Blaze (The High-Born Epic) (4 page)

             
“It wouldn’t bother me,” Harold shrugged with a sly smile.

             
“They held hands last time we went,” Ollie giggled.

             
Harold’s faced turned slightly red and Aunt Nean grinned as she eyed him and took a bite.

             
“She even put her arms around his neck,” Cooper said and Ollie was nearly squealing with laughter.

             
“Cooper,” Harold stammered.  “That was...  only... because she needed help getting across that muddy part and didn’t want to mess up her shoes.”

             
“She don’t never wear shoes to the river,” Cooper giggled.

             
Aunt Nean was smirking, and Ollie started singing, “Harold and Sarah sittin’ in a tree--”

             
Her mother lightly popped the back of Ollie’s hand, and pointed as she said, “Young lady.”

             
Ollie continued giggling and lip-synced another line before she took her next bite.  Cooper grinned widely as he looked at Harold’s blushing face.

             
“Well,” Aunt Nean said.  “Make sure you’re back in time for Colonel Foxx’s speech tomorrow night.  We also have to watch the Vista tomorrow night.”

             
“Already?” Harold said.  “It doesn’t seem like it has been a month.”

             
“I’m afraid so,” Aunt Nean replied.  “We may be able to get some fresh bread.”

             
“Maybe,” Harold said as he chewed, and looked solemnly at his nearly empty plate.

             
After supper, Harold went to his room.  He was lucky enough to have a mattress, but only because he’d made a good trade a few years ago.  He turned on his lamp, and the halogen bulb emitted its glow throughout the room.  Colonel Foxx authorized electricity from 4:30 p.m. until 9:30 p.m. every night for the entire village, but on speech night, power was left on until midnight to show how much the High-Born cared about them.  The other times electricity was allowed was from 5:00 a.m. until 7:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. until 1:30 p.m.  If you hadn’t finished cooking by then, you had to use a wood stove, but most people had one of those just in case.

             
Harold pulled out his book, but before he opened it, he looked at the picture of his parents on his night stand.  Harold looked at his mother.  She had pretty brown eyes and blond hair.  His father had blue eyes and dark hair.  They looked very happy.  Aunt Nean said it had been made on their wedding day.  The only thing behind them was a gray wall with a strange shape in the top right corner.  It was a curved bar and what looked to be the tip of a spear.  It looked like the spear and curved bar were a part of some larger piece outside of the picture.

             
He didn’t remember them because they had died when he was just a baby and he had come to live with his Aunt Nean.  She was his father’s sister and Harold thought that he was lucky to have her.  His Uncle Joe had passed away six years earlier from a bad fever.  Back then, Harold had only been ten years old, and it had been especially hard on him.  At that time, Ollie wasn’t even a year old, and Cooper had just turned four.   His Uncle Joe had been the only father he’d ever known, and he and Cooper had cried for nearly two weeks before they could function.  He remembered that Aunt Nean had been much stronger than he had expected.  Though he knew she had been sad about it, she said that she had ‘young ‘uns to take care of.’  Harold still saw her tear up sometimes when she looked at his picture, but it wasn’t often anymore.

             
Back when Uncle Joe had died, several of the men in the village came by to help with the chores, and many of the women helped Aunt Nean with Ollie until she was about four.  Most folks in Foxx Hole helped one another whenever they could spare the time or food.

             
Harold then turned his attention to his book.  He was glad it wasn’t one of those High-Born written history books.  Everybody had one of those, and it mostly just talked about how the A.I. Drones were beaten by the High-Born and how the High-Born saved the world from destruction.  Those books never said anything about what happened before the AIR War.  The only good thing about those High-Born history books was that they had a lot of big words in them.  Harold liked learning new words, and he knew most of the words in those books.

             
But those history books were almost the only things Low-Born were allowed to read. That’s why he liked the book he was holding, it was different.

             
It looked very old.  It had caked mud on some of the pages, and all of the pages looked like they had been wet and later dried.  Aunt Nean had insisted that he learn to read when he was younger, and he mostly enjoyed doing it now.  There were many books that you could get in trouble for reading, and this book was probably one of them.  He figured so because Aunt Nean would always hide it somewhere in the morning, but he didn’t know what was so bad about it. 

             
It just talked about people who did math and something called philosophy.  It usually had a picture of the person it talked about, and it really didn’t have much more than a couple of pages per person.  It seemed to be just general information, nothing with any real meat to it, as the old folks would put it.  He had already read about a man named Socrates.  He had learned a little about someone named Plato and his best student, Aristotle.  There had been other people too, but now he was reading about the people who did math. 

             
He had skipped ahead a few pages and was reading about a man named Rene Descartes, and about how he created something called the Cartesian Plane.  The book didn’t really say what was so important about his plane, just that it laid the foundation for more advanced mathematics.  Math was something you could get in trouble for knowing too much about, so it must have been important at one time or another. 

             
The High-Born didn’t care if you knew how to add and subtract and work with basic figures, but he had seen someone get a public whipping for teaching something called Algebra.  He had even heard that one time someone was caught trying to learn something called Calculus, and they were publicly executed.  Harold sighed, Algebra and Calculus sounded hard, but he thought about how nice it would be to be able to learn them. 

