CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3

Truck woke to daylight that poured through the gaps in the leaf lined collet. He had curled into a ball at night. And now found that his legs had slightly recovered some motion, coupled with a sharp low back pain in his movement. The cone between Hugly and him was now a perfect low ring of cold gray ash. Tiny beads of moisture were on everything around, and Hugly was absent, although his pack was staged in his place.

Truck was thirsty. He leaned through an opening in the wall and drew his fingers on the branches nearby. Putting his lips to the smooth bark, he drank from the clean, fresh morning dew. He wasn’t satisfied, but he wasn’t desperate either. He then immediately became bored, so he ate a small piece of raisin cake from a wax paper wrap and drew at more dew to wash it down.

While it was still early morn, Hugly quietly returned with things strapped to his back. In his hand was a piece of fibrous bark that had been stretched open to form a cup. This was filled with water, which Truck was grateful to drink further from.

Hugly immediately prepared to extricate Truck from the moist wicker camp, but Truck encouraged Hugly to slow down.

“Let’s eat something before we go. I have some nice biscuits and raisin cake that you’ll like. Give you lots of energy.”

Hugly’s look-away became more intentional. “Have to go now,” he said at a near whisper.

“Alright,” Truck responded obediently.

Taking Truck nearly back to the path, Hugly went ahead by himself in a very quiet and cautious manner, which caused Truck to become quiet and cautious too.

After a bit, Hugly returned with a wheel that was waist high, twisted and tied together, and made from an apparently very flexible green reed that he must have just cut. Hugly took the straight sticks from Truck’s belly pack, strap-mounted a cross member between them, and attached them also to an odd-wood axle on the wheel. Laying Truck with his back upon this and then placing his feet on the axle of the wheel that his legs now straddled, Truck’s crotch was a mere finger’s width from the green round.

Hugly lifted the sticks from behind, and Truck was now laying with his back propped by his pack, sitting nearly upright. With the two of them facing the same direction, Hugly pushed him out into the scrub path tunnel. And turning this newly mobile system west, Hugly began to run.

This path contained some rough spots, but Hugly seemed to just continue to pick up speed as he negotiated them. Truck was feeling each bump through the cross-member beneath him, and he was exerting what little his legs could on the axle. This was also keeping his scrotum from the rapidly spinning wheel where two protruding leaf ends were gently finding their mark. At one point, it could be clearly seen ahead, that the over brush was very low. But Hugly was not going to slow down. In fact, he deliberately ran at it even faster.

In uncertainty, Truck had just enough time to glance over his shoulder before Hugly dropped the sticks to the ground, stepped upon them, and rode them, skidding low with his hands and feet, for the full measure of the overhead obstacle, before lifting them again and continuing the run as the path opened up. They hadn’t even stopped. Truck began to laugh up into the sky, and Hugly smiled.

Out of the scrub and on to rolling hills of sparse grasses, their rabbit trail nearly intersected a maintained road of stamped clay, where the duo turned northeast, while the sun was rising into the sky. Now in the open and with a light breeze to their backs, Hugly began stretching out his stride. His arms stiff as branches supporting his rescue, and the flexible, soft wheel in perfect balance, Hugly found the challenge and scissored his legs in what fully astounded Truck. Lightly breathing with his mouth open and tongue raised, Hugly moved himself, his new friend, their three full packs, and a hastily constructed hand cart down this road so fast that Truck found himself terrified at times.

Soon, they were passing people in both directions. First was a pair of ladies with dried farm greens faggoted to their backs.

“Oh, dear!” exclaimed one in the after moment.

Then, from the other direction, after shearing by, a class train of young children all broke out into excited conversation, as the leading teacher instructed loudly for the children and the Hugly Express to hear: “And that’s why we stay single file.”

Next, they began passing increasing travelers and other maintained roads that intersected. Farmhouses were nestled in the corners, and labor shacks were perched in harvested fields of neatly furrowed farms made level by the combined efforts of generations of farming families and their neighbors. Hugly turned a right fork in the road, which shortly went downhill, where a vast depressed area was canopied in thin, leafless shrub branches.

The town of Mownacre had round and oval thatched homes and many more low and broad buildings—most of which had smoking stacks that spread out a flat, thick layer of gray above in the trees. Hugly began turning corners as the buildings grew more numerous and closer together.

After more than a dozen angles, Hugly stopped before a home, where a sun-faded green and white banner hung upon the wall. It had the image of a cracked grain, with an X atop and a reaching hand below. Hugly lightly and quickly rapped his knuckle on the door and then wheeled Truck around to the sunny side of the house. There, an earth borne, bubbling tube spilled water into an open clay aqueduct set into the soil, where the water slowly trundled away somewhere.

Helping Truck onto a wooden bench to tend to himself, Hugly reached into his pack and began pulling listless dibeetles out and putting them into an array on the ground. About half of them were missing at least one leg, which was probably due to their cramped quarters over the last day’s rough journey. Periodically adjusting ones that were sluggardly making an escape, Hugly put his toes and fingers before them. Matching a dibeetle to each, he put three aside and then declared, “Twenty.”

Truck looked to his pack in the moment, feeling a little embarrassed for him.

Voices were heard as the front door opened and closed. Soon, a woman and a large man rounded the corner. They were both wearing heavily stained smocks.

“Meeky!” said the woman affectionately, as she stepped forward and scratched her nails in a petting, over Hugly’s thin-haired scalp.

The man put his hands on his hips in mild disapproval of Hugly and glanced a bit at Truck, who sat watching. Hugly never looked up, but kept his head down, diligently attending the dibeetles in the neat little arch he had placed them.

