Mother and Son IP6

Island People 6

← Previous Scene .._____________________________________________.. Next Scene →

Island People is a young adult fantasy book centring on a young prince. The book starts with his kidnapping and follows his adventures as he not only escapes from his kidnapper but gains critical allies and friends. 

The entire book is scheduled on Substack, and there are several sequels. This is a book I wrote years ago, so it is in a bit of a rough form. Critiques and comments are more than welcome, they are requested.

---

“This was going to have to stop, Seth thought to himself. The first time it had been lighting and herds of cattle, this time it was boiling cauldrons of oil and screaming infants. At least this time his hands were not bound behind him. Uncomfortably he realized that he was wearing nothing except a light blanket made of bark. He opened his eyes but quickly closed them again. Sitting up carefully while gripping the branch he was on with one hand and his head with the other, Seth saw that while the boiling oil was a metaphor for a large and painful bruise on his head, the screaming infant was real. Seth attempted to review his memory, something he had become accustomed to since his transformation to a Heroiini. But either it did not work after an injury or the blow on the head had driven the possibility of memory away from him. What he did remember was the glimpse he had had of the young Elf boy, the same Elf boy that he was staring at now. The lad was sitting with each foot gripping a branch while awkwardly holding the aforementioned screaming infant. Noticing that Seth was awake, he stammered out in awkward Heroiini, “Don’t move. Mother will be back shortly with medicine for your head.”

“No fears”, Seth responded in his best Elf, “The way my head feels, I don’t want to go anywhere.”

The boy’s face lit up with equal parts of surprise and relief, “You speak Elf? Rare the Heroiini who speaks Elf.”

“I’m not a Heroiini. I’m a Farmer.”

“Begging your pardon, I helped undress you after your injury; I am familiar with the differences between Farmer and Heroiini. Perhaps the blow on your head has confused you.”

“Well, yes, I am a Heroiini now. What I meant was that I was a Farmer when I learned Elf.”

“You … were … a Farmer. There are many things of which I have no knowledge, the effects of a blow on a head, and Heroiini that were Farmers are two of the things about which I have no knowledge. Perhaps when you are better we shall speak with someone with more knowledge than I of these two subjects.”

Seth thought to himself that as a way of telling someone that they were out of their head and raving mad, this was perhaps the most polite he had ever heard. “Yes, well, they are two subjects about which I have only recently any knowledge myself. I have recently received two severe blows to the head, and have but recently been turned into a Heroiini.”

There was a brief silence. And then the Elf, in the manner of his kind, proposed a logical pattern experiment: “Well, it seems that there are several objects of comparison which have low probability. I could be talking to a Heroiini who knows Elf, and has invented out of his illness a strange history of himself. Or I could be talking to a Farmer who is speaking lucidly after a painful accident and who has recently been transformed into a Heroiini. No clear probability advantage lies in either direction nor is any immediate action required which would compel me to choose between the two patterns. Thus I will wait for further evidence to present itself.”

Seth’s head was spinning both from his recent injury and from his bath in the iron-cold logic of the high forest Elf. He remembered from his language learning lessons how often the lesson in grammar or phonology would turn into a lesson on logic, probability or philosophy. At the best of times he had found it difficult, but with his head spinning the way it was now, it was almost overwhelming.

Luckily, before he could be completely destroyed, the Elf mother arrived, hurrying toward him with concern in her eyes. Logical the Elf might be, but mothers were mothers the world round.

“Lie back,” she said to him, her Heroiini language several steps above that of her Son.“Yes, my mother”, he replied in Elf, gaining him a look of surprise, if not relief, equaled to that he had before received. Indeed her curiosity was such that even as she put the poultice and bandage on his head she queried, “How is it that you speak our tongue, my Son?”

“I learned it when a Farmer,” responded Seth going straight to the nub of the issue.

“But you are a Heroiini,” replied the mother

Whereas Seth, in an egregious piece of plagiarism, asked, “Which is easier to believe, that a Heroiini speaks Elf, or that a Heroiini was once a Farmer?”

She stared at him, and then settled back on her haunches, her feet each gripping a branch, her long legs pushing her knees up almost above her head. Her tail was beautifully covered with hair matching that on her head and that which flowed down her back. Her face took on the ‘seriously thinking’ look he recognized from his Elf teacher. While she thought she reached out absent-mindedly to her Son for her babe and put him to her breast.

