Bright returned to her room less than a glass-turn after she had left. She was met by a sight that startled her, and made her point the yet-unfired shooter; Coal was standing in the middle of the room, tying one of her own shirts around his bloodied and tousled hair - or doing the best he could with one unbroken arm.
“Sit your ass back down right now” she growled.
He looked at her a moment, only one of his eyes currently unobstructed by hair, and blinked once or twice. “Alright” he said meekly, and backed up to the wall, against which he lowered himself on his haunches.
“So my ropes weren’t good enough for you?”
Coal glanced from the barrel of the shooter, still pointed at his face, to the rope that had been picked apart and lay on the floor beside him. “I’ve learned to escape from worse.”
“Why didn’t you run?”
Coal shrugged. “I’ve nowhere else to go just now. I came to talk to you, and I intend to.”
Bright smirked, and lowered her weapon albeit cautiously. Coal relaxed a bit, spreading his legs out in front of him comfortably.
“I’m to guess there’s been no attack yet?”
“Not yet.” Bright sat on her bed, facing Coal and never aiming her eyes - or the barrel of her shooter - far from him. “But Clay’s guess was as good as yours. He figures now on an attack from the underground, but that the outliers most likely miscalculated and missed our tunnels by a little. So our tunnel collapsed but they’re likely still digging.”
Coal bit the inside of his lip to prevent any hint of disappointment from showing. He had been relying on that attack. “Clay’s a smart man,” he said instead, sneering as might be expected, “but I can’t imagine he’ll be satisfied to let them keep digging so close to his own home tunnels.”
“No,” said Bright with a hint of disappointment. “He’s sent all the diggers down there to find the outliers’ tunnel. When they break in, well the whole force of scouts won’t be far behind.”
Coal found himself still biting his lip, but now he did it to keep away the smile that wandered dangerously close to his countenance.
“It’s gonna be a bloodbath” she continued with no relish in her low, trembling voice. “Why they keep insisting on a war they only stand to lose, I can’t understand.”
Coal was silent a long moment before grimly replying: “Everyone needs war, I think. It’s one of those little fears that keeps folks from worrying about the bigger fear. It’s almost like dying in war is simpler than facing the end of the world.”
The corner of Bright’s lip curved into a slight smile. “Everyone’s got their own war they fight. You’ve got yours, you’ve been fighting since we were children. Doesn’t sound like much has changed since then.”
If it was possible for Coal to become even more deadly serious, he now did. “I’ve come home for a reason, you know,” were the words that quietly but heavily passed his lips.
“I figured as much,” said Bright. “I’m still waiting to hear it, along with an explanation of how the hell you knew about the outliers and their tunnel.”
Her steel, threatening face became to quiver as her eyes darted from Coal’s face to the shooter in her hand, and back again. Her lips curled downward involuntarily and she blinked once, twice, ten times in succession. “And also, where -” her voice trembled and tears welled up in her eyes - “where the hell have you been, Coal?”
Coal was startled by her show of emotion, and he turned towards her. His dark eyes fell on her face and he saw her, for the first time, as neither a threat nor a target nor even as the grown up little girl he had once known; he saw a woman who had herself been lashed by the hot winds of an unforgiving world, who had grown not just in beauty and physical strength but in indefinable force of presence, and who had utterly been transformed by the endurance of unmentionable suffering into a creature wholly unknown and unrecognizable to Coal’s experience. He wanted to reach out and wipe away the tear that rolled slowly down her cheek before it vanished into the light hair that flowed over her shoulder, that rare bright hair that so pleasantly and uniquely contrasted with her dark skin and darker eyes.
But he did not reach out, and he turned away as quickly as he could, choosing to stare instead at the blank wall of the chamber.
Bright sniffed, wiped her eye with the back of a dirty hand, and sighed. “What the hell were you looking for anyway? And if you didn’t come back for all that time, then why now?”
Coal drew a deep, anticipating breath then stood up quickly. Bright was swift to follow him, standing quickly with her shooter trained on his heart.
“There’s a lot I can tell you,” he said. “But, not here. Not where Clay might return at any time.”
Bright lifted one eyebrow suspiciously, then swept her hand, indicating for him to step aside. She stepped forward to the wall and stooped down to the grate, to which Coal had been tied. Keeping her weapon pointed at him, she swept a knife out of her leather boot, where it had been cleverly hidden in a snakeskin sheath below the ankle. With the knife she pried at the edge of the grate until it fell free, landing on the floor with a loud clang that reverberated once through the room, then many times from the darkness that lay on the other side of the grate.
“After you. Don’t move too quick or my trigger finger might get jumpy” she said, standing again and waving a hand toward the open vent. Coal smiled, nodded and lowered himself to his hands and knees. Awkwardly, keeping weight off his broken left arm, he crawled through the space and into the darkness beyond.
A moment later Bright joined him. In her hand she held a small torch, the shooter having seemingly been left behind. Gracefully she ducked through the hole, wriggling her way backwards until she could reach the grate and pull it back into place behind her.
