So we go next to the Library, where we have only a month to read before the whole building disappears, and the books with it. You can’t burn anything there because you might send the papers up in flame, but we rip the soft layer from the floor and make blankets of it. Do you know, that soft stuff comes back every time the Library does, but if you try to take it with you when the Library disappears, the soft stuff vanishes too. Same with the books, although I don’t mind when they go, because our Eldest tells stories about the Other Place all year round.
In burning season when the trees catch fire in the heat, we take shelter in the High Tower, which is a stacked-up building taller than the trees and all covered in vines and crawling with creatures—mice and shrews and raccoons. The creatures come there to get away from the smoke and the heat from the trees on fire, like we do. High Tower vanishes quick—you can’t stay for more than a few weeks. If you were standing on one of the tallest stacks of the building when it disappeared, you would fall right to your death, which is what happened to Truley’s mom when she went back for something she forgot.
The last part of the burning season, we try to get to the coast, where it’s cooler. There are sanctuaries that come and go much quicker than High Tower, like the Room With Medicines, which stays for maybe a day. And the Place Of Soft Seats—cushy chairs lined up in long rows under the trees—which you can only use for about half a day on your way to somewhere longer lasting.
I used to think that the good sanctuaries were created by magic from the Other Place, in order to give us aid. Now I’m older, I understand different: The Other Place doesn’t create sanctuaries out of nowhere—our Eldest says the sanctuaries are “ghosts of our ruined past, come to haunt us as much as to save us.”
Some of the oldest ones will tell you that they remember a sanctuary—or one that their fathers had told them about—that isn’t quite like the others. Because when it vanishes, it takes you with it. It launches you not back into the past but into the Other Place. Into a land of plenty—always enough food, enough medicine. Babies born all through the warm seasons and no one freezing in the cold. Sanctuaries that stay put. Houses instead of tents, and nothing ever torn down. No need to move on to the next place. No need to war with another band over what you don’t have enough of.
This is the reason I have put off my coming-of-age until now. I must do my Special Work, which is to find this sanctuary some say doesn’t exist, the Transporting Sanctuary.
Once every few years we might travel down to the Ruined City, to look for quarry if times are hard or we’ve missed an important sanctuary. But the Ruined City has a bad air. I’ve never gone very close myself. From a long way off I can see all kinds of High Towers that aren’t sanctuaries but just old buildings stuck to the spot and probably ruled by hordes of rats. We only go there if we’re desperate, because it’s the lair of the evil mages, shadowy men who want only to destroy everything good. Times have happened that some kin who went into the city didn’t come back out. That’s what tells us the mages live there. That, and the foul look of the place.
The mages are a plague to us, venturing out in secret from their lair and setting spells to work against us. Long ago, they were banished from the Other Place, and they’ve been in a rage ever since. They know they can never get back there, so they plot to destroy it. In the meantime, they play spiteful tricks on anyone they think has it better than they do.
It was like that once when Artak killed his first wild dog. We roasted it on the spit, but then after we ate it, it appeared right back on the spit again. We said to ourselves it was magic from the Other Place helping us eat our fill, so we ate again, and again the meat appeared back on the spit. But this time we realized some trouble: We’d eaten the meat twice, but our stomachs felt emptier than ever. It was the evil mages—they were taking the meat from our stomachs and putting it back on the spit so we couldn’t ever get full. We had to pack up camp and leave that place so the evil spell wouldn’t spread to our other food.
Sometimes the mages conjure up not-sanctuaries with food all rotten, or with great machines that grind and scream. Once when I was out scraping bark for medicines, I saw a house appear like a beautiful dream, bright yellow with a peaked roof to let the rain and snow slide off. But when I went in through the door I saw the back wall had been smashed in. There was so much rubble everywhere it was like someone had grabbed the house and shook it and shook it until everything was bits and pieces. There was something under the rubble too, which I couldn’t see but smelled rotten. I turned and went out of the house. I ran hard until the bright yellow was lost in the trees.