Carnivores of Light and Darkness (24 page)
Sorely vexed by the streamers of sand that flogged his heels, Ahlitah whirled repeatedly to bite at the sinuous red tormentors, pulverizing them within his massive jaws. But biting and spitting were ultimately no more effective than Simna’s sword-work. Furthermore, with each snap the great cat had to spit out a mouthful of hot, red sand. He would have much preferred to battle an opponent with some taste.
“The sword!” Sweating profusely as he struggled up the tenacious incline, Simna yelled at his tall companion. “Use the sword of sky metal and blow this Dunawake to bits!”
Looking back down at his friend, Ehomba shouted above the advancing shriek of animate sand treading corybantically upon itself. “It will not work! I can fight wind with wind, but rock and soil and sand are a weightier proposition.”
“Try!” With an effort more of will than of muscle, the swordsman used some of his rapidly failing strength to accelerate upward, until he was standing alongside his friend. Wind squeezed forward by the advancing Dunawake tore at their garments and wilded their hair. “If you can’t beat it, maybe enough wind in its face will discourage it.”
They were nearly to the top. “Feeding the wind off a dune face only encourages it. Its strength lies in its coherence. You have seen how it may be cut and broken on the sword.”
“Hoy!” Simna agreed as they reached the crest of the dune together. Ahlitah turned and snarled, mane streaming backward in the hot, stifling wind, defying the elements both natural and unnatural. “And if Gupjolpa would give me ten thousand swordsmen we’d beat it back as surely as this hot air scours my flesh. But there are only two, me and thee, and you won’t fight.”
“I did not say that.” Having swung his backpack around to rest against his chest, the herdsman was busy within its depths. “I suggested that it was futile to use the sword.”
Simna looked back and down. Already the raw red sand of the Dunawake was three-quarters of the way up the side of their inadequate asylum and climbing fast. “Well you had best find something to use, by Gostoko, or in minutes we’ll all the three of us be good and buried, leaving nothing behind but our memories.”
“Ah.” Straightening, Ehomba withdrew something from the interior of the pack. Simna’s hopefulness was replaced by disbelieving eyes and lowered jaw. In his right hand his good friend, his resourceful friend, his knowledgeable friend, held—a rotund, stoppered clay flask smaller than his fist. A single thin cord secured the rubber stopper to a ring carved in the side of the bottle.
The swordsman struggled to remain calm. “Poison?” he inquired hopefully. “You’re going to poison it?”
“Do not be an idiot.” Closing up his pack to keep out the swirling sand, Ehomba turned to face the rising, oncoming hulk of the Dunawake. Absently he juggled the clay bottle up and down in his open palm. “You cannot poison sand. I told you, to affect it you must impact its integrity.”
“With that?” Simna gestured at the bottle with his free hand. “Well then, by Gwipta, what’s in the pharking phial if not poison?”
Ehomba did not take his eyes off the oncoming Dunawake nor the tide of red granules that would soon be lapping at their feet. Behind them, more rivers of red sand were creeping up the backside of the dune, further extirpating any lingering hope of flight.
“Whater,” he replied simply.
Striving to retreat farther, Simna found himself slipping down the eastern, back face of their dune. “Water?” he mumbled, more like a drowning man than a moribund one.
“No.” Ehomba gestured at the pond remnant Ahlitah had dragged up the dune face with them. “That’s water. This is whater.”
Feeling more than a little taste of panic in his mouth, the baffled swordsman looked on as the herdsman carefully removed the stopper from the clay flask. The crest of the red dune was now very close to overtopping and swamping the dune on which the travelers stood. The glowing, fiery eyes had slipped up the face of the oncoming mountain so that they were now nearly level with Ehomba. Sliding farther down the backside of the crest, Simna bumped into the litah. The big cat snarled at him but held his ground, using his much greater weight and all four feet to keep them from tumbling down the steeper, unstable slope.
Above, they saw the herdsman lower the point of his spear and rap the bottle sharply against it once, twice. The clay cracked but did not come apart. Then Ehomba drew back his right arm and threw the fractured container directly into the face of the swollen, howling Dunawake. As he did so, the shattered bottle came apart, its contents spilling onto the hissing red sand. Simna strained to see, but it looked like the bottle contained nothing more than a swallow or two of water. Or whater, as his friend had insisted.
