TALES OF LONG SUNSET: Chapter One

The shadows that blackened the hot desert ground stretched far into the east. They danced back and forth, to and fro, forming the unnatural image of tall, distended creatures stooping and standing, stooping and standing as they grasped at some loose objects at their feet and then threw them aside. The undulating pace of each shadow was relentless and unchanging, but the rhythms of no two shadows were the same, so that one would outpace the next, then join it in motion before falling behind, and so on all down the line of moving shadows in an unintelligible, nightmarish non-pattern.

Were the eye of an observer to move beyond the shadows, daring to look toward the bright yellow horizon, it would find the objects casting the shadows to be less huge and ill-proportioned but no less remorseless in their movements. It was the long line of diggers, carving a trench into the dry desert ground with picks, shovels and fingernails. Their sweat dripped and poured into the ground, forming puddles that ever-so-briefly softened the ground before once again evaporating, and every now and again a digger would collapse, only to be quickly rolled aside and replaced.

Casting fleeting shadows over the diggers, for the briefest of moments blocking the sun from their weary eyes, were the figures of the horsemen who rode back and forth some fifty yards in front of the new trench. It was these figures, not the diggers, that concerned the solitary man who approached from the west, from directly beneath the setting sun.

He lay flat against the desert brambles, casting a shadow only a few feet in front of his face. His cloak was brown, making his form all but invisible against the dirt though it caused him to sweat and gasp in the stifling heat. There against the sun he would be hidden from all but the most straining of eyes, but he could see the diggers, the horsemen, and the entire Colony with sunlit clarity.

The diggers were active all along the western and northern perimeters of the colony. On the south and on the west the work seemed to be already done, and behind the trench stood a thick wall of hardened mud. On the north it appeared the wall construction had already been begun. The west side had been left for last, likely with the simple thought that the Outliers lay to the east so were more likely to attack from that direction. It was a poor strategy to leave the sunlit side - the side of least visibility afforded across the desert - undefended until the last, and it was a weakness that afforded this solitary newcomer his best chance at entering the colony unnoticed.

He crept forward slowly, knowing that at any moment one of the scouts might espy his shadow as a tiny dark blemish on the desert then move closer to investigate. That could not be allowed to happen. Not yet.

The watcher lay and waited and sweat. The digging figures vanished little by little downward as their trench deepened and first their knees then their hips disappeared below the ground. The mounted scouts, with their wide-brimmed hats and their shooters slung across their backs, kept crossing back and forth along the perimeter, about a dozen to each side. The time passed, and the length of the shadows remained the same.

The wind that whistled hot from the west paused as if to take a breathe before the next blow, and in the silent reprieve a howling cry could be heard from the north. All the scouts whirled their horses around and even the diggers stopped to look. Away in the distance a riderless horse was galloping toward the colony. It was the horse of a scout, though the scout was nowhere to be seen. Beyond the horse was a field of low hills and sand dunes, from which the warlike cry continued to be heard.

The watcher in the dirt stiffened and dug his right foot into the ground. Any moment now he knew he would have his chance.

The lone horse came closer and closer, and the scouts gathered curiously to watch its approach. The light brown dust it kicked up in the wake of its gallop could clearly be seen in the harsh low sunlight; but there was some other dust of a darker color that seemed to pour from the horse’s saddle, black and shining as it reflected the light.

No not a horse. Don’t use a horse, half-muttered the watcher, his every muscle tensing. The horse joined the ranks of scouts, slowing down and whinnying as it found itself among familiar faces. Then the scouts began to move more quickly, frantically as they also seemed to realize what was leaving a trail on the ground behind the horse.

A flame leapt up in the hills from which the horse had appeared, and sped across the desert, following the trail of explosive powder left there by the unwitting horse. The angry cries of the scouts carried over the desert to the still-hidden watcher. The scouts dismounted and began to kick the ground, scattering the powder and burying it as quickly as they could. But the damage had already been done; a long line of fire was blazing across the desert and the wind had picked up once again, pushing the inferno eastward. The bone-dry desert grass carried the flame nearly as quickly as the fire powder had done. The bright wave drifted on toward the farmlands, where what little water could be spared for irrigation fed acres of wheat and oats, the tenuous survival of which carried the livelihood of hundreds of colonists.

