The Starving Little Girl Who Saved Her Tribe novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Cellar
Lois Kester finds a furred four-year-old eating raw potatoes in her root cellar, feeds her, and sees the back wall behind the shelf is a dark mouth smelling of smoke.
The first thing Ilu did was eat a potato.
It sat in a wooden bin by her face, round and brown and cold, and she bit into it dirt and all.
It was hard and sour and the best thing she had ever tasted.
She was on her second one when the door at the top of the stairs opened.
A big light came down, yellow and square, and a pair of slippers came with it.
"Lord, I thought the power was out again," a woman's voice said. "Why is the cellar light on?"
The slippers stopped.
Ilu froze with her mouth full of raw potato.
The woman at the top of the stairs wore a green wool sweater and held a flashlight.
She was bigger than any woman in the tribe, with gray in her hair and a flour smudge on her cheek.
She stared at Ilu for a very long time.
Ilu stared back and kept chewing, because she was not sure she would get another one.
"Well," the woman said, very slowly. "That is not a raccoon."
She came down one stair at a time.
Ilu backed against the bin and held the potato close to her chest.
The woman stopped halfway down and crouched, which made her knees crack.
"Hey, honey. Hey. I'm not going to hurt you."
Ilu did not know the words, but she knew the voice.
It was the voice her mother used on the lame boy when his foot hurt.
"Are you hurt? Where's your mama?"
Ilu pointed at the wall behind her, then remembered the wall was shelves.
She said, in her own tongue, "My mother left me at the cave. I came through the warm wind."
The woman's eyebrows went up.
"I don't know what that is, sweetheart. Is that French? No, that isn't French."
She held out a hand, palm up.
Ilu looked at it for a long moment.
A hand like that, in the tribe, meant a trade.
So she put the half-eaten potato in it.
The woman laughed, a short surprised laugh, and her eyes went wet.
"Oh, no, no, you keep that. That's raw. You'll get a tummy ache. Come on up."
She stood and held out the hand again, and this time Ilu took it.
The hand was warm and soft and rough in the palm.
They climbed the stairs together.
At the top was a room that made Ilu stop and stare with her mouth open.
It was the biggest, brightest lodge she had ever seen.
A white box hummed in the corner, and a metal pot sat on a ring of fire that burned blue and did not smoke.
The floor was smooth, and the walls were the color of butter.
On a table sat a whole round loaf, and the smell of it filled the room so hard that Ilu's legs gave out.
She sat down on the floor right there.
"Whoa. Okay, okay, here," the woman said, and she knelt and broke off a piece.
Ilu took it with both hands.
It was soft.
It was hot in the middle and sweet at the crust, and she had not known food could be soft.
She ate it in four bites and looked up with her whole face wide open.
The woman was already tearing off more.
"Slow down, baby, slow down. There's plenty. Nobody's taking it."
Ilu understood the word "plenty" without being told.
It was in the way the woman said it, easy.
She ate three more pieces and a spoon of something yellow that was sweet and cold, and then a cup of something white.
She drank all of it and held out the cup.
The woman filled it again with a shaking hand.
"My name is Lois," she said, and tapped her chest. "Lois. Mar-ee-un."
Ilu swallowed.
"Mar," she tried.
"That's close enough. And you?"
Ilu tapped her own chest, the way the woman had.
"Ilu."
"Ee-loo?"
"Ilu."
"Ilu," Lois said, and smiled a smile that broke a little at the corners. "Okay, Ilu. Let's get some soup in you."
Soup came out of a can and went into the pot.
The blue fire made it bubble in no time.
Ilu watched all of it with the bread still in her fists, and she did not blink.
Her belly, which had gone quiet days ago, woke up all at once and began to hurt.
She whimpered, and Lois crouched at her side.
"I know. It's your stomach waking up. That means it works. You just go slow."
She poured the soup into a bowl and blew on it herself.
The soup was salty and hot, with small round white things in it that were soft and sweet.
Ilu drank it down to the bottom and licked the bowl.
Then her eyes started to close on their own.
She could not help it.
For the first time since the last moon, her whole body was warm, and the warmth pulled her down.
Lois carried her to a couch by a window.
She laid a blanket on her that smelled like clean sun, and tucked the edges in around her feet.
Ilu watched her through half-open eyes.
The woman was talking to herself in a low voice and wiping her face with a dish towel.
"Lord, Lord. A little girl in my cellar. In furs. I must be losing my mind."
Then she picked up a flat black stone from the table and looked at it.
She set it down again.
"Not yet," she said, to nobody. "Let her sleep first."
Ilu slid down into sleep.
When she woke the window was gray and the house was quiet.
She was alone on the couch.
For one terrible heartbeat she thought she had dreamed all of it, the bread and the blue fire and the hand.
Then she smelled coffee, and heard Lois's slippers go down the cellar stairs.
Ilu followed her, barefoot, sticky with sleep.
Lois stood at the bottom of the steps with the flashlight pointed at the shelves.
She had pushed the canning shelf a hand's width to the side, and behind it there was no wall.
There was a dark opening in the stone, as low as a fox den.
Cold air came out of it, with a thread of warm under the cold.
It smelled of wood smoke and old snow and mammoth fat.
Lois's flashlight shook.
"Ilu," she whispered, without turning around. "Honey. Where did you say you came from?"
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