The Realm of Imagination Read online

  “I ran,” said the bull-man. He looked at his scraped hands. “When I did not run I walked, and when I could not walk I crawled. I was on holiday when I was captured like an animal. An animal! Hunters from the Merchant City cast a sleeping spell on me and put me in a cage. They released me in a canyon maze, far from here, to hunt me, camping in silk tents at night while I starved! I stole a horse, but it finally threw me, and I just kept running away. Look at me!” He lifted his rags. His hands left bloody streaks on them. There were tears in his eyes.

  “I am a Tenth Rank Scholar,” he said woefully. “I was studying to become a Ninth Rank Scholar. I wanted a little holiday, and now look. I don’t even know where I am.” He drew away. “Where are your people? Are they going to hunt me?”

  Arimu smiled crookedly. “The Wind People are in the north. I am the only human you will see for miles.”

  He still looked nervous. “You will rob me. Only I know how to take my rings from my horns. If you cut my horns from my head, a dreadful curse will descend on you.” He began to chant in some foreign language, only to start coughing. At last he caught his breath. “Please help me.”

  Arimu sighed. “The Wind People do not give knowledge away. Once we did. Then, when we were poor, we were driven from rich homes east of the Andrenor into tents in the Dustlands. We no longer give anything to outsiders. When I go home in six months, I will be asked to tell the full tale of my time here. I cannot lie and I cannot break my people’s law.”

  The bull-man reached up to a horn, wrapped his hand around a jeweled ring, and gave it a complex twist. It popped open. He slid it off and tossed it to her. “What will this buy?”

  She inspected it. When she saw it was real gold and jewels, she put her spear aside and came to look at him more closely.

  “It buys you medicine and care for your wounds,” she said. The bottoms of his feet were cut to ribbons, his knees and hands nearly so. He took another gold ring from his horns and gave it to her. “This buys you a ride to my camp. The wounds first. I can’t bandage them all, but I can clean them.” She set her pack down at a distance, so he couldn’t grab it, and took out what she would need. “Do you have a name?”

  He lay back with a groan, then spoke a mouthful of syllables. “You would say Sunflower,” he added.

  Arimu smiled as she cleaned his cuts. “Well, Sunflower, tell me if it hurts too much,” she warned, swabbing a six-inch gouge in one of his great thighs. He grunted a reply; sweat rolled from his hide. His feet twitched as she plucked thorns from between his toes; she ordered him to hold still. Seeing a stone embedded in his heel, she pulled it out. He wheezed and relaxed. When she looked up, his eyes had rolled back in his head. He had fainted.

  “Just as well,” she muttered in her own tongue.

  By the time she was done, he was awake enough to get onto her stronger camel. She tied him down when the pain of that effort made him faint again. Slowly she led both camels up a tiny trail to the canyon’s rim. Twice Sunflower’s camel nearly fell off the path, dragged down by his shifting weight. Arimu got so frightened that she promised the rings he’d paid her to the goddess Dansiga, if she let them reach the top in safety.

  They camped that night on the canyon’s rim. In the morning Sunflower showed improvement. Though he was too weak to walk, he had plenty of questions, demanding to know the names and uses of every plant he noticed. Once they camped that night, Arimu gave him a tiny knife and a stick, and asked him to whittle some tinder while she got firewood. When she returned, he had cut himself three times.

  “Scholars don’t whittle,” he said when she scolded.

  “How will you live to go home?” she demanded as she cleaned his wounds. “It’s nearly autumn. You’ll need to build fires at night. They don’t just start themselves.”

  “I’ll learn quickly enough,” Sunflower said.

  Arimu wasn’t so sure. She remembered his infant-soft hands and feet. What did he know of the kind of work needed to survive in a desert autumn?

  As she got the fire going, he resumed his questions. This time, they were about her.

  “They turn you out on your own at thirteen?” he asked, horrified, when she explained about the Year of Proving.

