The Book Gatherer

Chapter Nine

The bad scrape along his ribs, surrounded by bruises, limited his movement, hampered his speed, and strained his breathing. The ragged tear on his bicep was almost healed but his shoulder of the same arm was sore with small scratches and more bruising, which restricted the use of his arm. And the worst and most essential of them all, his shredded leg. Who knew what that beast had done to him to damage it this badly.

Firek scowled at the blood stained on the bandages he'd just removed from his leg. The wounds kept reopening, no matter how much he tried to use the leg as little as possible. An impossible task, and another reason why he was rebandaging it again for the second time this day, after long, painful hours of travel by saddleback. Firek was half convinced he had more bruises from riding than being thrown from the saddle had done.

"This simply won't do," the lackey girl muttered, loud enough for Firek to overhear. He looked up and saw her standing over the line of saddlebags she'd set up on the trail they'd been using. It was thin and scraggly, crisscrossing randomly and bending around the most mundane of obstacles, following the terrain of the forest. Firek ached at the slow pace of it all, remembering the swift flight of a bird on a good wind. When flying there was only you, your bird, and the wind. It was so much faster when there was no need to worry about trees or hills or pesky bugs.

Firek smacked at a mosquito on his neck and flicked an ant off his leg, one of the red kinds whose bites smarted worse than arctic winds.

"We just can't keep going like this," she complained, kicking irritably at one of the bags full of gathered books. It boggled Firek's mind to see such huge sacks so full of books; at most a sky gatherer could carry only a dozen or two before their bird began to tire and had to stop at a cloud-town. And he could hardly believe this saddlebag was one of ten, and two of them, the ones that hung behind the saddle on the giraffe's hindquarters, were much, much larger than the rest. And this was one giraffe. So many books.

Too many books, apparently, for the girl. She began emptying the bags of their contents, pulling the books out with her hands until the bag was light enough for her to heave it upside down and let the rest tumble out.

"What are you doing?" Firek asked, his hands pausing their work on tying new bandages on his leg.

"All of this," she puffed, "all of my hard work, just slows us down. All of it, worthless." She finished with the saddlebag and went on to the next, kicking it over before savagely ripping the books out. "They're too heavy and bulky. They drag on branches and weigh Jeje down. No more." Her face was red and breathing fast and irregular; it was like this each morning and evening when she tacked or untacked the giraffe, though she never complained. Firek wanted to scoff at how pathetic she looked but couldn't help grudgingly admire her tenacity.

"Besides," she continued, holding up an orange-covered book, "I've never really liked sci-fi adventures very much." She chucked the novel over her shoulder; it landed in a bush, terribly bright against the black backdrop of the bush's diseased leaves.

Firek looked away from it. "Honestly?" he said, remembering his mission to trick the girl into trusting him. Light, meaningless small talk would help with that. "I think they're interesting. Reading about the plausible future, what useful technology we might have, how the world could change." They had also been his father's favorite.

The lackey shrugged, shaking the bag she held to remove the remaining books inside. They came out slightly flattened and sticky with ink juice. "I like to live in the moment."

She didn't seem all that trusting of him, but Firek didn't want to argue about science fiction, not when his father's face kept appearing. He let the conversation die and returned to bandaging his leg, using the few herbs he recognized from the girl's first-aid kit. She'd only let him use them this one time, refusing when he'd asked in the morning after his ritual.