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edenfallingI slept badly last night, which turned out to be a good thing because I put a log on the fire at 4am that kept it burning long enough for Dad to add another at 7am. So the fire stayed alive, and the cabin never got too cold.
This morning I took the handsaw and cut off some more branches from the pine tree, but my shoulders got sore (partly residual soreness from using the clippers yesterday, I think) so I came in. And wrote a little ficlet.
This is Ekanu on her way south to Estara. Someday, I think I'll go back and elaborate on her impressions of the journey.
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The Silence in the Stones
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The journey south passed in a haze of endless hours plodding along the trails and roads from the tundra to Estaria. Ekanu was easy while the caravan moved through the tiny village-nations of Mohrad; the half-buried sod houses and their stringy, taciturn inhabitants were familiar to her from summer fairs.
The forest, once she had acclimated herself to the impossible reality of trees that towered ten, twenty, a hundred times higher than her head, was comforting in its quiet rustling, and the way the leaves absorbed, muffled, and scattered the sounds of the caravan. Shouts, creaking wheels, and the protests of the mules were swallowed in the dim, green distance.
The forest peoples were at first like the men of Mohrad, blank-faced and silent, with a ready but grudging hospitality. But as they moved ever southward, the people grew rounder and softer of face and body, and their villages sprouted clearings and planted fields. The rows of corn and beans, the gourds and vines and grains fit together like puzzle pieces to make the most of every scrap of land, fascinated Ekanu. This land was rich by her standards, and yet the people here still spoke of bad years, of hard winters, and the need to keep everything balanced and stored against the lean times.
She understood them, these people, though they didn't move to follow the game, and lived in a silence colored green instead of white.
Estaria's differences were not apparent at first. The caravan left the deep forest and skirted Glenshadow, a place the traders told her was a city. A strange word, that. She asked, and learned that in the south, there were different names for a cluster of people, depending on how many lived there. How many lived in a city, Ekanu asked.
Thousands, they told her. Maybe even one or two hundred thousand, in the biggest ones.
Ekanu counted the numbers in her head, and then counted them out again with a stick to scratch lines in the earth. She couldn't see it. She could not see how so many people could exist, let alone all live squashed up against each other. And they were still traveling through farm country, on roads aiming southwest to Estara itself, the city at the heart of this land. She had seen a town -- a small town, the traders said, only two thousand -- and she thought a city might be like that, only with ten thousand. She thought ten thousand might live together and still be able to find food without traveling every moon.
And then they crossed the foothills that separated the central plains from the seaboard, and the towns grew. Ten thousand in one, twelve thousand in the next. The homes were built of stone now, as well as timber and plaster, and they rose as tall as trees. Three or four or even six rooms piled one on the other. Ekanu was beginning to grasp the image of a city, now.
When they reached Estara at last, a great, walled city sprawled for miles on either side of a river as it neared the sea, she was able to walk beside a wagon and not stop in her tracks to stare. Her image, built slowly over the long journey, was close enough to the truth. What almost did stop her, though, was the noise, the sheer press of those tens of thousands of people swarming like the vicious flies of the tundra. They called and shouted and wailed, and the stone walls of their city didn't swallow the noise like snow or trees or fields. They echoed and resounded and the noise became a constant rush in her ears, a meaningless blare.
In her years at the University, Ekanu learned how a city could live, how so many people could stay in one spot and still find food and keep their waste from burying them. She saw cities in styles as far from that of Estara as the bare tundra was from that first city. But she was never quite able to tune out the noise of so much life crowded into one place, never quite able to find the silence in the stones.
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Inspired by the 5/23/04 word #56 at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
15minuteficlets: noisy
This morning I took the handsaw and cut off some more branches from the pine tree, but my shoulders got sore (partly residual soreness from using the clippers yesterday, I think) so I came in. And wrote a little ficlet.
This is Ekanu on her way south to Estara. Someday, I think I'll go back and elaborate on her impressions of the journey.
-------------------------------------------
The Silence in the Stones
-------------------------------------------
The journey south passed in a haze of endless hours plodding along the trails and roads from the tundra to Estaria. Ekanu was easy while the caravan moved through the tiny village-nations of Mohrad; the half-buried sod houses and their stringy, taciturn inhabitants were familiar to her from summer fairs.
The forest, once she had acclimated herself to the impossible reality of trees that towered ten, twenty, a hundred times higher than her head, was comforting in its quiet rustling, and the way the leaves absorbed, muffled, and scattered the sounds of the caravan. Shouts, creaking wheels, and the protests of the mules were swallowed in the dim, green distance.
The forest peoples were at first like the men of Mohrad, blank-faced and silent, with a ready but grudging hospitality. But as they moved ever southward, the people grew rounder and softer of face and body, and their villages sprouted clearings and planted fields. The rows of corn and beans, the gourds and vines and grains fit together like puzzle pieces to make the most of every scrap of land, fascinated Ekanu. This land was rich by her standards, and yet the people here still spoke of bad years, of hard winters, and the need to keep everything balanced and stored against the lean times.
She understood them, these people, though they didn't move to follow the game, and lived in a silence colored green instead of white.
Estaria's differences were not apparent at first. The caravan left the deep forest and skirted Glenshadow, a place the traders told her was a city. A strange word, that. She asked, and learned that in the south, there were different names for a cluster of people, depending on how many lived there. How many lived in a city, Ekanu asked.
Thousands, they told her. Maybe even one or two hundred thousand, in the biggest ones.
Ekanu counted the numbers in her head, and then counted them out again with a stick to scratch lines in the earth. She couldn't see it. She could not see how so many people could exist, let alone all live squashed up against each other. And they were still traveling through farm country, on roads aiming southwest to Estara itself, the city at the heart of this land. She had seen a town -- a small town, the traders said, only two thousand -- and she thought a city might be like that, only with ten thousand. She thought ten thousand might live together and still be able to find food without traveling every moon.
And then they crossed the foothills that separated the central plains from the seaboard, and the towns grew. Ten thousand in one, twelve thousand in the next. The homes were built of stone now, as well as timber and plaster, and they rose as tall as trees. Three or four or even six rooms piled one on the other. Ekanu was beginning to grasp the image of a city, now.
When they reached Estara at last, a great, walled city sprawled for miles on either side of a river as it neared the sea, she was able to walk beside a wagon and not stop in her tracks to stare. Her image, built slowly over the long journey, was close enough to the truth. What almost did stop her, though, was the noise, the sheer press of those tens of thousands of people swarming like the vicious flies of the tundra. They called and shouted and wailed, and the stone walls of their city didn't swallow the noise like snow or trees or fields. They echoed and resounded and the noise became a constant rush in her ears, a meaningless blare.
In her years at the University, Ekanu learned how a city could live, how so many people could stay in one spot and still find food and keep their waste from burying them. She saw cities in styles as far from that of Estara as the bare tundra was from that first city. But she was never quite able to tune out the noise of so much life crowded into one place, never quite able to find the silence in the stones.
-------------------------------------------
Inspired by the 5/23/04 word #56 at
15minuteficlets: noisy