  “If I want to lead my people,” she said, watching the flatbread as it baked on a stone. She boasted, “It’s the path of greatest honor, if I succeed. I came to part of the Dustlands where the Wind People have never gone, to map land we have never walked. If I survive the year and bring my maps home, my people will have new places with water, grazing, and hunting. We will have new places to live free of our enemies.”

  Sunflower snorted. “How far away can your people be, not to have maps of this area?”

  Arimu smiled up at him. She did feel smug about her choice. “Spring City. Here.” Using the map she carried with her, she pointed to the location of Spring City, and to the ruined tower where she lived now.

  “You’re mad,” he said. “You’ll get eaten, or lost.”

  “Not as long as I have a good map, and the stars.” She pointed to the sky. “The North Star never moves. I know the constellations, and where they are at every season. All children of the Wind People learn these things, as soon as they are able to learn. What are you taught?”

  “How to read, and to write elegantly,” Sunflower replied dreamily. “How to play the lotus flute and the harp. The principles of music and poetry and law.”

  “Where did you learn such useless things and not fire starting?” Arimu wanted to know.

  Sunflower touched the map southwest of the Dustlands, on the seacoast. “We call it Wheeler.”

  “The Veiled City,” she whispered. “But it’s a legend.”

  “It’s veiled against those who mean us harm,” he corrected her. “So we cannot be invaded and enslaved.”

  “But you wanted a holiday,” Arimu said.

  Sunflower heaved an immense sigh.

  “I wanted an adventure. And so I left the veils. I got my adventure, and a person who wants me to pay for everything, and asks what use is poetry and music.”

  Arimu knew her duty to Sunflower. She meant to do it, even if she made him pay according to the customs of her people. “If you’re to get home alive, you must know some things,” she explained as she helped him down the steps into her lair under the old tower called Karn Wyeat.

  “But I feel your kind of learning will not make me as happy as my kind of learning,” Sunflower replied mournfully.

  “You’ll be happy when you’re home.” Arimu helped him to sit, then built a small fire of tinder and twigs and lit it. “There’s the firewood,” she said, pointing. “All you need do is add wood to keep the fire going. I’ll tend the camels.”

  She returned to a smoke-filled room. Once she aired it out, he explained that he had begun to look through a book he’d found in the ruined karn. When he saw the fire was dying, he had thrown tinder onto it. Then, when it had blazed too high, he had scattered water on it, dampening the tinder and making it smoke.

  More than once in the weeks that followed, Arimu wondered if that had been a sign from Dansiga that Sunflower could not survive on his own. He let meals burn. He let fires die. He knew wonderful stories for every constellation, but had no idea of their summer or winter positions, which could guide his travels. She found him watching a sandstorm advance, as if it were an interesting display. She barely got him back to the karn with both their skins in one piece.

  She first taught him the uses of honey and spider webs as medicines, then which plants were edible. She even showed him how to build a fire using dried dung and brush.

  “Why?” he asked her, recoiling from the smell. “There is wood here.”

  “Because you don’t want to follow the Andrenor to the coast,” she told him.

  He shuddered. “Follow the river to the Labyrinth and Merchant City? I may be a dreamer and an idiot” — names she had called him after the sandstorm — “but I don’t want to be captured again!”

  “Th
en you will have to cross the desert. Trees are scarce west of here. It’s mostly brush, so you’ll have something to use, but you must know how to use it.”

  “Oh,” he said mournfully. He drew closer to the fire. “Honored Teacher, teach me to cook food over burned animal droppings.”

  She grinned, put out the small fire, and began again.

  While Sunflower mended their clothes — children of his people were also taught to sew — Arimu made a straw hat that would fit around his horns, and a pack. He copied her map with brush strokes that made it into a work of art. When he was strong enough to venture farther from the karn, she tried to show him how to find water and food.

  He was not very good at it.

  One by one, Sunflower paid Arimu every ring from his horns. The day after he had given her the last ring, he put on his hat and the pack. He tucked the copy of the map in his rope belt. “You have taught me all you can by the laws of your people,” he said. “I thank you. When I am home, I will compose a song in your name and sing it before the elders. What is this?” he asked as she thrust a small pouch at him.

