E Stricker - The Almanac

They barely resembled the rusted-out heaps that littered the broad path running past the village. Most of the cars he had seen had holes and missing parts; the victims of generations of salvage. Many had plants growing out of the windows. One even had a tree coming out of its front.

Inside the cars in the picture, there were people. They were fatter than anyone he had ever seen in his life. Some smiled, but others stared blankly into the distance.

Then there were more pages of the black shapes, some lined up in even grids.

“A marvel, isn’t it?” Samuel said.

“They look like ants. A hundred ants in a row,” Illya said. He wasn’t sure how many a hundred was, but he knew that it was a lot. He traced a line on the table with his fingertip, trying to make it as straight as the ones in the grid, and failed.

“Letters,” Samuel said.

“What?”

“They are letters. They make up words that will tell you the thoughts of the person who put them down,” Samuel said.

Illya shook his head. “Do you know what they say?” he asked.

Samuel pursed his lips, still gazing at the letters. “When I was a child, there was a man who could read words.” He paused and frowned. “I never learned,” he said, looking away.

Illya couldn’t imagine Samuel as a child.

“How long ago was that?” he blurted then cringed, his face growing hot. His mother was always telling him he had to learn when to hold his tongue. Samuel fixed him in place with a sharp look; then the corners of his mouth crept up. He chuckled.

“Almost fifty years ago,” he said. Illya’s mouth dropped open.

“How did you live through fifty winters?” he asked.

“There were fifty springs, summers, and autumns too,” Samuel said. “But not all of it has been as hard as now.”

Illya dropped his eyes back to the book and flipped through it to cover his embarrassment. There were many pages of the letters, but scattered among them were more pictures, each one more fantastic than the last.

He saw strange things mingled with others that he recognized. Fire shot out of the bottom of a cone-shaped thing that took up an entire page, standing stark and white against a blue sky. Tiny people watched the fire from the edge of the picture. On the next page, there was a fish. It was so ordinary compared to the rest of the wonders that Illya laughed out loud. It was a trout, something he saw every day in the river when the fishing was good. Below it was a salmon with a pointy face.

On the next page, a grinning man held up a catfish as long as his arm. Illya recognized its pouting lip and whiskers. His stomach growled. A fish for breakfast would have been a miracle right now.

He turned the page, and there was a picture of a pair of people kissing. Illya snapped the book shut. Heat blazed in his ears and prickled along his jaw. He looked up and was relieved to see that Samuel was sorting through the pots on the far wall with his back turned. Illya’s mind went to Sabelle and the way she had looked at him the night before, her eyes dark and blue, like deep water. He opened the book to the kissing page again and stared at it in fascination.

Kissing hadn’t changed at all since then, though he was hardly an expert. He had never kissed anyone.

“Kissing and trout!” he said out loud, forgetting for a moment about Samuel. He cringed, hunching his shoulders, and glanced back at Samuel. The Healer was watching him, and his eyebrows had climbed nearly to his hairline. Samuel opened his mouth, but anything he had intended to say was abruptly cut off by angry yelling outside and a pounding at the door.

“Open up, old man!”

“We know you have food in there!”

Samuel frowned, and his eyebrows drew together. With slow deliberation in each movement, he walked to the door and opened it. A crowd comprised of what seemed to be half of the men in the village had gathered outside. They pushed and shoved at each other, trying to get into the hut.

“Everyone is starving.” Jimmer Duncan shoved a smaller man out of the way to cross the threshold of the door.

“Are you so out of touch you can hoard all this stuff and not feel nothing about it?” he said, pointing at the herbs hanging from the rafters.

He lurched across the room, and Illya caught a whiff of the brew that some of the men drank on his breath. Illya stood, knocking his chair over in his haste. He grabbed the book from the table and stuffed it inside his jacket before flattening himself against the back wall.

“It ain’t right, really,” said Piers Malkin, almost apologetically. “The roots are all gone, we just been out to dig, and there’s nothing left out there.” Samuel met this comment with silence.

“You can’t keep all this stuff from the rest of us, even if it’s supposed to be medicine,” Piers continued.

Jimmer, meanwhile, started smashing the clay pots against the floor, evidently hoping to find them filled with food. Powdered herbs spilled out of the shards in heaps and wafted into the air to mix with the smoke from the fire. Illya’s nose tickled as he inhaled the dust. More men crowded into the hut, shoving each other. From outside came the sounds of a brawl and the crunch of a fist slamming into someone’s nose.

Samuel stood by, seeming unruffled. He stepped back as a pot smashed at his feet and pressed his lips together as he regarded the new pile of gray-green powder on the floor.

“By all means, help yourselves,” he said.

Jimmer growled, having emptied all the shelves and found nothing. He started stripping the herbs from their ties on the rafters.

Conna Duncan pushed past two men who were fighting over a jar, just inside the doorway, and grabbed Jimmer’s arm. Jimmer rounded on him, swinging his fists. Conna ducked and sidestepped the fist in a well-practiced move.

“You watch yourself, boy,” Jimmer said, snarling.

“You don’t even know what that is,” Conna yelled back.

Illya bit back a yelp and dodged as Piers shoved Conna into the wall beside him. Conna recovered his balance then glared at Illya.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, reddening. He turned and lunged at his father.

“Oh, he is welcome to eat those,” Samuel said. With a swiftness that belied his age, he reached out and snatched a dried plant from another man who was about to stuff it into his mouth.

“This one, though, would steal your breath and put you far beyond my help. I wouldn’t recommend it,” Samuel said. He turned back to Jimmer, who had just swallowed his own handful of herbs, and smiled.

“That one wasn’t nearly so deadly, but judging the amount you just ate, you’ll soon be running for the trenches with your pants around your ankles and your bowels in a cramp. Don’t come to me, for I fear I won’t have anything left to give you,” Samuel said, shrugging, with a gesture at the mayhem that had been made of his once tidy hut.

Jimmer’s face blanched. He clutched his belly and pushed his way past the people in the doorway. The mob fell still in the wake of Samuel’s comment. He looked around cheerily as several men dropped what they had been eating and spit mouthfuls out onto the floor.

“Oh, cheer up. You should all be fine,” he said. “Except for you perhaps, Martin. Do come right back if your face starts swelling.” Samuel squinted at Martin for a moment then nodded as if satisfied.

The men, almost as one, started to stumble backward out of the hut, muttering apologies. A few clutched their bellies the way Jimmer had done.

When all that remained of the raid was a floor covered in clay shards and herb dust, Samuel looked up from the mess.

“First lesson, Illya,” he said brightly. “The amount of a thing eaten is what makes the difference between a poison and a cure.”