Keeping the herd separate was also a safety precaution. In the event of raiders trying to take the herd, they might take one  but not all.  If the camp was attacked, then the tribe would flee into the valleys and meet up at a pre-arranged rally point.  Raiders were never much of a problem anymore, but the older members of the tribe remembered what it was like when they were children and they enforced this style of organization.

Jeb watched Ydar moving the flock from the coral to the pasture on the valley floor for the days grazing.

“I hope I am doing the right thing, maybe I should go up and see the cave too.”  The thought had crossed Jeb’s mind more than once during the night.  He had wanted to ask Ydar to take him to the cave before he left, but didn’t because it was Ydar’s, and he did not want to make him feel worthless or that he did not trust his descriptions.  Jeb was the elder, would succeed his father as the head of the family when he died, and Ydar resented that a lot.  Jeb knew that he hid the resentment well, and tried not to show it. Unless Jeb had an accident and died, then the prospects of Ydar becoming a chief after their  father died was slim to none.  That was probably why he was so excited about caving and the Lost Ones.  It was the prospect of finding a treasure and starting his own tribe that made Ydar scour the valleys they herded in every season.

Jeb liked his life.  He did not think it was fair that he should be the heir, but that was how it was done in the tribe, and he was good at it.  He had tried once to share in cave exploring with his brother, but did not like the closed spaces, and also felt that his brother did not really enjoy having him along.  So he let Ydar do it alone, he only insisted on knowing where he was going, and since Ydar had shown him the TicTic, and how it worked Jeb was confident he  would be able to find Ydar by following the line if he failed to return to camp by the arranged time. It was an arrangement that kept the peace between them.

Jeb was not sure that Ydar would keep his word about exploring the cave, but since the door Ydar described seemed so massive, and unmovable, Jeb had little concern that he could open it until they both tried.  And anyway Jeb thought, if Ydar had opened it he would have gone in and then they would know what was in there.  There was probably nothing in there anyway.  All the ancient relics he’d seen  were mostly unusable junk coming out of those open pits.  Every tribal area had these hills, covered in grass and trees, but dig down ten feet and you hit clay and once you were through that, it’s a mass of stinking filth.  Jeb was not so interested in the past and gods and their adventures, but rather in the here and now.

Jeb left the cave with his pack and went down to the valley floor to say his goodbyes. He told Ydar that he would be back in about three or four days.  They shook hands and Jeb turned to leave.  Broorr began walking with him and Jeb turned and said, “Stay with Ydar and be good,” giving Broorr a knuckle rub on the top of his big head. Broorr barked a single loud bark then sat down and watched Jeb leave the valley, his big tongue hanging out and head cocked to its side.

Ydar stayed where he was waiting till Jeb was out of the valley.  He went back to tending the flock.  He hated shepherding, but it was what the tribe did.  He kept his mind occupied with planning the exploration.   Jeb might turn around and come back because he forgot something or had decided that they should both go back to the tribe’s encampment so he kept working to keep up appearances.  He went out and did a quick patrol of the flock, counting them to be sure that they were all there.  They never went anywhere anyway without him and Jeb to move them, and Broorr did most of that work anyway.  Broorr was watching the flock, sitting on a rise in the shade, occasionally barking and running out to move a yearling back into the fold if it moved too far out of the group.

Ydar went back to their cave to get his pack and then went out and sat with Broorr till noon. The waiting was too much for him, Jeb was not coming back now.  He could get past the bodies and explore further and find something really amazing.  He grabbed his pack, refilled his water skin and turned to Broorr and said, “Guard! I won’t be gone long.”

Then Ydar left the flock and ran up to the cave to find his treasure.  Broorr watched him go, and then went back to watching the flock.

“Are you sure that this one is traced right? Jeb asked, tracing the glyphs again with his stick. “It looks like “horse bags” or something like that.”

“It can’t mean that,” Ydar said, almost laughing, “Who would keep a room full of horse bags?”