A mammoth curl of sand rose high, higher than the dune peak, pausing before surging forward to crush the stoic herdsman and his companions beneath its hot, smothering weight. And then a strange thing happened. Simna, for one, was not surprised. He had already had occasion to observe that in moments of difficulty, strange things had a tendency to transpire in Etjole Ehomba’s vicinity, and that at such times it was a good idea to be on the herdsman’s beneficent side.
The unimaginable tons of sand that comprised the malevolent structure of the Dunawake began to shiver.
XXIV
I
T WAS A MOST PECULIAR SIGHT
,
TO SEE SAND SHIVER
. F
IRST
the dune face and then the entire scarlet mass commenced to tremble, shaking and quaking and shuddering in place. Ahlitah’s lower jaw fell, revealing huge canines in a gape of amazement instead of threat. Simna stared grimly, wondering how his tall friend had managed to freeze an entire dune with one tiny bottle of water. Only it was not water, he reminded himself. It was whater, whatever that might be.
T WAS A MOST PECULIAR SIGHT
,
TO SEE SAND SHIVER
. F
IRST
the dune face and then the entire scarlet mass commenced to tremble, shaking and quaking and shuddering in place. Ahlitah’s lower jaw fell, revealing huge canines in a gape of amazement instead of threat. Simna stared grimly, wondering how his tall friend had managed to freeze an entire dune with one tiny bottle of water. Only it was not water, he reminded himself. It was whater, whatever that might be.
But he was wrong. The Dunawake was not freezing, not turning from sand to ice or anything comparable. What it was doing was coming apart, shaking itself to pieces. How something that was already composed of billions of tiny grains could come to pieces was yet another wonder that the awestruck Simna had no time to ponder.
What was happening before their eyes was that the Dunawake was shivering itself into its individual components. A small dune of pure quartz began to rise alongside a sibling dune of feldspar. Next to them a glistening cone of mica rose from the desert floor, and beside it granulated black schist heaped up in dark profusion. There were other colors and cones, stacks and mounds, to which Simna could not put a name. Their identities did not matter to him. What was important was that none of them moved, and none glared up at him out of baleful, pulsing red eyes.
The once fearsome Dunawake continued to tremble and quiver until it had shaken itself apart. Where it had once loomed there now rose a dozen separate dunes far more modest in size, each composed of a single different, unadulterated mineral. The herdsman’s companions climbed the short distance back up the east face of the dune from where they had sought refuge to rejoin their friend.
Thin as a stick stuck in a child’s mud pile, tall and straight as a tree rooted in the depths of the earth, Ehomba was standing at the very apex of the yellow dune staring down at the disassociated remnants of the Dunawake. Wind whipped his shirt and the hem of his kilt. Had he suddenly raised his arms to the sky and drawn down lightning from nothingness Simna would not have been surprised. Nothing of the sort happened, of course. As the subject of the swordsman’s stare would have been the first to remind him, he was nothing but a simple herdsman.
Coming up alongside him, Simna grabbed his friend’s arm as together they gazed downward. “Tell me now you’re no sorcerer, Etjole Ehomba. Tell me now to my face that you’re not a man who can work magicks!”
“Sorry to disappoint you yet again, friend Simna, but I am not.” Lips firm, jaw set, the laconic southerner looked down at his disbelieving companion.
“Oh, I see. And how, then, do you explain what you just did?” He nodded at the dozen or so new, unalloyed dunes that rose from the desert floor below where they stood.
“That was not me,” the other man protested humbly. “It was the whater that did that.”
“Perhaps we would understand better,” Ahlitah put in from behind him, “if you told us what this ‘whater’ is? Or was.”
Ehomba nodded agreeably. “Before I set out on this journey, the women of my village gave me several things to carry with me, to help me along the way. Old Fhastal, clever Likulu, bright-eyed Omura; even my own woman, Mirhanja, helped. It is a tradition among the Naumkib that when a warrior leaves for any length of time, the women get together to bundle useful items for him to take with him.” His gaze angled downward once more, toward the remnants of the Dunawake. “Sadly, that was my only bottle of whater.” He started down the dune, positioning his body sideways as he descended, the better to balance himself against the shifting sand.
