Bugs 

by Anthony John

Sitting with my back against my guard rock, I carefully turned the pages of the old book I had found in the ruins. I had no idea what it was about, or what it was called, because at that time I couldn’t read. In our village, and in every village around, for as far as anyone known had travelled anyway, only The Sensor was allowed to read. And I knew that if I showed my prize to him, to find out what it was, it would be taken from me. That was the law.

A faded coloured picture showed a green field, with trees, birds, and all types of animals wondering freely on the grass. The Sensor told us once in one of his tedious preaching sessions, that before the bugs came, that was how things were. At the time though I never believed him.

It was mostly because of the bugs that I was on guard duty. Our village had a few small fields, where we grew food, mostly for ourselves, but some to trade. Corn, wheat, pulses, and fruits, we had chickens and a few ewes, but mostly for their fleeces.

Occasionally, at Harvestide, we had spare to trade with the next village. I tasted beef once, and I’ll never forget the succulent flavour of that first single mouthful. We did occasionally have chicken though; if one stopped laying, it would go in the pot, but between us, a few stringy bits in a soup is about all you ever got. Only the Sensor and the elders ever got to eat the ewe-meat.

I heard a crunching sound and was instantly alert, reaching for my bow and flint, as I peered into the gathering gloom. Turning my head this way and that, I tried to pinpoint the source. Silently, I reached up and placed a brightly coloured yellow stone on the very top of my guard rock, warning the others. Oh, Great Name, what was it? Please not bugs. Or gangs. 

The gangs were worse than the bugs. Men on horseback who roamed the countryside, looking for isolated villages, which they would raid, brutally murdering the men, stealing anything of value, and carrying off the women. Taking turns violently raping them before selling them onwards as slaves. Often, they carried off bodies as well, meat for their feasts. You could sometimes find the stripped bones of your loved ones where they camped.

I heard the sound again, a grinding, rattling sound, and knew it immediately. A bug, folding its wings under its iridescent blue-green wing cases. I replaced the yellow stone with a red one and looked around. A red stone on the next post told me Karaig had heard it as well. Good. 

Karaig was older than me, this would be his fifteenth Harvestide, and The Sensor had already selected a wife for him. She wasn’t bad, less homely than many, and a similar age to myself, or perhaps a little older. The comely women are reserved for the elders. The Sensor would perform the Ceremony of Union for them soon. 

Tremblingly, I struck my flint. The fishy smelling oil in the bowl flickered briefly before catching. I partially replaced the lid, not only to hide the flame, but to prevent it burning too fast. The Sensor would clout me if I wasted my oil. Peering fearfully over the top of the bank, I saw it, barely twenty paces away. A bug. A big one. Easily the height of two men, and gorging itself on my corn plants. Bugs’ll eat anything, crop or flesh. One that size could strip a small field in a day. I lit an arrow and raised my bow, took careful aim, and released it with a ‘thronk’.

The sound attracted it, and its head turned toward me. I saw patterns sweeping across its strange, honeycomb-like eyes as it searched. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bright streak from Karaig, as he loosed his arrow. Both struck their mark, the burning wads penetrating deeply into its vulnerable chest, and it screamed in pain. We rushed towards it as it fell, lances in hand. We mustn’t let it escape, even injured as it was; it could bring others. As we got close, its wings started to unfold, too late though. This one was ours, if we could kill it quickly, the hind legs would roast well, bug meat for the whole village.

Nobody knew where the bugs came from. They looked like giant grasshoppers, those tiny creatures that we sometimes found in the fields. Even those we killed though, we had no food to waste on insects. Only bees were allowed to live. 

The Sensor told us that once, long ago, in the gone-days, men experimented with all the creatures. Making them easier to manage, to grow quicker, or to make food faster. He said that in those times, men who numbered beyond counting, did those things to feed all the people who lived in their vast villages. Another thing which he said and I could never believe. No village could ever have been as big as he said they were then.

When we reached the bug, it had collapsed in the dirt, still struggling to unfold its wings. Without hesitation we both impaled it. Karag plunging his lance through its head, and me, deep into its thorax, just as we were taught. It twitched a couple of times and lay still, leaking green, foul smelling ichor from its piercings, a smell almost strong enough to burn our noses. Without speaking, we both knew what was needful, we retrieved our arrows, and dragged the carcass to the south side of the field, where it could rot down in the pit.

Karaig drew his long knife; it was a beautiful knife, glittering and sharp, with a patterned blade and a bone hilt. He told me once that it had belonged to his grand-father’s grand-father, before the coming of the bugs. Using it he quickly cut off the hind-legs with deft strokes. Having finished, he carefully wiped it clean on some moss, before replacing it in its ancient leather sheath. We bent the legs at the knees to make them easier to carry, and bound them with fibre, before kicking the rest of the corpse into the pit. 

Returning to our posts I set aside the book I had been looking at, and picked up another. In the crumbling ruin, the chamber where I found them was painted a pale-yellow colour, and had the remains of a child’s cot in one corner. Most of the rest of the room’s contents had fallen apart, or had already gone, but these few faded books remained, hidden under the bed. This one was a strange book. The first page had two black shapes on it. The first was angular, tent shaped, thick and black, but with a third line across its middle; the second was a circle, with a sort of hook on its back. Beside them was an apple. A perfect, unbruised, shiny red and green apple. Beneath the apple, the angular shape was repeated, with four other shapes alongside it.

What did it mean? I had no idea. I turned the page; here the illustration was of a bee. Curiously though, there were just three symbols below the bee. One of them twice, flipping back to the previous page I noticed that the repeated symbol here was the same as the last one below the apple. There must be a reason for this.

