When We Hold Each Other Up, page 5
Chapter Four
We put a mile or two between us and the Riverroaders before Eduardo paused. He perched on a fallen pine and unlaced his boots. “You did good, Rowan. Better than I’ve done before.”
I tightened my backpack straps. “I didn’t help much with Brand.”
“Brand was hurting.” He tucked his hands into his coat pockets. “How many stories are still told about Harmonizers? What do you know?”
I stared at the sky cracked with leafless elm branches. Like any curious child, I’d asked about the Harmonizers, and my favorite campfire stories had been legends about Erhent, the rebel who stole from the rich, who united Harmonizers and humans. My family didn’t like to remember any of those stories. Those days were mostly done with, they’d said. As long as you avoided the city, not many Harmonizers traveled beyond the limits—what more did I need to know? “There were dark times, according to Uncle Miguel. But there have been dark times with humankind, too. I don’t know what makes us different.”
We both straightened as something big moved through the woods, cracking branches and rustling foliage. Brother whinnied, and I whistled. He trotted through the pines, his skin still glistening with river water. He dripped all over me as he nuzzled my hair.
Eduardo stroked his neck. “Ride if you want. I’m feeling better.” He tied our packs together, forming makeshift saddlebags, and hung his boots over Brother’s back.
“That’s all right. I feel like walking.”
We continued east, up a hill, and I matched his pace, which still seemed too slow. Even so, his angular face was more relaxed, less drawn, and he took strong steps, even barefoot. “What did you do to the river yesterday? You look better.”
“Hopefully the river will look better, too. What do you know of wolves, Rowan? Have you seen them before?”
“I’ve heard them howling. I like it, even though it sounds sad. Sometimes the coydogs will howl, too.”
“What would you do, if you saw a wolf?”
“Try not to disturb it. Uncle Miguel says they are important to the world healing. He says how thankful he is to hear them howling.”
Eduardo’s bare feet whispered through the fallen leaves while my boots crunched alongside Brother’s hooves.
“Once, humans were very scared of wolves. They told stories about wolves eating children. Said wolves couldn’t be trusted, that they’d eat everything until people starved. They told stories of wolves hunting people even though that rarely happened. So, people wanted to kill the wolves. These wolves had become monsters and nightmares in their minds. And they did kill them, until nearly none remained.”
Uncle Miguel had told me other stories like this: about the bear, the mountain lion, the tiger, but also how it wasn’t always fear that lost whole species. Some people had done it to the salmon, the lobster, the whale—just because. I needed to learn those stories, too, but they settled so heavy.
“The world changed,” Eduardo said. “Where the wolves were supposed to keep the deer moving, to keep the rivers playful and the meadows wild—these places changed. Those parts of the world eroded, uprooted, died. Some people saw what was happening and realized they couldn’t listen to the stories anymore. The stories were wrong. Wolves weren’t monsters—they helped everything thrive. But so many others only saw monsters. They kept killing the wolves even though they weren’t supposed to.”
“That’s Brand,” I said. “He was told the wrong stories and now he’s stuck.” I ran and hopped over a log while Eduardo ducked under it. “But how do we know if we learned the wrong stories?”
He passed his palm over a hemlock trunk. “I don’t know. Be open to changing your mind.”
I held a branch back so he and Brother could pass through. “That doesn’t tell me what you were doing to the river.”
He trailed his fingers along a wide oak trunk. “I was eating, just like the wolves. Trash from a century ago, algae choking out the oxygen, dead limbs on the trees shading the bank, water plants too far overgrown.”
I motioned at his bare feet. “That’s what you’re doing now.”
He scuffed some leaves. “A little, but I’m trying to sense our path. I’ve heard of the Archivists, but never visited them.”
“I’ve always wanted to, but our path doesn’t go that way. Uncle Miguel promised to take me when I turned sixteen next year. They have so many stories.” I hadn’t told my family yet, but I hoped to stay with the Archivists for a few seasons. I wanted to see if their lifestyle was possible: to surround themselves with stories, all in one place, and still give back to the rest of the living world. Some people in our traveling group called them selfish. They asked how it could be possible to run all those electronics sustainably, enough to store the history and stories of several eras. I wanted to see how they did it—and if I could do it, too.
