A road movie is a film genre in which the main character or characters leave home to travel from place to place. They usually leave home to escape their current lives (Wiki). I looked up road story in Wiki too, but there is no such genre. But the story told below matches the definition given; the only difference is, it's a story not a movie. Its two main characters, Aegir and Buri, leave home and travel from place to place, from the icy north to the burning hot southern desert. They decide to escape their current lives to achieve a goal that on closer inspection is beyond reach.
In road movies the characters usually travel by car. But Aegir and Buri are living at the transition of the Stone Age to the Bronze Age and therefore they travel by foot or boat passing through wild and unknown places, meeting friendly and hostile people. It's a story and therefore they get rewarded along the way.
The story is embedded in a time long gone for two reasons. The first is a very personal one, the second the importance of this turning point in history. When I was a boy every book-worm was hot for "Rulaman" a novel by D.F. Weinland published first about 170 years ago *). In that still slow moving time you couldn't just order a book by mail and get it two days later and you just couldn't walk over to the bookstore, because the next one was about 50 miles distant. When I finally got my hands on it, I immediately became one of the "Cave Children", the main characters of the novel. And believe me I turned out to be the bravest "Cave boy" of all them all. At the transition of the Stone Age to the Bronze Age a technical revolution took place, the transition from a hunter-gatherer to a farming way accelerated by the discovery of metals providing the basis for new technologies, for new tools and weapons. Technological revolutions always go hand in hand with intellectual revolution: that is with a new way to look at life.
The story's main characters are Aegir and Buri, teens on the transition to adulthood. Aegir, named after the god of the ocean and the sea creatures, is the foxy haired son of a chieftain of an island close to the Arctic cycle. He is sick of the dark winters and decides to catch the sun and bring it back from the south to the dark windblown island of his fathers and he is sick of his narrow-minded fellow men forcing their way of life upon him. Buri is the curly-haired boy, the son of a flint-stone cutter from cave-dwellers from the Swabian Mountains and a dark-skinned girl, claiming to be daughter of the king of a copper digging clan in Africa. Buri is named after the first human being, a mighty deity, the forefather of all deities. Being an outcast in his father's clan, he decides to risks his luck in the south, hoping to find his mother's clan, the moon-stone clan and to come into the inheritance of his mother's royalty. But maybe his mother Teje wasn't a princess at all, just a beautiful dancer, a vestal "virgin", working at the temple of Râ-Kedet (now Alexandria).
~.~.~
*) "Rulaman" a Novel by D.F. Weinland (download of the German version: http://www.wissen-im-netz.info/literatur/weinland/rulaman/31.htm).
I would like to express my special thanks to my friend Anthony for improving my writing.
Last not least I would like to add thanks for reading.