The object on the third page looked like one of the rusting hulks we find all over, but this one was a shiny blue. It looked like a small cart, but with no animal at harness. However, I did notice that the middle symbol here, was the same as one of the two that stood by themselves on the first page. I needed to think about this, but now was not the time, my duty was ending, so I closed my books and carefully hid them under my rock, before my replacement arrived for the night watch.

Every day, I studied those books, and gradually came to realise that the symbols were the building blocks from which words were built. Slowly, very slowly, I taught myself to read, and as I did so, other books started to make sense to me. Like a gradual dawn, a light came upon me, and before Karaig’s first-born came into the world, I could read; and I read anything and everything that I could find. The more I read, the better I got at it.

One ten-day — most, when not on duty, rested on the ten-day, although we were expected to attend the Sensor’s preachings — I was sitting, barely awake, at the back of the Sensor’s Hall. He was, as usual droning on, reading from the great book on the pedestal. He was speaking of the time before the bugs came, when men travelled in the carts that moved themselves. That is what was on the third page of my alphabet book, a car, as I now know it to be. Now, knowing what they were, I also knew I had scavenged many of them for anything useful. Pieces of glass for arrow heads, or rubber from their wheels to fashion tough soles for shoes.

After the Sensor had finished, ending with his usual, “Go forth from this place, and may The Great Name protect us all from the evils of the land, seas, and skies.” He turned away, and went out through the door behind the offering-table. I took my chance then, and slipped forward, to sneak a look at the great book. He had left it open at the page he had been reading from; except that clearly, he hadn’t been reading. There was nothing on that page that even vaguely resembled what he had spoken about. I lifted the heavy book and looked closely at the spine. Words I didn’t know were printed on it in worn, barely readable, gold letters. Those words were hard ones, and I sounded them out as my alphabet book had taught me. En-cy-clo-pae-dia brit-ann-ica, and it had a number seven below that. 

It was then that the Sensor returned, tottering a little and smelling of ferment. In anger he aimed a blow at my head, but I ducked and ran around the table. 

“What, by The Great Name do you think you are doing? You know you aren’t allowed to touch the book! Only I, The Sensor, am permitted to look upon it.”

“But you weren’t reading it! There is nothing on the page like you read!”

“And just how can you possibly know that boy?” He feinted to the left, then tried to charge me from the right, but I was too fast and he had drunk too much ferment.

“Because I can read!”

“Liar!”

“It’s true. I found a book that taught me.”

“Liar! Liar!” He screamed, raving at me, “I’ll have you stoned in the village square!” 

The door behind me opened and Ceric, one of the elders came in, “What’s all the noise? What’s going on?”

“This boy has touched the book! I demand he be punished!”

“Is that right? Did you touch the book?”

“Yes Ceric, because I can read it, The Sensor can’t!”

“What are you saying? Lies like that will get you stoned!”

“I am not lying. Try me!” 

Ceric opened the book to a random page and pointed to it, “Sensor, read this and tell me in whispers what it says.” The sensor leaned forward, squinting owlishly at the page, running his finger under the line. Then whispered to Ceric, his mouth close to his ear.

“It is nothing. It talks only of the proper time to sow beans.”

Ceric looked at the page himself. “It seems to be a lot just to say when to sow beans.” Reaching out in a flash, he grabbed me by the ear. “Right boy, you read some of that to me, if you say you can.”

“Which bit?” The page was divided into two halves, and split up into blocks of words. Each block led by a word which was printed heavier.

“Here, start here.” He jabbed his finger at a heavy word.

“It says nothing about beans.”

“Liar! Liar!” The Sensor shrieked again, “He cannot read, he lies.” 

I put my finger under the word and spelled it out in my mind, then spoke it slowly. “Kayak. A small double ended craft of Inuit design, similar to a canoe, but enclosed…”

“Liar, Liar, it is about beans I tell you!”

“… except for a very small cockpit.” I paused, “Those are the words, but I do not know what they all mean.”

“Liar! Liar! You will be stoned!”

Ceric looked puzzled. “I think that if you were lying, you would have made up something simpler.” He turned a few pages and pointed again. “What’s this word?”

“That’s glass, you know the hard, sharp, clear stuff we find sometimes and use to tip arrows. It says much that I do not understand, but it does say that it can be melted and shaped in moulds.”

“Well Sensor, does he speak the truth, what is that word to your eye?” The Sensor leaned in close for a second time, struggling to see the word.

“He lies again! It’s carrot. It tells how to harvest carrots.”

Ceric looked to me. “You will come with me boy. I need to muse on you. You, Sensor, will say nothing of this.”

The fact is that the Sensor’s eyes were growing dim. Ceric had suspected this for some time, so with my finger he had me write large words on the top of a black dust covered white table. The Sensor could read that, and eventually admitted, both that he could no longer read, and that I could. Eventually he took me into the back of the Sensors Hall, and in there were a further twenty or so volumes of the encyclopaedia, together with hundreds of other books on all sorts of subjects. In the gone-days, the Sensors Hall must have been a library.

I became a Sensor myself then. And the first thing I did was to teach others to read. Together we studied the books. From one about weapons we learned how to make simple muskets. The next time a gang came, we surprised them, killing most as we drove them off, taking their horses and their slave women. And bugs? Well, we quickly learned that if you hit a bug with a heavy enough lead ball, it bursts. They seems to be getting less now as well. 

My first son is a craftsman now, he casts glass and polishes it into lenses, to help those who like the old Sensor and are losing their sight, to see again.

And, there’s one other perk, as Sensor, I got to choose my own wives!