More shouts came from the scouts, and now the diggers jumped in alarm out of their ditch. Some dropped their shovels while others carried them by their side, but all began to run to the fire at the direction of the scouts. From where the watcher lay in the hot dirt, every human being in sight was now swarming toward the spreading conflagration.

Out of an old instinct, the watcher glanced once more at the hostage horse, to make certain it had reached the ranks of its fellows unharmed. To his satisfaction he saw it had not been touched by the flame. Emboldened by this and by the sight of a long, unmanned stretch of defenseless ditch, he sprung to his feet and, cloak furrowing forward with the wind, he began to sprint. His shadow made a large and obvious mark in the otherwise featureless expanse, but nobody was watching now.

He ran quickly, and the nearer he came the farther away the scouts moved, fighting the fire farther north and farther east. The ditch loomed up close in front of him, not yet too deep nor too wide to leap over.

The runner’s concentration moved away from the now-distant scouts, then to the ditch in front of him, and then to a particular mud structure that stood near the center of the colony. It was one of the tallest structures, and though it was not a long run ahead there were many structures standing between him and it, and god only knew how many guards and scouts.

But there was no turning back now. The ditch was in front of him. He would vault it and sprint on toward that structure. Either he would reach it and enter the Great Tunnel, or he would be captured. If captured, he would no doubt be condemned to execution; but he knew the execution would never come. The horse and fire had only been a distraction. A real attack was coming, and it wasn’t coming from the north.

“Coal?”

He froze in his tracks, nearly tripping over his feet as they dragged to a halt just before they were meant to leap over the ditch.

“That you, Coal?”

The digger had caught him off guard, slinking back down through the ditch to retrieve the shovel he had left behind. Now the runner turned to look at the skinny, filthy man with a prematurely gray beard and long hair that was matted and caked with sweat and dirt, and barely recognized him. But after squinting a few moments an old, old memory reformed and attached itself to the sad image of the digger’s face.

“Yeah, it’s me Dusty.”

First a smile, then a quiver of anger, then fear passed over Dusty’s face all in a matter of short moments. He had taken his shovel in hand and held it blade forward in a way that could not be perceived as anything but threatening.

“I’m comin’ in, Dusty. You’d do well not to get in my way now.”

The digger stared. He was shaking now, and sweating even more than before.“Where’ve you been, Coal?”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m back now.”

“They’re…they’re gonna kill you if they catch you.”

“I know. But are you gonna help them catch me?”

Dusty wiped a filthy arm across his sweaty brow. He trembled a moment more, then stepped back, pivoting his shovel as he turned around in the ditch. He kept his head trained over his shoulder as he ran, but he said nothing and had soon rejoined the other diggers in fighting the fire.

The runner breathed heavily and trembled himself, wiping the sweat off his own head. He had successfully held his own composure, but the combination of the heat, the running and the unexpected vision of one of his oldest friends, so drastically changed, taxed him so that his confidence plunged. He looked back and forth furtively now, scanning for guards, for scouts, for diggers, for more old acquaintances who might suddenly appear. There was nobody, just as he’d known there would be. Even the non-laborers, the women and the children were well hidden out of sight, keeping themselves in the deepest of their tunnels in preparation for the coming war.

He shook his head quickly, clearing away the trepidation. He backed up several steps then leapt forward, clearing the ditch.

He was back inside the colony. He was home.

His head was clear once again. His resolve, never too long distracted, bent once again toward that tall structure in the middle of the colony.

The diminutive mud huts flew by as he ran past them. Not a soul was to be seen, and the shouts of the fire fighters began to fade as he neared the center of the colony’s surface. He nearly found himself pausing in spite of himself when, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted one particularly familiar hut, one that he had once entered times uncounted, in which he had suffered more than any child should, and from which he had once stepped with oaths never to return again. But he ran on. No memory was worth the risk of delay.

