Harvest Time

11 - The City

I awoke with a start the next morning. It was barely light, but Elcanah was shaking me and talking about making an early start to hunt down some food. Emla shot me a quick smile as she folded up her blanket before pushing it into her pack.

Not long after we set off, Elcanah spotted some tracks and Emla sprinted off into the forest, returning several minutes later with a couple of small, fat and, by now, extremely dead animals. These she slung over one shoulder, tied together by their long tails.

By mid-morning, I could see a change ahead of us in between the trees. It was a break in the forest where the greens and browns were replaced by something far darker.

"Come on, it won't bite you," Elcanah tutted, stepping out from under the wooded canopy to stand upon the road. "Not the clear black stuff, anyway."

Above us, the sky was as clear as it was on Nervanna, though my home world had never showed such a turquoise vista to my eyes. But it was the strip of blackness before me, wide enough to require twenty or more strides to reach the far side, that made me halt. Even Emla, standing close beside me, seemed reluctant to step onto this road. When Elcanah had described it as nothing like the tracks of Nervanna, she had not been exaggerating. The surface appeared to absorb light in a way that made your eyes hurt. It was as if it was sucking your soul from your skull.

"Yes, it can be scary at first," Elcanah said. "But it won't harm you. Also, it is cooler to travel on this road than through the forest."

"Why is that?" Emla asked. "Surely black things are hotter?"

Elcanah shrugged. "It's another of the mysteries of their technology. The surface absorbs both light and heat but where that heat goes is not something I have determined, other than it definitely doesn't remain here. Maybe it is stored and transferred elsewhere. I don't know."

Emla followed Elcanah onto the road and, reluctantly at first, I joined them. There was a drop in temperature that was enough to make me shiver, so used to this world's heat had I become over the past few days.

But, as soon as we started, I found that walking on this smooth but far from slippery surface was far easier than picking our steps through the forest. The lower temperature also allowed us to increase our speed to a brisk pace, despite the higher gravity.

Just before the sun reached its peak, we slid back off into the shade of the forest for a meal. Elcanah skinned the beasts that Emla's bow had taken down and they were cooked over a newly created fire. The flesh was sweet and juicy, washed down with water we'd collected from a nearby stream that flowed fast from a source that was clear and cool.

Growing partly in the stream were some long, thin-stemmed plants. Elcanah explained that it was from these plants that she'd managed to make some usable rope after several unsuccessful attempts.

"There are few places wet enough on Nervanna where similar plants exist," she explained. "So, I had to teach myself. But there are plenty of streams and rivers here."

After refilling our water pouches, we returned to the road.

The sun was halfway down the sky when I saw the citadel ahead. Except no citadel on our world was ever so massive as the one that unfolded before my eyes. Elcanah called it a city and I recalled Emla's description from our night in the Harvester depot. But, even my imagination had not prepared me for the vastness of scale. So high was it that parts towered over the tallest of the forest trees, not that they were as tall here as the ones around the village. Most of the trees in this vicinity were stunted, few were more than three times my height.

As we got closer to the city, I could see that the separate buildings were of all proportions and heights. It soon became apparent from the crumbled remains that a good number of them had once been a lot taller. Almost all were covered in climbing plants – I'd spotted similar plants in the forest climbing the occasional tree but, in the city, these plants had gone mad.