Tim Lebbon - Echo city

They speak to him in that strange language, and the woman responds for him. Some of them blink in surprise. A couple look at him with suspicion.

Something strikes his arm, a harsh burning pain. He cries out and looks, but there's nothing to be seen here in this memory, only the woman's kindly hand holding him still.

He swam in darkness as his Dragarian captors drugged him quiet once again, and then he was somewhere else.

Rufus is drawing images from memory, using charcoal on fine white paper. He has been in the village for some time. He has quickly become a part of the settlement, welcomed in by people whose level of trust is great and suspicion low. There are still some who have difficulty believing where he has come from, because, to the Heartlanders, the desert is endless and inimical to life. But they do not hold that disbelief against him. His presence has encouraged a large degree of debate and discussion, and as he slowly learns their language he is beginning to take part in those discussions. It's amazing that he is there, they keep telling him, but they are a people to whom an amazing thing is a gift, not a terror.

They pay homage to the Heart and Mind and tell him that it keeps the Heartlands safe and peaceful. When he asks if he can see it, they go quiet, and this is when he feels most like an alien. Perhaps one day, his savior says, but there is uncertainty in her voice.

His sketches are becoming more elaborate. In the small room in her home where the woman has let him live-he learned early on that her own son and husband were killed several years before by a herd of marauding beasts, whose name he does understand-he is surrounded by his artwork. The early attempts were vague and unsure, smudged by faulty memory. The piece he is working on now is far more clear. It is a city on a flat horizon. Close by are bleached white bones half buried in the sand. There is nothing alive and nothing indicating life other than the city-a place of hills and walls, towers and buildings climbing the heights, all reaching for the sky. There's a haze in the sky above and around the city, and hints of a river to the west. The more times he draws this same image, the more detail he adds and the larger the city looks. When he blinks, he thinks the city could be the whole world.

The people study his artwork but do not interfere.

He draws a shape in the desert between the strewn bones and the city. And in this new language he is learning, he calls it himself.

There's a pain in his leg and he winces, scratching the charcoal stick across the paper, grasping his thigh. There's no blood, no sign of injury, no smudge on the paper.

He swam in darkness again, his captors' drug in his blood, the pain of its gentle injection into his leg fading as this new memory cuts in.

Older now, fit and healthy and a full part of the settlement in the valley, he takes a walk with the woman who found him and who has become his guardian. She has been promising this walk for some time. He has been asking more and more, and as adulthood approaches, his need to see, know, and understand has grown. It is a long walk, past neighboring villages in other valleys, across a wide plain where different-looking people live in stilted buildings, tending walking plants that provide balms and medicines for everyone in this land. He has seen these people before on trading trips, and he stops for a while to converse with them. Their language is as alien to him now as his guardian's was when he first arrived out of the desert. Some of them try, however, and they call him Man from Sand. He is, it seems, something of a legend.

The walk opens his eyes to how vast the Heartlands are. From the top of one hill they can see the next, and the next, rising toward an uncertain horizon, and he understands that this place is much larger than the vague place he came from. Perhaps he could walk another ten days before reaching its far edge, where the desert would enclose it with its fiery landscape. He hopes they do not have to go that far. Man from Sand he may be, but he would happily never set eyes on the desert again.

"Why is everyone so fascinated with me?" he asks his guardian as they continue on their journey.

"Because you came out of the desert, and there is nothing beyond."

"There's the city," he said. "Sometimes I still dream of it."

A troubled look crosses her eyes. Even with age settling in her skin, she is as beautiful now as when she found him.

"Those dreams are nightmares," she says. "And those drawings…"

"No one believes them," he says, because no one ever has. Sometimes even he thinks of them as only a dream-a city built entirely in his mind, a hundred times larger than their largest village, which will fade over time. But sometimes he can almost taste the dampness of its stone, smell the market streets, and see the towering spires rising toward its center, hear the excited chatter of its many inhabitants echoed between buildings and down alleys. He can see the woman who might have been his mother back then, tutoring him in a language that stays with him now; he can accept the vastness of the place, the imposing concentration of buildings that are so close they seem to be constructed on top of one another. He can see the city and himself in it, and there is a sense of loss that he cannot comprehend, even in dreams.

"Only because they cannot be true," she says.

"My skin is paler than anyone's, even in the sun. And that language I can speak-"

"Is not one you should!" she snaps. A thousand times she has told him this, refusing his attempts to explore the language with her. He has been referred to physicians and mythmakers, and all of them have reached the same conclusion: that he was infected by a desert sprite, one of the cruel phantoms that stalk the sands close to the Heartlands, and it has jumbled his mind. Sometimes, in his darkest moments, he even believes this himself. These physicians and mythmakers have done their best to cure him of the affliction, but still the words come to him, and with the words are images, and those images carry the weight of memory.

He's confused, and his guardian says that this journey will help cure his confusion.

They walk for several more days, passing many small settlements and accepting the hospitality of their inhabitants. It's an exploration of food and drink as well, because everything here is affected by landscape. Wines taste different from valley to valley, and fruits and vegetables pick up diverse tangs from the soils. The land is rich and lush, and Rufus's strange memories of the city are sour and tainted in comparison.

At the pinnacle of one hill, he looks to the east and sees a stain on the landscape. It is miles distant-such distances that he is still becoming used to-but even from here its scope is huge. It is many shades of gray, smothering the landscape in that direction, filling valleys, crushing hills. The sky above it is similar in color, as if leached of blue vitality by what lies beneath. He can see the shattered remains of giant towers reaching to the sky with skeletal fingers. Around their feet lie other tumbled ruins, and all his senses seem affected by the sight. He imagines the smell of ash and age, tastes grit on the clear air, and hears mournful whispers of faraway breezes. Around this unknown place, the hillsides are green and the trees proud and tall. Lushness surrounds the ruin.

He is shocked silent for a while. This is not his city, though its scale is staggering, yet it is the first time he has been aware of its existence-no one has mentioned it, and it appears nowhere in the Heartlanders' lives, songs, stories, or history.

"Where is that?" he asks, voice barely rising above the breeze. He imagines the breeze coming in from that ruined place and talking to him, but he does not know its language.