The large structure loomed in front of him. It was one of the few structures in the colony to be enclosed by a door. The old door, that had stood as a symbol of authority and impassibility in his youth, had been made of tightly-bound snakeskin over a frame of rare wood. That door was gone now, replaced by a great blank slab of stone. Black streaks touched the bottom edges of the structure and climbed up around the entrance, the signs of the fire that must have claimed the old door.

The small huts in front of the door, usually occupied by the strongest of the governor’s guards, appeared vacant. But the runner knew better than to bare himself to their view. To walk right up to the front door would be asking for trouble, even if the outside guards were elsewhere occupied.

Instead he ran straight for an old outbuilding, a low flat structure running between the big house and the nearest other buildings. The old stables. The stalls were all empty, all the horses being far afield. One, two, three, four, five, he counted to himself. At the seventh stall from the left he dove nearly headfirst into the straw and dry shit, digging and scratching with both hands until the hardened dirt floor was uncovered. From where he first started digging he moved back a few feet farther into the stall. There his hands found what they’d been seeking: a solid slab of stone that looking nothing more than a lost corner of foundation.

Along the sides of this stone he ran his fingers, rubbing until the hard packed dirt broke loose and his fingers bled. At last he found the bottom of the slab on the side closest to him. Beneath this edge was a gap another vertical panel of thin stone.

Grabbing at the dirt he began to pull it apart in chunks, clearing away several cubic feet in front of the stone block. The dirt was hard from ages of trampling by whatever horse now occupied this stall, and sometimes it requiring kicking to break the dirt free.

A sound of neighing and trotting alarmed him. It was the sound of two horses not far away, and coming closer, accompanied by voices:

“Granite says someone heard something down in the excavations. Says the governor wants us to patrol it.”

“Patrol where exactly? There’s so many damned tunnels down there and it’s too dark for my liking.”

“Try telling that to the Governor when he finds out to refused a patrol. Go on, put the horses away. Sounds like they’ve got the fire under control.”

Footsteps could be heard entering the stable. The cloaked man in the stall froze still, hardly daring to breath. It was too late to run out of the stall without being seen.

The gate of the very next stall creaked open, and the panting horse loudly walked inside, whinnying impatiently. “Hush now” said the man’s voice, kindlier now. The gate could be heard swinging shut.

The footfalls of man and remaining horse thudded in front of the human-occupied stall. The prostrate man dared not turn his head, but out of the corner of his eye he could see the horse and the scout outside the stall gate. All the scout had to do was turn his head, and the man inside would be discovered.

But they passed on, two more stalls down. The gate swung open, the “hush” was repeated, and the scout hurried out on his way.

The man in the stall breathed out then, even more urgently, commenced his desperate digging.

Soon he had uncovered the vertical underground slab, a mere two feet high by two feet wide.

Working his fingers into the narrow space underneath this slab he pulled and lifted with all his strength.

The slab came loose, showing a deep hole that opened on utter darkness.

So in all the time he had been gone, this entrance had not been found and sealed up. That was good.

More horses were heard outside, now galloping. He could hear five or six now, and he knew that his luck was unlikely to hold when these newcomers were brought into their stalls.

Reaching into his cloak he retrieved a flint and a small torch.

“Ho there, what’s going on down below?”

“Trouble in the tunnels.”

“What about the outliers who started the fire?”

“That weren’t no outliers; it was a damn decoy.”

The voices and the horses stepped into the stables.

There wasn’t time to strike the flint. The man lay down and scooted backwards, his legs squirming blindly into the tiny opening to the pit. With one arm he gathered a bunch of displaced straw which he piled over his head, covering the orifice as best he could.

There he hung, hanging by his arms on the edge, his feet searching in the dark for the rough-hewn step he remembered to be built into the wall.

No sooner was he enclosed in darkness that he heart the stall’s gate open, and felt the heavy vibrations of the horse’s hooves stepping inches from his fingers.

No alarm was sounded. Only the hurried voices of the scouts and the sounds of their urgent running sounded thuddingly through the stable building.

