Blaze (The High-Born Epic) Read online

  “Here you go,” he said. “The meat has been smoked and it’s in the paper.”

  “Thanks, I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Harold replied.

  “Alrighty then,” said Phil. “The corn meal is in this sack, and these two empty sacks are the material for Maggie’s dress.”

  “Alright, Phil.”

  Harold laid the loose burlap on his shoulder and slung the corn meal on top of it. Then he tucked the meat under his left arm.

  “We’ll see you later, Phil,” he said.

  “Thanks, Harold,” Phil replied.

  He then turned and quickly walked back to the town circle. He stood for a moment, thinking. Then he walked toward the blacksmith shop.

  Before the door closed behind him, Sarah was rounding the corner.

  “What do you want this time?” Sarah asked.

  “Well,” he squinted as he put the corn meal on the floor. “I need your help with something. I just made a deal with Phil. Aunt Nean probably won’t be too happy about it.”

  “Harold,” Sarah sighed. “Not again.”

  “Yes, again,” he smiled.

  “Well, what is it this time?” Sarah asked.

  Harold explained about Phil and Maggie.

  “Ohhh,” she said as she sighed. “You are such a softie.”

  Sarah thought for a moment, “Well, I guess I can use the burlap to patch things, so give it here, and I’ll give you some decent cloth. You’ll just have to owe me for the extra bag of corn meal.”

  “Fair enough,” Harold said.

  “Well, since Millie passed away, ole Phil has had it rough trying to raise that little girl by himself,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Harold replied. “I’m glad that everyone in town helps him with her.”

  “She’s such a cute little thing. And everyone in town loves her... I’ll be right back.”

  Sarah went in the back and Harold could hear her rummaging around, and in a few minutes he heard her coming down the hall. She had some scarlet cloth that resembled the store’s curtains and a full sack of corn meal slung over her shoulder.

  “It’s what we had left over,” she said, holding up the cloth and pointing at the curtains. “Now you owe me a big favor.”

  Harold put the cloth over his right shoulder, slung both bags of corn meal on top of it, and tucked the paper-covered meat under his left arm.

  “You know I’m good for it,” Harold winked and left the store.

  Sarah stood at the window and watched him walk across the town circle until he disappeared around the corner

  “I know you are, Harold Knight,” she whispered.

  Chapter 2

  “You mean he actually took the deal?” Aunt Nean asked in clear astonishment.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Harold said. “Maggie really needed those dresses.”

  Nean gave him a look as she held up the scarlet cloth.

  “And this is the material he gave you?”

  “Does it matter? The little girl needs it, Aunt Nean.”

  Nean eyed him suspiciously as she thought for a couple of seconds, “No, it doesn’t matter; it just looks like the curtains in Willie’s blacksmith shop. Did he say when he wanted them?”

  “If Ollie’s old dress is ready, I’ll take it to him right now.”

  “No, you can get something to eat right now,” she said as she grabbed his arm. “Muscles like these need food. Maggie will be fine until tomorrow, you can take it then. Ollie’s old dress needs a patch anyways.”

  “Alrighty then.”

  “Now go wash up, and make sure to get your feet clean too. Cooper and Ollie are out by the well.”

  Before Harold even walked out of the back door he could hear the giggling. Ollie’s little laugh was unmistakable. Mixed in with the children’s chuckling was Scape’s barking. As Harold walked toward the well, he could see that Ollie had something in her hand and she was chasing a laughing Cooper around the well. Scape was basically standing in place, spinning like a top and barking, or rather making a noise that sounded very close to a bark.

  “I give, I give,” Cooper laughed.

  Harold recognized his old water pistol and Ollie wasn’t holding anything back. She was blasting her brother with everything the gun could muster. She turned it on Scape who began biting the stream of water, lapping it up as he did so. The water squirted all over as she bowed it back on Cooper while he ran at her. Harold ran towards them and jumped in between Cooper and the water gun, and Ollie let him have it too. He rushed her and she squealed and tried to get away, but he caught her, lifted her off the ground, and started tickling her. She laughed, kicked, and squirmed for a moment, and suddenly put the gun to his forehead.

