Chapter 2
~ A Year of Peace ~
That night, everyone was already too tired to argue, and Basjon’s parents quickly agreed to provide a place to stay for the unexpected visitor their son had brought home. The next morning, however, was an entirely different story. Sitting around the breakfast table, now both wide awake, Beysal and his wife had quite a few things to say.
“She’s from the mountain!?”
“Calm down, Beysal,” his wife said, grasping one of his arms, “I’m sure this is just… some little story that Jon and his friend came up with. She can’t really have come from up there…”
Basjon stood up from his seat, slamming his hands against the table.
“It’s true!”
“Well, I don’t see how it could be,” Beysal said, “Even if she was from that mountain, how in the world would she get all the way down here on her own?”
“I… I don’t know,” the boy said, sitting back down, “But I know she’s not from around here at all! Just look at her ears!”
At that very moment, Aykathla walked into the room, still wearing the same scraggly, oversized old cloak and intricately-detailed clothes that she had been wearing the night before. She stopped in the doorway to the kitchen, seeming a bit stunned by the fact that everyone in the room had suddenly turned to look at her.
“Um…”
“Her ears,” Beysal mumbled to himself, squinting in an attempt to get a better look despite his failing eyesight. “Well, somethin’ is different about those ears of hers, but…”
“What about her hair?”
Aykathla reached up and grabbed a handful of her own hair, glancing down at it in an attempt to see what they were talking about. She couldn’t understand what, exactly, was so unusual about it; yes, it was bright orange rather than the various shades of brown and black that Basjon’s family all seemed to have, but what was so strange about that? Surely they had seen people with orange hair before—it was hardly the rarest of colors, and she herself had met people with green hair, purple hair, blue hair…
“Look! It’s orange! And not a reddish-orange either, pure orange!”
“Now that you mention it,” his mother said, “That is a color you don’t see every day. Clothes are a bit different from anything we usually see around here, too.”
Basjon hadn’t really paid much attention to her clothes, aside from the fact that she was wearing a worn-out old cloak (which was now even more worn-out thanks to her trip through the woods), but now that he looked it was pretty clear that what she was wearing certainly wasn’t the kind of thing anyone in his little village would have worn. Rather than sandals or plain leather shoes, she wore a pair of almost knee-high blue boots decorated with gold and unusual moon-like shapes; her dress and shirt were purplish-blue in color and similarly decorated, with a line of odd pins or bars holding her shirt together in the way that buttons normally would. Compared to the simple outfits worn by the Gerhsam family, her clothes almost looked excessive.
“Well,” Besyal sighed, “I guess she’s not just some local kid tryin’ to play a joke on us after all.”
He walked over to the girl, patted her on the shoulder with one of his rather large hands, and then ushered her over toward the table, where an extra seat had already been prepared for her.
“I still don’t see any reason to believe she’s from where she says she’s from,” he added, sitting back down in his own place at the table. “But until we find out where she really did come from, I guess there’s no harm in lettin’ her stay here with us.”
With that issue settled, peace finally returned to the Gersham household, unhindered even by the lingering uncertainty over their guest’s place of birth. Mrs. Gerhsam opened a nearby oven and Beysal’s stomach let out a thunderous growl, almost as if the smell of his wife’s freshly-baked bread had finally awakened it from the previous night’s slumber. Basjon couldn’t help but laugh, and Aykathla smiled slightly for the first time that morning.
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That one day soon led to weeks, and then months, of Aykathla living with the Gershams. No matter how long they searched, nobody in their little village ever managed to hear any reports of a missing girl with pointed ears and orange hair; even the occasional merchant or messenger, coming in from distant lands hundreds upon hundreds of miles away, had never heard of any runaways or lost children who fit the description. It was as if she had literally appeared out of nowhere on that day.
Despite seeming so utterly different at first, Aykathla quickly adjusted to her new life in the village. Within a week, she was running and playing and doing chores just like any other child her age; she was extremely frail at first, and grew tired easily, but as time went on and she became more and more active this gradually began to change. Within a month, she could run well enough that most of the younger children had a hard time catching her; in three months, she had grown so much stronger that she was almost able to keep pace with Basjon, at least for a little while. She now climbed trees, ran about in the woods and hills, swam in nearby lakes and rivers… for the first time she had really had a chance to explore her surroundings, and wherever Basjon went she soon followed, not wanting to be left out when he uncovered any of the secrets that this unfamiliar land held.
She also found that she had a bit of a talent with weaving and sewing, and (with some help from Mrs. Gersham) eventually was even able to make some much-needed new clothes for herself. Most of what she had been wearing when she had arrived had long since been discarded, though she had kept the boots and placed them on one of the tables back at the Gersham house, converting the old footwear into two of the most unusual-looking decorative flowerpots that anyone in the little village had ever seen. Now she always wore a pair of sandals much like those that Basjon always wore, though (much like Basjon) she found that they often wore out and needed to be repaired or even totally replaced far more often than she had ever expected.
