Tales of Midbar: Religious Intolerance

“Sure it wasn’t a dream,” said Criadria. “Ancients normally avoid humans.”

“Well this one didn’t,” said Vritan, “I could smell his breath! It was the creepiest thing that’s ever happened to me! I couldn’t get to sleep after that! Had to go downstairs to the living room as that’s got a ceiling!”

The house was towards the east end of the town, overlooking the valley where it dropped away towards Taunbrit. It looked as if it hadn’t been maintained well and the garden was overgrown, so the irrigation system must have been kept running.

Iandris was standing at the gate to the garden, looking at a nursery catalogue.

“How do you think that would look?” she asked, showing me a picture of a small, variegated strangler fig.

“It will die,” both me and Breeze said.

Iandris gave us a cross look, “Everybody here grows cacti! We’re Astrigis worshippers, we’ve got to have some proper plants.”

“They’re from Earth,” I said, “they photosynthesize, they have cellulose cell walls.”

“You know what I mean! Why does everybody have cacti here?”

“Some people have mostly other succulents,” I said.

“The Vineyard is mostly grape vines, figs and olives,” said Breeze, “but we’re on the south side of the valley so we get less infra-red from Aleph and we’re allowed to irrigate more heavily because we grow fruit.”

“It hardly ever rains here,” I said. “The water supply’s limited, that’s why people have to use plants that don’t need much.”

“We’ll figure something out,” said Lishrashic. “Want to see inside?”

“Sure,” said Mum. “I’d like a proper house to decorate.”

They proceeded to show us round their new home. It didn’t have any furniture yet. There was a main room inside the front door, with a staircase leading to the upper floor. The upper storie rooms didn’t have roofs, except for over the staircase. This was the first time I’d seen inside a normal house in Minris, as none of the children at school invited me to their homes, except for the Benai Haprihagfen, who lived in an ancient communal structure.

The periods of sapphire light were getting shorter, the temperatures were starting to drop. Aleph had a lot of star spots that made things cooler than normal for this time of year. Much of the Vineyard’s fruit was ripe and it was time to pick it. As we were nearer to the ground than most people, the Haprihagfen had me, Breeze and Irvis and a few other kids from the town picking cactus strawberries. They gave us tongs so we could grab the prickly fruits and pull them off the plants. When the other kids weren’t too close, and they mostly seemed to be trying to avoid us anyway, Breeze used her magic to pick the fruits that were out of reach. Some of the grown up anavim used psychokinesis. I tried it but couldn’t get it to work.

Sometimes they had us climbing trees for fruit adults had trouble reaching. Breeze used magic to get some fruit while doing that as well.

“Is it me or are the other kids acting more creeped out than normal?” asked Breeze.

We were sitting between patches of Echinocereus, pulling the fruit off them. Of course we were doing this in white day so we could tell which fruit were ripe.

“Perhaps somebody saw you using magic to pick fruit,” said Irvis.

“I’m careful about that,” said Breeze, “and I’ve got to practice. I could just tell them I’m using an artifact.”

“Now you mention it,” I said, “I went to the toy shop the other day and there were a couple of kids, I think from fifth grade, who gave me a very hostile look and left really quickly as soon as I arrived.”

“We haven’t been getting as many kids to worship as normal,” said Irvis.

“That always happens in the summer,” said Breeze. “A lot of people are either busy with visitors or leave town and go somewhere else for a week or two.”

“I don’t remember it being so bad last year,” said Irvis.

“Perhaps we should find some other kids to talk to,” I said. “Find out if there’s anything going on we’re not being told about.”

We took bikes so we could travel faster and went to Fortress Park, the obvious place to look for children when there wasn’t any school. On a hot afternoon (even if there were star spots on Aleph), the best place to play was the pool. This was underground in a large chamber with pictures of seas, with rocky shorelines, ships and huge creatures. They’d obviously been painted by somebody who’d never seen the sea.

OK, possibly, you know better than me about that.

We rode our bikes down the tunnel into the chamber and found only two small, fair haired, faharni boys standing in the middle of the pool. They looked about six or seven and they looked at us nervously as we dismounted and took our shoes off.

“Oh, you’ve got six toes on your left foot,” said Breeze, “I’ve never noticed that before.”

“Lots of faharnis have extra fingers and toes,” I said.

“I’ve got six toes on my right foot,” said Breeze, “isn’t that cool?”

“I’ve got ten fingers and toes,” said Cloud, “not that anybody cares.”

We started splashing our way towards the boys. It occured to me that I didn’t recognise them.

“Girl with red hair in a bun,” one of them said.

“Idlan boy and a faharni boy and faharni girl,” said the other.

With that they started running towards the other end of the pool, from which there was another tunnel leading back to the surface.

Cloud ran after them and overtook them, “Why are you frightened of us?”

“Help, Winemaker kids!” they shouted.

“We’re not going to hurt you! We just want to know what you’ve been told about us!”

By now the rest of us were catching up.

“You send the Night Leaper to attack children,” one of the boys said.

“The what?” I asked.

“He can leap really high into your bedrooms and does terrible things to you,” said the bigger boy. “He’s a horrible monster!”

Now the boys were hugging each other and the smaller one was crying.

“Sure he isn’t an ancient?” I asked.

“He’s an ancient or a minion,” said the bigger boy, “but the Vineyard has minions and goes right up to the mountains to the edge of the sapphires, so you can bring down the ancients.”

“We don’t control ancients,” said Cloud. “I don’t think anybody can! OK we have a few minions but they only hurt people who do bad things in the Vineyard and they only obey Yoho.”

“But the Night Leaper’s been attacking children!”

“It’s nothing to do with us!” said Cloud. “That’s the first we’ve heard about it.”

“Vritan said she’d seen an ancient,” I said. “I thought she’d dreamed it.”

I was now confident enough in my mind reading to be sure she believed this to be true.

“Who told you this?” asked Breeze.

“The boy.”

“What boy?” asked Cloud.

“In our hotel.”

“Which hotel?”

“The Palace!” said the boy.

“Rigar!” I said.

I knew he was the son of The Palace’s owner, in the year below us at school. Criadria had introduced us, almost like she expected us to get married. We’d taken an instant dislike to each other, I think he was a hipsick with a particular dislike of psychics.

I’ve heard that some time long ago, there was a plan to build a big road around the outside of Minris for the traffic that was just passing through. Construction was started on the large Palace Hotel to accomodate that trafic. Then the road plan was abandoned leaving a partly built hotel on the edge of town, north of the high street. Now it catered to people who liked quiet and nature and strange people who wanted to see ancients.

It was a long, hard bike ride up to the Palace and it stood ahead of us like a monolith against the sapphires. It was the only five story building in Minris and surrounded by flingball pitches and mondit courts.

Fortunately we didn’t have to take the final hill, through the grounds, because the manager and her son lived in the gatehouse.