Dunes Over Danvar Omnibus

by Michael Bunker

  “I thanked you already when I didn’t shoot you before,” Peary said.

  “If not dying is the same as being rich, then I’ve been rich all my life,” Reggie said in a mock-serious tone.

  “We’re moving now,” Peary said. “Do you want to stay here or go on with us?”

  “What? Stay? And let you all split the coin? Nah. I’ll go with.” He looked at each of them in turn. “You three are the only family I have.”

  Peary looked at Marisa and nodded at Reggie. “How’s he doing?”

  “Still too early to tell,” Marisa said. “I’m not happy that he seems to be running a fever. But if he can beat the infection, he’ll do all right.”

  “You know,” Peary said with a slight grin, “by saving his life, you’ve cut our wealth down substantially.” He meant it as a joke, but Marisa didn’t seem to be in the mood for jests.

  “He saved my life,” she said. “And I’ve never cared about the money. I care about you.”

  ***

  Another three hours northward and the first graying hints of darkness were starting to touch the eastern horizon. Around them, the dunes began to be mottled with lengthening shadows streaked by bands of fading light. They’d passed by two fairly large tent towns on their route northward, and in both they’d stopped to take on water and ask around about Danvar. The latter was in order to assuage any suspicion from the migrant tent folk. Peary knew that if his group came across as just another band of Danvar searchers, they’d fit right in and not attract too much attention.

  All anyone in the trading towns wanted to talk about was Springston though, and no one had any new information about Danvar—although it was very unlikely that anyone who knew something about the search for the lost city would reveal anything of substance about it. Still, from the people’s demeanor, Peary got the impression that no one knew anything at all. After refilling their canteens and loading up their water skins, they’d pressed on northward, trying their best to look like sad latecomers to the frenzied search for buried riches.

  Peary raised his hand as they pulled up near a sandcross—the natural intersection of valleys between swells of dunes. The conflicting winds here had made a clean route through the highest dunes to the west.

  “Here’s where we turn left,” Peary said. This valley is our pathway toward the mountains… and whatever lies beyond them.”

  As Marisa put together a light meal, cooking it in a pyrinte ring to keep the smoke to a minimum. Peary hiked back to the south to spy out any tails they might have picked up.

  Peary was still a young man, full of life and vigor, but the stress and pressure of the last few weeks had taken a toll on him. Climbing up the huge dune to the south of the sandcross was a chore after a long day of sailing. He struggled against the shifting footing as he climbed the dune, pushing with his hands against his knees with every step, feeling the sand give way under his boots as he strained upward. Unsteady earth, he thought, unfit for any foundation at all.

  Maybe it was the weariness of a life lived in the endless wastes, or maybe it was the hope that in a few days—or maybe a week at most—they’d break free from the gravitational pull of the dunes and reach the foothills of the mountains to the west. Altogether, he’d had enough of this old life, and if there was a way to just blink and carry himself and Marisa to a newer and better world, he’d do it. He’d do it and never look back.

  The dune got particularly steep near the crest, and he had to lean forward and steady himself with his hands. The sand fought his desire to gain purchase. His fingers dug into the grit, pulling against this land that gave way with every grasp. Like life itself, the world was a wisp that was never solid enough to hold tightly.

  He rested for a moment, realizing he needed to make a dash for the top. Sometimes forward momentum was all a man had to push himself that last dozen meters. He took a deep breath, lowered himself, and lurched forward and upward, pushing hard against the sand despite its insistence on fading away beneath his feet. When he had a meter left to go, he dove forward and crawled the last bit.

  Winded, he rolled over on his back and looked up into the darkening blue of the evening sky, sucking air through his ker like he’d just surfaced from a dive. Again, he saw a sand hawk circling lazily overhead. He had to turn on his side to watch the bird float down and alight on the very tip of his sarfer’s mast.