Though her ways were, much like her appearance, a bit unfamiliar, the people of the village eventually grew to accept young Aykathla as one of their own. Though she had been considered a bit of a rebellious child back where she was from, here she was seen as being almost unnaturally polite, especially when it came to the elderly or any sort of authority figure. Those who took the time to talk to her about her past found the few details they were able to dredge up about the culture she had been raised in—the apparent source of her impossible manners—to be a bit unsettling; it seemed that wherever she had come from, girls her age were hardly afforded any rights at all, and adult women were only marginally better off. While some of the village’s women certainly chose to stay home to cook, clean, and care for their children, they were never forced to do so, and they had just as much right as the men to take up any occupation they were competent enough to manage. The village’s gunsmith, Kasandra Marek, was one such woman, and nobody dared to claim that a man could do her job better simply by virtue of which set of privates he happened to have been born with (anyone who did suggest such a thing might quickly find themselves facing down the wrong end of one of her products, so even those few who disagreed generally kept their mouths shut.)
One particular part of her culture that bothered the villagers more than any other was the idea that parents would routinely marry young girls off to friends of the family even before they were old enough to realize what was going on, and in some cases before they had ever met the groom-to-be. Arranged marriage alone was a bit of a shock to most, but the extremes that these distant, pointy-eared people apparently went to were more than they had ever imagined possible in any civilized society. Though Aykathla herself never admitted it to anyone, some even began to suspect that it was this very thing that had led her to flee from her homeland and end up where she was currently living in the first place. For a twelve-year-old girl, who had previously been given at least the illusion that she had some freedom, to suddenly discover the fact that her family had been secretly planning out most of her life in advance must have been devastating.
Gradually, the influence of her upbringing began to fade away, and she grew more and more used to her life in the village. By the time a full year had passed, she couldn’t imagine ever wanting to return home—though she did occasionally think about her family that she hadn’t seen in so long, she had learned in her time away from home that the bad parts about living up on the mountain far outweighed the good. Things that she used to simply accept as “the way things are” were now revealed for the injustices that they were, and though she was still a bit more polite than was necessary, she now realized that the various authority figures in her life were not absolute and that questioning them—especially when she suspected that something really wasn’t right—was a perfectly normal thing for anyone to do. Though she still had a few secrets that her adoptive family had not yet been told, even this was about to change…
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One year had passed since the day Aykathla had suddenly arrived in the little village, and aside from the fact that the place now had one more permanent resident, very little had changed. Beysal Gersham still went out and gathered logs so that everyone in the village would have enough firewood, his wife Leah still made and sold clothes in her spare time to make a bit of money in case any unexpected expenses ever came up, and Basjon still went to school for part of the year and spent most of the rest goofing off. Aykathla herself had now enrolled in school as well, and would have risen to the top of her class if not for the fact that she knew absolutely nothing about history and very little of math or the sciences; it was decided early on that she would have to take beginning-level classes in a few subjects to catch up on the things her previous education had apparently left out before she could move on to age-appropriate classes. The idea of being in a classroom full of children half her age didn’t seem to bother her at all, however; it was as if she had become so determined to learn the things that her own people had hidden away from her that even a horde of snot-nosed brats trying to pull on her hair every day couldn’t discourage her. Though it did, sometimes, freak other people out a bit.
“Oh dear,” Mrs. Gersham gasped, nearly dropping a pot she had been carrying when Aykathla came through the door. “What happened to your hair?”
She just shrugged and smiled slightly. Her hair was sticking up in all different directions—some parts were braided, while others were tied off into miniature ponytails with various colors of string and still others seemed to have been chewed or slobbered on.
“Some of the younger girls in one of my classes wanted to play with it again,” she said, sighing a little. “I’ll go and fix it right away.”
By the time she had managed to return her hair to its normal state, Basjon’s classes had let out as well, and he had come through the door and immediately started digging into the enormous plate of chicken and various vegetables that was waiting for him at the table. Before long Aykathla and the rest of the family joined in, going on about the mostly mundane events of their daily lives in between bites of good food. Eventually, the adults had gone off to do something else and only Jon and Aykathla were left sitting. After emptying the last of her cup of juice, Aykathla leaned over and whispered something unexpected in Basjon’s ear.
“Hey, do you remember that giant bird you saw on the day I first came here?”
The boy paused and thought for a moment, gulping down the last of his juice and setting the empty cup back down before answering.
“Yeah!”
He most certainly was not whispering.
“What about it?”
“There’s something I didn’t tell you back then,” she said, “I came here with that bird… she gave me a ride, actually.”
Basjon’s eyes suddenly got a lot wider. He thought back to that night, when he was knocked off his feet by little more than the wind from the gigantic bird passing overhead; he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to actually have been riding on that thing.
“No way,” he said, “How the heck’d you manage to get up on top of a bird that big?”
“I’ll show you,” she said, standing up from her seat and heading toward her room. “Just wait here, okay?”
A few minutes later, she returned from her room carrying an ancient-looking scroll which Basjon had never seen before. The boy looked confused.
“Okay… what’s an old scroll have to do with giant birds?”
“You’ll see,” she said, smiling slightly. “But not in here… we’ve got to take it somewhere outside of town before I show you, or people might get a little scared.”
