Desert World Allegiances

by Lyn Gala

  Looking over his shoulder, Temar could swear he saw a glimmer of light in a third floor window. The house was a long way off, the length of a full field, but if he could just convince Shan to let him go back, he could lie and tell Ben that he’d panicked, but that he’d decided to come back. A small imitation of a laugh escaped because it was a little ironic. Ben would probably enjoy the chance to punish Temar for something real. Normally Ben had to order Temar to act up and then punish him for it.

  “Shan,” Temar said softly. He felt like he was trying to tame a boar, which was one farm skill he’d never mastered. Well, one of many. “Shan, I need to go this way. You should go that way.” Slowly, Temar started backing up. Under the nightshirt, his fingers curled into fists, and he prayed. It felt a little hypocritical, praying. He’d spend the last couple of months cursing God, when he bothered thinking about him at all. However, right now, he needed a little luck. He needed Shan’s delusions to keep him distracted.

  “No!” Shan twirled around, panic clear in his face. “We’ve made it this far together, the three of us. You didn’t think we’d make it, back at the bike. I could tell from your face. You don’t hide things well.” He frowned. “Or you do hide things. Or I was just so busy not looking at you that I never saw the obvious when you came to church. How could I not even notice your pain? Do you really think we’re in the valley, or is this God’s mercy, letting us die thinking that we managed to save ourselves?” Shan reached out and caught Temar’s arm, pulling him forward.

  Clearly Shan had hallucinated some version of him, but Temar was at a loss as to why he’d do that. While Temar would often go to church, he was never particularly close to either of the priests. The church was simply a place of quiet and peace, when Temar hadn’t been able to listen to Cyla’s anger or his father’s insane rambling. If Shan were going to hallucinate, surely he could find someone more important to hallucinate about. However, until he changed hallucinations or sobered up, Temar didn’t have much choice.

  He followed down the long dusty path that led to the opposite side of the valley and away from Ben and George Young’s farms. A rise in the ground caught Shan off guard, and he fell to one knee, his fingers clutching at Temar’s nightshirt. With his bound hands, Temar couldn’t do much, but he did reach for Shan’s elbow, struggling to help him back up to his feet. As drunk as Shan was, Ben could kill him with a single finger. After being the cause of so much trouble already, Temar wasn’t going to let that happen.

  “Shan, you need to hide,” Temar said.

  “You and Naite need to stop teaming up on me,” was Shan’s nonsensical answer. Temar obviously needed to wait until Shan sobered up a little more. Wobbling a little, Shan got to his feet and started down the path again. A line of fence posts with no wire marked the boundary between Ben’s place and the Sullivan’s. Their farm was long and followed the slight curve of the valley floor. Temar stood in the moonlight and eyed the path back toward Ben’s place. If he went back after this long, Ben was going to make him pay. The memory of Cyla running through the rows of rye on their farm rose up so vivid that Temar imagined her racing between the beans and the rhubarb. She’d die. If he made the wrong choice, she’d die. Of course, if Ben was nervous, he would have already made the call. That thought nearly sent Temar to his knees. The only thing that kept his legs from buckling was the belief that Ben was just too arrogant to ever get nervous. He wouldn’t make that call about Cyla until he thought he had to, or until he thought he didn’t need leverage anymore.

  Leverage. Temar had to take several deep breaths as he remembered what he had allowed that man to do because he had leverage. And if he went back now, Ben would have all the time in the world to make Temar regret his few stolen moments of freedom. Maybe it was fear of that pain, and maybe it was fear that Shan would get confused and follow him back to Ben’s place, but for whatever reason, Temar turned his back on Ben’s farm and started walking after Shan.

  The Sullivans grew vegetables and rhubarb that provided both food and the oxalic acid the early settlers had used to leech the iron out of the glass sands to make optic quality glass that the more developed planets envied. Of course, there wasn’t much demand for that type of glass these days, but the rhubarb kept growing, even when the farmers had to cut back on irrigation. The already reddish stems looked even more red under the light of the moon, so that the wide green leaves looked like they were drifting on top of red sands.

  “Hurry up,” Shan called.