  “Surrender now, or face death, tickle monster,” she smiled as Scape ran around him barking and jumping.

  Before he could say anything she pulled the trigger. The water pistol was a high-grade toy and it soaked the front of his overalls while splattering all over Ollie, but it suddenly died with a massive puff of air.

  “Now what?” he grinned at her. “I survived your puny weapon,” and began tickling her again.

  “Put me down,” she laughed and kicked.

  He gently let her down and said, “Go on in the house, your ma is almost finished with supper. And put that thing up,” he said, pointing at the water pistol.

  “Oh, okay,” she said as she walked toward the house.

  Harold began pumping the well and filling the pail in front of it.

  “What did the trap line and hooks look like, Coop?”

  “We got a squirrel and two fish,” he answered.

  “It’s better than nothing,” Harold replied.

  “Yep, sure is,” he said with his brown eyes looking up at Harold. “You got most of the field done,” Cooper continued as he looked behind them at the backyard.

  “Almost,” he said as he scrubbed his feet. “I’ll be able to start on Jim’s field by lunch tomorrow.”

  “Then we’ll go to the river?” Cooper asked.

  “Maybe, we’ll have to wait and see. Did you see anything interesting today?”

  “Well, I saw some High-Born gunships flying around those skyscrapers.”

  “Yeah, I saw them too, but I think those were just air taxis, not gunships. Did you see anything in the woods?” Harold asked as he continued washing off.

  “Yeah, I caught a frog and scared Ollie with it,” Cooper grinned.

  “So that’s why she was soaking you when I came out,” Harold said.

  “Yeah, I sorta’ deserved it,” Cooper shrugged.

  “Alright, go on in. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Cooper then ran toward the back door, and Harold scrubbed his arms while looking at Scape. His strange ears were straight up on his head and his stark, green, cat-like eyes regarded Harold thoughtfully. Scape always reminded Harold of Jim’s blue healer except his coat was completely black. His cattish tail wagged back and forth rapidly as he looked at Harold.

  “You’re such a good boy, Scape,” Harold said as he reached down and rubbed his head. Scape made a half-growl, half-purr as he pushed his head into Harold’s hand. Harold smiled when he thought about how Scape had gotten his unique name. Most folks thought that he had been one of Colonel Foxx’s tree-climbing, hunting dog experiments that had not gone quite as expected. Many of the older town’s people said that he was too gentle for Colonel Foxx’s taste and had probably gotten away from the colonel before he could kill him. People said that he had escaped, and when Ollie had been younger, she could not say the word escape. So, she had called him Scape back then, and he had responded to her. The name stuck and though he did wander around Foxx Hole and its surrounding woods, he stayed at their house most of the time.

  Scape’s strange ears rotated towards the High-Born city, and he stuck his head up, regarding something. Harold looked at the city, it was not dark yet, but he could see the little squares of light that covered the buildings. Soon, each and every building would be lit up and ther
e would be less red and blue streaks zipping to and fro, but the ones that were left would be all the more brilliantly colored in the dark as they striped the night sky.

  Harold then looked towards Colonel Foxx’s mansion. The workers had stopped for the day and he could see the dinner guests starting to arrive. Colonel Foxx often had company and always put on a good show for his guests. There were all kinds of vehicles. In the limited education that the High-Born allowed, he had read about different types of engines. Some of the wealthiest High-Born had an affinity for antique gas engines, and a few of them were revving up the engines for the other onlookers. There were some vehicles that looked like gas-electric hybrids, but most of the sleek body designs hinted at being hydrogen-powered vehicles.

  He squinted as he examined the guests more closely. Some of them were gathering around the pool while others stood on the balcony pointing at different things. It looked like some of them were pointing out things in the High-Born city. Several of them occasionally pointed at Harold’s village, and then turned their attention elsewhere. He noticed that they all began looking towards the south, and it took him a moment, but he saw that they were all looking at an incoming air-taxi.

