The New World

I'm still working on Leyla's current adventure and will post the rest of the story when it's finished.  In the meantime here's something I wrote yesterday about another young girl in extraordinary circumstances.

     Maya was two years old when the Sky People came to her village and took everyone away.  She did not remember anything of her village.  The grownups told stories of the day the Sky Men descended in their metal birds that roared louder than thunder.  Maya did not remember thunder either so that description meant nothing to her. 

     She spent the next seven years in the metal cave.  The cave had trees and edible plants and a lake where her people had built huts and fished.  The cave filled with light every morning and dimmed to near total darkness every evening.  But the sky was metal so they knew it was a cave. 

     Every week they were visited by a Sky Person.  It was usually a Sky Man.  It was not always the same Sky Man and a few times it was a Sky Woman.  All the Sky People were pale of skin with golden hair and eyes of blue or green.  None of the Sky People looked like Maya’s people.  The visitor would speak with the tribal elders and sometimes with the rest of the tribe.  The visitor also brought bundles of meat.  The Sky People never said what kind of animal the meat came from.  The older members of the tribe said it did not taste like the animals they knew from the old times.  But no one got sick from the meat and they grew accustomed to the taste. 

     Everyone noticed the change in the light.  It gradually changed over the years to a reddish hue.  The Sky People said the light was changing to be more like the light of their new home.  The older tribe members were bothered by the red light but Maya and the other children did not mind.  Light was light.  They adapted to seeing things with a red tint. 

     When Maya was nine years old, the Sky Person visitor gathered the tribe and announced that they would be leaving.  The tribe would sleep tonight and when they woke up, they would be at their new home.  Maya lay awake in her family’s hut that night.  She was too excited to sleep.  A low noise at the door drew her attention.  In the dim red night light she could make out another child there.  She got up and went over.  It was Ranga, a village boy her own age. 

     “I couldn’t sleep,” he said.

     “Me neither,” Maya said.  “I want to see how the Sky People move us.”

     The two children sat outside Maya’s hut and waited. 

     “Do you smell that?” Maya asked. 

     “What?”

     “That sweet smell in the air.”

     “Oh, I smell it now.”  Ranga’s head started to droop.  “I’m tired.  Wake me up when the Sky People show up.”

     Maya was suddenly sleepy, too.  She and Ranga fell into unconsciousness as did everyone else in the village still awake.

    

     The tribe woke by the shore of a large lake next to a forest.  Nearby there were baskets of fruit and vegetables alongside piles of blankets and new clothes of rough cloth.  There was also an assortment of axes, shovels and other hand tools.  A stack of small bags contained seeds.

     The sun in the sky was red and according to the grownups was larger than the sun they were used to.  Maya, Ranga, and the other children were not bothered by the red sun.  They were too young to remember the yellow sun of their old world.  The children ran around laughing and playing while the grownups discussed what the tribe would do.

     A new village was quickly established and huts constructed.  The tribe found edible plants in the forest.  There were wild animals much like the game the tribe had hunted on their old world.  These new animals tasted remarkably like the meat the Sky People had brought the tribe in the metal cave.  Over the next year the tribe experimented with the seeds to find out which ones grew under which conditions.

     The grownups sometimes spoke of missing their old world.  The stars in the night sky were different and that made some of them afraid.  Maya and the other children had adapted to the new world and considered it their home.  She was happy there.  But sometimes she looked up at the night sky and wondered if she would ever see the Sky People again.