“Well then, you’ll have stories to take back to your family,” Eduardo said.
We kept a steady pace, if slow, climbing into the hills. The temperature dropped, but walking kept me warm. As we settled into the pace, Eduardo rarely talked. His gaze softened, and even though he chose the paths, he seemed to be guided by something other than sight. With the same careful purpose, he pressed his bare feet to the cold ground, he passed his hands over the trees or drew his fingers through the foliage. There was a grace to it, like watching Brother gallop through a meadow.
I fell into my own rhythms. While Brother walked with Eduardo, I circled them, gathering mushrooms for dinner, conifer needles and rosehip for tea, even some chicory root for morning coffee. I noted as many species as I recognized, the different tracks or scat, the bird calls or dropped feathers, which I’d add to the map tonight, so I’d know next time what to look for.
A dead aspen grove pulled Eduardo out of his trailing, as I’d come to think of it. Across a broken road, the asphalt shattered and crumpled by weeds, the dead trees bristled, ghostly, along the path. Eduardo sighed, his shoulders falling. “Wait a moment. It might still be alive.” He dug his hands into the loam.
“What do you mean? The trees?” My family had passed aspen groves like this before, long dead from bark beetles. We’d try to avoid these stands since the dead trees could fall and crush one of us.
He smiled. “This way. Someone protected the heart long ago.” He guided us through the skeletal trees, too quiet for a healthy forest, even in early winter. We crunched over fallen logs, sometimes so thick and tangled Eduardo would carve a path with his hand, turning parts of the trunks to sawdust so we could pass through. He crumbled the wood as effortlessly as brushing aside a spiderweb.
This easy destruction is what Brand feared, but Eduardo did it so carefully, out of necessity. Now, I understand Brand had witnessed this destruction so often in the city, with none of the renewal that Eduardo knew how to bring, the balance Harmonizers were uniquely capable of, but too many had foregone.
Where the bark had shed from the dead trees, the beetle trails zig-zagged. The twirling, mazelike designs added another texture to the wood grain, and I paused to trace the paths. “How can somebody protect against the beetles?”
Eduardo wiggled his fingers. “My kind can target them. Long ago, one of my kind passed through here and killed the beetles before it was too late.”
“Do you think they’re still here?”
“No, not for a very long time. The beetles died out several decades ago, so this aspen has been growing back. You’ll see.”
Just as the sunset rayed between the trunks, the trees changed. No longer dead, limbless poles waiting to fall, the bright white trunks watched us with eyelike knots. I took a deep breath as I brushed my fingertips over the smooth bark. Dead leaves still clung to the branches, chittering at the faintest gust.
Eduardo walked as if following a trail as the aspens grew denser. In a small clearing just wide enough for Brother to turn around, someone had made a wooden lean-to of aspen poles against a boulder. The trunks had collapsed, but Eduardo cleared them with a touch. Broken bits of slate circled a small fire pit.
I climbed on top of the boulder, my feet level with Eduardo’s shoulders. “This feels like a safe spot.” The intense quiet of the dead woods had been replaced with the winter stillness of the living world. A squirrel skittered. The leaves quaked, still clinging in the cold. The trees bent with the winter wind rather than breaking over.
Eduardo sat in the freshly fallen leaves, then rocked onto his back. He sighed. “I’ve always loved aspens. They’re so big.” He spread his arms, his hands disappearing into the loam. After a few minutes, his breathing evened into what I thought of as sleep, even though the stories said Harmonizers didn’t sleep.
Well, the stories didn’t say how much a Harmonizer would appreciate an aspen grove, either. I didn’t understand, then, how tired he felt. It wasn’t just the past few days, though he exhausted himself over and over in that short time, but the years before. To see the world so transformed—I can’t understand that. That is one of the ways we balanced. To me, these places were fresh and new, which scrubbed some of the exhaustion from what he witnessed, I hoped.