  When he’d caught his breath, Peary rolled over onto his chest and pushed himself to his feet. He stood tall and stretched himself, still weak from the climb.

  And that’s when he saw them. They were in the far distance, almost over the horizon, but he saw them: just the tips of sails moving northward through the valley. Dozens of them, it seemed, racing one another through the wastes. Miles away still, but closing quickly, sheets billowed out against a rear-wind, some of them red, but not all.

  The realization of what he was seeing flowed over Peary like the sand. A mixed salvage crew. Some from the Low-Pub Legion, others from another crew, or maybe they were freelance pirates, chasing riches and heading his way.

  “Cord,” he said under his breath. “And Joel, too.” No crew would be this far west and south looking for Danvar right now. No. These were brigands, outlaws, looking for Peary, his coin, and probably a guide to take them to Danvar.

  So much for blood being thicker than water.

  The Chase

  Chapter Nineteen

  Breaking west at the sandcross had been the only option available to them, but the Poet knew that the move wouldn’t fool an experienced pirate. Normally, Peary would have had them make camp at the sandcross for the night, but the diver had thought it best that they try to get a few more hours’ distance between themselves and the pirates who followed them. Not that that’ll do much but delay the inevitable, the old man thought. Maybe they’ll catch us tomorrow, or maybe it’ll be a few days from now, but they will catch us.

  “Maybe they’re not even chasing us,” Marisa had said.

  “You don’t know the sand,” the Poet had replied. It was all he had to say.

  Once the darkness was so complete that they could continue no farther, Peary had finally given the word for them to stop. They tied off the sarfers and prepared a small camp.

  They slept for only four or five hours before Peary had them up and loading the sarfers again. Surely he knew that the pirates were gaining ground, and would continue to. But perhaps he was foolish enough, or wishful enough, to maintain that stubborn mirage of human hope: perhaps he thought that they might still be able to get away.

  The Poet was under no such illusion.

  ***

  Two more days heading due west, but their progress was slowing. The mountains to the west kept growing larger, but the sand, like the ubiquity of despair and hopelessness in the world, never did give way.

  “How much longer until we clear the sand?” Marisa asked as they loaded up the sarfers yet again. This was the fifteenth day, give or take, since they’d first fled from Low-Pub. She’d never been gone from home anywhere near this long, and she wasn’t sure she could stand another day out on the sand.

  “I don’t know,” Peary said. “Hard to say. Hopefully it won’t be much longer.”

  The Poet knew that if the pirates didn’t catch them today, this would probably be their last night before the brigands overtook them. But he didn’t say so. He knew Peary knew, but there was no need to frighten Marisa or make things worse for Reggie.

  The sandal hop was sick, no doubt. Mortally ill, probably. Sicker every day. He wasn’t responding to any of the meds Marisa had bought in the trader village, and the scarcity of water and moisture-rich foods wasn’t helping the man’s fight.

  Their stops became more frequent, and however close the mountains looked, they never seemed to get any closer at all. It was like the sand haulers, an infinite number of them, just kept depositing endless dunes in front of them, and the mountains were never quite close enough to touch.

  When they finally did stop for th
e night, the inevitable—the unspoken—hung in the air like sift.

  “No fire tonight,” Peary had said as they prepared camp.

  The Poet noted that there were moans at this proclamation, even one from himself, but what could they do? The wind was blowing from the west, which meant that even a pyrinte fire, which gave off no light (nor sufficient heat, the Poet thought), could still be detected from the scent alone. It would be a long, tough night without a fire. Reggie was getting worse, and over the last few nights the temperatures had dropped down into the chilly range. Cold. Not unmanageable, but not comfortable either.

  Marisa had done whatever she could to make Reggie more comfortable in the haul rack of the sarfer, which was parked in the lee of a dune and out of the breeze, and joined Peary and the Poet a good distance away. The three of them spoke together in hushed tones.

  “Can we outrun them?” Marisa asked. She’d asked before, and she knew the answer, but she asked again anyway.