A short crawl later, the tunnel widened until it was tall enough to stand in. Coal grunted as he pulled himself out and up, his arm bumping against rocks this way and that. Bright slid speedily out into the larger space, standing up and leading the way through the narrow passage, farther into the darkness.
These tunnels were rough, hewn naturally by an ancient river that only survived as as a trickle. The going was slow. Coal threw a glance as Bright’s torch lit up the wall on his right, which opened up to another narrow passage that sloped steeply uphill. He knew that passage, farther up, met a vertical wall with makeshift steps carved into it. It was the lower end of the pit that led far up to the secret opening under the horse stable.
“Why were you in here, to find me when I fell?”
Bright chuckled. “I wasn’t here to find you. That I did was just an unhappy accident.”
They took a few more steps forward in silence. The passage disappeared into the darkness behind them.
“I heard you cough, or snort in your sleep. The noise echoes through these passages for miles. I had no real reason to think anyone had come in through the old secret entrance, but that was where I looked anyway. Lucky for you. Of course you only fell the very first bit. The long downhill tunnels after that, I had to drag you.”
“Was my arm broken before you dragged me?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
Coal couldn’t see her face, but he could imagine her wry smile and crinkled nose.
“But I still don’t know why you would be down here at all,” Coal went on. “I figured you had forgotten about this place, by now.”
Bright was silent for a moment, but Coal could see her head turning left and right, up and down as if she were rebuilding a series of memories. After a moment she finally replied: “sometimes I like to go for walks down here.” That was all she said, but Coal could sense by the distant softness of her voice that there was much she was choosing not to say.
Through the winding tunnels he followed her, though he could just as easily have navigated by himself, perhaps even in total darkness. The tunnel was joined by other passages and branched several times, but always Bright and Coal stayed on the downward incline, treading deeper and deeper into the earth.
“When we dug out the caverns that lay behind us - your chambers and Clay’s, the new worship hall and the armory - we thought they were the deepest tunnels that could ever be dug,” Coal mused. “But then you and I found these caves. Do you remember? It was our secret. Only we knew just how deep the world could be.” His voice was hushed as if still keeping a secret, though the amplifying stone walls turned his whisper into a shout.
Bright responded in much the same soft tone, as if in unspoken acknowledgement that they were entering some place that was sacred to both of them. “It was a pleasant illusion while it lasted, but we have dug deeper now. Even deeper than these caves. Everything we do now is for the dig. The age a boy became a digger was once sixteen summers.”
“I remember too well.”
“Now it is twelve. And most of our people who die, die in the pits.”
“Why now, though? What’s the use of digging new chambers? Sure there must be more tunnels than there are people to fill them.”
“It’s what our people do. We dig.”
Before Coal could respond, the illuminated rock walls on either side fell off into darkness and the tunnel opened into a larger cavern, from which multiple other small passages opened upwards, downwards and sideways.
“Here we are,” said Bright, turning to her left toward a small rock formation that formed a natural bench.
“But we’re not there yet,” protested Coal.
“We’re far enough down here so our voices won’t carry back to the chambers. That’s enough for me. Now you can talk, and I’ll listen until I feel you’ve said enough.”
Coal sighed, his eyes staring longingly into the blackness of one particular side tunnel that plunged even deeper into the earth.
Bright sat on the flat rock and opened her eyes in wide expectancy. “We’re not going down there, Coal. Here’s where you can tell me your story, or else I’ll take you right back and let you fend for yourself in a colony that wants you dead.”
Coal remained silent for a few moments more, his eyes never leaving that dark tunnel. “The place we found down there, so long ago” - he said slowly, every word potent with thoughtful memory - “it changed everything about the world we thought we knew. Do you remember, not just the place but that feeling, that certainty that something in our perception had been utterly broken.”
“I remember it clearly, and I think about it often.”
“Then why have you not done something more to change things? You’re the governor’s wife! If there’s anyone who can guide the people in a new direction, it’s you.” Thinly-veiled accusation dripped from his voice.
Bright’s eyes wandered from Coal’s face and off into blank nothingness. Her lips tightened and a spiteful answer shaped itself on her face though it remained unspoken. “Just because I think about it doesn’t mean I know what any of it meant,” she said with a tinge of sadness. “The world offers up mystery after mystery, but only a fool thinks he can interpret the signs with certainty.”
“Then call me a damn fool.” Coal began abruptly to pace back and forth. Bright started a little but relaxed when she saw he had no intention of leaving the cavern. “Your governor, and the governor before him, and the old priests, and well, everyone, has been throwing time away since before either of us were even born! It’s almost as if everyone here is perfectly content with worrying and wringing their hands while the world comes to an end. But what if the world doesn’t have to end?”
“Get to your damn point, Coal.”
“My point,” Coal stopped pacing and took a deliberate step toward Bright, imposing if not for his broken arm hanging limply at his side, “is that I’ve come back home to get our people the hell out of this dying colony. I’m gonna take them east.”
The cavern went entirely silent. Not even a drip of water could be heard. Bright’s expression, lit from below by the torch in her hand, was completely blank.