“Well maybe this is a whole room full of horse bags, remember the papers the seeress had.  You know that sometimes these caves are full of crazy stuff.”

“OK maybe that is what is behind the door, but, what about these other glyphs?” Ydar drew the other signs he remembered from the door.

“I do not think you should go back into that cave alone, maybe we should go and get a group and explore it properly.” Jeb said, “Knut has experience in caving and salvage.  Remember all those axles and steel he found last year.  We built four more wagons out of them, and those tires peeled nicely to wrap around the rims,” he said poking the stick into the fire to stir it up some.

“Are you kidding? Knut picks at every hill and hummock in the plains, and never leaves the plains. And if he helps then we have to split up whatever we find with everyone who comes with us. It is enough that we have to give over a share to the tribe.” Ydar said frustrated, that Jeb always took a more “tribal” position on matters where personal profit could be found.

“Hey! You know that we are the tribe and the tribe is us. So when the tribe gets its share we get ours too.  Don’t start thinking like a pirate or outlaw.  Remember, ‘It is madness to live like a wolf in the woods.’ Jeb said trying to keep his voice down and not act like an older brother.

“Jeb, you sit too much at the seeress’ fire. I don’t want to live like a wolf, or a pirate in the barrens. But I don’t want old Knut trailing behind us when we find a horde and then have to listen all winter to his songs about how we asked him for his wisdom and caving skill to walk down a staircase to a room full of treasure.” Ydar said.

“Or horse bags” Jeb said comically in an attempt to break the tension.  They both laughed at the thought of a room full of horse bags.

Jeb turned serious, “Well we need to find out what these other glyphs mean.  It could be really bad for everyone if we ran into the plague, or worse,” Jeb was taking the tone of the older brother now. “We should head back with what you have seen and talk to the elders.”

“Great; we come back early with the herd, and then try to keep something like this quiet?  You know the saying,” Three people can keep a secret if two are dead” Ydar felt good at throwing an old saying at Jeb for a change.

“You can’t go back in there until we know more about what these  glyphs mean. We should head back to camp tomorrow,” Jeb said sternly.

Ydar was worried now because if Jeb continued along this line of thought there would be no way to change his mind.

“Wait,” he said,”how about you go back and consult the seeress alone, and I will stay here and watch the herd till you get back. What’s three more days for a find like this anyway? If the seeress thinks that it is safe enough, then we can explore it together, and if she thinks that it is dangerous you can bring the whole warrior levy down here with you and we can seal the cave.  Either way we can keep the whole thing quiet until she can see the runes.”

Jeb thought about this, “And you won’t explore the cave along while I am gone?”

“I want to, but I can wait.  Just hurry back OK, I want to get back down there and see what we have.  Maybe it is full of gold.”

“OK Let me get some skins and you can draw the glyphs on it that you remember from the door.” Jeb said as he went to their packs.  Ydar noticed that Jeb seemed happier now.  He had told him about the door but not the fact that the stairs continued on down past it to who knows what.  He got to work redrawing the glyphs he remembered from the door onto the thin parchment skin.

This valley had been used by the shepherding part of the tribe for almost a generation. When the family had won this valley in the pasture lottery for the year, he were happy because it was their family that had originally found it.  There was a comfortable cave  here that the shepherds stayed in and it was large enough to keep them and their supplies out of bad weather and summer storms, stable against earthquakes, and could be defended against predators.  When the milking season started they could milk and make cheese in its cool interior.  It had been built by the Lost Ones; the brothers were sure, because of the materials that made up the cave, its square pillars at regular intervals throughout and its even floor.  The seeress said that it was probably a Gar-age used by the old ones for storing their beasts.  After her inspections, she said it was safe enough as far as the ancient knowledge could tell her.  The tribe had used it and the valley ever since.