  “I did not give full value for the sapphires in that pair of rings two days ago,” she told him. “This makes us even.”

  He dumped the pouch’s contents onto his brown hand: her spare flint and steel. He failed at making a fire with sticks as often as he succeeded.

  “Thank you,” he whispered. “Your goddess Dansiga blessed me when she put me in your path. I will make an offering of songs to her as well.”

  She had told him that the Wind People hated good-byes. He walked up the steps and out of the karn. Arimu followed and watched as he checked the sun’s position and headed west. He used the trail they had already scouted. It would take him into a valley where a stream flowed south.

  She told herself, He can follow that safely for at least four days. If he doesn’t fall in and lose his food. If he doesn’t forget to check the rocks for snakes before he sits. Unless he sees a bird he doesn’t recognize and follows it out of that valley and gets lost, or steps in a bog. Or he loses the pack, or …

  I have taught him all I can under the Wind People’s laws, she thought angrily. He has nothing more to pay me. He is an outsider, a bull-man. I owe him nothing.

  He is no more fitted to find his way to the Veiled City than a baby.

  What is a Year of Proving about, if it proves I am a heartless person?

  “Wait!” she cried. “Sunflower, wait!” She ran to catch him. She grabbed his sleeve, panting. “I want maps. Good ones, like the one you made for yourself, of our whole route south. I want trade goods to take back to my people. And you have to mind what I say.” She glared up at him, daring him to say anything that would make her ashamed of her softness.

  Instead he just smiled. “This will be so much better,” he said. “And I can teach you what poetry is for. That is a fair trade.”

  They shook hands on their bargain.

  Boarding School

  by Timothy Tocher

  Illustrated by Adam Larkum

  One more out and we would win the game, thanks to my home run. One more hit and we would lose, because of the error I had just made at first base. After only two weeks at my new school, I would be a hero or a goat. I knew which story I wanted to tell my dad when he picked me up on Saturday morning. I used my toe to draw a lucky horseshoe in the dirt as our pitcher delivered.

  Whack! My head snapped around as a line drive shot toward left field. But Jamie at shortstop timed his leap perfectly. He speared it in the webbing of his glove, then crashed to the ground.

  I raced across the diamond as my teammates whooped for joy. I helped Jamie up, so glad I was spending the night at his house. We’d talk about his great catch — and my home run. We were walking off the field, Jamie’s arm over my shoulder, when the trouble started.

  “You know, I’m glad your folks are getting divorced,” Jamie said. “Otherwise, we’d never have met.”

  I wrestled him to the ground, determined to rub his face in the dirt. Shocked, Jamie worked one hand free and popped me in the eye. Then Coach Johnson was picking us up by our shirt collars. Jamie blamed me for starting the fight. I didn’t say anything. Mentioning the divorce would just make me mad again. Finally Coach said, “I’ll fill out a report for the principal. Maybe you’ll talk to her. Billy, go to the nurse. Jamie, back to class.”

  Once we were alone, Jamie said, “Don’t even think about coming to my house,” and ran off.

  Even though my eye was throbbing, I took my time walking up the stairs to the nurse’s office. When she called my mother, I’d be grounded for the only weekend this month that I was supposed to spend with my dad.

  But a barfing first grader had Ms. Domiani too busy to do anything except hand me an ice pack. “That’ll take the swelling down, Billy. I want to see you again first thing in the morning, O.K.?”

  At first I felt lucky. Then I realized, once my mother saw my eye, the whole story would come out anyway. A tuneless whistling drew my attention. Mr. Ames, the custodian, rounded the corner. He unlocked a closet with one of the eight hundred keys that hung from the ring on his belt, and stepped inside. He came out pushing a mop bucket on wheels, using the mop handle to steer.

  “Hi, Billy. Feeling sick, are you?” he asked in his cheerful way.

  “Not me, Mr. Ames. Some first grader.”

  “Good,” he answered, as he rolled into Ms. Domiani’s office. “It wouldn’t be fair to have a shiner and a sour stomach in the same day.”

