Bannerless (The Bannerless Saga 1)

Enid and Dak never had to walk more than a day to the next village, and between those larger settlements, dozens of households had rooted in along the Coast Road. Most could be counted on to put up a couple of strangers for a night or two, especially if they helped with chores and sang some songs, making at least an effort to earn their keep. They knew one of theirs might need the favor returned someday.

Some of the villages they went to were more structured than Enid was used to. More formal, more . . . rigid. In a village called Saved, for instance, Dak found a spot that looked like a central gathering place and began tuning his guitar. Before he’d sung a note, a committee member arrived to explain to him what rate of exchange he could expect: an hour of playing for a place to sleep, six songs for a meal. Dak would look on these bargains with amusement, especially when the committee member seemed relieved that he wasn’t going to haggle. He sang because he liked it, and because he could usually count on some recompense for it. Meals, drinks, even a hat or some mending for his boots. But Saved wasn’t like Haven, where what people gave him seemed more like gifts or gestures of gratitude than payment.

Some places, though, were very strict about recompense and fairness. Very serious about resource management, and they considered music to be a resource like any other. Wouldn’t want anyone to get more than they’d earned, because that was what doomed the old world. Enid could understand, she supposed, but it didn’t feel the same as sharing.

Enid had credits from Plenty—a letter that stated she had the backing of her household, that she had resources if she needed them—and her own muscles and effort to support her. She reassured herself that she wouldn’t need Dak to sing for her bed as well. Usually, she did chores: weeding, chopping wood, some light cooking, and mending. A little of everything. She didn’t mind; she wasn’t dead weight. Dak even taught her a few songs, harmonies they could sing to add an extra kick to his music. She could hold a tune, but her voice wasn’t artful, didn’t draw people in by its tones the way Dak’s did. She didn’t sing much—and she’d rather listen to him anyway.

And they made love. Sometimes at the excuse of a picnic lunch or for no reason at all they’d leave the road, run off to a beautiful copse of willows along a pretty creek, and end up tumbled together, peeling off their clothes to soak up the sun and each other. Rainy season was coming—best get all the sun they could while they had the chance. Did they really need an excuse to roll around in the wild for an afternoon? They had food—not a lot but enough—they had water, and they had each other. They had exactly what they needed and no more. It was a good way to live, she thought.

Dak wanted to be south by the time of the first rains. More shelter there, he said. They could walk in the rain, but it was best if they had a place to dry out each night.

A week out, they saw the ruins.

The Coast Road went into some hills, rising gently enough that the walk wasn’t difficult, and they almost didn’t notice until they paused at a crest and looked out to what felt like hundreds of miles in all directions, if not to the ends of the world, then maybe to the ends of their world. Pockets of settlements huddled in valleys up and down the road; smoke from their hearth fires rose up, and flocks of bleating sheep dotted windblown pastures. Clusters of windmills reached up hillsides, spinning lazily.

But west, not so far in the distance as she would have expected, was the big ruin, what had been a city of millions a hundred years before. Enid couldn’t imagine a million people in a space like a city, much less in the whole world, though folk who talked about such things said there must have been billions of people still living—we just couldn’t get to them to count, and the world was too big. These days, there was a lot more space between people. A lot fewer roads and radios connecting them.

The city was a gray mountain that had collapsed on itself, its ruins projecting from the surrounding landscape like the shards of a broken bone. Those struts had been buildings once, towering hundreds of feet tall, and the space between them had been wide streets. Hard to make out more details than that—from where they stood, it was mostly a stretch of color, a gap in the land where something had been taken away. The air over the city was hazy, almost smoky, as if the ruins produced their own atmosphere.

Through the years of the Fall, the dense settlement had been inundated and washed away. Pieces broke and couldn’t be repaired until all of it was broken. It was a marvel, how quickly a structure became a ruin. “If we didn’t save it, it didn’t get saved,” Auntie Kath used to say. Meaning, they could only save so much. Those first years, they did triage on the whole of civilization. Auntie Kath said that they’d been shocked: much of the old world was gone or useless within a decade or

two. They looked around one day, and the Fall was over, and they were living After.

You could only save what you worked to save—what everyone came together to save. If you didn’t work to save anything—you saved nothing. That was the city in ruins.

Looking at it, Enid felt both revulsion and longing, urging her to flee from it and race toward it at the same time.

“Auntie Kath says they used to talk about ways to save the cities. There just weren’t enough people, and then the buildings started coming down, and it wasn’t safe to go there anymore. But I’m thinking it might be safe now—everything that’s likely to fall down has probably already fallen, yeah?”

“But is there anything worth saving in there?” Dak said.

“I don’t know.” That was why she wanted to go check. And to bear witness. Had Kath ever gone back, after helping to build Haven?

“Who’s Auntie Kath? You talk about her a lot.”

“She was the Last.” And yes, the word felt like a title rather than a description. The Last of them. There might have been others up and down the Coast Road—even now, there might still be folk who remembered what it was like before. But maybe not. Someone with vague childhood memories of things like television and airplanes wouldn’t be able to explain, not like Kath. “She was alive before the Fall. Really old when I knew her. But she told stories.”

“Must have been great stories.”

“Yeah, they were. I learned a lot.”

“Anything useful?”

She looked at him. “Everything’s useful to someone, I imagine. I want to know everything.”

“But really. I bet she talked about things like airplanes and orchestras. You think anyone will ever see an airplane fly again?” A laugh touched his voice; he sounded like he was mocking her.

“Then maybe it’s even more important to know about it.”

“That can be your job, then. The Knower of Things.”

Yes, he definitely seemed to be laughing at her, though he had the decency to hide his grin. She frowned and scuffed a foot at the dirt.

“The old world fell because it was broken, Enid,” he said. “We left it behind because it was broken.”

Yes, that was so. But Auntie Kath had so loved to talk about that broken world.

She asked, “You ever been there? To the ruins?”