Simna simply walked straight down, paralleling his friend and exhibiting the remarkable physical poise of which he was capable. The four-footed Ahlitah, of course, had no trouble at all with the steep slope. Not nearly as agile as his companions, Ehomba stumbled several times in the course of the descent.
“This whater,” the cat asked, “what does it do?” The maned head nodded tersely in the direction of the neatly disassociated dunes. “What
did
it do?”
did
it do?”
“It was for purifying water.” Ehomba stepped over a rock that protruded from the lower dune face. “The women say that one drop of whater will make an entire basin of water fit for drinking. It purifies liquid by separating out all the dirt and scum and little bugs we cannot see from the water itself.”
A much puzzled Simna wore a deep frown. “‘Little bugs we cannot see’?”
Herdsman and cat ignored him.
“So that’s what you did to the Dunawake,” Ahlitah mused aloud. “You ‘purified’ it.”
“Into its individual parts.” They were almost down, stepping back onto the hard, unyielding, blissfully motion-free bed of the ravine where the monstrous apparition had almost had them trapped. “In this instance, the sum of the parts is much less than the whole. A man would be no less,” he added thoughtfully, “if he were similarly purified. Skeleton here, blood there, muscles in one pile, and organs in another.”
Simna’s mouth twisted. “Now there’s a pretty picture. Remind me not to go sampling the contents of any other bottles you happen to be carrying.”
“That was my only whater.” Ehomba gestured at the half-full floating pond Ahlitah continued to tow. “We had better hope we always find good water from now on, because I have nothing left with which to launder the undrinkable.”
“You did the right thing, Etjole. By Girimza, you did!” The swordsman clapped his friend reassuringly on the back. “Clean water’s no good to a corpse.”
“Hold up.” Ahlitah lifted a paw and sniffed the air. “We are still not alone here.”
Startled, Simna reached instinctively for his sword even though it had proven ineffectual against their last opponent. Then he relaxed. Relaxed, even though he was no less disconcerted.
Ehomba handled the unexpected confrontation with his usual sangfroid, smiling and nodding at the figure that now blocked their path.
“Hello, Loswee. I did not expect to see you again.”
As the Swick’s feathered mount advanced toward the travelers, a dozen other miniature mounted warriors trotted out from their place of concealment behind a pile of sand-swept rocks. Brightly tinted pennants flew from the tips of their lances, and they were clad in decorative ceremonial armor.
Leaning forward in his saddle, Loswee stared at the travelers for a long moment before sitting back and gesturing at something behind them. “For not-a-magician you seem to have not-dealt pretty well with the is-no-more Dunawake.”
“It wasn’t him,” Simna interjected sarcastically. “It was just a bottle of whater that did that.”
“Thum,” murmured the Swick fighter. “It would be pointless for me to argue with you about your true natures. The People of the Sands do not care. What matters is that the Dunawake is done and the dreadful, persistent threat of it has been removed. For this deed you will live forever in the hearts of the Swick. One last time, I salute you.”
He raised his lance as high as if he wished to pierce the sky itself. Behind him, his resplendent escort echoed the gesture. Five times they did this, each time giving forth a piercing ululation that seemed to rise up from the depths of the surrounding sand itself. Then they turned to go.
“Strange the ways of coincidence, is it not?” Ehomba watched the long tail feathers of the warriors’ mounts bob up and down as they filed back behind the rocks from where they had emerged.
“What?” A bemused Simna turned to look up at his friend. “What coincidence?”
With a sigh, the herdsman started forward, formally resuming their trek northward and using his spear for support, like a tall walking stick. “The little people wanted us to fight the Dunawake for them. We refused, and so after wining and dining us they graciously bid us on our way. They even told us the easiest way to go to reach the lands to the north. Told us even though we did not ask directions from them. Soon after leaving, we run right into the Dunawake.” Glancing over at the swordsman, he did something Simna had not seen him do very often. He laughed aloud: not only with his mouth, but with his eyes.
“Face it, my friend. We have been played the way a master musician plays his flute.”
Simna’s expression darkened. “Are you telling me, bruther . . . ?”
“That we have been the victims of a Swick trick.” And the herdsman chortled afresh.