  “Coming,” Temar answered. Clearly, Shan was used to his hallucinations disagreeing with him, because he turned and looked at Temar with a bewildered expression, but he didn’t say anything. Awkwardly kneeling down, Temar strained against the rope leash until he could grab the red stalks and snap them off.

  “What are you doing?” Shan wandered closer, stumbling now that he didn’t have Temar to lean on.

  “You need food, or the pipe juice is going to rot your brain.”

  “It already has,” Shan pointed out. Temar stopped for a second to really look at Shan. Wearing his black clothing and standing in front of the congregation, Shan always looked imposing and regal, and with his sharp features, a little intimidating. Now, he looked smaller.

  “Just help me steal some food.” Temar waddled a few feet down the path and broke off more stalks. Hopefully, the theft was small enough that no one would notice it. Then again, the council couldn’t do much more to him… not unless they exiled him, and at this point, Temar thought that might be the better fate.

  “Thou shalt not steal,” Shan announced grandly, his voice sounding like a sermon as it boomed in the darkness. Of course, he also started snapping off rhubarb stalks. “I don’t like rhubarb.”

  “It’s the only crop that’s ready to eat.” Temar had several fat stalks in his hands, but as he stood, he could only hold them by the green tops and let them hang low. “Take these, and then we can go.” Temar awkwardly swung the red stalks out toward Shan.

  Shan stared at his bare legs for a long time. “You aren’t wearing pants.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “The sandrats will get you if you aren’t careful.”

  “We aren’t on the desert. We’re in the valley, remember?” Temar tried to keep his voice even. When his father was like this, anger would either make him cower in fear or, on rare occasions, strike out. Temar didn’t intend to find out how Shan would react.

  “We’re in the valley?” Shan looked around. “Ah. I stole water from Ben, but I don’t think he’ll mind too much. He’s a good man.”

  Temar’s guts tightened in immediate hatred. He knew it wasn’t Shan’s fault, no more than it was the fault of the workers who would tell Ben how wonderful and patient he was. The sound of people praising Ben Gratu still made his stomach sour. “Take the food or don’t,” Temar said as he flipped it onto the path near Shan.

  “You’re angry because I noticed your legs are bare. You’re right.” Shan bent over and grabbed the stalks and started snapping off the poisonous leaves, throwing them farther into the field where rows of bean plants were starting to get bushy. “I never looked at you long enough to see your father was hurting you, and now I act like I have some sort of right to stare, just because I’m hallucinating.”

  “You… what? My father never hurt me.”

  “Naite used to say that to people too.” Shan nodded and turned back toward the far side of the valley, but the turn put him so off balance that he stumbled sidewise, got tangled in a rhubarb plant, and fell with a heavy grunt.

  “Shan.” Temar hurried over, but tied he couldn’t do much except crouch down near him. Shan was staring up at the stars, not even trying to move, one hand fisting the base of a rhubarb crown.

  “What kind of a priest stands at the pulpit and doesn’t notice that people are in trouble?”

  “Who’s in trouble?”

  “I suppose I should forgive myself for Naite because I was too young and idiotic to know any better. But how could I le
t Erqu Gazer hurt you? Why didn’t I ever walk up to you in church and tell you that you could stay? That’s what Div did for me, you know. I was sitting in the back of the church one night, after a day interning with Holmes, and he sat next to me and asked if there was something I needed to talk about. I should have done the same for you.” Shan reached out so fast that Temar didn’t have a chance to retreat. Shan’s hand caught him right above the knee, and he held on tightly, his thumb pressing into one of the purpling bruises decorating Temar’s legs. “I’m a poor excuse for a priest. I should have been a mechanic.”

  Shan’s hand was close enough for Temar to reach, and he worked his fingers between his leg and Shan’s hand, struggling to make Shan release his painful grip.

  “I never needed saving until recently. Shan, please, you’re hurting me.”

  Immediately Shan let go. “I do that too much.” The fatigue seemed to settle over Shan like a sudden weight, and he let his head fall back onto a bean plant so that the teardrop-shaped leaves covered part of his face. “You should go on.”