  Harold looked closer.

  It was not an air-taxi; it was a High-Born military gunship.

  Scape made a whimpering sound and lay down, using his strange ears to cover his eyes. Then he placed his paws over his ears.

  “Feeding time,” Harold said to himself as he turned his attention to the man-made island in the center of the pond.

  Apparently, the snake knew it too. He saw it slithering vigorously around on the island with its head up high, watching the inbound gunship.

  Harold didn’t really want to watch, but he could not help himself. The bottom of the gunship opened and what appeared to be a sheep fell into the water. Harold looked back at the island, but the snake had disappeared. In just a few moments, he saw the sheep thrashing wildly. The snake had wrapped around it, but only once. It was holding the sheep in the center of its own body at about an equal distance from head to tail. It seemed that its victim would stay held taut while it swam. Harold noticed that it seemed to hold its food slightly above the water, and the snake made a significant wake when it moved, so he thought it was very fast.

  The pytheel slithered up onto its island, and Harold noticed that the crowd of High-Born that had gathered were clapping and cheering at the disturbing spectacle. It began wrapping itself around its victim rapidly. In a moment, he couldn’t see any of the sheep, just a coiled mass of snake around where the sheep actually was. Harold turned his head, and was thankful he had finished washing. He glanced at Scape who was still hiding his eyes; Harold did not watch anymore and quickly walked to the house.

  He decided he wasn’t going to talk about it with the family.

  He shook his head as he opened the door, clearing the image from his mind. He breathed deeply, smelling the air. He sat down and watched Aunt Nean put the steaming pot of turnips on the table. Cooper and Ollie were already sitting, forks at the ready with eager eyes. Then she grabbed the baker of cornbread on the stove, and placed it beside the pot. She spooned out the portions herself, giving Harold the most; Cooper’s was not as large as Harold’s, Ollie’s was not as large as Cooper’s share, and Aunt Nean gave herself the least. Everyone got their own piece of cornbread though.

  “I know all of you are hungry, but remember to eat slowly,” Aunt Nean said. “You will feel more satisfied.”

  “After I finish the field tomorrow,” Harold said. “I think I’ll take Cooper and Ollie to the river to play, Aunt Nean. I’ll start on Jim’s field the day after.”

  “You’ll take them to play?” Aunt Nean smiled as she raised an eyebrow.

  Harold just smiled.

  “Can Scott come too?” Cooper smacked.

  “Can Sarah come?” Ollie asked, chewed cornbread visible for all to see. “I like her, she’s nice.”

  “Well,” Aunt Nean said. “I ought not to let the two of you go. If you eat with such terrible manners in front of me, how do you eat in front of others? Cooper, stop smacking. Ollie, don’t talk with your mouth full.”

  “Well,” Harold said as he pushed some turnips up on this fork with his cornbread, “I tell you what. Why don’t the two of you go ask Sarah at her pa’s shop tomorrow before lunch? If he says that her and her brother can go, then, sure, they can come with us.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t mind if Sarah went too?” Aunt Nean smiled knowingly at Harold.

  “It wouldn’t bother me,” Harold shrugged with a sly smile.

  “They held hands last time we went,” Ollie giggled.

  Harold’s faced turned slightly red and Aunt Nean grinned as she eyed him and took a bite.

  “She even put her arms around his neck,” Cooper said and Ollie was nearly squealing with laughter.

  “Cooper,” Harold stammered. “That was... only... because she needed help getting across that muddy part and didn’t want to mess up her shoes.”

  “She don’t never wear shoes to the river,” Cooper giggled.

  Aunt Nean was smirking, and Ollie started singing, “Harold and Sarah sittin’ in a tree--”

  Her mother lightly popped the back of Ollie’s hand, and pointed as she said, “Young lady.”

  Ollie continued giggling and lip-synced another line before she took her next bite. Cooper grinned widely as he looked at Harold’s blushing face.

  “Well,” Aunt Nean said. “Make sure you’re back in time for Colonel Foxx’s speech tomorrow night. We also have to watch the Vista tomorrow night.”