“But you’re the only person who can help me do it,” said Coal after the pause had become uncomfortable. “Nobody’ll believe me, let alone follow me. They’ll listen to you. Even Clay, he’d listen to you at least.”
Bright kept on staring at him without movement or emotion. This was enough of a response for Coal. “And right now you must think I’ve gone crazy,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And usually you’d be right to think it. Not long ago I would have thought anyone was crazy who said we ought to go anywhere, let alone into the east.”
“Wherever it is you’ve been, I think the sun baked your head while you were there.”
“Then just listen to me a while longer. I don’t say these mad things without the greatest consideration and conviction. Otherwise I wouldn’t have risked my neck coming back here at all, unless I knew it was the only way.”
“Then,” said Bright, wedging the bottom of her torch into a gap in the rock then leaning backward on her elbows, “give me your reasons. I have nowhere else to be, and the massacre of the tunneling outliers is something I’d prefer to avoid altogether. While I may not believe you, I’ll listen.”
Coal looked at her a moment, then turned around, fumbling around on the darker side of the cavern for a place to sit. Finding a comfortable nook for his backside at last, he rested his broken arm on his knee and breathed a deep, deep breath. He turned his eyes upward.
“Til the sinking of the sun, and after light is done…” He looked at Bright. She said nothing so he finished the invocation:
“We put our trust in you, and the sun will rise anew.”
CHAPTER
I remember where I was the moment the sun first touched the horizon. I awoke from a travel rest in camp and rolled over, tossing aside the snakeskin sheet I used to block the wind while I slept. The sun struck me somehow as being different, but it wasn’t til I squinted and stared for some time that I saw how the bottom had softly landed upon the distant flat horizon.
I can’t say how I felt, or that I felt anything at all. The old prayer came with a mutter to my lips for no reason other than instinct, and I expected no response at all: “Til the sinking of the sun, and after light is done…”
“We put our trust in you, and the sun will rise anew.” Slate was awake, and he’d seen the sun too. His response surprised me at first, since he was not a believer and to the best of my knowledge never had even set foot in the worship hall. But then he coughed a little and I realized the noise in his throat was a harsh laugh. Then he spat on the ground, perhaps out of disgust, or perhaps because the wind had picked up distant sand while we slept and had flung it into our faces.
We were just shy of a two month trek west of here. After our sudden departure - which I’m sure you remember - the first part of our journey was mostly uneventful. I had adapted slowly to the extended heat, thirst and hunger, and Slate had often had to drag me along although it was my own journey we were on. How many miles we traveled was impossible to say, but our progress hadn’t been as quick as we would have liked since, as I’m sure you know, Slate had only taken a single horse for us.
“Remember how the old folks would smile a little, and shake their heads when we asked them about the Sunset?” My question elicited no response from Slate. Immediately I realized the foolishness of what I had said, since he was so much older than I. “I mean the people like Elder Gold, and the Governor, and Miss Gentle, who act like we’re stupid for wondering about what happens when the sun goes down.”
Slate didn’t take his eyes from the sun. His long, spry frame lay rested on one bent elbow, and his squinting eyes set in a leathery sunbaked face offered no betrayal of what his emotions might be, or whether he had any emotions at all.
“Those folks,” he finally replied in that softly growling voice of his, “outta rot in some sorta hell.” He spat again, then tore with his teeth into a strip of gopher jerky he held in his hand.
The whole world along with us had seemed to pause for that moment the sunset began. Even the wind died and the desert became utterly silent.
I couldn’t take my eyes away from the horizon. The bottom of the bright circle stretched with the distortion that warped up from the heated plains. Long ago it had turned this very shade of blood red, and the deep orange wash over the desert was nothing new. But right now, maybe it was something about the clouds forming, dancing, arrayed above the descending sun and shaping the light into new and ever-changing jets and streams that made us pause for so long; it was, in face, beautiful.
“The horse.” Slate’s sharp utterance broke any spell the sun had cast over us. He bounded in an instant to his feet and turned around once and muttered “he’s gone. Someone took ‘im.”
It was my turn for me to scramble to my feet. All the aches from the miles of travel vanished in an instant as the blood rose hot in my head, a mix of fear, anger and shame.
“Did you fall asleep, Coal?” He towered over me, his eyes burning a hole through my face.
“I…must’ve.” Not able to bring myself to look at him, I spun round and round as if hoping to somehow see the horse apparate from the sand.
“Only one sleeper, every watch.” That was all Slate said to me on the matter, but as he turned to where the horse had been tethered I could hear “dammit” burst through his gritted teeth. He stooped down to look at the dirt where the horse’s hooves had broken up the ground. Two or three sets of footprints clearly followed our own from the east, then carried on with the horse’s to the northwest.
No more words were spoken for a while. As the guilty party I gathered up whatever gear had not been strapped to Slate’s horse, slinging it over my back and following him as he strode forward, tracking those prints in the dirt.
“Can’t be too far ahead of us” I said at last, trying to stir up some hope from the bitter silence into which we’d fallen. “By the prints, it looks like one or two of them is on foot like us.”
