In the Valley of Hermitsby Colin Lee Heintze |
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| part 2 of 4 |
The girl hurried from the tent and went to inform the others, whose nervous postures showed they were partly aware of the situation even if the details had not yet been made clear to them.
It was an unnatural time to pack up and leave, and the unprecedented break in centuries of routine put the people ill at ease. Most had never hurried a moment in their lives and found the rushed, frenzied pace at which they were now asked to break down the tents, bundle the poles, and herd the goats from their steep pastures to be back-breaking labor.
The trees in the area still bore fruit, and the grasses were still high and plentiful for the animals. The streams still ran with silvery bands of fish, a creature whose primitive reflexive nature translated poorly to the people’s own sensitivities; they could be harvested without an abundance of suffering. The people were moving on well before their time, while this patch of land was still abundant enough to sustain them.
The girl next saw grandfather on their exodus farther up the mountain. They were, by then, deep under the horn. The afternoon sunshine did little to alleviate the eerie coolness of their skin, for they had walked several miles in the shadow of the mountain and the gloom it cast settled on them like an almost tangible thing.
As preparations were being made for the departure, the girl searched for the old man desperately, always missing him by a few moments as if he were everywhere and nowhere at once. Her attempts to feel him out of the bustling village quickly became frustrated and confused: the level of activity in the village was like that of a hive, and even should grandfather have been isolated from the others it would have been like trying to sense the presence of a stone.
When she eventually saw him on the long hike, she ran up the column of marching refugees to come abreast of him. He had a bindle of tent poles over each shoulder. The added weight and the increasing steepness of the trail aggravated the hitch in his step and made it a dragging limp. He appeared preoccupied with ignoring the pain it caused him. It took a few moments of ardent tugging at his wrists for the old man to look down and see the girl trotting alongside him like a faithful hound.
“Yes, granddaughter, what is it?”
“Where are we going? I don’t recognize any of this. I was always told not to go up here.”
“We are going up to the Valley of Hermits.”
The girl stopped, stunned. Grandfather resumed his march. Though he wished to comfort her, time was a consideration, and only the mechanical repetition of motion kept the hike bearable for the old man’s withered legs. The girl was not long in catching up to her grandfather and begging answers from him.
“It is forbidden to visit the Valley of Hermits. We can’t be going there.”
“It is the only place the strangers will not follow us.”
“How do we know they even want to harm us?”
“It does not matter if they do or don’t. They are strangers, so they will.”
“What if they don’t know about the hermits? What if they’re not afraid?”
“Don’t be foolish. Everyone knows about the Valley of Hermits.”
“I’m afraid. What if a hermit tries to kill us?”
The old man gave out a sharp, wheezing laugh between labored breaths.
“Don’t worry, they won’t try anything. If there should be a hermit anywhere nearby, we would feel him from miles away. That is why they are exiled there, you know, because they cannot control how they feel any better than they can detect how others do.”
“And besides,” a rumbling feline voice said behind her ear, “the hermits are ashamed of what they are and would hide themselves away if they saw us coming.”
The voice was Chalc’s, who had been pacing up and down the column before halting at the girl’s heels. Reflexively, the girl turned away and blushed, though Chalc was far too engaged in his duties to notice.
He had taken on the aspects of an entirely new man. Though typically withdrawn and taciturn, he was bright-eyed and flushed with excitement. The girl did not need her strong feeling to sense his happiness: it was written across his grinning face and in the little snap of his foot in his wide, bounding strides. He had been an outcast, one who had a useful talent but was not a true member of The People. While The People were mute and sunken-eyed with dread, he was finally at his most useful.
The girl felt the blisters forming on his heels and the shortness of his breath. Far from causing him discomfort, those conditions were held to be trophies of his recent exploits, and he cherished them as reminders of his newfound importance.
“I’ve done the best I can to conceal the tracks behind us. Now I’ll scout ahead and run off any hermits. They know me: I’ve tracked game up here a few times, and they’ve seen me shoot my bow. I don’t think we’ll get any trouble from them.”
“Good,” the old man said.
“I’ll search for any sign of the strangers while I’m up there. Take care of this little one for me until I get back!”
The hunter bent down and rubbed his nose against the girl’s. The fuzz on his cheek tickled her and his warm breath on her face mortified her with embarrassment and she turned against her grandfather’s leg as the hunter ran ahead laughing and howling, imbuing all those he passed with a moment’s courage. As he ran he tooted his little horn to alert others of his approach, as if the waves of his enthusiasm and joy rippling through the exiles were not enough to announce him.
“I remember the day when we decided the fate of that man,” grandfather mused. “All the people met by the fire. Chalc was barely a man then, and his feelings were as out-of-control then as they are now. He had been a disruption all his life, and the onset of manhood did nothing to tame his temperament. We were just about to vote to banish him to the Valley of Hermits when he walked into the circle, bow in hand and pack over his shoulder. He told us he was leaving The People, that he would hunt for us alone in the wilderness, and that when he returned with his prizes he would sound his horn to let us prepare ourselves for his arrival. I am glad we agreed to his compromise. He has become a great asset to The People, and is loyal despite his banishment from us.”
“Is there any way he could ever rejoin The People?” the girl ventured hopefully.
“No. If he has not learned self-control yet, he never will.”
