Simna would no more back down from a verbal challenge than from a physical one. “And when I claim my share of treasure I’ll buy a harem to care for me, and guards, and the best physicians. That I’ll enjoy while you toss and rot as old women chant lamentations over your withered, dying body.”
“You may be right about that,” Ehomba conceded, “but therein lies a difference between us.”
“And what’s that?” riposted the swordsman belligerently.
Ehomba held his head high. “Having already acquired my treasure, I have neither the need nor the desire to claim another.”
“What treasure?” Simna made a face. “Your ‘beautiful wife’? I’ve had, and will have, dozens, hundreds more of the most beautiful. Gold, you know, herdsman, is the most potent aphrodisiac of all.”
“It will not bring you love,” Ehomba shot back.
“Hoy! Love!” The swordsman laughed aloud. “Highly overpriced as well as overrated. Keep your love, bruther, and I’ll have my harem.”
“That is where you are wrong, Simna. If you are not careful, it will have you.” Angry, he lengthened his stride, forcing the stubbier swordsman to have to hurry to keep up with him.
“Is that so?” Simna really had no idea what his companion meant by the comment but was unwilling to leave him the last word. “I can tell you from experience that—”
“Scat on your experience! Be quiet !” Having viewed the entire argument with jaundiced detachment, Ahlitah had lifted his great maned head high into the clear, overheated air and was listening intently. Ehomba and Simna immediately put their discussion on hold as they tried to detect whatever it was that had alarmed the big cat.
For alarmed he was, or at the very least, suddenly wary. It was manifest in his posture: every muscle tense, every sense alert. Both men looked around uneasily but could see nothing out of the ordinary. A lizard with unusually broad, flat feet scampered up the face of a dune to get away from them. White-breasted dragonets circled on silent wings high overhead, hoping and waiting for one or more of the party to drop. Isolated insects buzzed about the fragmentary plants that clung to the dry ravine or fought the fringes of encroaching dunes. There was no noise, not a sound, as if the very constituents of the air itself had stopped moving. The stillness was as profound as stone.
Then a slight breeze picked up, ruffling the paralysis. The world, after momentarily holding its breath, seemed set in motion again. For an instant, Simna would not have been surprised to see one of the violent corkscrew storms they had battled on the veldt emerge from hiding behind one of the towering dunes. But all that showed itself was a pair of iridescent blue butterflies with white wing spots, flitting and fluttering about a common axis of anticipated procreation. That, and the slightly darker-hued sand that was blowing around the far corner of the dune on their left.
Except—far more sand was sifting from west to east than the barely perceptible breeze should have been capable of moving.
It was the color of powdered rust, stained with a hint of decay. Yellow blotches appeared here and there as the sand drift continued to increase. Now a small ridge a foot or two high where it was emerging from behind the motionless bulk of the other dune, it continued to pile up across the wadi. The first scouting grains had already crossed completely to the other side, leaving behind a rising, widening seam of dark reddish sand.
Ahlitah continued to sample the air, but it was Ehomba who called a halt. “That is odd.”
A frustrated Simna was searching their immediate surroundings for a nonexistent danger. “What is?”
“That rising ridge of sand.” The herdsman pointed. Simna glanced distractedly at the unthreatening maroon granules that were drifting across their path. “I see a line of blowing sand. Nothing odd about that.”
“Not in and of itself, no.” The herdsman gripped his spear a little tighter. “But by its actions it heralds an approaching darkness. Not an eromakadi, an eater of light that can only be slain by an eromakasi, but some kind of more physical, less subtle relation.”
“Hoy, what are you jabbering about, long bruther?” What he could not see made Simna more nervous than any visible opponent, no matter how menacing.
Adding to the swordsman’s discomfort, Ehomba took a step backward, acting for all the world as if he were actually retreating from something. “The reddish sand advances—but the sand in front of it and across from it does not move.” He glanced meaningfully at his friend. “Since when does the air select its wind-borne freight with such care?”
Simna’s expression contorted as he mulled over his companion’s words—and suddenly he saw the blowing, drifting red sand in a new light. It was true, only the sand the color of rust rushed and rambled across the width of the wadi. Before it and behind it, not a grain was stirring. That was peculiar, all right.
It was also more than a little frightening.
“Maybe we’d better go back.” He had already started backing up. “Loswee’s directions aside, there must be another way north. One that doesn’t involve confronting animate sands.”
Retreating, he bumped into the litah’s behind. But the great cat did not growl at him. He was holding his ground, facing back the way they had come.