Jeb reached for a bag of water and took a swig.  Broorr saw him drink and trotted over for a share.  Broorr was a constant companion of the brothers and a fine herding dog.  Jeb squatted down and cupped a hand to poured water into it for Broorr to drink, while keeping an eye on the flock.  There were packs of forest cats here, but they were cowardly and never approached if people were around.  Broorr’s big tongue lapped at the water a little then licked Jeb full on in the face, a full chin-mouth-nose lick that knocked Jeb down on the ground.  They started to wrestle to see who would win the fish.  The flock played contentedly;  alternately eating clover, twitching their noses at some interesting scent or laying in the grass on their backs playing with each other as their appetite dictated.  Some flicked their long velvety ears around listening to the sounds of the valley.  Jeb had Broorr in a headlock and was rubbing the big dogs head with his knuckles when he noticed the flock turning to look over the stream.

Jeb stopped playing and sat up to see Ydar running towards him.  “What has he found?” he said to Broorr.

There was no obvious way to open or roll the stone away, no keyholes, knobs, or levers.  So after investigating Ydar marked the stone with his chalk and kept on down the stairs.

              The boot sequence continued.             

     Sequences of beads were read into working memory of a more conventional nature which the builders had provided for in many redundant banks to fight the ravages of time’s relentless ticking march into the future.  As fast as lightening across a dark sky, memory was read and processors acted on the instructions. 

Down and around, down and around, past more sealed portals, until he saw the body in the torchlight.  It wore coveralls and lay face down on the stairs. The dry air must have mummified it.  There was no sign of a fight, the clothing was not ripped, and it still had its boots on.  It looked as it had been caught in the act of crawling up the stairs. Ydar just stood and stared.  He had never seen a body of an Old One before.  He had seen skulls and bones of the dead, everyone had.  This one, this man, he thought–with shrunken skin over skull, eye sockets black and empty, teeth bared in rictus like some kind of ravenous animal and lips pulled back over canines in a mummified smile was one of the old ones from the stories.  Raising his torch higher, Ydar saw more bodies.

More bodies, all in a pile, all fallen in a crowd as if killed in the act of racing away from something coming up the stairs. Bodies piled on each other all the way down the stairs to the next landing and around the corner.  Ydar backed up the stairs, with the image of lost souls scrambling up towards him trying to escape, tugging at his brain, until he began to run.

     After several minutes of processing, the Primary Controller triggered a reed switch which closed 2 contacts.  Something stirred in the deep dark.  Little currents of power trickling through sleep, lighting up grains of sand on crystal pins, and with a click, the Sentinel woke up.

Ydar emerged from the cave into the bright sun of day out of breath and covered in dust.  The seeress who kept the ancient wisdom and interprets the dreams and omens for the chiefs, had told the stories about the lost days around the fire, and about the gods, the Makers and the Breakers, had fought and unleashed the plague that struck down the One-of-Five.  Could that have been what happened to those people in the stairway?  Did he have it now?  He had to find Jeb and tell him.  Ydar wound up the last of the TicTic line and put it hastily away in its protective bag, not bothering to clean it like he normally did.  Finding Jeb in the valley was the most important thing right now.

The chamber began to hum softly; lights came on around the chamber and cast a faint glow on the surroundings.  On a raised podium of stone, a man-sized featureless column of grey untarnished metal stood alone.  Its domed top sported two lit orbs that pulsed softly and slowly. A smooth glass hemisphere on its front, like a lidless eye glowed softly, inspected the surroundings, recording and filing its senses for analysis.  The Sentinel waited.

In his previous explorations, Ydar had crawled through many basements and foundations of the wrecked houses of the Lost Ones, but nothing so intact and clean.

At the fairs they told stories of the huge broken wrecks of buildings fallen
in on themselves, but he had never seen any of those since his tribe did not migrate that far and there was too much danger around them.
Ydar figured that a serious quake must have broken up the structure to put the entrance at such an odd angle to the original staircase. With TicTic ready, and torch and pick in hand, Ydar descended the stairway into the echoing darkness.