Slate still didn’t say anything. He trekked on ahead, his long legs moving with such relentless strides that I struggles to keep up with him even though I occasionally broke into a run. My hope was half-hearted since, far as the desert stretched out flat ahead of us, the horse was nowhere to be seen.
“Who are they, do you think?”
Now he finally answered. “Someone who knows horses. They got River loose and on the move without making a ruckus, or else I would’ve woken.”
After a spell of perhaps half a glass-turn - our time glass having gone along with the supplies on the horse - we paused for a breath and a splash of water, since we were fortunate enough to still have the water skins.
My own hopefulness had worn thin. I had only one thing to say that could sum up my disbelief at our current situation: “There aren’t supposed to be other people out here.”
“It would seem we were wrong on that count.”
“It was just us. Just the Tunnels, and the outliers. If there are other people in the world…What
does that mean?”
“Doesn’t mean anything. Situation’s still the same. Just more complicated now.”
“I guess we didn’t map out very far.”
“Coal, for all it’s worth, our people haven’t mapped out a dime’s worth of space. It’s a great big
world, and we don’t know a lick about it.”
He tossed the water skin over his shoulder and marched forward.
I had long suspected that, beneath his stone-hard shell, Slate was on this journey with me because of something more than anger at the colony we’d left behind. Now I was sure of it. He was probably just as curious about the nature of the world as I was, and our westward journey promised the best chance of some sort of answers. But like any thoughtful but simple man, he railed against his own lack of knowledge, and so pretended not to care.
The line of foot- and hoofprints led to the northwest and then wrapped round directly into the west, continuing the path of our journey. It became gradually clear that the desert had begun to slope slowly uphill, falling away again some miles ahead of us. This long, shallow hill accounted for the disappearance of our quarries, who must have been far enough ahead to have fallen dropped over that ridge before we had begun our pursuit.
It was a dry stretch of desert, and even the spiny brown weeds we were used to seeing had all but disappeared. In our hastened pace we burned through our store of water at an alarming rate, though the blame for that rested largely with me, Slate being somehow able to carry on for miles on a single mouthful.
When our feet crossed a shallow natural ditch, Slate glanced back at me then diverted to follow it back downhill. I followed without any explanation from him, since many times we had followed ditches in hopes to find muddy collections of water beneath the dry eddies shaded by the banks. We would lose valuable time, but out there water was far more valuable than time.
The ditch took a sharp turn not a mile down from where we’d crossed it, and it was joined by another ditch. Several boulders lay scattered around there, sheltering some of the ground from the heat. As we had hoped, a steep outside edge of the ditch cast a shadow over a space of maybe three feet by two which was dark with moisture. The rains (as you must remember) had been torrential that past season, and such lonely shadowed sponges that still held water were the only thing that had allowed our journey to continue as far as it had.
We stooped over the muddy ditch beside one of the leaning boulders. Digging with our hands we uncovered a cache of cool, soggy sand some two feet beneath the surface. “Smells alright,” said Slate after sniffing a dripping handful of the watery dirt.
We began to soak our handkerchiefs in the water and then squeeze them out, first into our cracking mouths then into our water skins. When the skins were full Slate took off his wide-brimmed hat and squeezed a handkerchief’s worth of water over his grey head, then reached back down for one last dip.
I stood up, as I tied my water skin tightly shut.
Then what I saw was a quick movement out of the corner of my eye, and I heard two sharp hisses and a coughed curse from Slate. Turning around again I saw that Slate was lying sideways on the ground, his right leg kicked straight out from under him. In his hand he had drawn his knife, and beside him in the dirt lay the severed head of the snake.
“Can’t believe I didn’t see it coming” he said, breathing heavily. “Just a baby too, or else he woulda had the common courtesy to rattle and announce his presence.”
The small slimy trail the snake had left led beneath one of the boulders that lay just beside the ditch. It must have sprung at Slate from the cover of darkness underneath the rock.
Slate tore away the leg of his pants from the ankle up. As I scurried to his side I saw the two tiny puncture wounds just below his knee, and the already yellow skin that surrounded them.
“Ought I to suck out the poison?” I asked, shaking more violently than Slate.
“No, stay clear. Venom’s already in the blood.”
“I could light a fire fast, and heat up the knife, and cauterize the wound.” My thoughts were quick and scattered, and not at all helpful.
“There’s nothin’ to be done, boy!” On our long journey, Slate had never shouted at me until now. I fell silent. Slate propped himself up on his arms and good leg, then pushed himself to a standing position. Gritting his teeth he hobbled for a step, then sunk back down to the dirt. His leg was swelling visibly.
I stood by him, trembling, waiting for an opportunity to make myself useful. It slowly, very slowly, began to dawn on me that our situation was truly dire, and I felt like a frightened child, which indeed I was.
“Take my portion of the food and make your way back” said Slate after a long moment during which he watched his leg swell to twice its normal size.
My voice was shaking: “No, sir. I ain’t abandoning you like that.” I don’t know if I said what I said out of courage or cowardice; sometimes they feel much the same, and right then the feeling was nauseating.
