Khana carried the horn.
The horn was life. The fire of the tribe, their last flame, burned at the base. He sat, panting, at the edge of the woods they had left. The trees out here had not yet fallen.
They would.
The blight would come, as it had to all the trees about them in their woods. Their home.
"The Teoh will come soon. We cannot sit still," said Adtso. She did not look down at her little tribe as she spoke. She looked out. Ahead.
Khana followed her eyes and saw the grasslands before them. The openness made him uncomfortable if he thought about it too much. The sun set ahead of them, to the west, and lit up the vast land in colors staggeringly beautiful. There was so much space though. So much room about them. He looked down at his feet to hide his fear. Khana hid his gaze from the open space he felt he could simply fall into. How could one ever find their home in a pace so wide? How could one be safe from enemies when you could spot them as far as the eyes could see? How could you sneak up on quarry and hunt for food?
The fire horn in his hand felt heavy.
How would they live without trees to burn?
What would they cook with?
Khana could not open the horn to check that the small flame, the spark of their people, yet burned. If he opened the horn, it could snuff the very thing he protected. But he was satisfied the fire was safe. He felt the heat of the flame in his hand.
There was a rhythm to the fire, like a drumbeat in his heart, which told him they'd be safe. Fire would not leave them if they did not let it.
They had to find a way to keep the flame alive.
"We press on," said Adtso. The people of the tribe looked up at her with pain in their eyes.
"We cannot leave the trees," said someone.
"What if the blight does not reach the edge of the wood?" said another.
A third: "The stone children remained! What if their trees do not die as ours did?"
Adtso yet out a yawp that silenced the crowd. Khana was not close to their leader, but he had never felt another should take her place. She led them well.
"We cannot speculate," began Adtso. The people all looked to her. "The giants may have their trees, but they will not allow us to stay. We've wondered how far the blight will go, how many trees will fall upon our heads, for the entirety of our journey and they have not ceased with our wondering. They fall still. They will ever fall. We cannot wait at the precipice of our old life, afraid to jump into the new. Fear will not guide us. We shall not succumb to it.
We were people of the trees, of the forest. That life abandoned us with this blight, so we shall abandon it as well."
"We cannot forget who we are!" cried a crowd member.
"And we shall not! The people remain. The stories remain. We must continue to live to tell our tales though. We cannot remember the histories if we do not persist ourselves."
"We become people of the grass?" asked another member of the tribe.
"If we must," retorted Adtso. "If we must."
Khana felt the flame in his hand, the last spark they carried. He looked out at the grassland, afraid.
This spark could alight the whole of the land before them.
What would that accomplish? What would that do to let his people survive?
There was a crash behind him that shook him from thought. The tribe turned as they heard it too. The painfully familiar sound that had driven them out of the forest. A tree fell behind them.
Dead.
Blightstricken.
Cursed.
"We must move," said Adtso. "The trees fall, and our enemies will not cease their escape as we run as well.
There was a hushed murmur. The Teoh. Another tribe. Another people stricken by the end of the world as they knew it.
Khana pitied them as he pitied himself and his own tribe. They would never know comfort again.
The people packed up their lives on their backs and followed their leader into the grassland beyond.
"Why do you not eat?" said Pesho.
Khana jumped at the sound.
"Are you so frightful?" laughed the girl. Had they remained home, in the forest, Khana may have become her betrothed. There was little time for such frivolities now.
"I cannot say," he said. But Pesho did not leave.
She saw his work: a hole, as large as his torso, dug into the ground. A thin stream of smoke rising from a flame at the bottom.
"Khana, what are you doing!"
"Shush!" he cried, leaping to put a hand over her mouth. She pushed him away before he could. She squatted to look at the flame. "Did you steal the coal of the tribe?"
"Only because I must." he said, squatting next to her.
"We need this for food."
"But we will run out of it soon."
"Sooner if you keep stealing it. I must tell Adtso."
"Don’t!"
Pesho shushed him then, and they both laughed.
"Tell me why, and I may conspire in your secret."
Khana looked at her with pleading eyes, but she did not relent. He would have loved her given the time. Those stern eyes that would not waver one iota once she wanted something. Pesho could be leader of the tribe one day with a look like this.
"We need more coal," he began.
"And thieving helps this how?" she said.
"We used to make coal from the trees."
"I never knew how, but Rhati and Bew worked at this," Pesho recalled.
"Yes! They taught me once. I use their coal to keep the flame alive." Khana gestured to the horn he carried. The soul of the tribe. The flame they always carried to light another cook fire or another fire for warmth. "You need fire to make it. Bury wood atop a flame, covering it with earth, save for a few holes to let the fire breath, and the wood becomes coal."
