Chapter One: The Wilting Slopes
The entire row of radishes lay withered on the dirt, their leaves dry as paper. Moma crouched down to get a better look, hoping there would be some sign of hope at their centers. Her knees might complain, but they’d served her well over the years and still had some life to them yet. She’d been luckier than most and could still clamber over the bigger rocks and up the path to the mountain’s peak. Her neighbors were each older than her, and had never been as eager to forage at the boundaries.
She turned over the leaves, careful not to let them crack.
No, there was no hope left for the radishes. They were the last radish seeds she had, and unless something surprising happened, there was no chance now she or anyone else would get to taste them again.
She stirred at the dusty earth and pushed herself back up.
Selan, the only man left, called from a bench in front of his door. “Did they make it?”
Moma shook her head. “Not this year.”
“If not now, then never.” He said something else, something she couldn’t quite hear, but they’d lived near each other for so long that she didn’t need to hear the words to know he wasn’t surprised. Selan leaned to rest his back against the wall of his house, which had been built into the gray mountain. Each of them lived in a small house—a single room, really—carved like swallow’s nests into the stone. There were twelve doors for the twelve Elders, but only four got any use now.
Selan rapped a bundle of thin sticks against the stone behind him. The sound brought her right to the start, right to the moment her mother had shaken the same sort of sticks over her head during a childhood fever. The two moments, one happening now and one so faded in time it barely ticked anymore, overlapped each other so that while Selan made the noise, it was her mother’s hand she saw, just above her brow.
Selan coughed, and she walked right out of the memory like it was made of fog.
“I’ll ask the others if they have any more.” When Selan started to speak, she held up a hand. “I know, but it’s worth having them check their back cupboards once again.”
“Hope is the pride of youth,” he said.
“I may be younger than you, but that doesn’t make me young. It just makes you older.” She smiled, trying to soften the words. Three years of constant cloud cover—and very little rain—had taken its toll on the Wilting Slopes. The famed village of elders had dried up like her radishes.
She left Selan behind and made her way down the row of houses. They’d been dug out of the stone so long ago, no one knew who or how it had been done. Each house had a wooden door divided in half, top to bottom, so they could let in light during the day. A chalky path stretched between the houses and a narrow bed of lavender, sage, and sweet sorrel. These plants were still alive, though not as robust as they’d been before the cloudcover. Below the flowerbed lay the terraced gardens, each bed its own theme—health, flavor, beauty. A series of half-moon pipes carried water down the mountain side, but they only dripped, caked with mud and silt.
The radishes weren’t in their usual spot because Moma had thought they’d have a better chance if they were closer to her watering can. Sighing, she went to the sandy-colored door belonging to Kaila, a woman ten years her senior and fifty times as knowledgeable. Kaila knew each plant, right down to its tiniest particles, and how to turn them into healing tisanes or powders. She knew if a plant was at its peak by its scent, and she had taught Moma as much as she could over the years. It was this skill that had kept them here and alive for this long. The rest had all left, either down the slope or buried in it.
“Come in, Moma, I know it’s you.”
Inside, Kaila lay on her narrow bed covered by a blanket stuffed with feathers and wool. She had grown so frail, there was barely a body to cover anymore, but her eyes were bright and keen, and her mind still sharp.
“How are you doing?” Moma asked.
“I’m the same as I was last night.” She pushed herself up onto her elbows while Moma fixed her pillow behind her back. “If you’re here for seeds, I don’t have any. What was left got stolen by the mice. Even the ones I kept in a jar. Don’t know how they got that open, but they did.”
At least the mice would survive. “I came for seeds, but I’ll stay for the company, if that’s alright with you.”
Kaila smirked, but it was weak and faint, her muscles having lost their strength. “You can stay.”
Moma visited the other two elders next, one writing his daily record and the other sweeping the blown dust out of her house. She left a pile on the chalk path to be taken by the wind, as had always been the custom.
No one had any seeds or bulbs. They were, after years of saving and careful cultivation, at their end. All that was left were the wild plants, most of them inedible, and the dried strips of fish from Selan’s last trip to the lake on the other side of the mountain.