While Eduardo rested, I built a fire and cooked up what I’d gathered along with some dried venison from my supplies. I put on a pot of tea and huddled over the small fire to write down the day’s notes. I’d incorporate this part into my story when I had to convince the Archivists that Eduardo wasn’t like the stories they’d heard. Maybe they wouldn’t need convincing since they had such knowledge, but I doubted it. I wanted to ask Eduardo about why most of the stories I’d heard weren’t about Harmonizers like him, but he looked too peaceful.
Even the stories about always inviting a Harmonizer into the home hinted at what would happen if the listener didn’t. Histories brought out at festivals or to teach children focused on Harmonizers shepherding, or forcing, humanity through the ecological collapse after the Capitalocene. The only stories that weren’t traced with fear were the old legends about Erhent, a Harmonizer during the collapse who helped humans. Most of those stories were just told to settle rowdy children by the campfire on early nights, though from the way Gran and Grandmother exchanged glances or Octavia laughed a little too loud when Uncle Miguel would tell the stories on solstice, after a few glasses of peach wine, I was pretty sure I hadn’t caught all the jokes, yet. Except for these legends, Harmonizers were harbingers of hard times—drought, famine, illness. They gave warnings, scared us into change, and left with our strength.
Now wasn’t the time to question why those were the only stories I knew—that would make him sigh. He still looked too worn to be roughing the roads or just lying in the leaves like he was, but some of the care had brushed off his shoulders. The wounds on his face and neck had faded, and his shoulders had relaxed. Sometimes, after a hard travel, when we came to a campsite where we’d stay for a bit, I’d see that same change pass over Granmum and Grandmother or the other elders we met.
The fire burned low, and Eduardo still stretched in the clearing, a sliver of moonlight slowly crawling from his legs up to his chest. When I felt tired enough my eyes ached, I stoked the fire with the last of the wood and crawled over to Eduardo. He’d stretched out beyond the heat’s reach. I crouched, my arms around my knees. In the moonlight, he didn’t look cold. He breathed easy but strong, no discoloration around his fingers, at least what I could see above the loam. He’d slept fire-less and blanket-less when I’d found him in the apple orchard, so maybe Harmonizers didn’t need to stay as warm as humans, like Brother or the coydogs.
He cracked open one eye, a matching sliver of moonlight.
I fell backward with a grunt. “Sorry.”
“What are you doing?”
I scooted back toward the fire. “Making sure you weren’t frostbit.”
He stretched, crunching in the leaves, then sighed and folded his hands over his stomach, the way a burning log settles into the embers. “Kind of you, but you needn’t worry. It takes much more than this kind of cold to hurt me.” He raised his head, a leaf caught in his dark hair. “Are you warm enough?”
“I know how to tend a fire.”
He rested his head in the loam. “No need to keep watch tonight. The aspen will alert me if something approaches. We will reach the lake by noon the day after tomorrow.”
“How do you know that?”
“The aspens told me.”
I unrolled my blanket. “That sounds like the perfect amount of time to tell me more about the city.”
The leaves crunched as he pressed deeper into the loam. “You can read to your heart’s content at the Archives.”
I snuggled into my blanket. Somewhere nearby, Brother huffed and shifted his hooves. I hummed to him, then pulled my hat over my ears and eyes. “But maybe if I know something interesting about your time in the city, I can be more convincing when I have to explain why you aren’t like the stories.”
“Tell them a Harmonizer saved this aspen grove.”
“Some group of humans a day and a half from here won’t care about that.”
“Exactly. You’re the storyteller. Make them care.”
I groaned. “Fine.” I pulled up my blanket. If my family were here, Octavia would tell me to stop pestering him, but a Harmonizer who lived for so long, he had to have some great stories. Something stopped him from sharing even though I’d told him my story.
The leaves crumbled and crunched again. “Rowan?” He barely whispered it.
“Hmm?”