The girl sighed sadly. The People continued their march up the mountain, locked for hours in silence. It became cooler as the altitude increased. The trees thinned and the covering of weeds and vines on the ground became checkered by large patches of barren earth. The land received little direct sunlight, spending half of every day in the shadow of the peak, and it seemed to the girl to be the least plentiful piece of earth she had ever trod over. Surrounded on all sides by imposing stone ramparts, dusk came earlier than usual as the sun sank below the towering ridges. This was, the girl realized, the Valley of Hermits.
The People gratefully dropped onto their haunches, letting their few possessions fall with them. The sun was too low in the sky for them to begin setting up the camp, and the accumulation of their aches and sprains left any further exertion for the day out of the question. The People shuffled wearily to their packs and bundles and took out blankets or tent skins, intending to sleep beneath them on the ground until morning, when revitalized spirits and bodies would be better suited for the work ahead.
A sense of security began to spread among The People: after all, who would follow them to that dreaded place, a fortress whose walls were made not of mortar but of isolation? It was a fleeting comfort, for soon after they made preparations for the night they heard a sound echoing from one of the high passes near the top of the mountain. It was Chalc’s horn, though its cadence was much different than it had ever been before.
Chalc had always blown his horn in a series of long, flat notes; this time, however, the notes were frenzied and rapid, leaving The People to wonder what, if anything, the hunter was trying to communicate to them. For a people whose routine had changed little over a thousand years, this new event, taken with the unprecedented day that had just endured, seemed unbearable.
The horn sounded again, now in the slopes just a few miles above the camp. By then, the more powerful among the people had begun to feel a faint trace of potent emotions moving towards them. When the horn sounded next, not a mile from the camp, The People were fighting for the control not to burst into panic.
They were surrounded on all sides by a ring of emotions they had felt in but fleeting moments, feelings they barely had words for if not for tales passed down about the bogeyman hermits: terror, regret, and hate. The source of those emotions seemed to be advancing around them in a closing circle, until stopping mysteriously just outside the vision of the frightened, huddling people.
There was a crashing in the bushes encircling the camp and Chalc stumbled through, his face contorted in a sad grimace and tears gushing from his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said, barely able to form the words between sobs. “I’m sorry. They caught me up in the pass. They said if I did not lead them to us they might hurt us... They said we have been trying to avoid them and that it makes us look like one of the enemy...” This last thought he could not finish before collapsing into a whimpering heap on the hard ground. Many others, overwhelmed by Chalc’s misery, did the same.
At the same time the foliage around the camp came alive. Behind Chalc, a man the likes of which The People had never seen before stepped into the open. He was tall, taller than The People thought a man could be. He wore black boots and a patterned suit of leaf-green clothes. On his head he wore a bowl strapped onto his chin, and on his belt a variety of indescribable objects that captivated The People, who wondered what their functions could possibly be.
Of all the objects the stranger carried, none was more unusual than the strange branch he had slung over his shoulder. It appeared to be made both of wood and some other material, perhaps the lowland metal that The People still had trinkets of from contact with previous generations of estranged travelers.
The stick had several odd protrusions coming from its central shaft, as well as an abundance of interlocking parts that seemed to be housed mostly on the inside of the wondrous item. What awed The People the most, though, was not the object itself but the importance with which the stranger seemed to regard it, and the fearful respect he had of it, as if it were some barely-tamed and dangerous animal slung on his back.
The man himself was not lacking in fascination. His eyes were ghostly in color, resembling the hue of the sky on an autumn morning. And though he appeared to be over thirty years of age, his skin was not shrunken and weathered nor his joints stiff and creaking. His face was lined and sagging from the weight of some long-standing trauma, but its surface remained largely smooth and unblemished.
The People had grown up hearing stories of the Lowlanders, but had never imagined in their most fanciful moments that they could be anything like the man standing before them. The man finally opened his mouth to speak, and The People’s bewilderment only grew.
“Let me apologize for all of this. We’re in bad shape. Trust me when I say that we wouldn’t even be here if there was any way to avoid it.”
As he spoke others of his kind emerged from their ambushes and stepped into the camp, each man more unbelievable than the last until seven in total were standing with their leader.
“We were routed,” the man continued, “down in the lower valleys. We have orders to regroup with any forces that fled into the mountains and carry on a guerrilla campaign against the occupying forces until we get reinforcements.”
The lowland and highland dialects were not mutually incomprehensible: The People could understand much of what was being said to them or could at least recognize the sounds that made up the words. The words “campaign,” “orders,” and “reinforcements” held no meaning, but from what their minds could not comprehend their hearts filled in from the feelings the man associated with each of the alien terms. From what they could decipher, the strangers had met with some kind of calamity in their own land and were hiding in the mountains.
The man, seeing that The People were grasping some of what he was saying, resumed his speech:
“You have been ordered by your government to aid and assist us against the enemy in whatever capacity we deem appropriate, from guiding, supplying, and sheltering us, up to direct military involvement.”
This sentence The People had a harder time comprehending. It seemed as if the man was asking for some kind of help, which they were glad to give if it meant he would go away, though the conditions of this request had a haughty and demanding tone.
“Of course, the provisional government will reward you for your contribution towards final victory. With any luck, we can still win this war.”
At this statement, the man lost his audience completely. The People looked to one another for some sort of explanation.
In the ensuing confusion, the old man stepped forward and addressed the stranger directly. “War?”
“Yes, the war.”
The old man shrugged his shoulders and again repeated the mysterious word.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know about the war!” the stranger exclaimed, his own confusion beginning to rival that of the people he was addressing.
Copyright © 2010 by Colin Lee Heintze
