approached the object. He bent down and brushed his fingers along the material, a mesh of metal so fine it slid away like a silken robe. Pushing that aside, he exposed a dull gray corner of metal. From its shape, he imagined it to be a cube about the size of a foot stool.

Like the fabric, the materials of the mesh and the cube were foreign. With a glance over his shoulder, he picked up a broken branch and reached in for a tentative poke at the object. Lodged deep in the mud at a crooked angle like an impacted molar, it didn’t budge. With his heel, he scraped mud away from the edges, carving around the shape, slowly revealing more of its sides.

Eventually, the object, and the mesh sack surrounding it, lay exposed in a shallow, wet hole. Alai grabbed the mesh and shimmied the cube out of the sticky mud. He smeared away the grime, finally lifting the cube up with two hands. Lighter than he had anticipated – no more than a net of small fish. The mesh sack, rinsed of mud and debris in the cooler upstream water, crushed easily down into a tiny ball and tucked into his pocket.

Nothing else out of place caught his eye, but there was too much here to ignore. The green glow, explosions, craters, fabric from what was most likely a stranger’s clothing. Of these, he would need to tell the elders right away. For the safety of the village.

But the cube. He stared at it for several moments more. Of course, he should hand it over to Elder Tiul right away. But then he would never again have the chance to study it. The Elders frowned upon his tinkering and an object like this might cause him even more trouble. He looked up into a crack of sky between branches. Surely, they know about things like this. Why, then, do they never explain them? He would always wonder what it was. Why couldn’t he at least learn a bit about it before surrendering it to them?

Alai set his pace as he returned to the coastal trail. He shivered despite the heat. The dog circled around him with her ears pressed back, whining softly, and leaned into him with her snout. The cube, cool and solid, had indentations on opposite sides that fit his hands well; clearly these were intended for a person to carry it. Hexagonal panels on other sides appeared to be protective covers. He anxiously hiked home, ignoring the burn that grew in his arms and back as the weight of the cube sapped his strength.

Arriving outside the courtyard, stiff and sweaty, Alai rounded the bushes and dove towards the shed while the dog disappeared towards the shady side of the cottage. He could make a quick inspection of the cube before going to town. To be sure it wasn’t dangerous.

Inside the shed, he placed the cube beside the mesh sack atop his work bench and poked around to collect a few soiled rags and a screwdriver. He smeared away the remaining mud. The top and bottom were matte metal, with thicker casing around the corners. Centered on the fifth side, the recessed, hexagonal shape he saw on his walk home, smaller than his palm. He ran his fingers along its smooth surface. When he tapped it, the surface sounded hollow and felt somehow cooler than the other parts.

Rotating the cube to inspect the final side, he pressed his fingers against another recessed hexagon, similar in shape to the first one, but with what appeared to be a seam. With a screwdriver, it didn’t take long to carefully slide it back and reveal that it was indeed a cover, exposing, to his surprise, a terminal reset into the cube that looked nearly identical to those found inside the wind towers.

With that discovery, the metal now also reminded him of other parts of the wind towers. A power cell? He wondered. Perhaps it might work better than the shoddy salt cells we use. Alai stepped away from the workbench and rummaged through an old box of spare circuitry he had accumulated from regular repairs of the low-voltage circuits used in villagers’ cottages. Power cells and small, direct current circuits for lighting and other meagre appliances provided basic conveniences deemed not to pose a risk to the village by the elders. After some sifting, he removed an old section of circuit link with its light emitting diode. This will do.

He positioned the circuit link onto the terminal as he had done with other power cells countless times before and felt the chill down his spine as they matched perfectly together. Taking a deep breath, he flipped the bulb’s switch. The recessed area where the terminals were positioned flashed and… SNAP! Alai tumbled back from the workbench and fell to the ground, his fingers tingling.

The cube shrieked so loudly, Alai was sure his family and even Bemko would hear. The dog barked in response from her dozing spot in the yard. Alai got back up to his feet and quickly smothered the cube in rags to snuff the shriek, but just as quickly as the tone had started, it stopped. Only its echo remained in Alai’s ears. On the front of the cube, the smooth hexagon now glowed green with a row of symbols he couldn’t read.

Alai, groaning, wagged his hand in the air. The shock was as strong as that received from a wind tower connected to a malfunctioning salt cell, except this … this was just a tiny box. He considered the risks of such an object to his family and the village, and muttered to himself, “Perhaps I should hand it over to Gallia-Tiul.”

“Father, are you okay?” called a soprano voice from outside, rapid footsteps rounding the shed and approaching the door.

“I’m fine, son,” Alai called, wrapping up the cube in rags and hastily pushing it deep under his work bench behind some paint cans.

“What was that noise, that beeping, Father?”

“Oh, only the door hinge again. I’ve just greased it so it should be quiet now.” Alai swept the boy from the shed. “Come,” he said. “My stomach’s growling.”

Alai removed his soggy boots and stepped inside, his son following close behind. Upon entering the house, the dog darted into corners, sniffing for threatening creatures, and then curled up into a quiet corner. Alai greeted his wife with a hug and kiss and, to distract her from any questions about the noises in the shed, he immediately removed the shred of fabric from his pocket and placed it on the counter.

“What’s this?” his wife asked, as she tended to the sizzling pan.

“Found it in the branches of a fallen tree by Sharkjaw Creek,” he replied.

She put down the spatula to inspect the fabric more closely.

“It’s no weave from these parts.” She frowned. “Who could wear such fabric in this heat?”

“Yes, exactly what I thought when I saw it. And something popped in the trees when I was there, although I can’t say what it was. Also, further up past the junction, there were two huge craters blown into the creek bed. Like an explosion. I couldn’t imagine lightning doing that, in different places too.”

“Oh, wow, explosions?” the boy chirped. “Can we go see them? Was there a fire, then?”

Alai shook his head. “I saw no fire. The ground was charred, and several large trees were knocked down around the craters. We can go see them later; they’re not going anywhere.”

The boy’s shoulders slumped. Alai glanced at the steaming eggplant and toast his wife slid onto a plate.

“Looks delicious. And perfectly timed too!”

“We thought we’d still let you tinker a bit in the shed while I made you something to eat.” She smirked but pretended to be distracted with the table settings. “I’ve had plenty of time.”

Ah, he thought, she knew he had been back for a while. The boy must have seen him return earlier.

Alai placed the plate on the table and sat down beside mother and son. Tall mugs of citrus-tinged rainwater, a celebration of the night’s storm, cornered each sitting place. He sipped his tea, green leaves floating in the brew, looking thoughtfully down at the shred of grey cloth on the table.

His wife wiped a napkin across her mouth.

“Well bear, it’ll be a busy day. Bemko says there’s three ships in the harbor, including a four-master that arrived yesterday evening. I’ve promised to help him harvest the tomatoes, tend the citrus blooms, and get the stand set up before the festival begins.” She looked down at the shriveled scrap on the table. “I assume you’ll want to inform Gallia-Tiul right away. This cloth is clearly that of a stranger. Someone could be hurt and no one else may know about it.” She seemed to consider something else for a moment while Alai munched his toast. The boy poked his finger at the citrus slice bobbing in his mug. “Yes, Elder Tiul would want to be told of this immediately. She can decide what to do.”

“You’re right, bee. The boy and I will head up to town as soon as we finish eating.”

“Mm-hmm,” she replied.

The family resumed their breakfast for a few minutes in silence.

“You might also tell her about that odd box you’ve brought back with you,” she said looking up at him momentarily and then focusing again on her plate.