Finally she spoke. “In my ignorance before today I would have said that it was impossible for a Farmer to become a Heroiini. Thus your question would have compared that which was merely ‘unlikely’ with that which is ‘impossible’. But your statements force me to reexamine my assumptions. Surely my judgment of its impossibility was simply ignorance; an admission that ‘I don’t know’ of any process that can transform a Farmer into a Heroiini. I cannot say either that there is no method or even that no one knows it.”

“For the moment then, wisdom would withhold judgment. When you are better we will explore the matter further. Are you hungry? Do you believe you could eat?”

He was hungry, and said so. He no longer had any contact with the horse and thus his body had to fend for itself. And he had eaten nothing for the last few days, relying solely on his horse’s grazing for nourishment, so his stomach was empty.

As he ate the Elf boy came over, and in the strange, impersonal, way that they have, began asking him questions. Seth found himself relating his life as a Prince, his kidnapping, the change to a Heroiini, his escape. From time to time both the boy and his mother would cast a slightly appalled look at how much he was eating. He was eating slowly but steadily, and had already eaten what would have served him as several good sized meals back home.

And it was not exactly appealing food he was eating. The Elf fare consisted mainly of edible nuts from the trees they lived in, along with some staples that they traded their neighbors for, and an occasional bird which they shot. On saying the nuts were ‘edible’ Seth meant merely ‘could be eaten’ and ‘would sustain life’. There was nothing ‘tasty’ about them. They were bitter, hard, and dry.“But in his condition he didn’t care, his body craved food and would have it. It placed no high priority on Seth’s pleasure in eating. Eventually, however, even his stomach began to protest, and Seth ceased eating, merely taking a few sips of the ‘tea’ that he had been given. The mother noticed this and came over, interrupting her Son with, “You are learning well, my Son, but this our guest needs to rest now.”

Seth sank back on the ‘bed’ that the Elf had made for him between the two branches, glad for the excuse. While the boiling oil in his head had cooled to a mere ‘scalding’, the rest of his body was beginning to ache abominably. Every bone in his body felt as if it were in process of breaking. He couldn’t recommend jumping off a cliff onto one of the Elves trees as a pleasant beginning to a day-even if it did accomplish his goal of escape.

Sometime after he lay down he noted the return of the rest of the family: the Father, an older Daughter, and three younger children. Elf were known for their long lives, which also included delayed maturity; thus the older daughter might well be twenty-five years old, but looked as a fifteen year old girl might among the Farmers. She was probably already betrothed at her age, to a Husband who would take her to his bed in five years or so. The ‘young boy’ that had rescued Seth during his fall was probably older than Seth as well, in spite of his appearance of approximately ten years of age.

The following day continued the pattern they had set. Seth ate, drank, slept, and was grilled by the Elf boy. Toward midmorning, however, Seth began to return the compliment and quiz the Elf; which he took in good measure, as, among the Elf, turnabout was considered fair play. He hurt worse today than yesterday, which he remembered as well from his various hunting accidents. And his head hurt abominably. And he could only talk for an hour or so before he became so dizzy he had to lie down. Thus the day passed.

The next day Seth woke feeling much better. Oh, his head still hurt, but he could move it around without the world spinning. And his body still ached, mostly his bones, but it had settled down to a dull ache. And he was getting very tired of lying in this ‘bed’.

The Elf awoke early, and after he had (politely) choked down his breakfast he breached the issue with the Elf mother, “I would like to get up now. I am feeling much better, and am afraid that lying too much will cause me to tighten up. I think it would be good if I were able to move around and stretch.”

“If you would allow me,” she responded, “I will examine you.”

Seth submitted to her examination. After it was done, and both agreed that he was going to have a nice black eye but no bones seemed to have been broken. But there was the question of clothing…

“My Son, we have kept the clothes you came in, but… they are not in good shape from your fall, they are not of the fashion here, and,” she hesitated, “the, umm, cut, of the Heroiini’s clothes can make it awkward in the trees. Seth’s clothes were not, obviously, those of a Heroiini, but he understood her point. The way he had cut his clothes for riding the horse meant that they would be rather revealing when he tried to climb up and down trees. And Elf did little in the way of ‘moving about’ except for climbing up and down trees.

“… Would you mind if we gave you some of our clothes?”

