[Fic] "Beginnings" -- original, Ekanu

[edenfalling]

This is my... um, third? Fourth? Yeah, my fourth attempt at writing the beginning of Ekanu's story, the part when she leaves her people. I took a stab at it back when I was thirteen, with predictably awful results, and the two more recent tries were, respectively, as flat on the page as a bad anthropology text, and way too contaminated by modern parent-teenager arguments.

I'm still not wildly fond of this attempt, but it feels closer to what actually happened than the others. Beginnings are hard, after all. Maybe someday I'll get it right.

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Beginnings
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There is a rhythm to life in the north. Spring comes grudgingly, imperceptibly, until summer bursts over the tundra in a frenzy as the people move south. And when the long days begin to shorten and the flowers bury themselves for the dark times, the people move north to the ice and the month-long nights of winter.

North and south, winter and summer, to hunt and to gather. In the summer they trade their skins and ivory bones for food and cloth, glass and iron from the distant south. And in winter, they walk with the spirits and a young girl becomes a half-woman on midwinter's night.

She takes the name Ekanu, "I Listen," because the wind spoke to her on her vision quest, calling her south past the tundra, past the tiny, huddled villages and trading-fairs of Mohrad, past the impossible-to-imagine forest -- who can believe that trees can grow hundreds of feet tall? Who can credit stories of life so lush all year round?

She wants to leave in the summer, to follow the wind, but her father wins their argument. "Wait a year or three," he says. "Learn the traders' language. Learn to be a woman so you don't forget yourself or the people in the south. Gather a store of furs and carvings to trade for passage."

And he is right, as he usually is, so she waits three years until, caught halfway between childhood and woman-making rites, she can ignore the wind no longer.

"I go south," she tells one of the traders in the little she's learned of their language, mixed with the pidgin they use to barter with the people. "You take with, yes? I give pay." Ekanu holds forward the bundled furs in her arms and rattles the intricate beaded bracelets on her wrists.

The man looks at her askance. "You want to go south with us, girl?"

"Yes."

He shrugs. "Never seen one of you people leave the Ice, but there's a first time for everything I guess. Hand it over." He motions to her bundle and she lays it in his wagon. "Wait a bit and I'll find you something to do -- nobody rides free even if you pay gold."

Ekanu nods as if she understands his stream of words, and follows him into the tangle of wagons. Whatever he wants her to do, within reason, she'll do. For the first time since her twelfth winter, the wind is silent, and she knows she is walking her right path.

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Inspired by the Feb. 29, 2004 15minuteficlets word: unusual

And that's more or less it. She doesn't get into the music thing until later, partially during the long trek south through Mohrad, the Forest Kingdoms, and half of Estaria, and partially when she is forced to actually find a place to stay and something to do in Estara proper.

Eh. It's weird talking about this stuff and realizing exactly how much background I have for this world. Ten years produces a lot of random information -- cultural studies, maps, histories, character outlines, trade patterns, mythologies, methods of warfare... it's funny how much stuff I read ends up in this world some way or other.

And to think I started it as a story about psychic people with pointed ears. Yeesh. There are times I look at my younger self and can't quite figure out how she and I can possibly be the same person. Then I remember that the psychic powers were meant to be a thought-experiment about a world where people literally couldn't lie to each other, and realize I've changed less than I sometimes think. I'm glad I got off-track with that idea, though. I like my existing version of that world much better.

Maybe I'll go back and do something with the world-without-lies someday, though. It is an interesting idea, after all. How human would people still be if we couldn't lie?

Okay, shutting up now.

Comments

[edenfalling]

Really? Cool. Depth is hard on a worldwide scale.