“I’m afraid it’s too late for that, man.” A rising breezed stirred his jet black mane.
A second stream of reddish sand was whisking across the ravine behind them, cutting off their only retreat. Simna gaped at the steady flow and the rising dike it was creating.
“For Grentoria’s sake, it’s only sand! A man could still clear it in a single bound!”
“Maybe,” Ehomba conceded, “if all it did was continue to blow from west to east.” Turning, he gestured sharply with the toothed tip of his spear. “That way, quickly! Up the side of the dune!” Obeying his own words, he started up the slick, difficult slope. Glancing methodically from left to right, Ahlitah followed, his broad footpads having an easier time with the difficult terrain than the sandaled human.
Simna trailed behind, cursing with every step the sand that slid away beneath his feet and made upward progress a strenuous ordeal. Seeing that the mysterious wall of red sand was now ten feet high at either end of the gulch and still rising helped to spur him on.
They were halfway up the side of the accommodating dune when the sky began to darken and a voice boomed behind them. It was the lament of something that was less than a beast and more than a natural phenomenon, the unnaturally drawn-out moan of a fiend most monstrous and uncommon. With their feet planted ankle deep in the sand the fleeing travelers turned, and saw at last what had so subtly tried to ambush them by trapping them within the ravine.
It looked for all the world (or any other) like just another dune.
Except it was taller, and darker. Angry-red darker. And it advanced not in the manner of a living creature, but in the fashion of dunes, by shifting that which composed its near side forward, so that it in turn pulled the center. The center drew the rear portion forward, rolling on over the middle, and so continuing the cycle. Back become middle become front, like a slow wheel spinning about a central axis; endless, eternal, indomitable.
It had no arms and then a hundred, no feet but one that was as wide as the base of the advancing dune itself, like the great lumbering foot of some muscular mollusk. Everywhere and all of it was sand, dark red like all the rust that had ever afflicted all the metals of the world rolled and bunched and squeezed up together into a single swiftly shifting pyramid of revenge. Loswee had spoken of roaring dunes, and indeed there were some such in Ehomba’s own country. But never before had he heard of, or encountered, a dune that howled and moaned and bellowed like some sky-scraping banshee unwillingly fastened to the Earth.
And in the midst of all that displaced geologic fury, two-thirds of the way up the face of the oncoming mountain, were two eyes. An abyssal, lambent red, they pulsed like fires from deep within the sand, inclined forty-five degrees in opposite directions, and focused fixedly on the three fleeing trav
elers. Why they, foreigners in a foreign land, should inspire such rage and determination on the part of the Dunawake, none of the three could say. Perhaps the monster raved and raged from a deep-seated need to exterminate whatever life it encountered within the dunes, no matter its origin.
Already, several small mammals and reptiles had been caught and smothered beneath the advancing skirt of sand, too slow or too blinded by blowing particles to flee in time. The same fate now threatened those trying to scramble clear of its reach. Blasts of maroon sand stung their backs while granular tendrils clawed at their legs. High on the face of an indifferent, inanimate dune, they were temporarily safe as long as they stayed above and ahead of the abomination’s advance.
But the Dunawake was bigger than the dune they were climbing. If it continued to flow forward it would eventually engulf the sandy prominence, overwhelming both it and them. Ehomba knew the far side would provide no refuge. Not when their abrasive pursuer could send arms of sand racing around the base of the dune whose summit they were about to reach. They were trapped. They could only continue to climb until they reached the top, there to wait until the steady advance of the Dunawake overwhelmed them on their final perch.
Struggling upward as his sandaled feet sank inches deep and more into the unstable slope, Simna drew his sword and slashed repeatedly at the thin red tendrils that were clutching at his legs. As he cut and hacked away, handfuls of sand went flying in all directions. What held them together, what made of tiny individual particles a coherent and persistent entity, he could not imagine. Who would have thought that unadulterated rant would make so effective a glue?
For every clutching sandy offshoot he scattered, another crept upward to take its place. Noting the dispersing effect of his methodical, skillful sword strokes, he felt he could eventually cut the Dunawake down to size. Why, at the rate his sword was strewing sand to left and right, the monster would run out of granules with which to form grasping tendrils in not less than a couple of million years! Unfortunately, his arm was already growing tired.
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
IT WAS A MOST PECULIAR SIGHT, TO SEE SAND SHIVER. FIRST 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 n
o 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.”
Carnivores of Darkness and Light: Journeys of the Catechist, Book 1 Page 24
