Blott

THREE: ESCAPE PLAN-1

THREE: ESCAPE PLAN

Blott shot back, putting as much space between himself and Artemis as possible. As panic replaced anger, he no longer wanted to hurt the bully. Not in the way that the second voice wanted.

He struggled to slow his pulse and force the rhythmic clanking of cogs to the back of his mind.

Artemis took a step towards him but stopped just outside his reach. His eyes narrowed, but there was an uncertainty now, as if he wasn’t sure how to react to what he had just seen.

“What was that, freak?”

“Cut myself on the wall,” Blott lied. “You’d better get out of here before someone thinks you had anything to do with it.”

Blott clutched his palms together, wincing, and hunched over. It was a pretty convincing act. With a pained expression on his face, he gestured for Artemis to leave him alone in the alleyway. He couldn’t show him that there were no actual wounds, that the weird fluid running out of his palms was all his doing. A secret ability he struggled to suppress.

“Hey! What’s going on?” A girl’s voice sounded distant.

Seraph, Blott thought.

Hurtling down the street, his friend showed no signs of hesitating. She charged up to Artemis until the pair were nose to nose. Blowing a long hair out of her eyes, she instantly went on the attack.

“What have you done to him, Fexelit?” she demanded. “Don’t you have anything better to do than hound Blott your whole life? Being Arcana’s son and everything, I thought you’d have a full schedule managing your farm and, you know, being an upstanding member of the community… but apparently not! Leave him alone. Ugh! Idiot.”

Artemis backed away, retreating to the far end of the alley. At the last second he shouted a defiant, “Mind your own business, girl!” Then he vanished.

“You okay, Blott?” Seraph asked, stooping to give him a hand.

“Yeah, I think so. Just a few scratches.”

“Honestly, I can’t wait to see the day he picks on the wrong person. He thinks he’s invincible because of his father. Someone will prove him wrong.”

Smiling sweetly, she wiped a smudge of blood from Blott’s lip then recoiled. “Woah! What happened to your hands?”

“Oh, this? I just, err… I’ve been picking fruit for Mrs Tumblestream. Most of the berries have gone mushy. They stained my hands.”

The dark blood was gone now from his palms. Only a faded shadow remained on his skin. Seraph didn’t seem to notice the spots on the ground so Blott shifted slightly to cover them. His feet tingled with apprehension, almost as if the liquid under them had a life of its own.

“Okay, I think I’d better walk you home,” Seraph said.

“You don’t need to do that. He’s gone now. And I’m not hurt. Really, Seraph.”

“It’s no problem. I’m going that way anyway. He won’t come back for you again if I stay with you. He’s one of those guys who thinks girls are swooning wallflowers, too sensitive to watch a fight. I guess that’s one good thing Arcana taught him. I can take advantage of it,” she grinned, faking a faint, then gestured for Blott to walk with her. “Geez, what was his problem this time anyway?”

“He caught me on Arcana’s land.”

“Again! But I thought you said you couldn’t find any food stores? Blott, you promised you wouldn’t go there again.”

Blott held up his hands in defence. “I know, I know. It’s just… I was so close this time. I know Arcana’s hoarding food. The rumours–”

She cut him off. “I know all about the rumours.”

Everybody suspected the Fexelit family were withholding food. It made sense; when it became apparent that there was a problem, the Grand Councillor had been one of the first landowners to claim that he had run too low to share any more than a tiny portion of his stock with his neighbours, despite having the largest farm. Nobody dared slander the head of the village publicly, but as people’s desperation grew, the rumours had taken on a life and courage of their own.

“The rumours don’t bother me, Blott,” Seraph continued. “What bothers me is that you didn’t tell me where you were going. What you just did was dangerous. You could have been hurt.”

“Well someone has to do something. I mean, look at this place.”

Seraph and Blott had left the alley and were now strolling through the village. The wattle and daub houses, with their withered gardens and meagre smallholdings, were a shadow of their former selves. As they walked, the pair greeted neighbours and relatives. Their gaunt features were noticeable, their tunics hanging loose from once-hearty bodies.

The bowl-shaped valley they lived in housed just over a thousand people in total. It stretched to a little over three miles wide and everyone knew everyone else. It was both a blessing and a curse. With the village running out of food and no rainfall for nearly a month, the closeness of the community meant more squabbling. Everybody was in everybody else’s business. Nobody was immune to scrutiny.

“My dad always tells me that Ortus was once an oasis in the White Plains, Seraph,” Blott said, gesturing with his hands. “The bushes and trees were packed with fruit and wildlife. Surely you can see that hardly any of that’s left. There are too many of us and everybody needs to chip in if we’re to survive. And even that might not be enough!”

He thought of the powerful stream that once gushed from the crater’s steep wall and snaked down near the centre of the settlement during his early childhood. It had formed a topaz pool, now shallow and muddied, having shrunk as the Canvasians grew more numerous. Once that dried up completely, there was no telling how long the villagers could stay alive.

“I know it’s frustrating Blott, but I’m not sure your actions are helping at all. Targeting Arcana isn’t proving anything. You’ll just get your family in trouble. You know how much strain there is at the village council. You don’t want to go upsetting the apple cart between your dad and Arcana.”