Seth assured her that he wouldn’t mind, and indeed would be honored. The heavy cloth that Farmers traditionally wore (or for that matter the even heavier leather that the Heroiini usually wore) would be very out of place here in the forest. The Elf traditionally wore clothes they made themselves out of various parts of their trees, particularly bark. The colors were natural, thus their clothes blended well with their surroundings, making it very hard to see an Elf in the forest. They were also very light, allowing much free movement of air--which would probably be nice, Seth thought, in his current environment. The mother brought him the clothes, and then discreetly turned her back. Seth was at first amused that someone who had nursed him for the last few days, and indeed had just given him a thorough going over in the medical sense, would show such modesty; but he suddenly remembered a lecture that his teacher had given him:

“Elves, in distinction to many of the other races, place a high value on ‘discretion’. This shows itself, for example, in our modesty. The Elf lifestyle, among the trees with no walls or roofs, is one of continual exposure. Our family and our neighbors are on continual display, both visually and aurally. We have reacted to this situation by the creation of invisible, cultural, walls. Something that is not ours to see, we do not see. Something that is not ours to hear, we do not hear. We do not even admit to ourselves that we have seen or heard it.”

“Among the Elves, to turn one’s back on someone is to create such a wall. The person behind the back may perform any action, however private or embarrassing, with the full confidence that they are ‘not seen or heard’. This custom, deeply ingrained within us and taught to our young at an “early age, is one that causes great difficulty when we go out into the wider culture, which, as you know, we frequently do. Our young people, particularly our young men, have a very hard time learning how to adjust to other cultures in this respect.”

As he stood to dress, Seth realized he had never thought (how boring some of those lectures had seemed at the time and how little to apply to his life) that one day he would have to figure out just how to apply them to himself in the reverse situation. He would have to be careful of not staring at something that he was supposed to be treating as private, of not turning his back at the appropriate times.

The garment Seth put on was an amazing work. If he had been at home he would have called it ‘patchwork’. It didn’t fit at all well, he was of very different dimensions than any Elf, and of course it had a flap in the back for a tail he didn’t have. But, barring these two ‘complaints’, Seth was very pleased. It was marvellously comfortable; loose in a way that let in air, but, flexing his joints, he could “see that it was not so loose as to flap, and possibly catch on something while climbing (as the Elf did all day) up or down a tree.

“Thank you, my mother, these are wonderful,” said Seth, signalling her (he hoped) that she could turn around.

Apparently, he was successful, for she did turn around, and came and measured him and his new clothes critically, first with her eyes and then with her hands. “Well, my Son, you are not at all the right shape to wear our clothing. Perhaps in a few days, I will take these back and make some changes in them.”

This speech reminded Seth of how valuable and difficult to produce clothes were among the Elf, “My mother, how can I thank you for loaning me these? It is a gift beyond price, and one which I am currently unable to repay.”

“They are valuable,” she replied (the Elf were, in a curious way, among the most polite and among the most rude of all the races… their ‘rudeness’ in the form of a blunt accuracy that most other races found very off-putting). However, you have already begun to repay me. Your speech with my Son has already increased his learning greatly (here she actually used one of the many Elf words that all translated ‘learning’. Seth had never completely understood the differences between them. This one, if he remembered correctly, translated something like ‘things learnt from first-hand evidence’.). And I trust that your contact will continue. You need have no fear that you will leave us indebted.”

Surely the ‘book learning’ that he had done of the Elf was coming home to roost. The mother’s words reminded him that the Elf society, from their hierarchy to most of their ‘economy’ was all based on learning. Oh, they had the normal patterns… Husband/Wife/children, elders, buying/selling etc. But most of the rest of their society was based on ‘learning’. Everyone had an area, or areas, of expertise. These were known by the community, and people increased from specialist, to teacher, to expert. Thus, indeed, the young Elf would have “been considering his conversations with Seth as of very high value; a rare chance to talk to a Farmer; and an unparalleled chance to talk to someone who had transformed from Farmer into Heroiini. Thus Seth felt encouraged that, far from being a burden to this Elf family (by eating their food, wearing their clothes, requiring nursing, etc.) he was actually seen as an important asset: providing their Son with an unrivaled educational experience.

He tried out his legs, walking carefully along a nearby branch, his young escort hovering by his side. It was obvious from his face that he doubted whether anyone without gripping feet and a tail could walk successfully along a branch without falling off. Seth, who was also severely dizzy, was inclined to agree with him. But as he walked further and further, and back and forth, his balance got better. He walked barefoot, as did the Elf, and he had climbed multiple trees when a young boy. His Heroiini feet were unaccustomed to the task, and ill-suited, but he got what grip they allowed him and, using his hands to grip tightly to higher branches, Seth was able to traverse most of the branches in his immediate vicinity before, dizzy and weak, he was forced to return to his bed for a drink, a snack, and a nap.