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“Outside of town” turned out to be a bit of an understatement—the two kids walked through the woods for at least a few miles and came out on the other side, ending up in a flat, grassy area dotted with white rocks. Off in the distance, the mountain that Aykathla claimed was her original home was clearly visible on the horizon, rising up above everything; it was a very clear day, so no clouds obscured the view of the mountain’s peak. If you looked closely enough, it was even possible to see some structure rising high into the air above the mountain, an incredibly tall tower that seemed to keep going up and up indefinitely.
“Okay,” Aykathla said, removing the scroll from its hiding place inside her shirt while Basjon flinched away for a second to avoid seeing anything he probably shouldn’t. “This should be far enough away, I think…”
She glanced around for a moment, then walked over to one of the rocks. Using it as a table, she unrolled the scroll from both ends and spread it out on the stone’s flat surface, giving Basjon a clear view of exactly what was written on it. Well, “clear” in a relative sense, as seeing it really didn’t clarify much of anything as to what it actually said—it was written in some unknown language, perhaps even many unknown languages, scattered about the page in odd combinations that almost seemed to have changed slightly every time the boy took another look at it. Somehow, it managed to be both difficult to look at and difficult to look away from simultaneously.
“The bird you saw before… she doesn’t like to be disturbed without good reason,” she said, turning back toward her friend for a moment. “So I probably won’t be able to summon her today. But if you’d like to see a bird, I’m sure I’ll be able to find a smaller one.”
Basjon nodded; he wasn’t exactly sure how someone would go about summoning a bird using a scroll in the first place, so just how large the bird in question was didn’t seem like it would make much of a difference. Seeing that as a signal to continue, she focused her attention on the scroll and began to read the unusual words out loud. At first she spoke somewhat slowly; she had not actually used the scroll once in the year she had lived with the Gershams, and she had only studied it occasionally when no one was looking, so she was a bit out of practice. Eventually, however, her pace picked up and she began reading the alien words as if she had been speaking them all her life (because, of course, she essentially had.) The symbols on the scroll began to glow with a yellowish-orange light, and soon this light had begun to stream forth from the pages, erupting upward with such brilliance that Basjon had to struggle just to keep his eyes open. Eventually, after one especially bright flash, it was all over.
As he opened his eyes, the first thing Basjon saw was a good-sized bird rising up from the scroll, still partially surrounded by the golden-orange glow that had been emanating from it just moments earlier. The bird was not unnaturally large, but still impressive, with a wingspan that was probably close to his own height. Much like the bird he had seen flying overhead the year before, it had large, round, glowing-orange eyes and a few parts of its body glinted in the sun; once the glow around it faded, it became clear that these parts were actually decorated with some sort of jewelry.
“See?”
Aykathla held out one hand, and the bird fluttered through the air for a few moments before perching on her arm. Basjon flinched at the sight, expecting the creature’s talons to dig into her skin and be rather uncomfortable, but apparently this had not happened; she turned to the bird and smiled before patting the creature on the head lightly and literally ruffling its feathers.
“She’s about my age,” she said, pointing to the bird, “I think. I don’t really know how long they can live, and I’ve never really had a chance to ask, so… that’s really just a guess.”
The bird squawked, sounding mildly annoyed; apparently the girl’s guess wasn’t entirely accurate. Aykathla gasped slightly and turned back to the bird, whispering something in her ear (or at least, where an ear would presumably be—it was hard to tell with birds) and then getting a quiet chirpy squawk back as a response.
“Oh, I’m sorry, that wasn’t right at all,” Aykathla said, looking a bit embarrassed as she turned back toward Jon. “She’s actually closer to your parents’ age, I guess. They’re both around fifty, right?”
Basjon’s jaw dropped.
“Wait… fifty years old!? I didn’t know birds ever lived past twenty or thirty!”
“And this little one’s still young,” Aykathla said, stroking the bird’s feathers slightly. “The big one you saw before? Now she really is old—she’s probably been around even longer than your village has!”
The bird took off and circled in the air a few times before swooping back down toward the ground, landing on a low branch of a nearby pine tree. She reached up with one clawed foot and scratched at her head slightly for a few moments, then turned toward the two kids and let out a rather loud squawk.
“Oh,” Aykathla said, apparently understanding exactly what had been said, “I must have brought her here at a bad time… she wants to go home already. I’ll have to send her back right now.”
The pointy-eared little girl sat back down at the rock where she had left her scroll, then motioned for the bird to come to her. She did, fluttering down from the trees and landing on the surface of the rock just inches away. Aykathla grasped both ends of the scroll and rolled it up once again, speaking only a single word as she did.
“Ebiru.”
The bird immediately began to glow with the same yellowish-orange light as before, then seemed to sink beneath the surface of the rock she was standing on until finally she had disappeared entirely, leaving only a circle of light behind. This circle then shrunk rapidly and then vanished, its light disappearing entirely in a matter of seconds.
“Wh… where’d she go?”
“Where… I’m not really sure,” Aykathla answered, “But I know she’s back home now.”
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