Two years on, he still sat with Mama Moon once
a week to learn the letters and read from the books. He loved the stories, even
though he did not understand many of the words. He understood that elsewhere in
the world there may not be People of the Book, or those who still shared
lessons and stories from the histories.
Desert Boy watched as the carriages and horses
drew away from the valley, cresting the hill as they passed the river, rounding
beyond the Redwoods to the West. He watched for a few minutes more, and then
continued gathering what could be gathered, urging a line of cattle toward the
entrance to the caverns. After leading them downwards, and past the first gate,
he returned back up the tunnel, as swiftly as his legs would take him.
The sun had set, the sky was dark as he
returned back to the ground above, the air chill and smelled of frost. He
watched as others drove the animals down into the maw of the earth, and saw
that their work was nearly finished. Then the real work would begin.
He ran to the houses, gathering cages of
chickens and rodents, their noses twitching at the sudden movement. They were
naturally creatures of the night, so they moved about in their cages. The
chickens did not take kindly to the rousting, cawing and clawing as they could.
But this house only had three cages of rodents and six chickens, so the work
went by quickly. He could see the last of the stars wink out behind him as he
pushed yet another cage down into the dark. Other hands pulled them down
deeper, lines of candles shone outward, and then disappeared into the
dark.
He hurried on to another farm, and another,
and another, until the false dawn started to creep over the Eastern sky, far in
the distance. The birds began to sing, announcing that the night was nearly
through. The hands who remained behind to do the work of storing what could be
stored began working on moving baskets of the harvest down into the caverns as
well, row upon row of man drawn basket, pulling boxes and baskets and barrels
of vegetable and grain. The seed for the next year would be stored at the lowest
depths beneath the valley, and the food which was to last through the winter
would be protected from the frost and the raiders. None knew what evil would
come, only that it was coming. And the rememberance of those fears would drive
him to move ever faster.
Dawn came. The light trickled up past the
hills to the east, and those who remained began cleaning the ground, sweeping
the tracks, picking up stray signs that the entrance to the caverns existed at
all. Once all signs were erased, they began moving stones over the hole in the
hill, climbing in and shuttering the metal door behind themselves. Desert Boy
heard the long wooden beam fall into place on the other side, and began piling
rocks over it, so as to hide it from the swiftly rising light of the day. Stone
after stone was laid, covering the great metal doors, and finally, the piles of
sand and dirt were laid in place, scattered over the stones, handfuls of
natural grass were stuffed between the holes here and there, so as to disguise
the place where only hours before thirty of his kinsmen crept hidden down in
the dark.
He stepped back to look upon the cairn, and
saw that there was no sign remaining of his work, that it looked as clean and
as natural as any gathering of stones piled near the edge of a field. The ruts
in the road passed by without a trace of the cairn’s true purpose. He breathed
deep, opened his water skin and drank deeply as well. His job here was nearly
completed.
He looked out over the valley, and saw that it
was deserted, nothing remained. The families and children were gone now,
seventeen hours they were gone, and travelled well past the end of the
redwoods, and likely onward towards the mountains.
Only he remained, the sole body, with nothing
but his wits to keep him safe. He opened the liquor bottle that Mama Moon gave
him, and sprinkled its contents around the dirt near the cairn – meant to cover
the scent of the animals and people who had been hidden therein in case dogs
were sent to hunt for them.
Then he began to walk, following the valley
outwards toward the North, up the steepest parts, away from the homes and the
fields, away from the roads and the corrals. He looked down over the valley,
and like the sun risen high over the valley saw only that the cloud of dust
from the East rose high into the air, signalling that men ahorse rode towards
the valley in order to plunder its harvest, raid its wealth, and steal its
women, killing what few men might dare put up a fight. The thought sent shivers
through his bones, and sent his teeth achatter.
He hid amongst the scrub, against Tall Man’s
orders. He had been told to leave the valley for ten moons, and to return when
the full moon rose in the night sky. Instead, he stayed on and watched as the
men fom the village to the West entered the city, burned the cabins and houses
to the ground, and finding no one to murder and nothing to steal, raged and
ravenged what they could, tearing down fences and gates and barn and shed. The
smoke grew thick in the valley, and the bottles of whiskey were passed around
the men, their swords left unfulfilled, their blood lust unquenched. The Valley
People’s cowardly offering of whiskey would have to suffice.
Desert Boy counted a score and five men,
hardly a gigantic army, but still more armed men than he had ever encountred in
his few years as a farm boy. Their swords and rifles seemed to glisten in the
autumn air as they gathered round their fires and pitched their tents. The
thirty six bottles diminished into thirty, then twenty five, then twenty, and
by the coming of the twilight, the last bottle had fallen from the hand of a
drunken and sleeping monster of a man. Desert Boy could imagine their snores,
though he could not hear them from where he lay hidden nearly a mile away and
above their camp.
He carefully lifted his head, rising up out of
the shrubbery that protected his ascent, and continued to climb up towards the
crest of the hill, sneaking away in the night. He did not see behind him that
the bodies had stopped breathing, stopped moving, and stopped living. He could
not have known that the men below him were all dead, their souls no longer a
part of their flesh.