“Boy, then what’s your plan? We sit here, we both die.”
There was nothing I could say to that. I knew how right he was. Pacing anxiously, I looked around the desert and threw my gaze up into the sky, hoping to find a magic solution to the problem at hand, but there was nothing. We were alone in the middle of a vast desolation, and I was an inexperienced boy with soft skin and big ideas, and my guide could no longer walk.
“Then I’ll run ahead. I’ll run ahead and find someone.”
“You don’t know if anybody lives out west, or if its just more goddamned desert.”
“Well, somebody stole your horse, didn’t they?”
Slate scowled. “Sure. But you’re a fool to think you’ll get help from damn horse thieves.”
I looked into the west, at that blood-red sun whose descent had filled me with terror ever since I was old enough to understand. But no longer did I let terror overwhelm me; now it was rage that filled me when I saw the sun, as it challenged me to follow it, find its destination, defeat the coming night. This was the rage that started my journey in the first place. I stopped trembling.
“What was it you said to me, Slate? ‘When you have the choice to do somethin’ or nothin’ at all, it’s better to do somethin’.’ Well, this is somethin’.”
Slate’s eyes narrowed and he looked at me with something like pride, though at the time I was too preoccupied to notice it. Then the pain of the snake bite overcame his face. “You’re a reckless son of a bitch,” he said.
“Yes sir” was all I could think to say.
As I picked up the satchel of food and an extra skin of water, Slate muttered loudly through the blistering wind: “Take the shooter, since I reckon you might need it. But leave me the knife; you know what I’m probably gonna have to do.”
Again I dared to look at his swollen leg, recently so lean and muscled but already a puffed up monstrosity, blue skin and oozing yellow liquid. Even I knew that, without doctors or medicine, the leg would never walk again.
Slate handed me the shooter he usually kept slung over his back. It felt heavy and unwieldy, and I didn’t know that I would be able to use it properly if the occasion ever arose.
Slate sensed my discomfort and pointed to the barrel: “that end points at the thing you’re wanting to shoot. Only four shots left, so make ‘em count if you need ‘em.”
I tied it to my back as best I could, and stepped away. I didn’t know what to say to him, and urgency was on my mind more than anything. But before I could turn my face to the west I was stopped by one last unexpected utterance from Slate: “’Til the sinking of the sun, and after light is done…we put our trust in you, and the sun will rise anew.’ We’ve been saying that shit since I was a boy. I wonder how long we’ve been saying it. Ever since they first figured out it was gonna get dark sometime, I reckon. Did anyone ever really think someone was listenin’? Coal, what do you think’s gonna happen when the sun goes down?”
It wasn’t fear that I heard in Slate’s voice, but it was something vulnerable that I’d never heard before. I was confused at the question, but I knew the answer. It was the only answer I’d ever truly suspected.
“Everyone’ll die.”
Slate nodded in his slow, distant way. “Then you’d better run.”
So I ran.
I didn’t know how long or how far I ran. My mind no longer accompanied my parched body as it mechanically shot one foot in front of the other thousands, tens of thousands of times.
My thoughts sped away to the last time I had run that fast and anywhere near so far. It had been at the games when you and I were little more than children, though that was not so very long before. I’d given all my strength to the race but it hadn’t been enough. I’d fallen far, far behind the others, though I’d pushed my legs until the muscles burned and my lungs chafed in the dry air. Now with my thoughts on the struggle of that past, childhood race I became more conscious of the present burden, the food pack on my back feeling like a stone dragging me down, the hot wind on my face like a furnace pushing me backward. So I brought my thoughts back to the present, to the only moment that was real. Whatever the stakes of that old race (and Bright, those stakes were high indeed), the stakes now were far, far higher.
Immediately I felt lighter. Pushing myself onwards out of necessity was simpler than doing so for sport. I kept my thoughts on the snakebit friend I’d left behind, on the setting sun, on the poor, ignorant people of the colony who, though they didn’t realize it, were depending on me to save them from the night. That thought made me angry, and the anger put miles behind me.
I approached the ridge of the gentle slope over which the horse thieves’ tracks had vanished. A cascade of dust blew up from beyond it, catching the light as it was lifted in the air. As I finally reached it the wind in my face seemed to double in magnitude and I was nearly blown over backward. The first thing I noticed was the strange scenery that met my eyes when I looked to the horizon. Beneath a surprisingly steep incline that dropped off in front of my feet lay a valley, its north and south edges formed by massive arms of hills that, now rounded and softened by the wind, must have once been sharp with rocks and cliffs. More such valleys branched out below, shelving downward until, nearly hidden by a grey haze, the land seemed to even out into what looked like a plain: a hard-surfaced, impossibly flat, eternal plain that reflected the sun.
The second thing I noticed was that, to my great discouragement, the stronger wind had all but erased the prints in the fine sand. The path I followed was blowing around my head in a billion sandy particles. But I knew the thieves had been traveling more or less to the west, so westward I would continue.
