Shelter from the Storm

by Jeff Chapman -

Elihu poked the oval shadow with his spear, but unlike the other shadows, which had been indentions or shallow fissures, this one swallowed his spear head and all the shaft he fed it. The cave entrance rose from the crevice floor to his waist. Maybe it ballooned farther in or tapered to a crack. He couldn’t tell without crawling inside. Much too small for a mammothbug, but he had once seen a black spider with orange splotches dotting its abdomen lunge from one of these holes to snatch a powderbug that he had been stalking.

The pastor-turned-hunter swallowed hard, jabbed his spear into the hole twice and then jumped back to a crouch, holding his breath, listening, his spear poised to skewer anything that emerged. Nothing came. Only the soughing wind overhead and the settling ash pecking against the dried lavabushes disturbed the quiet. No skittering legs or clicking pincers against rock.

He broke three of the thickest branches from a lavabush and then stripped the lower branches until he could hold the three together like a bouquet. Taking a lighter from the inside pocket of his coat, he clicked the trigger, igniting a mixture of burnweed and fish oil that flamed yellow and blue. Burnweed grew in the ocean shallows and, in bulbs that studded the long olive-colored leaves, held an oil that was toxic to eat but highly flammable. Strange, he reflected, that sources of fire came from the sea.

The dried bush caught and crackled, bathing his face with heat and yellow light. The smoke scent and flames reminded him of drinking tea with Sarah after supper. She would nurse the baby and he would talk and when he stopped to sip his tea he would ponder his child’s future. Sarah would worry, but he had been gone overnight before. He thrust the torch into the cave. Bugs feared fire.

He expected smooth walls fading to blackness or a pair of eyes the size of his head retreating from the flames that glittered and repeated across purple and yellow compound eyes. A bristle blanket, or something like it, hung across the tunnel no more than two meters in. Could be spider silk, he thought, some sort of trapdoor or cocoon. He lit another torch, laid it on the tunnel floor and prodded the flaming bush into the tube with his spear, following behind on his hands and knees. The weave in the cloth stood out, a beacon of friendship or at least common species. He sighed, letting go the tension. “Thank you, Lord,” he muttered. “Thank you.”

“Hello?” The flames collapsed to orange embers. “Anybody in there?” He listened. Nothing. “This is Elihu Simmons, pastor at Tube Hill. Just need some shelter for a bit, from the storm. Hello?”

He crawled backwards out of the tunnel. The gloaming weighed on him with its uncompromising edict, the doom of darkness when the biscorpiabugs woke and unfurled their bifurcated tail and stingers, and all the other bugs he couldn’t see pushed out of their holes. The ash-gray sky had faded to charcoal overhead and black along the eastern horizon. This tunnel had to be the one, he told himself. Might still be a spider or bug inside--only the cautious survived in this world--but already he was thinking how this ordeal might complement a Bible story. David found refuge in caves.

He entered the tube with a larger torch clutched in his left hand and in his right gripped his spear together with two more unlit torches. Heat singed his face and smoke stung his eyes in the cramped tunnel  He poked the blanket with his spear tip and lifted the edge. Minerals glittered in the rock wall opposite the entrance. A cavern. He might be able to stand up. He thrust the torch past the threshold into the chamber, following close behind.

A domed ceiling sparkled with flecks of minerals embedded in black rock, stars in a night sky, as the Milky Way galaxy would shine down on Eclectia if the curtains of ash fell aside. The lava here held riches of minerals the likes of which he had never seen. Elihu shook his head to clear his thoughts.

The stars dimmed as the flaming bush starved for fuel. He stuck the other torches into the embers of the first and they roared orange and red. To his left a lone table fashioned from fist-sized chunks of dolerite and a slab of stone held a lamp and a hodgepodge of bowls and to his right a pile of blankets covered the floor and a niche in the wall appeared to serve as a hearth.

Liquid sloshed inside the lamp when he picked it up and held his torch over the wick, which caught and burned at the center of an orange halo, the same halo that lit his wife’s face when she checked on the baby long after dark. Her face would be creased with worry tonight. Hunting was no job for a family man and no work for a pastor.

He stuffed what remained of the torches inside the hearth. A crack the width of two fingers snaked up the wall from the hearth and disappeared into the ceiling. He gathered more bushes from outside. The woody stems at the base of the plants, some as thick as Elihu’s wrist, burned slowly, and in the light from the lamp and hearth fire, he plucked seeds from the lavabush branches, dropping the kernels into a blackened carapace bowl for roasting. A hymn of thanksgiving thrummed at the back of his throat and the repetitive picking and hulling lulled his mind.

A groan snapped his senses awake.

Diligence

by Travis Perry -

The four grandchildren lay next to one another on the fiber mat on the cave floor, wrapped around by two thin blankets. While they slept sound after their first meal in days, bug leg soup, Elsa reevaluated her life. She couldn’t hunt forever; there was no doubt about that.

She seemed immune to ash lung; she thanked God for that, unlike her son and daughter-in-law, both now dead. But her strength had faded from what it used to be and she wasn’t getting any younger.