The ticking in the distance had been heard. A single low-powered subsystem sensed the echo like an itch, persistent enough that if the mechanism was a person it would have scratched and rolled over in its sleep. But instead it nudged its neighbors.
The subsystem was powered by a beta-voltaic battery. Beta particles whose energetic electrons charged a capacitor bank that powered a small circuit programmed to listen for rhythmic sounds, sense light or vibrations in the structure it was attached to. The ticking of the TicTic had been sensed and fulfilled one of the systems If-Then conditions. The micro-controller queried the count of its sleet of atomic decay bombarding the sensor that could not be heard, but its own tick tick ticking of time passing
was relentlessly counted by more mechanisms. The elapsed time was greater than 200 years, so the micro controller began the full system boot cycle. The Sentinel roused.

Down and around, down and around, Ydar’s footfalls softened by the dust. The TicTic making its comforting sound at his belt the only sound in the dark. On the first landing, Ydar found a portal sealed with stone; unmovable and labeled with glyphs. Above the portal was an orb of black glass. The glyphs on the portal were not the ones he knew, like the poison skull, or the sharp circles indicating corruption, or the circles in circles warning about the invisible poison that would rot the teeth out of your head and make your hair fall out. None of these symbols were present.

I am working on another short story that works along the theme that is in this novella and I will talk about it as i release each section of Osymandias’ Spirit. Leave comments and next week i should have figured out how to set up the RSS feed subscription so you can know when the next piece is uploaded. I hope you like it.

0000

My brother stayed too long with the Machine and it changed him. It drove him mad, and made him believe he was loved by and special to a god of the Lost Ones; and that it would make him the king of a new tribe; and I killed him.

It is cold in the evening rain as I sit by the low fire of my lookout. The flock we tended together is either dead on the valley floor or driven into the forest, slain by cats and now food for carrion eaters. Across from me is the cave of the Machine. I watch the cave. The rain makes the fire sputter and smoke but still I sit here looking at the rubble sealed entrance to that monster’s lair, and I wonder at it all.

It started in early summer. We had been herding in this valley for the season and Ydar had explored all the caves that he could find. In previous cave explorations in the valley Ydar had found forks and spoons made from the silver metal that does not rust, and a nice silver-metal bowl. While other tribes dedicated themselves to scrounging and mining the great mounds of wreckage and buried trash from the Lost Age; our tribe, the Aderling, lived by herding on the great plains below the mountains where we would pasture our flocks.
Ydar had caught a glimpse of one of the Eskely tribe’s mines during one of the spring trading fairs. Trading, pretty girls to meet, beer to drink and new stories to hear made the spring fair high points of the Spring season. The Eskely would host and they had the largest relic mines of all the tribes. The Eskely did not show their guests their best mines, only a small one. One year, Ydar snuck away in the evening to find their big mine. The smell of the open pits was terrible for someone who grew up in the open air he said, for someone who lived under the sky and stars. But seeing all the glass, metal, and artifacts from the Lost Time recovered from these pits was fascinating he had said. He loved the excitement of it all; I could not imagine how he wanted to spend all his time underground. Thinking on it now, maybe Ydar hoped that this new cave in the valley held something really valuable, like what the Eskely had. Now it is all gone. He should have told me everything when he was able, before I had to discover the terrible secret of it all for myself.

I fulfilled all three guidelines and because the corn is still sprouting and low too the ground it was not too damaged when I landed and sort of ground-looped around off the side of the runway. While take-offs are always optional, landings are not. Colin, my instructor with many years of experience, said that they were fine enough first landings. He flies in the ultralight with me so he is there if things really hit the fan. During the debrief after wards we talked about what went wrong and how to improve. A landing is a controlled fall at angle to the ground that is optimally an airstrip with your engine at idle and that big green round thing…that needs a really big and round word…like ground! hurtling up at you and you sort of have to fly the plane down towards this thing you hope will be friendly, and then straighten out put the aircraft down not-too-hard. During my practicing there were other pilots in the circuit around me and they were laughing at my exploits. They all had to do this too and I am sure that was why their laughter was good natured. I am just hoping that none of it was videoed because it must have looked quite humourous. Scary? somewhat. A new experience? Most definitely!

