Prejudice

Chapter One

The girl-woman ran.

At first she had run down paths she had known all her life. The dark did not matter. Memory placed her feet.

Now she threw herself down a trail visible only as a blacker gash between half-seen trees. She had fallen so often that her palms and forearms were a raw red ruin. As she crashed through the forest, she made noise enough to set roosting birds flapping skyward.

It did not matter. She would not be missed, yet. When dawn came, she would be quiet. When her brothers came to hunt her, she would be quiet. For now, only speed was important. Nothing else mattered. Not the branches that cut her as they whipped across her path, not the salty taste that rose to her mouth from her burning lungs, not the fiery ache in her belly or the blood that still seeped from between her legs. Nothing mattered. Just distance.

So she ran.

Dawn found her staggering with tiredness, splashing down a narrow creek bed that ran fast with icy mountain water. When the sky finally had lightened enough for it to be certain in which direction the sun would rise, she stopped, allowing herself a moment of panting rest and a thin-lipped smile of satisfaction. The pink and gold haze of new daylight painted the brow of the hills in front of her, as she'd hoped; her sense of direction had not betrayed her through the night. She was as far as she'd ever been from home.

She would, she decided, follow the creek for the first part of the morning. Putting more distance between herself and her brothers was important. But she must not keep following the easy path; once the full heat of the day was upon her, she would drink her fill and then head up into the hills once more. Eventually, she would need to find a place to hole up and rest, then find some food.

As the sunlight strengthened, so the creek-bed widened. The rush of the water slowed, and it felt warmer around her feet. A fallen tree ahead had opened the forest canopy enough to cast a thick band of sunshine across her path. Magnolia trees clustered about the banks, their great white flowers brilliant in the sudden light.

The fallen tree proved to be an annoyance. Wedged across the creek, with its branches raking the water, it had sieved a great pile of floating debris from the stream - mostly sticks, leaves, and clumps of less identifiable muck. It would be tricky to climb over, yet the riverbanks were also steep enough to make her hesitate. She stopped, weighing her options, and her eye fell upon something in the pile. It was the color that caught her eye - a greenish-yellow that seemed almost to glow in the sunlight. She'd never seen anything natural that color.

For all her tiredness, her curiosity got the better of her, and she bent to examine it. She pulled at it, and it unraveled - a length of brightly colored old-timey string. She was too tired to laugh or dance for joy, but she felt a deep sense of relief. To find such a treasure in such a place was a gift from the Earth Mother, a sure omen of success. Old-timey stuff was generally inexplicable or useless, but string - string that wouldn't rot had a thousand uses.

She pulled hungrily at her end of string. A tangled clump came loose from the debris pile, but then it snagged again. She began to dig into the mound, hoping to work the remainder free. Almost immediately, she found another potential treasure - the grooved curve she recognized as the mouth of an ancient bottle. She tried not to get excited. Such bottles turned up all the time, usually too broken to hold water. But intact, they were greatly prized. Her fingers all but trembled as she worked to tease the bottle loose.

It was whole. She smiled to herself as she rinsed the compacted dirt from the inside, unable to believe her luck. With the knife she had stolen, a bottle for water, and enough string for several snares, she felt confident she would at least live to see the first snow of winter. The Earth Mother had granted her a reprieve.