The lowest ravines in the valleys, as I soon saw, were shaded deeply from the sun and appeared green with vegetation. Prompted by that sight I made my way down into the bottom of the nearest valley, where the sun and wind were both blocked and puddles of clear, cool water collected. Though the greenery was little more than fragile moss and thing clinging vines that sat in clumps near the puddles, it was more green than I’d seen my entire life. Probably for at least a thousand months those lower slopes would have been out of the sun’s harshest rays, habitable and even comfortable to live in. If only we had explored this far, I remember thinking to myself, not without anger, I could have grown up in a place like this.
But I reminded myself that even these valleys, filled with grass and water, sheltered by hills instead of tunnels, would be in darkness along with the rest of the world, within just one generation.
At any rate, the sight of the grass awoke a strange hope within me, where before there had only been dogged, hopeless determination. Perhaps somewhere, thousands of miles ahead under a morning sun, there would be a place like this with green hills and cool water. I could raise my own children there eventually, if I had them. If I lived that long. If I was right about the shape of the earth.
The bottom of the valley fell away, cascading into another valley, and below that was another. The land dropped down dramatically until I wondered whether the distant plain I’d seen from about had been a mirage. Perhaps I’d been wrong, and my family, friends and enemies right; maybe the world had an edge and this was it, a series of valleys that fell off into eternity.
Amid such thoughts as these I began to wonder whether I had lost my sanity somewhere along the journey, or whether I had ever been sane at all. As a result I didn’t know whether to believe my own ears when the softly returning wind carried up a cacophony of high-pitched cries from somewhere below. They were not the sounds of people, or of any animals I had heard before. Thoughts of the world’s edge ceased to be conjecture as my mind rushed madly through the stories I’d heard about screaming demons who guarded the abyss beyond the world. I’d been warned time and time again not to chase the sun, and maybe I should have listened after all.
But as I kept climbing downhill and the cries became louder, it was not terror that the sound inspired but peace. The noises were soothing and impossibly rhythmic despite their randomness. What’s more the smell of the air began to fill with a cool freshness that, as it filled my lungs, cleared my mind and gave me a burst of energy.
A movement caught the corner of my eye and I whipped around. No sooner had I seen the source of the movement, I fell to my knees, covering my mouth and stifling choked and joyful laughter. Tears sprung to my eyes.
There, behind a large rock that blocked the wind, sad a small creature standing on two tiny feet and methodically smashing a bug it held in its mouth. I had never seen one, but I recognized it by the descriptions from stories even older and more fanciful than those about demons.
“It’s a bird.” I must have unwittingly uttered the words out loud, because at the sound of my voice the creature shot up into the air, its white wings fluttering madly.
I sprang to my feet and gave chase. Everything else vanished from my mind; the horse, the thieves, Slate, and even the sunset itself. Birds were real, and anything was possible now.
The farther I ran, the more the sky filled with birds. White and grey, swimming through the air, navigating the wind with heavenly ease, occasionally diving downward and rising back up. The wind increased drastically, but even in its intensity it was somehow kinder than it had ever been in the desert. There was another sound, too. Something endless, without echo, thin but full. It could have been the wind, though I had never heard the wind rush and crash like that.
As the final valley opened up on either side of me, the grass gave way to pebbly sand. The sun was clear and bright, and illuminated the sharp black cliffs that formed the final walls of this last valley. In front of me was flatness. Flatness for eternity. Flatness, against which the sun cast a reflection so bright there may as well have been a second sun.
I shielded my eyes. It was clear to me now that I was looking at something else new, entirely unfamiliar and alien. If the sounds and smells were not enough, I now noticed that the surface of the plain was moving, undulating endlessly.
It was not I stood ankle deep in sand and water washed over my sore feet and blood-soaked shoes that I was able to wrap my mind around the thing that I was seeing. It was a world of its own, from stories even I had never given any credit.
Again I couldn’t help but mutter aloud: “The sea.”
CHAPTER
Bright’s laughter rang out startlingly clear and resounding through the caverns. Coal shifted uncomfortably on the rock that was his seat, looking at Bright with wide eyes that suggested exasperation rather than surprise.
“A sea, was it?” Bright half-coughed the words between bursts of laughter. “And you’re telling the story so seriously!” Seeing that Coal did not respond and his lips didn’t even crack a smile, she breathed deeply and replaced her mirth with stern reproachfulness. “Here I was, expecting sincerity. What’s your game, if you’re not going to tell me the truth? Did you really risk coming back here for the sad joke of telling me a child’s fable?”
Coal’s face remained expressionless, his eyes wide wide with weariness. “Would I lie to you?” he said.
Bright shrugged. “The Coal of ten summers ago wouldn’t have. But I don’t think you’re that Coal anymore.”
He nodded slowly, never once looking into her eyes. “Then, Bright, would you believe Slate?”
“I never knew Slate,” said Bright. “He was just another scout as far as I was concerned. But if his story were to match yours, that might be something. Doesn’t make a difference without him being here to talk. Unless he’s hiding under that cloak of yours, I doubt you’ll have much luck getting him in past the guards, being wanted like you both are.”
