Chris Pourteau - Tails of the Apocalypse

Basr smiled. “You’re not that old, Polluk. You remember your training. The Map of the Ancients.”

Everyone knew of the Map of the Ancients, but no one had ever actually seen it—at least no one that I’d ever talked to. And this kid claimed to have it?

“You must think I’ve been in the desert a very long time, my young friend. It’s a myth, like the rest of the bullshit they fed us in training.”

He tossed off the last of his aragh, ignoring the glass of Pure-clear I’d sent him. He was drunk.

I reached across the table, picked up his glass of water, and drank it off. Then I stood. “Show me.”

His gait was steady but sloppy as we walked to his vehicle. He deactivated the alarm and opened the door. I wrinkled my nose when I saw the interior. A messy cabin is a cluttered mind, Ghadir always said. Organization is the key to survival in the desert.

“Well?” I folded my arms.

Basr propped his elbows on the table that folded down from the wall. “I bet you’ll never guess where it is.”

“I don’t have time for this, Basr. I’ll—”

He flipped the tabletop over and there it was. In hindsight, the key to the Map of the Ancients answer was so simple that I wondered why no one had used this technique before. We navigated by the Finding of water or we followed the direction of the sun, that was it. As long as the clan had water, we didn’t care much where we were. If we saw birds in the sky, we knew we were near a Hold City and we moved on.

But I knew of old-timers that claimed the Ancients used the stars to guide their travels. Of course, these same tale-spinners also said that men floated their way across the Salt Ocean and flew through the air like birds, so their stories were just a wee bit suspect.

But maybe there was more to the myth. The Map of the Ancients used the stars. The device consisted of three rings: a center ring of constellations, an outer ring showing the day of the year, and a middle ring of numbers that ranged positive and negative.

“What is this?” I touched the middle ring.

“Angle,” he said. Basr took a triangular-shaped device off the wall. “You measure the angle between the star and the horizon with this—it’s called a sextant. The Great Hold is here.” He tapped the center of the star chart.

The map looked very old and was made out of some sort of laminate material that gleamed in the lamplight. I touched the outer ring; it spun easily under my fingers. “Where did you get this?” I asked.

Basr had pulled a bottle out from the cabinet behind his head. He uncorked it with his teeth and took a long swallow. He offered the open bottle to me.

“My master had it when he took me on. He was a thief and worse… a bad person. Mean. I was just a kid, after all.” Basr was slurring his words. “He was going to ditch me somewhere out on the sand and make a run for it. I showed him.” He grinned up at me, those beautiful hazel eyes full of hate.

“You turned him in, didn’t you, Basr?”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re damned right I did.”

“Where have you been?” Dimah demanded as I walked in the door. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

“What? I had some business—”

I stopped short when she pointed to Shadow. For a second, I thought maybe my friend had passed while I was out, but then I saw his chest heave up in a long, slow breath.

“He shit in my house again. You should have taken him out before you left.”

I knelt next to Shadow. “Go to bed, Dimah.”

“But who’s going to clean up this—”

“Go. To. Bed.”

I cleaned the mess off the floor after she left. Even his shit was pitiful now, a dried up turd. More like something that might come out of a rabbit, not a mighty Water Finder like my Shadow.

I turned out the lights and curled up on the floor next to him, my hand on his rib-etched flank. He tried to lick my face, his tongue rough on my skin. All of him seemed dried out now. Used up.

“Easy, boy. It won’t be long now,” I whispered.

He thumped the floor three times. That was our signal in the old days: three slaps of his tail against my leg meant he’d found water.

When my own Gift began to falter, I was just past my thirty-second birthday. Ghadir had been gone for two years by that time and the two of us made a good living. Then one day, in the middle of a show, I just lost the feeling. The familiar sensation beneath the soles of my feet was gone.

I panicked. I began to shake like I’d been struck with fever.

The crowd went silent, watching me lose my cool. One minute I was all patter and flash and the next a quivering boy with stage fright.

Shadow’s bark brought me back to the moment. I wonder if he’d smelled the fear on me. He trotted over to me like it was all part of the act and took my fingers in his mouth, leading me forward.

I played along, desperate to recover the good will of the audience. “The water’s this way, Shadow? Is that what you’re trying to tell me, boy?”

“Yes!” the children chorused.

The familiar feeling returned to my legs, the tingle that told me moisture was near. When the clan diggers struck water, I hugged Shadow so hard he yelped.

That was the beginning of the end of my Gift. I still had it some days, but the feeling was inconsistent, and I was never quite sure if I’d be able to perform. But Shadow picked up the slack for us both. The act actually got better as I learned to recognize his cues and play off him.

I stayed on the floor next to Shadow all night, my head never more than a few inches from his. I watched his black nose quiver with each breath and when his filmy eyes opened, I met his gaze. I dripped water into his mouth with my fingers and stroked those silky ears that I loved so much. Toward dawn, he grew restless and I carried him outside into the early morning chill.

Still in my best Finder robe, I sat down in the dirt and watched Shadow make his halting way around the yard. He had dirt on his nose when he finally got back to me, and he was wheezing. I cleaned the crust of dusty snot off his face with the sleeve of my robe and gathered him into my lap. He curled up nose to tail, just like he used to do when he was a puppy.

Shadow closed his eyes and let out a long sigh.

When the first rays of the sun touched our yard, I was still sitting in the same position. I tried to will the sun to go backward, to retreat behind the hill again and never come up.

I refused to look down as the light sharpened the gloom around me. Instead, I begged every god I could think of to give me a few more moments with my Shadow.

I never shed a tear over Shadow’s passing. I just let the weight of him rest heavy in my lap, let his body drain of warmth against my thighs. The settlement had just begun to stir when I stood up with Shadow in my arms.

I needed to move swiftly now. For both of us.

Shadow had lost so much muscle mass I was able to tuck him under one arm and mostly hide him with my robe. On the way out the back, I picked up a shovel and slung it over my other shoulder.

The desert in the early morning is beautiful. The sun at a low angle highlights the sand but leaves pools of mysterious darkness. The clean, chilly air even holds a hint of moisture. I walked in a straight line north for maybe a kilometer, then gently set down Shadow’s body and dug.

It was over in a few minutes. I said my last goodbyes and heaped the sand on him. I knew it was foolish to avoid the reclamation process, but Shadow didn’t belong to the clan, he belonged to me. On the way back to the settlement, I made sure to obliterate my tracks. By the time I made it over the second dune, even I couldn’t have found Shadow’s body.