Realization landed on the swordsman like the news of an unwanted pregnancy. “Why, those miserable little, lying-lipped, arse-mouthed, flat-faced fuggers!” Raising his voice, eyes wild, Simna drew his sword and rushed toward the pile of rocks where the diminutive warriors had disappeared. “I’ll kill you all! I’ll cut off your hairy ears and feed them to the scorpions!”
With an indifferent snuffle, Ahlitah changed direction until he was pacing the long-striding Ehomba. “He doesn’t get it, does he?”
The herdsman shrugged diffidently. “Simna’s a good man. He is just a little impulsive.”
“A little too human, you mean.” The big cat sniffed derisively. The penetrating yellow eyes of a great feline predator peered into Ehomba’s face from only a foot away. Hunting, searching. “And you?”
The herdsman pursed his lips. “I do not follow you.”
“What are you, Etjole Ehomba? Are you all human? Or is this a mask you choose to wear to fool the rest of us? I am thinking that the Swick are not the only ones who are good at tricks.”
The rangy southerner smiled comfortingly as he poled the hard ground with the butt of his long spear the way a sailor would dig his paddle into water. “I am only a man, Ahlitah. I am only what you see here walking beside you.”
“I will accept that—for now.” With that, the litah moved away, the hovering pond bobbing along behind him as he put a little distance between them. Ehomba watched him with interest. For one who slept as long and often as the litah, very little escaped the big cat’s notice.
Simna ranted and raged among the rocks for only a moment or two before resigning himself to the fact that his intended quarry had fled. More than fled, they had disappeared, utterly vanished from sight. Even the footprints of their mounts had evaporated like mist in the desert air. Muttering to himself as he resheathed his sword, he rejoined his companions.
“The little buggers are fast, but I didn’t think they were that fast.” He shook an angry fist at the dunes and wadi behind them. “What I wouldn’t give for one small gray neck under my fingers!”
“Yes, they are fast.” Ahlitah’s black lower lip curled upward. “That’d make it a quick slick Swick trick, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, shut up, you imprecise venter of stinking bodily fluids!”
Still grinning in its sly cat fashion, the litah did not respond.
“They did what they felt was necessary for their survival.” Ehomba tried to mollify his companion.
“Their survival?” The swordsman jabbed a thumb into his chest. “They didn’t give a sparrow’s fart for
our
survival!”
our
survival!”
“The grand welcome they gave us, mere passing strangers. The escorts and the tours, the singing and the feasts, giving freely, even extravagantly, of their food and drink. Did you think that was all done out of impulsive friendship?”
Simna’s anger dissipated as he considered the herdsman’s words. Eventually, he nodded agreement. “Yes, you’re right, Etjole. I, of all people, should have known better. I suppose it was their size that fooled me. Who would have guessed that their appetite for treachery was as great as their ability to build structures out of sand?” With that admission the last of his fury fled as effortlessly as it had originally consumed him, and he was his old self again.
“Clever little dumplings, weren’t they? I’ll know better next time. From now on I, Simna ibn Sind, won’t accept hospitality from a mouse without first questioning its ulterior motives.”
“I understand why they did what they did.”
The swordsman glanced up at his friend. “You take their side? ‘What they did’ nearly got us killed!”
“I know. But if it was my village at stake, my family, all my friends, everyone I had ever known, I would also do whatever was necessary to save it. At such times, under such circumstances, expediency always takes precedence over honor.”
Simna drew himself up to his full height. “For a true hero, nothing takes place over honor!”
“Then you can be the hero, Simna. I want only to discharge my obligation and return as quickly as possible to my family and to my village. That is what is important to me. That is what I have built my life around. Not abstract notions of what may or may not be considered acceptable behavior among those I do not care for and do not know.” He nodded back the way they had come, back toward the silent dunes and their sand-locked, unseen mysteries. “That is how the Swick believe. I cannot condemn them for acting exactly as I would have under similar circumstances.”
The swordsman snorted. “Then you’ll never be a hero, Etjole. You’ll never ride in triumph through the streets of a great city, acknowledging the acclamation of the crowd and the eyes of pretty women. You’ll never be a noble in your own land, much less a king lording it over others.”
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