“They manage to do that on their own. I don’t think anything I do will change it much,” he retorted. “And we’re running out of options. It won’t be long before people start dropping dead in the market.”

“Still…” She paused, thinking as she played with a long strand of her fair hair. “It’s getting pretty tense around here now. I don’t think you should be involving yourself. Not alone, at least.”

Blott smirked. Despite him constantly getting Seraph in trouble, she always had his back. It was how they’d been ever since they were small. The only reason he hadn’t included her this time was because she was already on thin ice.

Most neighbours didn’t tell Blott’s father, Primus, about the times they caught him “exploring”. Primus was a village Councillor, highly respected in the community, and they didn’t want to distract him from his job of wrangling laws and reining-in Arcana.

Seraph’s dad, Larten, however, had no such influence. He was just a labourer. Every time she was caught trespassing or picking fruit, he found out right away and punished her in the only way that he knew would get to her – he grounded her. Seraph was no house cat. She needed to be free, so house arrest was the severest of punishments.

“I get it. I promise I’ll let you in on the secret next time,” Blott reassured his friend. He knew he would break that vow. The idea for a new mission had been fermenting in the back of his mind for the past week and it was riskier than sneaking around the Fexelit farm.

The adults who remembered arriving at Ortus often said there was nothing out on the White Plains but death. None of the kids were allowed up to the edge of the village’s great bowl since someone had tripped and fallen over a hundred feet many years ago. After that, a law had been put in place that forbade anyone from venturing into the unpredictable wilderness.

Blott sometimes wondered if the Plains even existed. Nobody had seen them for years, not officially anyway. People wouldn’t mention it even if they had snuck a look. If they did exist, he guessed there must be more life out there somewhere. He felt that finding out was necessary for the village, given the current lack of food. Only, he wasn’t sure he had the guts to attempt it. Yet the plan was growing more tempting by the day.

They arrived at the village square. It was actually more of a circle, but planning wasn’t as rigorous in Ortus’ founding days as it later became when shacks started to be erected too close to the edge of the crater. The communal area included a public well and a cobbled clearing that housed the weekly market. Other than that, the area’s principal features included the village hall and the temple, as well as the workshop of Mr Alvin, the blacksmith.

The village hall was a cavernous building with wooden arches and a steeple fitted with a bronze bell. The only things higher than its ceilings were the Councillors’ even higher opinions of themselves. Primus, Blott’s father, was one of the few Councillors who took into consideration the villagers’ need for extra farmland, without just blindly raving about the law that forbade anyone from leaving. Having said that, Blott always thought he could argue the case a lot more strenuously than he did.

The Canvas temple was a smaller structure than the village hall, but what it lacked in size it made up for in grandeur. The temple doors were laced in precious metals excavated from a mine near the base of a dried-up waterfall in the crater’s sidewall. There, almost pure seams of brass, iron, and other metals layered the walls and ceiling. Inside the temple, the walls sported paintings, mosaics, and tapestries of stories about the Canvas gods, each a masterpiece in its own right.

Nobody really knew how these legends originated, but there were a lot of them and they stretched as far into the past as anyone could remember. Most adults said they remembered them being told around campfires during lonely nights on the White Plains, long before Blott was born and the village had been founded.

Blott didn’t know all of them. Most were boring and he never paid much attention at temple gatherings. The major one, though, he did know. It was about creation. The tapestries showed the story of The Weaver. He was there before the world, and created everything, weaving the fabric of the Canvas. The first of the Canvasians stumbled out of the Canvas itself. The fibres gave them life but they needed more to survive.

That was when The Weaver created the rest of the Canvas gods. Their job was to nurture the fabric and add land to the White Plains, building a home for The Weaver’s children. It was said that the earliest Canvasians met these gods but neither they nor The Weaver had appeared for thousands of years.

Blott considered the legends as nothing more than exaggerated stories told by superstitious travellers. He guessed the tales had simply been retold so often they blurred with history. Even the story of how his people found Ortus was steeped in legend. What the elders called “godly intervention” when they needed it most on the White Plains, he considered pure luck. Still, he would never say anything. The beliefs were as ingrained in the Canvasians’ culture as it had always been. It was the way things worked.

At the square, Seraph bid Blott farewell, slipping away down a street while he loitered on the corner. They routinely parted ways at this junction. Waving goodbye, Blott strode in the direction of his house, hands tucked deep into his pockets and eyes blinded by his thoughts.

Blott wondered why she always accepted his strangeness. Several times she had seen the stains on his hands and had swallowed his obvious lies without question.

They both knew that old Mrs Tumblestream’s garden had been picked clean days earlier. She had paid both of them in bread rolls to finish the job. But, like a script played out countless times, he had made excuses and Seraph bought them. She knew the stains on his hands weren’t caused by berry juice but she allowed him to lie to her anyway.

It was as if Seraph had always known there was something different about him, something she gave him the option to reveal in his own time. If only she knew all the details about his freakish ability, she would have avoided him long ago. He was sure of it. They would never have become friends.