"What genius," said Pesho.
"Wondrous minds, thinking greater than mine figured that out," laughed Khana.
"Then what do you hope to do here? We have wood only for shelter remaining."
"I'm trying this with the grass."
Pesho laughed then. You refuse to eat because you wish for grass to become like trees?"
Khana picked up the bowl of cold gruel beside him. "You may be able to eat this waste, but we cannot survive on cold food. What will we do when we kill a twinhorn? Eat it raw like savages and beasts?"
Pesho didn't respond to that. Kahan saw the sadness in her eyes. Who knew if there were even twinhorn in the plains? Questioning their survival was not something one did in the open with Adtso's leadership. According to her, their survival was inevitable.
Everyone knew the stakes though, Adtso included.
"Here, this is my third attempt. The first should be finishing soon. Would you like to see it?"
Pesho's face lit up with excitement and Khana knew his love for her was not gone with the trees. It only had to wait, like the spark in the horn. It could become a flame one day.
"The smoke stopped a little while ago," said Khana as he went towards a mound Pesho hadn't even noticed. She saw his bowl, carved from a tree ages ago and handed down to him from his parents. It was full of the seed-gruel paste the tribe had been eating for the last few days of their travels. Khana had barely touched it.
"Huh," grunted Khana, pulling Pesho's attention away from the bowl she had decided to pick up.
She investigated the hole that Khana had dug open again and saw the smoldering pile of ash and black sitting in it. "What is it?" she said.
"I think it worked."
"Those don't look like coals to me."
Khana leaned down and reached into the pile. He sifted through the ash with his hand. "It isn't all coal, but there is some here. It’s too loose yet."
"What are you doing?" came a voice, stern, almost a shout. Adtso.
"Khana is making coal of the grass," said Pesho.
"You waste our fire?" The leader's stern voice approached a shout. Closer this time.
Kahan stood, hands up. He didn't want to plead with her, but this was so important. "The horn yet burns," he said, placating.
"Yet you risk it!" Adtso stepped forward to the open hole. She slid her foot through the dirt and ash and coal. "You waste our flame for burning grass?"
"I don't waste -" Khana stopped. He did not know why for a moment. He only saw the faces of horror on Adtso and Pesho's faces. Pesho looked like she was screaming, but Khana didn't hear a thing other than the throbbing of his own heartbeat. It drummed in his ears as he looked down.
He saw the spear, red-stained and blunter than it had been, sticking out from his chest.
"Teoh," cried Adtso. It was no more than a whisper to Khana.
He watched his leader drag Pesho away as he fell to the ground. His last thought was of the wasted wood.
Did the Teoh not wonder how many spears were left to carve in the world as the trees died around them?
Weeks passed before Pesho could sneak away from the tribe.
They had fled the Teoh. After days of fighting and running and sparring on the plains, the other tribe left them alone. There was enough grassland about to find a corner for ever tribe of the forest and never cross paths with an enemy again.
But Pesho's people starved.
They ate the seed gruel, plentiful with the rains and the grass about them, but the cold gruel did little for their hearts and their stomachs.
They would not yet succumb to the way of beasts and eat their meat raw. They could cook no more for want of keeping their last precious shelters aloft, held by the final remaining wood they carried. would they die of cold from the rains or of starvation and malnourishment?
Pesho could not wait to see.
Not without an answer.
She paused as she saw Khana's body. It lay half buried in the dirt, thrown in the charge of the Teoh.
She buried him completely. Digging a hole near his final project and laying his body to rest beneath the earth. The first burial of a new people, she thought. A people of the plains, not of the trees.
With a prayer to gods she knew no longer listened, she said a final farewell to the man she may have once married.
She turned then to his final work.
The first hole, opened by Khana, was ruined. The soil mixed with the ash and after days of rains, was unknowable in the mixture it made.
But the other two mounds remained untouched.
As Pesho began unearthing the first of the two mounds, she saw Khana's bowl sticking out of the first uncovered hole.
Dirt and ash stuck to the yet uneaten gruel.
She stopped digging when she realized her discovery.
Gruel of the seeds surely would burn.
Pesho wet the gruel after she unearthed the second hole. The ash and coal were mixed as they had been in the first opening, when Khana unearthed it, but they were there.
She scooped the burned mixture into the gruel, creating a grey and black putty.
As she completed her work, all that was left in the experiment was to wait for the grass coal to dry. They would have coal once more, the gruel binding the fuel made from the grass. Her people would survive.
Pesho let her tears fall as she bid farewell to the resting place of her greatest friend.
She and Khana may have saved them all.
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Love ya!
Max
Photo by Irina Iriser courtesy of pexels