Secrets of the Fire Sea, page 41
‘Just a larger crowd and more noise.’ Hannah smiled and reached down to take the archbishop’s hand. ‘I’ll be safe, your grace. Sometimes, well, sometimes you just have to have a little faith.’
The Archbishop of New Alban’s hand fell away from Hannah’s as the wagon train began to trundle forward, before rising in a final wave, and he stayed where he was until the last wagon had cleared the city gate.
‘I sometimes wonder what we ever have to teach you, anyway?’ the archbishop muttered to himself as he grimaced in worry.
Then he turned to walk back home.
Among the other members of the ab-lock clan on Jago, the male was known as Cutter, for his skills at sharpening and shaping flints and cutting grooves in the bamboo shafts to hold their spearheads. His eyes were sharp too, and as he left the entrance to the cave system he was the first among the ab-locks to notice the glassy black surface of the ground cracking as heads of wheat pushed through.
He didn’t know that the seeds of the wheat he was noticing had blown in from one of the distant city’s ruptured farm domes, now emptied of the last of humanity, and he certainly didn’t realize that there was a new network of lichen filaments growing under Jago’s dark soil, sapping the poisons, cleansing the burnt, barren ground.
Days later, however, when Cutter saw many more of the heads pushing through, he fell to his gnarled knees and muttered guttural sounds of thanks to the goddess of fertility – and in that he was part-right, for it had been a goddess who had created the lichen network – a push here, a nudge there, modifying, with a little hint of irony, the death spores left over from an ancient war to a far better purpose.
But the goddess wasn’t around to hear Cutter’s prayers any more, nor would she have approved of them if she had been. She might have approved of his next thoughts, though. If the clan grew these, they wouldn’t need to root around in the dark fruitless forests – they wouldn’t need to hunt so much.
And then what might they do?
By Stephen Hunt
The Court of the Air
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves
The Rise of the Iron Moon
Secrets of the Fire Sea
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Copyright © Stephen Hunt 2010
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Stephen Hunt, Secrets of the Fire Sea
