Departures

The rest of the tribe stuffed themselves. Dogs yapped and snarled over gnawed bones thrown in the dirt. A little girl hit her baby brother over the head with a drumstick. He toddled off, crying. Their mother paddled her. She ran after him, crying even louder.

“Here, wizardry sir.” Jorj passed Madyu a skin of wine. “Always goes good.”

Madyu took a pull, then another one. He smiled, nodded his thanks, and belched enormously. Not to be outdone in politeness, Jorj belched back.

Then the chief hunter said, “Oh, what with all the ducks and everything, I almost forgot.”

“Forgot what?” Madyu asked absently. He was watching Neena again. Even if she had been his woman, he was too gorged to imagine anything but watching at the moment. Yet watching was a pleasure, too, albeit a small one.

Jorj’s answer brought back his full attention:”We came across an Old Time building nobody’s ever seen before, far as I know.’’

“Did you?” The descendants of the handful of people who had survived the Big Oops (a term that had as many interpretations as there were shamans), had been picking their ancestors’ bones for the past two hundred years. There were a lot of bones to pick, though. Every so often, somebody came across one with meat still on it. Madyu glanced at the dogs, which were still quarreling over remnants of roast duck. He wondered if the godlike men of Old Time would look at his scavenging tribesfolk the same way. No matter. “Where is it? How do I get to it?”

“It’s on a patch of fairly high ground that overlooks the pond where we took all those ducks, thanks to your magic.” Jorj thumped Madyu on the back and almost knocked him over even though he was sitting on the ground. “It’s surrounded by oaks and creepers. I suppose that’s why nobody noticed it before.”

“Oh.” Madyu’s spirts plummeted. So many Old Time buildings were nothing more than tumbledown ruins, hardly worth going through. By the way Jorj had spoken, he’d hoped for something better from this one.

The chief hunter was better at noting animals’ vagaries than those of his fellow men, but he saw how disappointed Madyu looked. “Cheer up, shaman. I didn’t mean there are oaks and creepers growing up through the building. They’re just around it. One must have blown down in the last storm, to let us see the walls through the new gap. The building is in halfway decent shape, maybe better. Part of the roof still looks to be on.”

At that, Madyu did feel better. If it was true-let the gods make it true! He bent his head, muttered a quick prayer. Then he said, “Will you take me to it tomorrow?”

“Me?” Jorj frowned but finally nodded. “I suppose I owe you that much after you brought us all those lovely ducks.”

“What I find in there might make me a better wizard yet,” Madyu declared. The ducks hadn’t been his doing, but if Jorj insisted on giving him credit for them, he wasn’t too proud to take it.

After a breakfast of duck soup and porridge, Madyu followed Jorj into the woods. The chief hunter moved as confidently as if he were walking down the Old Time road not far from camp. Toting a spear he wasn’t used to, Madyu blundered along behind him, peering this way and that at every noise. He didn’t know why he bothered; he never could see what made them. He thanked the gods he didn’t have to go out hunting all the time; he would have been the laughingstock of the tribe.

Because he didn’t hunt all the time, he was soft. He’d been puffing and panting for quite a while when Jorj stopped and pointed. “There it is. Do you see?”

“No.” Madyu had to walk a fair way in the direction Jorj’s finger gave before he could make out a smear of lighter color against the greens and browns of the woods.

“I’ll come along, if you like,” Jorj said, but he didn’t sound as if he meant it. The magic that often lingered in Old Time buildings was dangerous even to shamans. The chief hunter wanted nothing to do with it.

“You don’t need to,” Madyu told him. If anything worth having did rest inside the building, he wanted it all to himself. But after a moment he added, “Could you stay within earshot in case there are snakes instead of demons in there?”

“Fair enough,’’ the chief hunter agreed. He reached into the pack he wore on his back. “Figured you’d say that, so I brought along a songbird net. The ducks won’t last forever, however much we wish they would. Pigeons and starlings aren’t bad eating, either.”

While Jorj looked for a likely spot to string up his net, Madyu scrambled over the moss-covered trunk of the fallen oak. When he made it to the other side, he let out a soft whistle. Jorj had been right: the newly revealed building wasn’t badly overgrown at all. After a moment, he saw why: it was surrounded by a stretch of the same hard black tarry stuff the men of Old Time had used to make their roads.