At this Coal smiled distantly and began a strange, voiceless heave that was something like dry laughter. “So he doesn’t tell you things.”
“What? Who doesn’t tell me things?” Bright asked, confused.
“Clay.”
“What about Clay?”
Coal again laughed, this time audibly. “This explains why you weren’t at all expecting me back here. But your husband would be less surprised. What he didn’t tell you is that Slate is here, in the colony. Clay made him a prisoner less than a dozen glass-turns ago.”
“Nothing’s happened yet,” said the tattooed young woman to her silent young companion. They still lay on top of the small hill overlooking the above-ground part of the colony. The boy made no response; he stared ahead at the crowds of diggers and patrolling scouts.
“Attack was supposed to happen by now. He was supposed to signal. Something’s gone wrong.”
The boy glanced in her direction and held up his arm, making an emphatic squeezing motion with his fist.
“They might have captured him, yes,” said the woman with not a sign of emotion.
Then the boy made a whirling gesture, then pointed to himself, then squeezed his fist inside his other hand.
“No,” said the woman sternly. “He won’t betray us. What reason would he have to do that?”
The boy shrugged and sighed. A moment of silence passed before the woman continued: “I almost wish he were the sort of person who would betray us. He’s too good, too trusting. It will get him into trouble. If he’s captured like his old friend was, I don’t know what the two of us can do.”
At that moment there was a stirring among the scouts. A small line of people, neither diggers nor scouts, had made their way from the inside of the colony and crossed the unfinished ditch. Several scouts, among them a tall figure with a wide black hat who looked to be in charge, were shouting at the newcomers, who shouted back and pointed forward into the desert.
The long-haired boy turned questioningly toward the warlike woman. “No, it’s not what we’re waiting for,” she responded to his silent question. “This is something different.”
In the front of the line of civilians strode an old, old man in a flowing robe that looked completely unsuitable for the hot conditions. Nevertheless he appeared calm and controlled, and his responses to the angry scouts seemed to hold an air of respect. After a few moments of authoritative pleading with the lead scout accompanied by pointing at the sky, he turned his face toward the desert and continued leading the line of thirty or so people out from the colony. The scouts no longer shouted at them, and the lead scout pointed to four of his men, who rode out alongside the procession, holding their horses to a slow walk to match the walkers.
None of what was said or shouted was audible from the hill where the watchers lay, but much could be inferred. The scouts had felt the desert, under threat of attack, was too dangerous for whatever civilian mission the old man was leading, but he had convinced them of its necessity and had been allowed to continue with guards.
Faintly now it could be heard that the walkers were singing loudly, chanting a strange hymn that was carried by the wind toward their tense observers.
The boy’s eyes lit up hungrily and he turned to the woman. His hands flew in a sequence of shapes that ended with a finger pointing at the sky.
“Yes,” nodded the black-haired woman. “It’s the priest he told us about.”
The boy looked at his companion pensively for a moment, then looked back at the processors. His whole body quivered with anxious anticipation and his muscles tensed. Again he shaped his hands into a quick sequence of signs, finishing on an exaggerated squeezing of both fists which he moved back and forth through the air in a sign of exchange.
The woman nodded slowly. “It’s not part of the plan. But if he’s captured, you may be right; this might be the only way we can carry this off.”
Together they watched the procession march off slowly into the shallow hills a little west of their position. Once they were shielded from view by a gradual rise of ground they nodded at one another and slunk away from their station, creeping silently as snakes toward the unsuspecting line of singers.
“Between the digging of the trenches and the threat of the outliers, I don’t find it surprising that Clay never thought to mention Slate,” said Bright. “So one old scout comes back after deserting a long time ago. How is that important enough to tell me?”
“Because it was me he left with.” Coal’s voice was beginning to tremble ever so slightly with what seemed like anger. “And if he’d come back after all this time, that just might mean that I would too.”
“And do you think your coming back would make such an impact? Do you think anyone cared all that much when you left?” Her eyes were filled with pity and her voice remained soft.
Coal grit his teeth but said nothing.
“I don’t want to be harsh, Coal,” she went on in the same tone, “but for most everyone around here, you were just some digger who got sick of the digging and the praying and the fighting and ran away. Hardly anyone even remembers your old friend Sands, or the awful things that happened before you left.”
Coal looked blankly into the darkness, his teeth still clenched but his expression aimless. Bright sighed and pulled out a second small torch from her pocket, lighting it off the nearly-spent one that had been lighting the cave. “Is that why you’re here right now? To rescue Slate?”
Coal looked at her. “Yes, and no. It’s one of the things that’ll have to happen once you agree to help me.”
“You still haven’t told me what it is precisely you need my help for, or how you came to decide what it is you intend to do.”
“Let me finish telling you my story then. If you don’t believe me you can find where Slate is being held, and ask for him to verify what I say. Once you believe me, then I shall let you decide for yourself whether or not we only have one choice if we’re to save our people.”
“Go on then,” said Bright. “Tell whatever outlandish tales you’d like. I won’t laugh again, at least not so you can hear it.”