Hunting had changed, too. Once mainly the livelihood of families determined to strike it out on their own and be independent in this harsh land, it had become a commercial enterprise. Hunting bugs, taking parts back to the new camp in Adagio with all its tents for paid shipment to Zirconia or up to Avenir, was a business that paid poorly, poor enough that usually only desperate souls turned from whatever they had done before to hunt bugs here. But it used to be, it never paid at all. It used to be that nobody came here from elsewhere. Back then, none of the hunters had fancy weapons like those scytheguns…

Hunting had changed, continually filled by a fresh pool of hungry young men. An old woman just could not compete.

Tears streamed down her face when Elsa understood what that meant. She would have to abandon the cave, an ancient lava tube into which her great-grandfather had hewn out a door by hand. The family would have to move into the tents of the new camp, with all its crime and debauchery. Lord, lord, oh lord, please give me the strength.

In the morning she hauled up a fresh bucket of water from the well carved out by decades of work by her grandfather. A hot spring filled the well, so the bucket steamed in the cool morning air.

The youngest child, Misha, age 5, was already awake and beaming at her with joy. “Dear child,” she said, kissing the curly locks of his head.

She woke the other three, having them wash their faces and hands in the warm, mineral-bitter water. They ate the breakfast she’d warmed of leg soup. By then the bucket water had cooled enough for drinking, and all of them took long draughts.

They loaded up all their kitchenware—the pot, two knives and a ladle, and bugshell plates and bowls. Elsa added the household goods, the one precious family Bible, the blankets, the mat, and the cannon, along with a single old spear. The children carried each one a portion of the goods, but Elsa reserved the heaviest thing, the cannon, for herself.

After the long walk of nearly a whole day from Tube Hill, tears rimmed her eyes to see the beaten-up tents of Adagio, their new home. She sold most of their goods, especially all the metal. She found work cleaning the tavern floor, in exchange for paltry broken pieces of bugshell, even though her people had always frowned on all forms of liquor and any association with it.

She labored late into the night, exhausting herself in the twilight hours, forming shells’ bits into little bowls and plates and smaller items. She exchanged her few goods for bigger pieces, enough to eat off of, and with discipline and diligence, there was enough left over to sell to the Zirconia Trading Company about once every other week, many dozens of hours of toil for a few small copper coins.

She saved her coppers and her one silver piece, struggled to trust the Lord to not worry about camp robbers and what the hunter men might try to do to her one granddaughter, and prayed and prayed and prayed for her grandchildren every waking moment and sometimes in her dreams. The grandchildren helped her in her labors, even though none of them knew why she was working so hard to save coin.

Insight, from the Lord no doubt, had told her that she would not live long enough to see the grandchildren reach adulthood. She had to provide for them past her own life, even if the life she gave them would be strange, dangerous even.

All the copper she saved, all the continual ache and pain of her endless handiwork, all served one purpose: to pay the passage to send her grandchildren to the orphanage in Zirconia.

Hospitality

by Travis Perry -

Elsa studied the grim face of her pastor, Elihu Simmons.

“Elsa,” he said with the raspy wheeze of the early stages of ash lung, “You know I don’t get paid hardly a thing by the congregation, that I hunt bugs to make my living, just like you.”

She stood at the entryway to his cave. He leaned on the chiseled doorway as he spoke with her, looking down at the ground, his face tinged with red, framed by his ash-flecked beard and graying mane of hair. His gaunt wife in the room behind him cast uneasy glances her way.

“That’s why I haven’t asked you before now, Preacher. I know our church isn’t rich—we’re lucky to have a church at all in this place. The rich churches build their universities and cathedrals but don’t do anything for us—”

“Give ’em credit,” he interrupted, “They send travelling ministers on a regular circuit. And give out things. Like old clothes and such—”

“But you live with us. You’re one of us and share our troubles. That’s why I’ve always respected you, Preacher. That’s why I’ve been a faithful member of your congregation. And never asked you for any help…until now.” Tears clouded Elsa’s eyes.

Simmons cleared his throat, still looking down. From somewhere behind his wife a baby began to wail. “Sarah,” he said after turning his head back. “Please fetch all the bug legs we’ve got on the shelf. I can always go back out for more.”

His wife’s eyes showed the whites of her astonishment, but she arose without a word. In less than a minute she was at the doorway, handing them over to Elsa in a rough sack woven from the long fine bristles that line the legs of powder bugs. The sack held six scrawny legs.

“Thank you so much, preacher. God bless you,” sang Elsa.

Pastor Simmon’s face flushed a deeper red. “I’m just sorry I couldn’t give you more, Elsa. Very sorry. Would you like to come in for some tea?”

“No thank you. Have to get back to feed the grandkids! They haven’t eaten in three days.” On an impulse she kissed his cheek. The pastor’s face somehow looked even redder, glowing like the ruddy sunshine during a dust storm. His wife first was astounded, but then she smiled—perhaps because she saw no threat in a woman more than twice her age.

Elsa turned away, striding back toward her home. She knew there wasn’t much meat in these half-dozen gangly legs. But it was more than a day’s worth, which was more than she had any right to expect. For the Lord had taught the disciples to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”