“I’m not good at—I don’t know how to explain my memories. They aren’t stories—to me. They aren’t happy, either. I’m not a storyteller. I don’t know how to make them mean something.”
I raised my head and twisted to look at him, but he still stared at the canopy, his eyes bright. “Maybe that’s why I’m here.”
He sighed. The glow of his eyes matched the moonlight sliding off the aspen bark. “I want to be forgotten, by all except for a few.”
“I’ll remember you.”
“I know.”
The next morning, Eduardo quickened our pace, so I rode Brother as we left the woods behind for a meadow, then up the next hill, draped in a younger forest, most of the trees only a few decades old. Switchback trails cut into the hill, wide enough for two carts.
On the other side of the hills, we hurried into the valley, following dry creek beds until we came to a stream for Brother to drink from. My family summered in this valley, so I told Eduardo stories of the deer in the wildflowers and the black bears coming from the real mountains to the west. Once, Octavia had chased off a bear because the people who came before us hadn’t buried their food waste, and it became a story my family laughed about every year.
We made good distance in the valley, even though the wind cut through the new growth trees. I walked alongside Brother so he blocked some of the wind, but Eduardo didn’t seem to mind. He just took off his coat, so it stopped tangling around his legs.
Other nomadic communities passed through this valley, and a few farms dotted the meadows or clearings near the stream. Usually, they recognized Eduardo as soulkind and listened as we explained the city had expanded into the hills, but with a day’s walk between them and that new expansion, most said thank you and avoided meeting our eyes. But it wasn’t at all like the Riverroaders. I had expected more people like Brand or my Granmum, but most folks didn’t hassle us, and some even smiled and invited us for a drink or some food.
We ate lunch with a group of hunters on a rise, watching an elk herd pass below and stayed the night in a hut at the base of the foothills. A few stone shelters had been built into the hillside long ago, and a large family had moved in to map the woods. They’d come over the pass to document the ecosystem and track its recovery. They asked Eduardo all kinds of questions about what he could sense of water pollution from mining run-off.
The next morning, they gave us the most direct route to the Archivists, and Eduardo promised to come back and help with the mapping if he could.
According to them, the Archivists managed a similar project, trying to restore the biome around a mine. Following the mining roads to the quarry was the fastest way to reach them from this direction.
Asphalt cut into the hillside, still young enough it had only begun to shimmy apart and crack. Eduardo pulled on his boots, and we took the road to the top of the hill.
The lake spread out below us, glinting in the overcast sun, except it didn’t look like the ponds or pools my family camped beside. Rather than sloping to the water, the rocky sides looked like a big shovel had cut into the hill and levered out the middle. Trees and other foliage grew on top, but the sides stretched blank and rocky except for water lines. The water turned cloudy and red around the edges.
Eduardo shaded his eyes. “Ah, it’s not a lake. No wonder it felt strange.”
“That’s a lot of water.”
“That’s the mine, filled up.” He pointed at the rocky sides. “Coal or maybe mineral.”
Brother left us to graze at the top of the hill as we passed through a narrow gorge, the only way down to the water. Other paths had been blocked with rubble or trees. As we struggled over the splintering limestone—at least, I struggled; Eduardo remained sure-footed—the gorge opened onto a stone platform with crumbling, lichen-spotted equipment. Some old flood had wedged a tree trunk between the two walls, and Eduardo ducked under it while I climbed on top and perched there.
Eduardo slapped a hand over his shoulder as if swatting a mosquito, almost bumping his head. “Did you feel that?”
I dangled my feet over the wind-smoothed trunk. “Huh?” The lake looked bigger from this angle than at the top. The water spread so dark it became a cloudy night sky. The occasional breeze blew the water’s coolness over my skin, and I shivered. A metallic stink made me pull my scarf over my nose, but the breeze cleared away the smell.
We scuttled off the rocks and onto the platform. Other than the rusted equipment, no entrance or sign of a community broke up the rock and water.
Eduardo pressed his palm to the rock. “There’s a community here, underground.”