Two hours later he stood on a branch several levels higher than that of his bed, and peered out over the plains, amazed and appalled at the leap he had made. On the way up, Tristan, for that was the Elf lad’s name, had shown him the bloody branch where he had been rescued. It had not been the difficult rescue that a Farmer would have made of the situation; Elves were able to support their entire body weight by the grip of any of their four limbs, use their tail as a further grip, and they had lightening fast reflexes (an excellent feature to have when one lived in a tree). Seth had slammed face down on the branch. Tristan had shot out both hands, gripping the branch he was standing on with his feet and his tail. Then, while holding Seth firmly against the branch Seth was on, Tristan had moved one foot after the other down to that branch, and voila, Seth had been rescued.

“Tristan said that he hadn’t seen anything of the Heroiini that had been Seth’s captor, but neither was surprised by this, as the rescue had taken up all of his attention. Seth, looking out over the plains, didn’t see any sign of him either.

Not that he had expected to, there was surely no point in standing for days at the edge of this cliff. The Heroiini would have known that there was nothing he could do once Seth had jumped off the cliff. Either he was dead, or he was alive and with the Elf. And he could certainly have offered no good reason to the Elf why they should have given Seth to him. But Seth had wanted to see, and had needed to move about anyway. The plains called to him, in one sense, but another side of him saw them as alien, another world.

Turning, he and Tristan descended. Tristan keeping up his running questions, and Seth answering almost mechanically. Tristan had now turned his attention to Farmer family life, seeming to find a fascinating array of differences. But Seth was too tired, and dizzy, and too much in pain, to have the energy to frame the questions that would help him understand what Tristan found so different. Going back to his bed and undressing gratefully, he hit upon something which he thought would help, “Tell me about your family life, and how you find it different from what I grew up with.”

Tristan settled back on a branch, and launched into ‘lecture mode’… and Seth, listening with one ear and falling asleep with the other, drifted quietly off.

By the time the rest of the family again returned at the end of the day, Seth knew a great deal more of the family life of Elves, had climbed up and down several levels, eaten an enormous amount (it seemed he was never going to catch up from his time with the Heroiini), had a blazing headache, ached everywhere else in his body, and was extremely dizzy. He lay in his bed and listened quietly to the rest of the family’s conversation (which seemed to consist mostly of them relating what they had learned during the day) and fell asleep. The next day surprised him. After he was up, dressed, and had eaten, the mother and Tristan came over to him, and she said, “Now that you are feeling better, the Father and I have discussed your case, and we believe that you should go and talk to one of our experts.”

Seth sat back on his haunches, a foot on either branch, and stared at the mother, as she continued, “There is one, not too far from here, who is an expert in both Farmer affairs and Farmer medicine. It would perhaps be very educational for you both to talk. Perhaps he has heard something of cases of transformation like yours, and perhaps the two of you can work out an acceptable plan for your next actions. I don’t understand Farmer affairs at all, but from what we discussed it sounds as if you are involved in a crisis of affairs, and need to proceed cautiously and correctly.”

Seth nodded his head, “Your analysis seems logical to me. I lack information about what has happened, and I lack a plan for how to proceed from here. I will proceed as you direct.“The mother nodded, then gave Tristan directions and a lunch for the two of them, as there was no telling how long the expert would want to talk to Seth. Then the two descended their tree to some of the branches nearest the ground.

Along the way, Seth had several opportunities to practice Elvish ‘modesty’. Tristan had emphasized several times in his lecture that even ‘looking’ at a family group was an invasion of that modesty. Thus he had to force himself, as they descended practically through the middle of ‘houses’, to ‘not look’ at things that he saw perfectly clearly… perfectly normal and natural things, women preparing meals or caring for children, but things which were, in Elf culture, ‘private’. And then, when greeted from these same ‘houses’, to suddenly take down all these mental walls of modesty and ‘look’ into the house and greet back.

Once descended to the lowest branches, which served the Elves as ‘highways’, Seth and Tristan began walking just south of west. The expert’s tree turned out to be only about a dozen trees or so “away from that of Tristan, and the expert’s ‘house’ only a few levels above the ‘highway’… which was good, as Seth, by then, could not have travelled much farther. Tristan took Seth near to where the expert sat (both of them studiously ‘not looking’ at him), and then both turned their backs and waited. The old man quickly called out, ‘Greetings.”

“My Father,” Tristan responded, both of them turning toward him.

“What brings you to me?” he responded.

← Previous Scene .._____________________________________________.. Next Scene →

Links