30 Days of Character Development Challenge - day 16
16.) Are there any blood relatives that your character is particularly close with, besides the immediate ones? Cousins, Uncles, Grandfathers, Aunts, et cetera. Are there any others that your character practically considers a blood relative?
Ebonhawke was never a place to find good climbing trees, especially during the sieges. What trees there were lacked the necessary low branches or were too spindly and weak to hold even a small person’s weight. Boys in Ebonhawke grew up climbing rubble, cliff ledges, rocks. Girls might have grown up climbing the same thing for all Vrenille knew—he’d never known many girls his age nor cared that he didn’t. For his part he climbed rubble and rocks.
He was good at it too at thirteen. He’d climbed most of the city at one point or another, or so it sometimes felt, and he could manage to scramble his way up onto rooftops, wriggle through holes and squeeze into narrow crevices to make hideouts in spots most residents had forgotten (or just didn’t care) existed. He had a lot of time for this—beyond assuring that he was literate and numerate, no one had bothered to see about his education or pressed him to attend school. As long as he spent his days out of the house, no one asked or cared much where he was, and it had been this way for what felt like an eternity—two years at least; long enough that he barely remembered how it felt for it to be any other way.
Today he had set his sights upon a wall. Not a particularly impressive wall, he felt, but so positioned that it would give a view down the slope towards the square while remaining largely hidden from anyone who might be spied from atop it. It was perhaps seven foot tall at its highest—a remainder of what he assumed had once formed a barrier between house and street. Probably it had been hit with a ballista fired from somewhere out in the Fields, back in the years when the charr still managed regular volleys with newly modified war machines whose ever-improved range allowed them to pelt the human stronghold for a few days or nights, until the Vanguard could devise its own way to strike their new firing line.
All that had been before Vrenille was born. In his parents’ time, he guessed, though it wasn’t as if he could ask them. In the intervening years, No Man’s Land had stretched foot by foot, and the charr engineers (some people said) found their attention drawn elsewhere or otherwise (others claimed) had just been beaten by human resourcefulness.
If someone asked Vrenille, he would have said that it sounded damn boring spending all day trying to make a trebuchet clear just one more meter. He couldn’t see why they’d bothered in the first place, and since the whole siege business sounded equally boring the stupid charr should just give up and go home.
But nobody asked Vrenille and he never figured that to matter much. What mattered more was that right now up on that wall in the slanted afternoon light of late autumn the world would be warm and golden. The shadows stretched long over the uneven ground, the broken stonework collapsed into piles where grass grew up through the cracks. Only as he grew closer Vrenille discovered that there was already somebody up upon the wall.
He had auburn hair and sharp brown eyes, and his skin was the color of wheat. Behind him the sun formed a penumbra as Vrenille craned his head to look up, squinting against the glare. It took some moments for him to decide that this boy (for that’s what he was) was probably near his age, though likely younger since even seated above he looked quite small. He was shoddily dressed and not very well scrubbed, but since Vrenille wasn’t all that well washed or clothed himself this hardly bothered him.
There was a stalemate silence of several long seconds before the boy on the wall spoke: “There’s a better way over there.” He kicked his heels lazily, looking down over the broken stone edge and pointing.
“I can do it.” Vrenille’s pride bristled slightly as he held his course.
The other boy waited. He didn’t offer a hand. Eventually though, Vrenille pulled himself up on top of the wall, slung his legs over the edge and sat beside him. They were silent.
“I was here first, you know,” the sharp-eyed boy pointed out, not bothering to draw his gaze from the street below.
Vrenille favored him with a sidelong glance. It was clear to him that the boy didn’t own the wall just by virtue of sitting on it first. They’d each climbed it in their own time—it sort of made it something they’d done together. Maybe this was the question: were they going to be rivals? Vrenille didn’t care about being rivals. At length he just said, “So?”
The smaller boy shrugged.
On the street below, a trio of moas ran passed, escaped from their pen. It would be a trio—moas seemed always to fraternize in threes despite all human efforts to consolidate them as mated pairs. To listen to the local moa farmers talk, it was as though the birds' natural state was to confound the whole logic of animal husbandry and form these nonsensical bonds.
From the wall, the pair of boys watched the moa triad lap the central plaza and leg it towards Kestrel Market. About twenty seconds later, a farm girl with switch in hand chased after them at a perfunctory jog. It seemed as though she sensed the futility of her errand but kept at it nonetheless for the sake of getting to call it done, like some token gesture of duty or responsibility.