From now on I do all the takeoffs and landings myself so they will get better.

If you want to see what I am flying check out Colin’s website www.lightoffaviation.com and you can see the ultralight and see why flying one of these is more like motorcycling than regular planes.

The ride from Mojave was windy but not for very long. There are a lot of windmills out on the mountains and it certainly makes sense considering all the wind out there. I rode through California on route 99, the hope was to ride on the coastal highway but instead I rode up through the valley where all our food comes from. When I was in the parking lot getting ready to leave I chatted with a fellow, Jack Richie who lived in the Fresno valley. Jack said how there were a lot of Germans living in the valley that had emigrated there in the 1800′s. I can see why they would stop here, the soil is really dark and free of stones, the land is very flat, and probably reminded them of Poland.

As I was riding along route 66 and I-40 I could not help thinking about the book and the movie “the grapes of wrath” These people that left the interior of the US to move to California during the dust bowl of the 30′s must have had their minds blown from the experience of seeing a landscape change constantly. The one constant would have been the sun setting in the west, where they were heading. The sun really does set right in front of you. Like a great pillar of fire sinking into the horizon showing you where you will be riding the next day. The landscape around you is always changing into new vistas but the sun always sets in front of you. Those poor desperate families saw it in the 30′s and I see is every evening when I start looking for a place to hold up for the night.

I am at the end of my trip. I used the gps to navigate my way into Berkeley because the roads are a basket weave of flying overpasses, highways sharing names and lots of exits. Now in California, if you are riding a scoot you can split lanes, meaning you can ride between the cars if there is a slowdown in traffic. This is illegal in Ontario and in Canada in general, and not safe to do either. So I am in the traffic jam on 18 north coming into Berkley and I am in my lane waiting for the traffic to move and this motorcycle goes roaring up past me splitting the lane. I look and see him go and remember that I could do this also. Now when I was in training to ride I learned to ride safe, which means always doing shoulder-checks and being aware of the traffic around you, looking for places to ditch if things go bad, and reacting to the flow of traffic so you are not boxed in. I have been riding like this all the way across the country. These things were going through my mind as I considered splitting the lanes to get out of this traffic jam. So three seconds into my decision about this I watch as 2 cars suddenly switch positions in the lanes in front of me. If I had decided to run the lanes I estimate I would have been the meat in a metal sandwich. You make the training a habit, and you use the habits to keep you safe. It’s these kinds of events that remind me that riding a motorcycle is dangerous but you mitigate the risk by setting up rules you ride by. I had decided not to split the lane because I said to myself, “I do not split lanes in Ontario, and I am not going to now.” That is why the last hours of a trip are the most dangerous. You get anxious to finish and win, however you define winning, and so you think you can cut corners, but the routines and habits you used to get you to the end slow you down, so you want to move faster. That is where the world of hurt lies.

I got to GrayHavens at about 5pm local time. Grayhaven is the home of Diana Paxson, a great friend of many years. She and Lorrie are hosting me here while I wait for my flight back on the 13th. Diana lives in a big old house full of people and the shock of so many people around me was quite striking and dissonant, I have been by myself for about 2 weeks, only talking to people once in a while on the road, and here I am in a house full of people all talking and going about their business. What was a great comfort was Diana being a gracious host, and their house dog Grendal. Grendal is a half bull terrier golden retriever cross and about as big as a small lion. He comes lopping up to me all growly and slobbery and greats me, a total stranger, with lots of licking and dog talking. So I spent time with the dog just playing and talking with people around while I settled in.

We all went out for supper, latter in the evening to Rudy’s Can’t Fail Cafe, where the 8 cheese macaroni and cheese is good and they have a chocolate shake made with Guinness that is actually the most wonderful way to drink the dark beer. Latter on in the evening I made contact with Susan, Anne’s friend where I will be storing the bike. This morning I arranged the details for the trip home.

Tomorrow I get to see what the security protocols of SFO are like.