  For a second, Temar couldn’t form words, with the panic growing like a bubble in his stomach. Oh no. Shan couldn’t drag him away from Ben just long enough to get him in real trouble and then abandon him. True, this wasn’t the rescue he’d imagined as he lay in bed or as he’d walked the rows of neat crops on Ben’s farm, pulling weeds and picking off bugs. However, if this was the only rescue he was getting, he didn’t want the rescuer passing out where Ben was sure to find him.

  “Shan, you have to get up.”

  “No, I don’t. If I’m in the valley, then someone will find me, and if I’m imagining the valley, then maybe it’s time to let the sandrats have me. ‘The upright have God for their Savior, their refuge in times of trouble.’ Not that I am all that upright. I tilt to the side, but I swear that I never meant to hurt you, Temar. I never meant to let someone else hurt you.” Shan rolled his head to the side and looked up with such agony that Temar could feel his anger give way to the same sort of exasperation he’d always had for his father when he’d been drinking. Sometimes pain was more than a person could bear, and they had to either drink or hear their own hearts cracking like glass cooled too fast. But Temar couldn’t understand why Shan would drink. The man had, until now, always seemed so confident.

  “Shan,” Temar said slowly, trying to find the words to reach through the fog. “Naite wants us to hide,” he said hopefully. If Shan wouldn’t listen to him, maybe his hallucinations would have more power over him.

  “I really want to lay here.”

  “If you do, the people who tried to kill you will come.”

  “They wouldn’t dare.” Shan smiled, but slowly his smile faded. “But they’re already here. I heard them.” Reaching over, Shan patted Temar’s leg, and Temar’s skin crawled at the familiar gesture. It was one Ben often used when he was in a particularly good mood. “They said he’d know.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t know. Naite insists that he wouldn’t try and hurt me, but I’m not sure I should believe a hallucination. I’m really drunk.” Maybe Shan was sobering up, or maybe he had more self-awareness than Temar’s father had had when he was drunk. He pushed himself up onto his elbow. “If I don’t know who tried to get me killed, I should hide.”

  “Do you know a really good hiding place? We have to hide where nobody will ever find us,” Temar said. He considered telling Shan that it had been Ben. Ben had left the bruises and tied him and had listened on the phone with his lips pursed in thought as his friends described how they’d killed Shan. He just wasn’t sure that Shan wanted to hear that. In truth, he wasn’t sure that Shan could understand him—not now, with his brain inventing visions.

  “I know a place that only Naite knows about.” Shan grunted as he pushed himself back up to his knees. “But what if Naite is the one they called? They tried to shoot me. They missed.”

  “Naite wasn’t the one,” Temar promised. He held still as Shan used a shoulder to get back up onto his feet. The skin around the corners of his mouth had the shriveled look of someone about ready to drop dead. “Did you drink water when you were at Ben’s place?” he asked. If Shan got food in his body before water, the man probably would drop dead.

  “You and Naite are always ganging up on me,” he complained.

  Temar stood next to Shan and then took a step forward, urging him into motion. “I’ll stop ganging up on you if you tell me whether you drank some water.”

  “Too much water,” Shan said with a distant look in his eye. But whatever his destination had been before, he obviously remembered it because he started walking with purposeful steps, his arm around Temar’s shoulders for balance. “I almost vomited, but that seemed like such a waste. I put more water in my canteen, but I don’t like the smell of it. I’m sorry I liked you.”

  Temar shook his head and kept walking next to Shan. Hopefully morning would bring more answers, and hopefully he could convince Shan to untie him. For now, they just had to find someplace to hide that Ben wouldn’t find.

  Chapter 13

  THE cave where Shan had led them was little more than a deep crack in the rockface. A pile of rock that had tumbled down from the cliff had piled up in front of the opening, and a giant wind tree with branches twisted into impossible shapes had taken root in the rock itself, so that a person could walk right by the mouth of the crack and never see it. Hopefully, Ben Gratu would walk past without seeing it if his search brought him this far. Logically, Temar knew that everyone posed an equal threat, since anyone in the entire valley would turn him back over to Ben, but it was the idea of Ben finding them that made him afraid to sleep as he rested his head against the warm rock.