  I picked up my backpack and scuffed slowly down the hall. Passing Mr. Ames’s closet, I peeked inside. It was lit by a bare bulb, and crowded with mops, brooms, trash barrels, and an oversized sink. The rungs of a metal ladder ran up the back wall. Curious, I leaned in and looked up. There was a trapdoor in the ceiling.

  Glancing over my shoulder down the empty hallway, I ducked inside. My heart raced as I eased the door closed, then started up the ladder. Even wearing my backpack, it was an easy climb.

  My feet were four rungs from the top before my hands were close enough to reach the trapdoor. I gripped the ladder with my left hand and pushed against the wooden barrier with my right. It lifted slightly.

  The mop bucket squeaked its way down the hall, and I eased the trapdoor back into place. The door swung open. Mr. Ames rolled the bucket into the closet, hoisted it up to the sink, and poured. Then he rinsed the inside. When that was done, he stuck his mop in the sink and ran hot water on it. The ammonia fumes nearly knocked me from my perch.

  Leaving the mop in the sink, Mr. Ames reached up and pulled the string under the light bulb. Still whistling as if his job was a delight, he shuffled into the hallway, banging the door closed behind him.

  I was in total darkness. I felt that if I moved a muscle, I’d fall. The buzzer sounded for final dismissal. Shouts and laughter filled the hall. Maybe I could wait until everyone went home, then sneak out without being seen.

  Then I remembered the trapdoor. In the pitch blackness I needed all my courage to let go of the ladder with one hand and push against it. It lifted. This time I brought my feet up to the next rung. As I straightened, the door raised higher. I stuck my head through the opening.

  An attic ran the length of the second floor of the school building. Blankets of puffy, pink insulation lay everywhere, packed between the wooden beams. Across some of the beams, planks had been laid to provide a narrow walkway. A dim light filtered through vents in the roof.

  I slid the trapdoor away from the opening and heaved myself up. A thrill shot through me. No one knew where I was, and no one was expecting me. My mother thought I’d be at Jamie’s. Jamie believed I was going home. I had clean clothes in my backpack. Why couldn’t I stay in school? I could uncover all the secrets in this mysterious attic, then slip into class tomorrow morning.

  I tiptoed along the plank pathway, forgetting everything except my opportunity to explore. Toward the center of the building I spotted a gap in the insulation blanket. Carefully
, I knelt and peered through a narrow crack between the ceiling panels, down two floors, to the stage of the auditorium. It was like being the Phantom of the Opera. The stage was bare, but if there had been a show going on, I could have seen everything.

  I continued along the shadowy pathway. A few light bulbs with string switches dangled from the roof. That meant I’d be able to explore the attic all night. But I also planned to spend some time below. I’d watch television in my science classroom, play games in the computer lab, even visit the cafeteria for an ice cream.

  The planking ended at a flight of stairs that led up to another trapdoor. When I climbed the stairs and clambered through it, I was in a small room filled with machinery. The domed ceiling told me I was inside the clock tower above the main entrance of the school. I remember tilting my head back to look at it when I came to school on my first day.

  I dropped my pack and ran to a small, round window. The school buses rolled toward the highway. I felt like shouting with joy. No other kid had ever been up here. I stared at the beautiful sky, the puffy clouds, the distant mountains. Birds flew past, and I envied them for having this view every day.

  I decided this snug space would be my bedroom. I opened my backpack and dug out the remains of lunch. I downed half a ham sandwich and a slightly bruised banana as I walked laps around the tower. When Mr. Ames’s pickup truck chugged out of the parking lot, I knew I was alone. I couldn’t wait to wander the school. Also, I needed a bathroom.

  As the sunlight in the attic faded, I made my way back to Mr. Ames’s closet. I dropped into the darkness through the trapdoor and crept carefully down the metal ladder. Safely on the ground, I pulled the string, lighting the dark closet at last. I grabbed the door knob. It wouldn’t turn. I panicked and banged the door with my fists. I might even have yelled “Help!” a time or two. The closet filled with a deep stillness that seemed to bring its walls toward me.