“You are altogether too kind to me” said Coal, a hint of a smile dancing on his lips. Again he stared into the darkness for a moment as if mustering memories, and then he went on.
CHAPTER
They’d been right about the edge of the world, after all. I’d been wrong. I chased the sun as far west as I could possibly go. The world ended in water.
Once or twice I did recall my own terrible thirst and bent down to lap up some of the infinite store of water, only to be left coughing and sputtering. By some horrible twist of fate the great sea sour and salty and refused to sit well in my stomach.
But at that moment, I could not have cared less. The sea entranced me and for as long I walked along the shore - how long it was, I don’t know - my worries were forgotten. Believe me when I say that nothing I have experienced in this world has matched the overwhelming tranquility and violence of the sea. I felt small, but not small in the same way you might feel in the middle of a desert. This smallness was comforting because it gave certainty; certainty that the sea would never be conquered, would never be crossed, would go on for ever and ever. Just like the Night it would swallow us up and there was nothing I or anyone else could do about that.
A harsh whistling sound broke my trance. First I thought it was the birds, but this sound came from the hills. Whirling around I tried to find my bearings, but was surprised to see my footprints had vanished in the water swept sand, and I had no idea how far I must have walked.
I heard the whistle again. It was somehow methodical, somehow intentional enough for me to know by instinct that it belonged to no animal at all.
All my concerns rushed back to me; the colony, my self-imposed exile, Slate’s poisoned leg, the horse thieves. The horse thieves; this must be them, come to finish me off for having the gall to track them down.
As my wits sharpened and I began to see my surroundings clearly, shapes became apparent seen against the seaside cliffs and partially blending in with them. They were angular shapes, black like the cliffs but carved into rectangles that stood one above the next in various sizes. The more I looked, the more of these I saw lining the cliff faces. Here and there taller sections of the cliff were home to large square columns studded with small openings. That these structures were built by men, I had no doubt. But about the builders I didn't need to wonder long.
Multiple whistles answered the first, coming from the north and from the south of where the other had sounded. I froze in place, not knowing whether to run forward or to go back the way I came. The only other place to turn was into the sea, but that watery abyss would mean certain death for me.
Then two, three, five human figures appeared from the shallow hills at the base of the cliffs, running toward me faster than I’d ever seen a human run. For a moment I thought they weren’t humans at all, since they had an unearthly look about them. Their clothes were a tight, thin mesh made from some dark material I didn’t recognize, but their skin was entirely covered in black tattoos of extensive design.
These observations took one instant for me, but the most important thing I knew was that these people were not colonists and they were not outliers, and they were certainly here to kill me. Their weapons, rather than the technological shooters we use, were barbaric looking blades with long handles that they twirled and swung as they raced toward me, shrieking inhumanly. Both men and women were there, both equally fearsome in their approach.
I had been trained, as we all are, how to act in the event of an Outlier ambush, with hands outstretched in a sign of peace and surrender since the Outliers always trade hostages for supplies. But these creatures were no Outliers, and though I was terrified I wanted very much to be brave. And I had Slate’s shooter.
I raised it up and pointed roughly in the direction of the frontrunner, who was closing in quickly and swinging his long handled blade.
Never had I used a shooter before, but the sky above knows how often we’ve seen them used. I knew what to do, and even though my hand was shaking and my vision streaked and my ears were filled with the chaotic cries of my attackers and of the seabirds, I knew that my shot would strike home.
So I lowered my arm, pointing the barrel towards the ground at the feet of the wild man, and pulled the trigger.
The sand shot up into the air, creating a momentary cascade in front of him before being carried away by the wind. But the impact of the noise was not so fleeting. The loud boom, that tremendous shout of war, rang against the cliffs and grew in impact as it resounded. Two of my assailants flinched and covered their ears, while the other three stopped in their tracks and raised their blades in preparation to throw them, looking at me, the whites of their eyes shining starkly out from their darkly inked faces.
If you know me at all, Bright, you should know why I did not shoot the man. For one thing of course, to spend one shot on one attacker would hardly have saved my life, for the four others would have cut me down in an instant upon witnessing the fall of their companion. My best chance at survival lay in a warning shot, like the snake that rattles before striking. But above and beyond that line of reasoning, in the moment I held up that shooter I had a vision of all the shots I’d seen fired, all the Outliers I’d watched die, all the foolish fighting either for sport or for war. All of it was nothing but the greatest of distractions, something to do to pass the time while the world fell into darkness. If I shot the man, I would be no better than all that, for in my panic I would have forgotten the truth that all the people in this world face the same great fear, and that ought to give us all something to stop fighting over.
They withheld their charge only for a brief moment, a moment during which I was not sure whether I had frightened them, angered them or simply forced them to change their tactics. I lowered the shooter all the way and raised my left hand, palm outward to show that I didn’t mean any harm.
Then one of them barked out an order, utterly a loud, quick shout that I didn’t understand. Faster than I could hope to respond they all closed in on me. They waved their blades and swung the wooden handles to the front. One or perhaps all five of those blunt weapons struck their target and I don’t remember anything more.