Dave Duncan - West of January

The heat in the lowlands was incredible, even to me who had never known cold. Light flared up from the sand in unkindly waves and silvery shimmers of mirage, roasting a man’s eyeballs. The wind alone could flay him. Teasing, useless clouds still hung far ahead of us, seaward, while the hills we had left were now elevated to the sky, transformed into pale blue ghosts of mountains—so far had we descended.

Far off on either hand, great spurs of highland flecked the sand. Our course lay toward the ocean, but also toward one of these barriers, the more southerly. That was our fastest route, Violet said, in that wind, and also a better chance for water. He spoke little; the silence was broken only by the hiss of our wheels and a keening of the wind in the rigging.

How long? I have no way of knowing how long we took to cross that desert. I slept three times, I think, but my sleep was fitful in the heat and thirst tortured my dreams, so perhaps my sleeps were short. Violet sat grimly by the mast, working the sails, steering with every speck of his great skill, losing not a moment. Red and bloated still, he somehow could yet look haggard, his face caked with dirt and a silvery growth of whiskers, his eyes almost hidden below the brim of his hat, screwed up against the glare. Our tongues felt huge and calloused in our mouths.

As the ordeal continued, I began to worry about him—I, who had cared nothing while a whole people died around me. I wondered if he would hand over the controls and give me my first lesson in driving a chariot. He might have done so had the way been flat, but the sand rolled in ridges. There were fields of deadly soft dunes and outcroppings of rock. A broken axle would have doomed us. So I remained on the bedding in the front and he stayed by the mast, and the chariot hurtled endlessly over the limitless plain like a frantic ant.

Then came a strange tang in the air, and an inexplicable sound. I looked to Violet and found there a smile for the first time in longer than I could recall, perhaps the first I had ever seen on his face.

“Breakers!” he said.

I watched the breakers in amazement. He had told me to imagine a big water hole, but my mind had never conceived an ocean. I wanted to drink all of it, until he explained about salt, and soon I could taste the salt on my lips. Breakers and unfamiliar white birds and interesting things being washed up in places—all these I could not tarry to investigate.

Now we must follow the shore, still southward, looking for fresh water. We were down to our last canteen when we found it. Where the sand ended and the hills sank gracefully into the sea, a tiny stream trickled from the rocks to die away into the back of a beach ridge. It was barely more than a lagoon—acrid, dead-tasting brackish stuff—but it was life for us. We plunged in bodily, soaking and drinking at the same time, as if we could absorb moisture through our skins. Yes, it was life to us, but it also meant death for the herdfolk, the steady draining of the last groundwater from the grasslands, emerging here to die in the ocean. We splashed and drank and laughed.

Then Violet went squelching back to the chariot, stretched out beneath it in the shade, and went to sleep.

When I saw him sitting up, leaning against a wheel, I went marching over and knelt down to speak. During his long absence I had napped, eaten, napped again, tried archery, bathed many times, and discovered the fun of rollicking in surf. I had almost drowned in learning about undertow. I had killed a bird with my sling. I had even dug out the mirror and confirmed what my fingers had been telling me about a mustache, although it had a disappointingly accidental appearance.

“I thought you’d died,” I said. I had checked three times to make sure he had not, but I tried to sound as if I were joking.

He took a moment to reply. “No.” It was a sigh of regret.

“Can I bring you some food, sir?”

He shook his head and continued to stare at the faint smudge of hills that we had left behind us. He looked very old and spent—and limp, as if he had been blown against that wheel by the wind like a litter of leaves.

“Can you live by that now?”

I was holding my bow. Archery was not as simple as I had hoped. “Not yet, sir.”

“I’ll show you how to fish. There are lots of fish.”

That sounded as if he might be planning to abandon me. I was alarmed, but I did not question. When he spoke again, it was of other things. For the only time in our acquaintance, in this moment of defeat, he revealed a glimpse of his soul.

“They knew,” he said. “Heaven has known for a long time. The texts warned them. It always happens.”

“Sir?”

“It happens every cycle. But not so bad. Never as bad as this.”

“No sir?” But he was not really talking to me.

“Trouble was, not enough angels. Not enough men, not enough equipment…too many herdfolk. You got any idea how many descendants one woman can have in the ninth or tenth generation?”

“No sir.”

“About a million—and that’s not counting sons.”

He wiped his face with the usual rag and let his hand fall back to the sand with it. “They’ve been sending us out for…for a month. Your father must have been one of the first.”

A month is one of the twelve north-south strips that the angels use to define the world, but they also use the term to denote time, the time taken for the sun to cross one month. I was about a month old, more or less. But I did not understand all that then.

“Doesn’t work with herdfolk,” he went on. “They won’t spread the word around, like other peoples…won’t cooperate.” The wind lifted the rag from his hand and rolled it out into the sunlight and away across the sand. I jumped to retrieve it. When I returned, he was still talking.

“…at the north end. Let just enough woollies by to feed them. Kill off the rest and spare the grass—narrow, it is. And the rest of us were to send them up there, stop them going south. Should have stayed.”

“You did what you could, sir?”

He looked up at me blearily. “I went to save the herdfolk. Looks like I saved one. No, you’re half angel. So I saved half a herdman. Should have stayed.”

He fell silent, staring again at the distant hills where the people were dying. Suddenly I knew what was alarming me the most: his eyes. They had the same flat hopelessness that had haunted the eyes of the herdfolk—yet we had escaped, had we not?

Probably he had guessed what I only learned much later, from the saints. Heaven lost more angels on that herdfolk mission than it had ever lost before. Too many waited around too long and died alongside those they had come to save, snared by the doldrums of High Summer.

Then I asked the one question that I had been carefully trying not to consider: “My family, sir?”

His unwinking eyes crawled around to study mine. “What do you think?”

I nursed my agony for a while in silence. Violet had been running away, even then. He wouldn’t have been running if he’d thought he could do any good by staying. I shook my head.

“It’s not quite hopeless,” Violet said, but he didn’t fool me. He didn’t mean to—he was just being gentle. I wanted Anubyl to have saved my family. I wanted him to have escaped, so I could find him and kill him myself. But I knew he could not have reached the sea before he starved.

Vengeance was denied me.

“What do we do now, sir?”

“You go south. Eat fish. There’s lots of fish in the surf. There will be springs, along the edge of the sea.”

I looked out over the barren windswept sand, the rocky hills, and the misty islands. I shivered.

“Go south, lad. Then west. The ocean will be shrinking. By the time you’ve got your growth, you’ll be on the west shore. The herds will be coming in from the north. You can make your kill then—little woollies of your own, little blue-eyed herdbabies.”