  “No,” the Poet said. Peary just shook his head, agreeing.

  Marisa didn’t fully understand. “Why are they so much faster than us?”

  The Poet smiled. She’d not spent much time on the sand before these past few weeks, and he knew that the ways of the sand people were strange to someone who’d spent most of her life in the towns. “We’re loaded down with gear weight and coin,” he said. “Add to that the fact that we have two people per sarfer. Of the four of us, only Peary does this for a living.” The Poet shrugged. “We’re just slow.”

  Peary agreed. “And I’m not very fast at the best of times. I never have been. These people who are chasing us have lighter craft—some of their gear is being carried by tri-hulls and skidders, who usually trail the frontrunners by a few days. They can travel twice as far in a day as just about anyone else.”

  “So they’ll catch us,” Marisa said. “Then what?”

  There was silence for a half minute and then the Poet spoke up. “If all they wanted was the coin in our bags, I don’t think they’d bother.”

  “Are you saying they don’t want to steal the coin from us?” Marisa asked.

  The Poet shook his head. “No, I’m not saying that. The amount of coin Peary managed to wrangle out of Joel is significant, and any pirate worth his salt would kill for it. I’m just saying that the coin isn’t all they want.”

  “What else could they be after?” she asked.

  “They’ll take the coin,” Peary said, “and then they’ll want someone—either me or the old man—to take them to Danvar.”

  “But they have the map!”

  “Maybe they do, but the map means nothing if they don’t trust it!” the Poet said, a little too loudly. “As far as they know, it could have been faked. It could be wrong. In fact, we should have been suspicious when Joel gave you double the coin just for the map. He was just biding time until he and his man could get a crew up to go after you.”

  “I can’t believe my uncle would do this,” Marisa said.

  The Poet laughed mockingly. “Any man would do this.”

  “That’s not true,” Peary said. “You didn’t do it when you had the chance. You didn’t run straight to the money-changers or to the Legion heads and tell them about Danvar. You didn’t sell off the salvage or my gear.”

  “A momentary lapse in judgment,” the old man said, closing his eyes.

  Marisa waved her hand and then stood up. She was frustrated, and it was obvious that she didn’t want to listen to the Poet and Peary bickering. “So what?” she said. “They’re going to kidnap us and force us to take them to Danvar? So they’re going to take our coin? Is that it? So we let them! Give them all of it! I don’t care about any of it. They can have it. We’ll take them to Danvar. We’ll give them all of our coin. If that’s all they want, then we’ll live and head west without any of the stupid riches!”

  The Poet shook his head. “No, Marisa, that is not all. These people are not going to take what they want and then let us walk away.”

  “What else, then?”

  “They’ll kill us all,” the Poet said.

  The old man didn’t notice until Reggie was standing amongst them that the sick sandal hop had climbed out of the sarfer and limped to where they were talking.

  “There’s another way,” Reggie said. His breathing was labored and the short walk had taken a toll on his strength.

  “Another way to do what?” Peary asked. “Why are you here? You should be resting where we left you.”

  Reggie tried to lower himself to the ground to sit, but the strain was too much, and he ended up flopping on the sand and rolling over onto his side. After a few moments’ rest, he pushed himself into a seated position and took some deep breaths.

  “Another way that maybe you two can escape,” he said, nodding at Peary and Marisa.

  “Wait a minute,” the Poet said. “What are you talking about?”

  Reggie closed his eyes and spoke only with much effort. “I’m dying. We all know it.” He opened his eyes and looked at the old man. “I’m dying and you’re old.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” the old man said.

  “We all know that the only thing slowing us down is that we have two too many people on these sarfers, and too much weight. So I say that you and I,” he said, pointing at the Poet, “stay behind.”

  “Stay behind?”

  “We’ll take our coin and stay behind. That’ll lighten the load and give Peary and Marisa the best shot at getting away.”

