The Starving Little Girl Who Saved Her Tribe novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Quiet Cave
The tribe leaves Ilu at the cave of the unwanted. Her mother sets her at the warm wind and walks away, and Ilu crawls toward the heat into white light and the smell of bread.
Ilu was four winters old, and she had not eaten since the last moon.
She knew this because her belly had stopped hurting.
Her mother said that was the worst sign, so Ilu hid it and kept saying she was hungry.
The tribe walked up the white valley in a long, slow line.
Thirty-one people, and every one of them had stopped talking days ago.
Kesh carried Ilu on her hip, though her own arms shook.
Ilu rested her cheek on her mother's cloak and watched the ridge come closer.
They had walked all night, and the Quiet Cave came out of the dark as the sky turned gray.
It was a black mouth in the gray rock.
Everyone in the tribe knew what it was for.
When the snow got too deep and the meat ran out, the ones who could not walk south were left there.
Ilu had seen it once before, last winter, with her grandmother.
She had waved at the cave from her mother's back, and nobody had told her not to.
Hurn stopped at the mouth of the cave.
He was the best hunter in the valley, and he wore a lion's hide that had belonged to a man he had never talked about.
He counted with one finger, the way he counted spears.
"The old one," he said, and two men carried an old man forward who could not stand.
"The lame boy," he said, and the boy walked in on his own, with his jaw tight.
Then Hurn's finger stopped on Ilu.
"The small one."
Kesh's arm tightened around her.
"She can walk," Kesh said.
"She cannot walk to the sea," said Hurn. "She eats and she carries nothing."
Nobody spoke up.
Ilu looked at the faces and found Oro, her great-grandfather, leaning on his bone staff.
Oro looked at the snow.
Ilu understood then that the thing she had waved at last winter was now hers.
She did not cry.
She had never had enough food in her to cry.
Kesh walked into the cave carrying her, and the tribe waited outside in the wind.
Inside it was dark, and the dark was not as cold as the valley.
Ilu noticed that first, because her fingers had not worked in days and now they tingled.
Kesh walked past the old man and the lame boy and kept going deep into the rock.
She walked so far that the voices behind them turned into echoes.
At the very back, the stone opened into a low hollow.
A small wind came out of it.
It was soft, and it was warm, and it smelled like something Ilu had no word for.
Kesh knelt in front of it.
Her breath was shaking.
"Do you feel that?" she whispered.
Ilu nodded.
"It is warm."
"It is warm," Kesh said. "Stay close to the warm."
Ilu frowned.
She was small, but she was not stupid.
"Mama, you carry me out now."
Kesh pressed her forehead against Ilu's hair, hard enough to hurt.
"Not now," she said.
"Mama."
"Stay close to the warm wind, Ilu. Whatever happens, go toward it. Do you hear me?"
"Mama, I'm good. I don't eat much. I don't."
Kesh made a sound Ilu had never heard from her.
She set Ilu down on the stone, right in front of the hollow, and folded her small hands together.
Then she stood up.
Ilu grabbed the edge of her cloak with both fists.
"Don't go."
Kesh peeled her fingers loose one at a time.
She was crying, and she did not wipe her face.
"I love you," she said. "Go toward the warm."
She walked back up the dark passage, and she did not look behind her.
Ilu listened to her steps get quieter.
She listened until she could not hear them, and then she listened to the silence.
She shouted once, as loud as she could.
The cave shouted it back.
Nobody came.
She sat very still, and the old man coughed somewhere far away.
The lame boy was singing something to himself, very low, so he would not be afraid.
Ilu did not want to be afraid either.
She turned her face to the warm wind.
It blew across her cheek, and her cheek came back to life.
She decided that the wind was the only thing in the cave that wanted her to be there.
So she got up on her hands and knees.
The hollow was tiny, hardly bigger than a fox den, and the wind came from deep inside it.
Ilu crawled in.
The rock scraped her knees through her fur leggings.
The air grew warmer, then warmer than anything she had ever felt.
She smelled smoke, and old stone, and something sweet and brown that made her mouth fill with water.
Then there was a light, a white light that did not flicker like fire.
The hollow ended.
Ilu fell out of it onto a cold floor of packed dirt.
She lay with her cheek against the ground and her heart going fast.
Wooden shelves went up above her, and on them stood rows of glass jars full of red and green and gold.
A white light hung from the ceiling, and it was not the sun and it was not a fire.
And through the whole room, thick as a hand on her face, was the smell of bread.
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