Once the woman turned and looked directly acknowledging Truck, he introduced himself and apologized for not getting up. “He rescued me from a dragon yesterday. Most amazing!” said Truck, as the thought put a smile upon his face.

“Gallium fighters at Dead Tree,” declared Hugly, while being extra diligent to the insects before him.

The man’s brow went down discontentedly. “What the devil? Is the war coming here?”, he queried to the air. The woman looked to him with the same concern. “Are they conscripting, maybe?” He shrugged his lips about, before he turned the corner and reentered the house.

Looking at Truck, the woman pointed to herself and then in the direction of the door, “I’m Della, and that’s Carter.”

From a stack of them, Della picked a woven basket and filled it with the dibeetles. Carter returned and set on the bench a large, husk-wrapped wedge of powder-covered white cheese and two large wooden cups filled to the brim with milk, saying in a friendly tone to Truck, “Refresh yourselves and get a wash up. We have work calling us.”

Before following Carter inside, Della gave Hugly a thin silver coin about the size of his fingernail. She called him “Meeky” again and listed a few other things she would like him to bring before the snow came.

After Della departed, Truck produced a knife and began sectioning from the cheese. “They’re nice,” he said to Hugly, who was now drinking his fat-rich milk in deep gulps.

Hugly stopped to breathe. “She wants spotted dumbugs. My red moon birth sign. I can’t never find ‘em.”

They ate cheese and biscuits and washed up in the cold water before readying themselves for travel again. Hugly put the remaining three dibeetles in a basket. He set them on the stoop, rapped on the door, and started off down the road, pushing Truck on the wheel.

The sun peaked as they came west out of the depression and the day began to warm. Hugly only stopped to replace the worn wheel from a fresh green marshy supply that was close to the road.

Running this farmland, into the afternoon, they finally crested the root hill of an enormous misshapen alder tree that they had been seeing for some time in the distance. Nearby, tall grasses carpeted a small glen surrounded by a variety of smaller leafless trees. Following around the base of the hill suddenly revealed a low, brick-built square, topped with a split-wood counter on the roadside. Next to it, there was a short path upward that led to a home that could not be seen unless one were directly in front of it.

The tiny hillock home was set within the cleave of two large stones that had forced the tree to grow an opening above it. The front wall appeared as an odd face with a tall, thin, round-top door at the center, as if it were the home’s mouth, proclaiming. Three high openings, spiraling deeply inward, were conically narrowed down to divided glass polygonal windows, providing a pair of faceted eyes and a nose. A broad, single sloping roof with a large hinged flap and several stone chimneys were built into this, giving something of a cave above, where in some late summers, various creatures would attempt to make a home. This, of course, could be very dangerous. So the owner, Foster Cousins, having dealt with this a number of times, simply ran a smoldering pitch in the emberhearths whenever this happened. The smoke would rapidly drive out anything, and those that were driven out, would never return.

Saplings had come in the last few years and so too had come their bits of shading in the summer days that helped to cool the home, along with a large furry hemlock, whose broadening had grown to cut the sun off early in the summer afternoons. All in all, it was a cozy, insulated place that stayed extraordinarily warm in winter and required little upkeep.

Hugly back-pulled Truck up the path to the flat area before the home. He staged him in the shade near two out-buildings, where he removed Truck’s packs and set them by the house door, which he then rapped his knuckles on before pulling much of his pack apart on the stoop.

A moment later, the door swung inward, and out came a plump, middle-aged woman with a pleasant smile and rosy red cheeks. A pair of tiny spectacles were wire-suspended from one of several firm, rounded knurls of graying hair above her forehead. She wore soft ferret leather shoes and a frilled, long dress of light blue with sleeves. Around her neck were several gold chains—all of which dangled something useful, such as a magnified monocle, keys, a soft clump of bitumen for starting embers, a small grip-shaped smoking pipe, and even a small shaker of salt.

Hugly looked directly at her.

“Huuuuuggs…” she said affectionately, as she reached out and took hold of him at his side. Hugly looked away uncontrollably, and the woman turned his head back and scolded, “Come now,” before stepping back and asking expectantly, “What did you bring me?”

Hugly reached for his pack and began extricating even more from it. A half minute later, Truck drew in a loud, deep breath. For from the moment Isha Maera had stepped out, he had been laughing so hard that no sound was escaping from him. Now that he had breathed, he was silently laughing even harder, with his face turning bright red, as little successive shots of pressured air escaped his throat in rapid rhythm.

Surprised, Isha Maera jerked her head his way and focused on him as realization came to her.

“Truck Bonesift, what are you doing here?”

Truck’s eyes drew wide, and his brows shot up, as he took another breath and loudly began to bellow a hearty laugh. Hugly began to laugh with him.

While she strode toward him across the dirt landing, holding her dress pinned to her thigh, Truck managed to say to her, “Isha Maera Bonesift, you have become our mother.”

“What on earth are you doing here?” she asked in a choppy tempo as she reached him and hugged him in his seat. “How long have you been here?” she now asked as she made a leading gesture for him to follow her. “Why are you just sitting there? Come inside.”

He put his hand beneath and shifted himself. “I’m in need,” he explained, extending a hand toward Hugly, who quickly came over, turned around, cinched Truck up his back and moved towards the door.

Isha Maera stood mouth agape at this before collecting herself and rushing ahead of them. As they neared the door, Truck looked out across the road to the broad field that gently sloped away until it met an area of tall brown grass that followed a short stone wall. In the field were a pair of magpies casually picking around for insects. “

They’re

awfully close.” Truck noted. Isha Maera looked out at them with an eyebrow up. She pursed her lips. “Oh, they’re back.” She said. “They’ve been rummaging that field for years now. I think they have a nest nearby.”