E Stricker - The Almanac

They spent the remainder of the morning cleaning up and assessing what needed to be replaced. Samuel took the opportunity to cram Illya’s head with information about the best times to gather the herbs and the way to process them. He included a sizable dose of the many properties of the plants as they swept them up.

By the end of it, Illya felt like he couldn’t fit another fact into his mind.

It became evident to him that Samuel wouldn’t be able to repair the entirety of the damage for a long time. It would take a full year at least because many of the plants only grew during particular seasons. He wondered aloud how Samuel could be so relaxed about it all.

“There are few limits to what desperate men will do, and hungry men are desperate men,” Samuel said, meeting Illya’s eyes with all trace of joviality gone.

“We are fortunate that they left when they did, but I fear that the worst is still coming.”

Illya noticed a slight tremor in the Healer’s hands as he replaced a rare whole jar in its spot on the shelf.

“Maybe, because of today, they will remember to fear this place when that time comes,” Samuel said, gazing at the jar.

IT WAS NOT until he returned home that evening, after an unsuccessful afternoon of foraging and fishing with his cousin Benja, that Illya realized he still had the book tucked in the inner pocket of his coat. His fingers lingered on the unfamiliar outline, then he carefully drew it out. Had Samuel meant for him to take it? Why hadn’t the Healer, who noticed everything, noticed that it was gone?

His little sister Molly was sitting on the dirt floor of the hut with her skinny arms wrapped around her knees. She was as thin as he had ever seen her, but her belly was round. It was almost like the fat people in the pictures, though Illya knew that it was not the same thing. Most of the children in the village started to look that way at the end of a hard winter.

“I’m hungry,” she whined. Worry twisted his gut. The lichen from Aunt Ada was gone, and he had nothing to give her.

“I’m sorry Mol,” he said. She looked up at him and started whimpering as she rocked back and forth. Her cheeks were hollow; the shadows under her cheekbones were deepening by the day. He looked at her bony wrists and knobby knees and felt sick.

“Maybe I’ll catch a fish tomorrow,” he said, forcing brightness into his voice. “A big, fat one. Maybe I’ll even get two.”

Molly didn’t answer but tucked her head down into the circle of her arms, pressing her forehead to her knees. His mother met his eyes from across the room. The crease in her brow deepened, but she said nothing.

He got up and put some more sticks on the dying fire. Crouching onto his hands, he blew at the base of it until the coals were hot, and flames rose tall to catch the fresh kindling. The firelight brightened the room, lending a cheer despite the hollow worry. It softened the misery in Molly’s face and flowed over Grenya’s back. It glinted off the warps and ripples of the glass jars that were wedged into the mud of the wall to make their single window.

Illya was proud of those. He had been the man of the family since his father had died, and he had rebuilt the hut himself season after season, reinforcing it and improving it with salvaged things. He had found the jars, rare and whole, in a nearby ruin a year past. Because of his find, his mother was the only one in the village with a glass window. Not even the stone house had any left.

He watched her pull a clay pot down from the shelf below the window to look inside. She put it aside and reached for another then another. The knot in his stomach pulled tighter with each one she set away.

Illya swallowed. He wanted to scream, but he pressed his lips together to hold it in. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so helpless before. Molly was wasting away before his eyes, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He dropped his eyes and stared at the floor.

Turning his back to them, he pulled his furs up around his shoulders and opened the book.

He stopped for a moment, his fingers hovering over the page. Those who lost the gift would hear the hidden voices of the world pouring into their thoughts, whispering secrets, driving the person to do mad and dangerous things. To lose the gift was a Calamity of its own. Anyone touched by madness would be cast out of the village for fear the contagion would spread.

He traced the shapes of the letters with his finger. Rachel, Benja’s older sister, had lost her mind years before. It had been so long ago that he barely remembered her. Illya listened for the voices to come pouring in on him. He knew he had seen enough in the pictures earlier that they could come at any moment. He held his breath.

None came.

He gazed at the letters, wondering what they meant. There was a round shape that could represent the sun. S could be a snake or maybe a rope.

Samuel had held no fear of the book, Illya remembered. The Healer knew more than anyone in the village. If anyone were to lose the gift, it would be him. Still, Illya felt more than a little uneasy as he looked at the letters. To try to learn what they meant was surely taking it too far. They said that Rachel had been thrown out of the village at night when the voices had come and was never seen again.

But knowledge was a gift too. How else could they know what to eat or how to make fires? He blinked.

There was nothing among the shapes that he could see that could represent food. Even his people had ways to mark down what was food and what was not. An entire wall of the stone house had the shapes of the plants that were edible and the plants that held malice carved onto it. If these letters were the shapes of important things, there seemed to be a lot missing.

Across the room his ma sighed, putting aside another jar. She reached for the last one on the shelf. Their stores were gone. He knew better than to hope that she would find anything inside it.

She pulled out several handfuls of shavings from the inner bark of a birch tree. He swallowed. More bark. It was not good for much besides making you feel full for a little while, and he wasn’t sure if that was better than nothing at all. She positioned a pot of water over the fire on a grate that had come from one of the rusted-out cars along the broad pathway.

He blinked, trying to clear his eyes as he looked back down at the page. The firelight had left spots in his vision, blurring the letters. When they came back into focus, he noticed something. There was a C at the beginning of a line, then another, smaller one, a few words later. He looked again to see if other shapes repeated. There were many repetitions. Sometimes there were even two of the same shape in a row. In one place there were two circles. Why would you say “sun” and then “sun” again?

He laid his head back and rubbed his hand across his eyes then looked back at the page. C could be a shield—that could mean battle. He tried to guess the meaning of each shape, looking for clues for what the words might say. Shield first, then an arm over a fat belly, a hill, raised arms, sun, cup, spear? It didn’t make sense.

He squinted at the page, trying to let the lines of each word blend into a recognizable shape, but it was useless.

He shook his head, shutting the book, and put it aside more roughly than he meant to before joining his family. They sat near the fire and chewed on the softened bark slowly, sipping the hot water to wash it down.

“The first plants you must learn are the malice plants,” Samuel said to the group of wriggling children in front of the wall. Illya chased one of the littles across the snow and picked him up by the waist, returning him to the others.