  “No,” Peary and Marisa said in unison.

  “Hear me out,” Reggie said. His voice grew stronger. Not from any improvement in his health, but from the strength of his desire to do the right thing before it was too late. “We can bury our coin. That way if either of us lives, we can come back and get it. After we take the crew to Danvar.” He pointed his finger at the old man. “You know where to find it, and maybe they’ll accept that. Maybe they won’t keep chasing Peary and Marisa.”

  “No,” Peary said. He was shaking his head and pounding the sand with his fist. “No way will I let you do this.”

  “I’m not going to do it anyway,” the old man said, “so it is a moot point. If we both don’t do it, then the plan will fail.”

  “Don’t be so selfish,” Reggie said.

  “Easy for you to say, sandal hop,” the Poet said. “You’re going to die either way. But I’m not dying!”

  “Maybe they let you go,” Reggie said. “Maybe they see you as just an old man who can’t hurt them, so they let you go after you take them to Danvar.”

  The Poet shook his head. “That’ll never happen and you know it.” He looked up at Peary. “And I’ll never, ever, take those people to Danvar.”

  Reggie looked at the Poet, imploring him. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  “Don’t look at him,” Peary said. His anger was boiling over and his voice trembled as he spoke. “We’re not leaving anyone behind, do you hear me?”

  “It’ll work,” Reggie said quietly. The strain turned out to be too much for him, and he closed his eyes and lay back on the sand. Peary and the old man carried him back to the sarfer and placed him back on the netting in the haul rack. They covered him to keep him warm, then the old man pushed Peary back toward Marisa. “I’ll take care of him,” the Poet said. “You go comfort your lady.”

  Peary walked back to where Marisa was now standing and put his arms around her. She shivered a little, more from the situation than the chill, but he held her closer just the same.

  “We can’t let them do this,” she said to Peary.

  Peary nodded. “We won’t.”

  ***

  Reggie was dead by morning. Peary had known the sandal hop was going to die, but he’d figured the man had a few days of excruciating pain and discomfort to suffer before he’d finally enter the grace of death. None of them, it seemed, had anticipated the reality of having to unstrap the sandal hop from the sarfer and decide what to do with his body.

&nb
sp; The valleys were still in shadow, but the pink-orange rays of morning were visible up on the very tops of the dunes, and the cool night was already giving way to the warmth of the day. In the distance, out to the west, the mountaintops beckoned like sirens sent to torture the souls of men, and up above—high up above—a sand hawk circled, his shriek echoing through the morning air.

  “Let’s just bury him deep,” the Poet said. “That’s probably what he would have wanted anyway.”

  Peary looked down at Reggie’s body and didn’t look up. His words came out in a whisper, but the other two could hear. “You don’t have any idea what he would have wanted. None of us do.”

  “We could load up and be gone in minutes,” the Poet said. “With the lighter weight, maybe one of us could actually get away.”

  “And I suppose that ‘one of us’ would be you, Poet?”

  The Poet looked down and shrugged, “No… I… I wasn’t…”

  There was a long period of silence, then Marisa spoke.

  “Something tells me these last few days together might have been some of the best times of his life,” she said.

  Again, for a moment, there were no words. A bitter silence permeated the air, only to be broken once again by the screech of the sand hawk.

  “So what do we do now?” Marisa asked.

  “I don’t know,” Peary said.

  The old Poet looked out and pointed to the west. “We can still run. Maybe something happens. Maybe they miss the turn, or lose a sarfer. Maybe they don’t catch us.”

  Peary glanced at the Poet, then his eyes scanned over until he was looking at Marisa. “Yes, we’ll run. We’ll load everything onto my sarfer and I’ll carry the old man.” He took Marisa’s hand in his own. “You go first. Get out of here now. Just as soon as we’ve unloaded all the weight from your sarfer. We’ll be right behind you, Marisa, but don’t stop for anything. Ride on ’til you outrace the sand itself.”