Presently, at a distance beyond proper earshot, a young man fled into the street pursued by a woman who boxed his ears, scolding him.
“Want some salt pork?” Vrenille pulled the wrapped square of meat from inside a jacket pocket.
“What’s wrong with it?” The boy was all suspicion and mistrust.
“I dunno,” Vrenille shrugged looking at the offending meat as though it must have a flaw that he’d missed. “It’s not very good, I guess. If you don’t want it—“
Vrenille tore the strip in half and passed one part over. Another silence, the two of them eating. They might have been companions.
“What’s your name?” He asked at length.
“Thanks.” A pause. “How old are you?”
The smaller boy shrugged and turned the question around: “How old are you?”
This answer seemed suspect. “You can’t be.”
“You’re littler than me.”
Vrenille couldn’t think of a good counter-argument to that. Fine then, Hakkyuu was thirteen.
Down in the market the moas had formed a congress around a fruit stand, leaving the fruit seller to try to fend them off on all sides. He shooed at the one on the left only to be harangued by the one on the right. He waved his fly whisk at the one behind him, only to lose an apple down the gullet of the one that had moved round the front. And now he had surrendered the stand in favor of going off to yell at the girl with the switch in her hand who, even at this distance, seemed to be lamenting the tiresomeness of her lot in life. He gesticulated, the moas gorged, the girl looked bored of it all.
Seated on the wall, Hakkyuu and Vrenille made up ribald dialog for them, a pair of ventriloquists with real life marionettes whose strings were beyond their control. Their fruit seller punctuated every sentence with a produce-related explicative—“bugger me with a lemon,” “raspberry farts.” Their farm girl wanted the whole thing done so she could go watch sheep copulate. Only the moas seemed to have a modicum of culture or sense, carefully selecting the choicest fruits from the stall to feast on. The two boys clutched their sides with laughter.
Finally the girl drove the moas away and their entertainment subsided. The sun had sunk low.
“You gotta go home for supper?” Hakkyuu asked after a time. “Mom gonna be looking for you?” Indeed, there were sounds in the distance of mothers shouting, lights in windows beginning to flicker on.
The answer seemed to raise a pique of interest. “You got a dad?”
“No,” Hakkyuu had managed to find an interesting stick, perhaps blown down from a tree somewhere. "You got somewhere to go though? I could show you a place if you don’t got somewhere.” It was a generous offer.
“Uncle’s old girlfriend. My people were merchants. Last time he left, he left me with her. Then the charr got him too. I stay out of her hair so she hasn’t kicked me out yet. What about you?”
Hakkyuu scraped at a crack in the rocks with his twig. “I just stay around. Don’t have a group that I run with, but sometimes I stay in their places with them.”
This Vrenille understood easily. There were plenty of orphans and street rats in Ebonhawke and a lot of them banded together, pooled their energy and resources. Being part of such gangs came at a cost though—each had its own pecking order, its own hierarchies and internal politics. The liberty and independence of unaffiliated status meant that food and shelter were never assured.
“How long ago your folks die?” Vrenille asked him.
“Yeah, same. I never knew my mom. Dad bought it when I was five, uncle about two years ago."
“Not much,” Vrenille shrugged. “There’s this tavern I go to where Loraina works—she’s my uncle’s ex. They let me bring ale to the tables for tips sometimes and there’s some Vanguard who go in there who want their armor polished or their leathers oiled. What about you?”
“Just running messages for people, errands, deliver stuff, things like that.”
Vrenille turned it all over in his mind for a moment. It didn’t take him long to decide. Sometimes a person just got a sense for these things. “You wanna see my hideout?”
Hakkyuu’s skeptical look returned. He understood the implications. “You sure?”
“Yeah,” Vrenille gave a confident nod, positioning himself to drop down from the wall onto a flat patch of ground below. He knew what he was doing inviting Hakkyuu into his space: no locks, no doors, the only security was the secrecy of the location.
The span of a breath, then Hakkyuu’s feet hit the ground by his side and he dusted his hands on his trousers. Invitation accepted, the bond was being forged.
“It’s this way,” Vrenille said, taking the lead. He felt light inside. They were a pair and he was not alone.
It was evening then, and everything was beginning to come alive.
