I learnt about the runners in much the same matter of fact way that schools teach children about all professions that make our economy tick. There are farmers to plant the crops, miners to bring us up ores and minerals, builders to make our walls and, my teacher taught me, there are runners to relay our messages. Runners can lope like wolves for days, resting briefly to eat and drink and then trotting on, always moving. Or so the stories say. I’d never actually met one, other than to pass in the street.
For all their peculiarities, they weren’t all that distinguishable from anyone else. There were many leanly muscular people, particularly in my part of town. Their one true defining feature was a winged tattoo, a physical representation of a prayer.
My mother told me stories of other far flung countries, wild and exotic, where there are animals that are big enough to carry people on their backs and tame enough not to think them a tasty lunch. I used to imagine such a place and marvel. Perhaps they would be scaly, like a very large lizard, crawling quickly over the low ground but prone to napping in the sun their glinting bellies up. Or like a massive house cat with long flowing fur that one would have to trim regularly.
I have a drawing somewhere of a stick figure girl with a very large smile napping on the back of a small barn sized feline, nestled in the fur that curved up safely like a basket. I was very fond of that idea.
We have our goats, of course, which can be laden with packs but they are not faster than even the most novice runner. A sheep, which might gamble and frolic, is both too small and too prone to falling over to bear even the smallest teenager over any distance. We’ve tried using birds with some mediocre success. A well-trained raven can be enticed to carry a one-way message to a location it already knows, or presumably, if there was a trail of very shiny objects. But that is of limited use, of course. Most ravens would barely even wait around to see if the message receiver wanted to write a reply.
There is no animal in Westal that could equal a runner for convenience, utility, and trustworthiness. I knew this and I summoned all this knowledge of my people, our culture and our history as I told my dear Lori that I was leaving Wardwatch to go and become a dirt-covered society-shunning novitiate athlete in the name of improving my prospects. Which wasn’t all that convincing, even to me.
Lori did not look convinced. She had caught me as I returned home, still surprised by the way the day – and my life – was turning out. No doubt watching from her window, Lori had burst out on an intercept course. I was thankful as I still hadn’t figure out how to tell my mother that I had accepted the offer and that I would be leaving in the early evening.
“I’m just not sure it’s for you Anya.” She shrugged helplessly before essentially repeating herself. “It’s just not very you.” The emphasis on the last word was biting, primarily because it was true. “Sure, we played as kids, chasing each other up and down the streets, and you certainly aren’t unfit. But there’s a thousand leagues between not unfit and a runner.”
“So what? I’ve never even tried. Why can’t it be for me? I could be like Anvil!”
It was a well-known and oft-repeated story of a poor beleaguered young man whose village was raided by invaders. They sailed in on their ships with fire in their fists and ears closed to the pleas of the dying. Anvil had crawled out of the wreckage of his smouldering house and with smoke wracking his lungs had begun to move, following the sky and the stars to the nearest town with soldiers.
Anvil had known it was too late for his people, who already lay butchered and dying. At best, they had fled into the woods, cold and defenceless. He staggered on, fleeing the invaders on trembling legs. Perhaps they were even at his heels, baying like hounds in the dark.
As the black deepened around him, Anvil sped up from a shuffle to a walk to a jog until he broke from the wood like a deer, his wild dark hair as antlers catching the dawn. The guards on the walls of Smithsmoke spotted him coming and their cries roused the soldiers as they pried open the gates to let Anvil in, shivering and exhausted. Too late for his own townsfolk, but it was not so for Smithsmoke to raise their blades in defence and repel the raiders because of Anvil’s courage and determination.
“I don’t understand Anya. Please, explain it to me!” Lori looked at me urgently, as though it wasn’t so much about the fact that she didn’t believe I could be a runner, but that she didn’t believe that I believed it. “Why do you need to do this, instead of waiting a year and trying again?”
She didn’t understand why I would settle for something that didn’t light a fire in me and I tried to find the words to put voice to what I felt. I thought of Anvil, a man turned into a legend and a tale preserved in the throats of men who spoke of him to their children, daring them to dream of greatness and heroism over defeat. Now that I was older, the story seemed inexorably sad. I pictured the young man with tear-streaked cheeks, newly orphaned and lost. But the kernel of the story rang true to me, that someone ordinary could strive to do something that echoed down the ages.
I looked at the ground, my shoes scuffing in the dirt and it burst out of me.
“My mother has lived here her entire life and she has never done anything!” Lori blinked. I pressed on urgently. “I don’t mean that in a cruel way, but it is true. Can’t you see it? She has lived here for years, worked in the same shop for even longer. She has loved me and raised me but every day has been the same.”
It was true for Lori’s family too, a truth that I felt must echo down this entire street and out into the houses around us. We were all good, decent, hardworking folk who had never done anything of note. We rose in the morning to the beat of a new day, we worked, we ate, we laughed and we slept as weary as we had awoken.
“Sofia has worked herself and given me so much so that I can go and do something. Anything. It’s like Andrew was saying last night; if all else fails he’ll go and join the military. This is my something else. You’re right, I don’t love running or being sweaty or the idea of trekking miles and sleeping outside, but I love the idea of being out there, out beyond Wardwatch, out where I can see things that my mother has never seen. Out there where there might be a very large cat with very long fur that can deliver messages with me sleeping on its back.
“So yeah, I’m not going to be Anvil. I’m not going to be the greatest runner that ever took breath, not even close. But I am going to try and if nothing else when my training is over I can make a mint ferrying lover’s notes between rich and soppy nobles.”
I wasn’t even sure where that tirade had come from and it left me panting with emotion, a tear drying on my cheek as I realised that every word of it was true. My voice was softer as I finished my melodramatic speech.
“I’ve gotten up every day of my life and done things that don’t interest me. I’ve written essays and studied and patched clothes and done a thousand and one other things that I would much rather not. So what’s one more in the face of all that? I can learn to do one more thing so that at least I can have a story to tell.”
We were close friends. Lorianne and I had grown up together, shared secrets and been each other’s first kiss when we curious and too nervous to approach anyone else, and yet I think that this was the most truth I have ever spoken. It came from somewhere deep inside me, somewhere that I was only beginning to recognise. Perhaps, I wondered, this is what it felt like to grow older.
Lori sighed and slung an arm over my shoulder, drawing us closer together. I breathed in deeply, inhaling her light perfume and resting my forehead on her shoulder.
“I won’t pretend to understand, but it this is really what you want then you should go for it.”
I exhaled deeper. “I kind of already have,” I admitted. “I need to meet Mistress Farrow at sixth bell.”
“Bloody typical,” she snorted. “You know you haven’t even asked me about myself yet.”
“Shit,” I jerked upright to look her in the face. “You’re right! I didn’t even ask you. Some kind of shitty-ass friend I am. Did you get it? You got it, didn’t you?” The smile that blossomed and transformed her face told me everything I needed to know and I buried my friend in a tighter hug.
“I’m so proud of you, you’re going to make an amazing scribe.”
The role of the scribe was a bit broader than the name suggested. They could take minutes in courtrooms or important functions, writing down events as they occurred to preserve in the books of history. Or they could make painstaking copies of texts, distributing them to archives for safekeeping or to local schools as educational scrolls.
Lori’s dream, however, was to work in the archives on the grandest of texts. The best tomes had gorgeous illustrations that required a delicate hand to refresh. A skilled scribe could gather vibrant plants and turn them into a variety of inks with which to paint across the page. It would be a long journey, combining a variety of skills, but I knew my friend could do it.
“Maybe I’m going to write a really important missive and you’ll get to carry it for me.”
“Maybe,” I laughed and held her tighter.