  “Already?” Harold said. “It doesn’t seem like it has been a month.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Aunt Nean replied. “We may be able to get some fresh bread.”

  “Maybe,” Harold said as he chewed, and looked solemnly at his nearly empty plate.

  After supper, Harold went to his room. He was lucky enough to have a mattress, but only because he’d made a good trade a few years ago. He turned on his lamp, and the halogen bulb emitted its glow throughout the room. Colonel Foxx authorized electricity from 4:30 p.m. until 9:30 p.m. every night for the entire village, but on speech night, power was left on until midnight to show how much the High-Born cared about them. The other times electricity was allowed was from 5:00 a.m. until 7:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. until 1:30 p.m. If you hadn’t finished cooking by then, you had to use a wood stove, but most people had one of those just in case.

  Harold pulled out his book, but before he opened it, he looked at the picture of his parents on his night stand. Harold looked at his mother. She had pretty brown eyes and blond hair. His father had blue eyes and dark hair. They looked very happy. Aunt Nean said it had been made on their wedding day. The only thing behind them was a gray wall with a strange shape in the top right corner. It was a curved bar and what looked to be the tip of a spear. It looked like the spear and curved bar were a part of some larger piece outside of the picture.

  He didn’t remember them because they had died when he was just a baby and he had come to live with his Aunt Nean. She was his father’s sister and Harold thought that he was lucky to have her. His Uncle Joe had passed away six years earlier from a bad fever. Back then, Harold had only been ten years old, and it had been especially hard on him. At that time, Ollie wasn’t even a year old, and Cooper had just turned four. His Uncle Joe had been the only father he’d ever known, and he and Cooper had cried for nearly two weeks before they could function. He remembered that Aunt Nean had been much stronger than he had expected. Though he knew she had been sad about it, she said that she had ‘young ‘uns to take care of.’ Harold still saw her tear up sometimes when she looked at his picture, but it wasn’t often anymore.

  Back when Uncle Joe had died, several of the men in the village came by to help with the chores, and many of the women helped Aunt Nean with Ollie until she was about four. Most folks in Foxx Hole helped one another whenever they could spare the time or food.
/>   Harold then turned his attention to his book. He was glad it wasn’t one of those High-Born written history books. Everybody had one of those, and it mostly just talked about how the A.I. Drones were beaten by the High-Born and how the High-Born saved the world from destruction. Those books never said anything about what happened before the AIR War. The only good thing about those High-Born history books was that they had a lot of big words in them. Harold liked learning new words, and he knew most of the words in those books.

  But those history books were almost the only things Low-Born were allowed to read. That’s why he liked the book he was holding, it was different.

  It looked very old. It had caked mud on some of the pages, and all of the pages looked like they had been wet and later dried. Aunt Nean had insisted that he learn to read when he was younger, and he mostly enjoyed doing it now. There were many books that you could get in trouble for reading, and this book was probably one of them. He figured so because Aunt Nean would always hide it somewhere in the morning, but he didn’t know what was so bad about it.

  It just talked about people who did math and something called philosophy. It usually had a picture of the person it talked about, and it really didn’t have much more than a couple of pages per person. It seemed to be just general information, nothing with any real meat to it, as the old folks would put it. He had already read about a man named Socrates. He had learned a little about someone named Plato and his best student, Aristotle. There had been other people too, but now he was reading about the people who did math.

  He had skipped ahead a few pages and was reading about a man named Rene Descartes, and about how he created something called the Cartesian Plane. The book didn’t really say what was so important about his plane, just that it laid the foundation for more advanced mathematics. Math was something you could get in trouble for knowing too much about, so it must have been important at one time or another.

  The High-Born didn’t care if you knew how to add and subtract and work with basic figures, but he had seen someone get a public whipping for teaching something called Algebra. He had even heard that one time someone was caught trying to learn something called Calculus, and they were publicly executed. Harold sighed, Algebra and Calculus sounded hard, but he thought about how nice it would be to be able to learn them.