  The night was a long series of half dreams and shadows and the sound of Shan snoring heavily in the deepest corner of the crack, and morning came with vivid streaks of red and orange that stained the sky. In the distance, a worker walked the rows, sinking a probe in every five or six feet, checking buried irrigation lines, and his long shadow followed him. Temar’s wrists itched from being tied together, the sweat gathering between them, but he just sat on the loose gravel and watched the distant worker.

  As the morning sky brightened to blue, Shan groaned and shifted. Temar watched as he pushed himself up on shaking arms until he had his back to the wall of the cramped cave. He peered through narrowed eyes, and Temar was guessing he had a headache big enough to make his head fall off. Maybe his time with Ben had brought out his own meanness, but Temar was a little amused at Shan’s misery. If the man was going to drag him out of his familiar despair, at least he got to hurt as much as Temar.

  “Great,” Shan said with tremendous disgust. “I’m brain damaged. I’m at least half sobered up, and I’m still seeing things.”

  “No, you aren’t. Not unless you’re still seeing ghost Naite.” Temar shifted around awkwardly. His bound hands were trapped near his stomach, so he used his heel to push himself up a little straighter.

  Shan frowned. “Temar?”

  “Yes?”

  He watched as Shan’s eyes scanned him, and his eyebrows drew down with worry or confusion. It was hard to tell, but his color looked better, and his face didn’t have that odd wrinkling and puckering that suggested imminent death. “But….” Shan stopped and then inched forward. “I imagined those.”

  Temar looked down to where Shan was staring. His short nightshirt couldn’t hide the vivid, purple bruises with a rim of green where the skin had started to heal. He could feel the heat gathering in his face. Logically he knew it hadn’t been his fault, but a little part of him wanted to hide the marks and hide the fact that he hadn’t been smart enough to find a way out of Ben’s trap on his own.

  “No, you hallucinated a lot, but these are mine.”

  “I kept imagining you and Erqu on that isolated farm—”

  “My father never touched me!” Temar froze, horrified at his own shout. Looking out through the curling branches of the wind tree, he watched the wo
rker continue to walk the rows.

  “Is someone out there?” Shan moved forward but grunted with each step he crawled.

  “A worker. He didn’t hear.”

  “Thank the Lord.” Shan sagged against the rock, but he’d moved forward far enough that their legs touched, even though Shan pulled his knees up under him. “We have to go to someone on the council.”

  Temar’s stomach rolled with panic, but he set his heels into the dust of the cave floor and pushed himself back. “No.”

  Shan jerked back in surprise. “Temar, he hurt you.”

  “Gods and stars… don’t you think I know that? Do you think I’m stupid?” Temar pulled at his bound hands. Ben had done more than Shan would ever know because he had no intention of telling anyone. His suffering was his own.

  Shan blinked his eyes a little more open. “Of course you do. I never suggested you didn’t.” Shan closed his eyes and let his head come down to rest on his knees. He was the picture of misery, and Temar felt wisps of guilt for verbally striking out at the man who had tried to save him. True, it was a disorganized and clumsy rescue, but it had worked… maybe. Temar still wasn’t sure what they were supposed to do from here. If Ben didn’t find him soon, he’d have his friend kill Cyla, and then he’d tell the council that Temar had run away, so that an exile order would go out. Three valleys and five towns. That was not a lot of room to hide. Shan moaned and tangled his fingers through his hair.

  “You’re recovering from pipe poison. You shouldn’t be talking,” Temar pointed out. His father always complained that his own voice echoed in his head, the morning after a particularly bad round of drinking. Before all this happened, Temar had wondered how his father could ever drink, but now he understood. If he had to face a life in Ben’s bed, he would have happily lost himself in the madness of pipe juice. Ben wouldn’t have liked that much, but that would have been a bonus. Temar just never thought Shan would be one to drink. Temar wondered if the attempt on his life had driven him to drinking. Actually, now that he thought about it, Temar had no idea how Shan had survived at all. Ben said his friends had killed Shan outside Red Plain, and Temar hadn’t heard of any rescues.