             
Harold read for a while, and then turned off the light.

             
That night he dreamed about Colonel Foxx’s pytheel and something about fire.  But he often dreamed about fire, so he really didn’t think that much about it.

Chapter 3

             
Harold opened the back door and started across the yard.  As he walked, he ate a piece of cornbread leftover from supper and looked above.  Though the eastern sky was turning red, the sun had not cleared the horizon.  When Harold walked into the barn, the mule actually puffed loudly in her stall.  He tossed her some dried corn cobs, a charge of hay, and gave her some water.  While she ate, he walked outside and looked past the field out over the slight decline and seemingly a carpet of tree tops.  He could see Colonel Foxx’s house underneath his electric security lights.  Farther on the horizon, he could see the High-Born city and the silhouettes of its skyscrapers covered by tiny squares of light.  There were only a few red dots moving slowly between the buildings, mostly air taxis.  He squinted and could even make out the jagged tops of the partially-destroyed skyscrapers.  The High-Born didn’t seem to bother with restoring power to them.

             
He leaned against the side of the barn and curled his toes in the morning dew.  Sleep still clung lightly to him and he rubbed his eyes as he yawned.  Scape padded up, wagging his tail and letting his ears droop.  Harold reached down and stroked Scape’s head and they both stood there for a few minutes, listening to the shuffling of the mule in her stall.  He looked towards Colonel Foxx’s mansion and noticed something strange.  Scape noticed where Harold was looking and he also looked in that direction.  Colonel Foxx was awake and was walking around the pond.  Scape whimpered and put his ears over his eyes.  Harold shook his head and looked more closely at Colonel Foxx.  He was pacing around the fence, looking intently at the ground surrounding it.

             
“That’s odd,” Harold said to himself.  He didn’t usually see the colonel, and certainly never this early in the morning.

             
“Something must be wrong,” he whispered.

             
Harold looked at the island, and he didn’t see the snake.  He felt oddly warm.

             
Then, he noticed that the mule wasn’t making noise anymore.  He walked back into the barn and took the collar off the wall, and walked toward her.  She flicked her ear and turned her head, and pressed her nose against the side of the barn.  Harold smiled as he shook his head, then he just let the collar and bridle dangle at his side.

             
“All right, old girl,” he said and rubbed her neck and tried to slip the bridle over her ears.  “Let’s see.  Hmmm... I got it, you’re Miss Sassy today, right?”

             
The mule was now pressing her head against the side of the barn in an effort to stymie his attempts to bridle her.  He took a deep breath and watched her for a few moments. 

             
She wasn’t budging. 

             
After a couple of minutes, she seemed to relax and he managed to get the bridle over one ear before she pressed her head against the side of the barn again, tucking her other ear between her neck and the wall.  He took another break, and after a few moments the mule looked at him.  Harold snickered at the way the dangling bridle hung at an odd angle so that it resembled badly matted hair.

             
Harold could see it coming.

             
“Oh, no,” he said.

             
Then Miss Sassy began braying...

             
and braying...

             
and braying...

             
and braying...

             
As it just kept getting louder and louder, Harold turned his head and clapped the ear closest to her.  With his other ear, Harold could actually hear the braying echoing through the woods and village.  The impossibly loud braying went on and on and on. 

             
Several minutes later, the fit finally ended.

             
“Keep going,” Harold said with an amused laugh, flicking his head toward the city, “no sense stopping now.  I’m sure that the entire village is awake now, and at least half the city, may as well wake the other half.”

             
Miss Sassy just glared at him for a few seconds.

             
Then, she obliged him. 

             
This episode of braying dwarfed the previous in both volume and length of time.  The racket resounded through the sleeping village.  This time, in the short breaks between outbursts, Harold could hear his neighbors shouting something unintelligible.

             
“I think you’ve got a fan club, now,” Harold smiled as he kept the ear facing her plugged with a hand.

             
Finally, she stopped.

             
“Well,” Harold chuckled as he pointed toward the skyscrapers.  “No doubt, that got the rest of ‘em.”

             
Fifteen minutes later, Harold emerged from the barn back first, pulling and tugging with everything he had.  His feet occasionally slipped, but he always quickly righted himself; he was almost completely covered with sweat.  The bridle was stretched to its entire length and the mule had her feet set firm.  Harold’s left suspender was broken and dangling, and there were two large chunks missing from his straw hat.  The mule still had part of the hat in her mouth.

             
After another fifteen minutes, Harold was sitting on the stack of firewood against the barn and the mule was grazing in the back yard.  Harold walked to the well and pumped himself some water.  He took several large swigs from the ladle, and looked at the mule.

             
She was eyeing him suspiciously.  He shook his head and wiped the sweat off his forehead.

             
Over the course of the next half hour, he tugged and fought with the mule, and eventually he got the bridle and collar on her.  They were barely halfway done with the first row when the mule stopped. 

             
She turned and looked at Harold.

             
“Oh, no.”