The man in the pit had no chance to rejoice at his escape; his feet still flailed, searching for the step. His hands grew quickly exhausted, holding all his weight by the fingers, and the flint and torch slipped away from him, falling into the darkness below.

He let out an exasperated sigh as he recalled the long time that had passed since last he’d been in this tunnel, and how much taller he must have grown. He lifted his foot to the height where his knee had been, and there it found the tiny shelf. But his arms were too tired and they relaxed too soon. Before his foot had found a solid hold on the step his fingers let loose and he fell backward into the narrow vertical corridor, his legs folding up in front of him as he plummeted downward.

The hole was deep, he knew, and it was the best-kept secret in the colony. He would hit the bottom and he would perish, and his body might be found, but likely only after it had decomposed into a crumpled pile of bones. By that time it would be too late for the colony. By that time the Sun would have set.

All these thoughts sped through his head in the moment before he hit the ground.

“Coal.”

The voice called gently through the darkness.

Darkness. Coal thought his eyes were open but he could see nothing. At first he did not remember where he was, or when. Darkness itself meant only one thing to his waking mind: night. It was too late.

“Coal. Goddamn it, wake up.”

A splash of cool water on his face startled his eyes open. He was not in the total darkness of his dream. It was a torchlit chamber, tall enough for two men to stand on top of one another, and wide as the length of four horses. He lay on the hard stone floor and looked up at a face that, like Dusty’s, took a long moment to mesh with the old memory Coal had stored.

But the face was familiar. Painfully so.

Coal’s cloak had been removed and his long dark hair spilled around his shoulders, dripping with sweat and blood. He tried to move. His head was tender and his arm felt broken. Despite these ailments he would have sat up, if he were not tied fast to a metal ventilation grate. He looked at the yucca-thread ropes that held him, and his eyes grew wide though his mind was still too hazy to form words.

“It ain’t that I don’t trust you, Coal. But when a man disappears for five summers and then suddenly appears in my bedroom’s secret entrance, I’ve got to be a bit careful.” The light-haired woman smiled, but there was none of the warmth or kindness he’d remembered and even expected.

“I didn’t intend to come upon you this way,” he muttered, blinking his eyes to keep his vision sharp.

“Oh? You meant to sneak up on me then, when I was helpless in bed?”

Coal coughed a laugh. But the woman did not seem to have been joking. Coal suppressed his momentary mirth.

“No. Not that neither. I wanted to talk with you. It had to be you.”

The woman stepped away holding the cup from which she had tossed the water onto him, and sipped what drops remained. “Waste of perfectly good water. Wish you’d woken sooner.”

“Was I out for a long time?”

“How am I supposed to know that? I don’t know how long you were in there. You’re lucky I went in there and found you at all.”

Coal lifted up his head and looked right into her eyes. Yes, they were the same eyes he’d looked into so long ago, but they had a sharp edge now. They were less kind.

“Does anyone else know I’m here?”

Her eyes grew even less kind. “Why don’t you say what you really mean to say?”

Coal looked down at the floor, and hesitated. Then he muttered, “Alright. Did you tell Clay?” There was something pained and halting about the way he moved and spoke, and he looked older than the twenty-five or so summers that made up his age.

She kept her eyes locked onto his so intensely that he had to look away whenever he glanced up into her face. “And what if I did?” she said. “Maybe there was a time when I doubted the things they were sayin’ about you, and didn’t agree you deserved a death penalty for the way you left the colony. But hell, Coal, you’re not doing my opinion any favors by showing up like this.”

Coal was silent. He knew that she was right.

Then the woman’s turned away from him, walking to the far corner of the room. “But no, nobody knows you’re here. As for my husband, he’s been gone a while. Tunnel’s collapsed in the new dig, from what I hear.”

At this declaration, Coal’s dark eyes lit up and he lurched against the ropes. “How long ago did the tunnel collapse? What else have you heard about it?”

“I don’t know,” said the woman, filling her stone mug with water. Drinking it down in one long series of gulps, she filled it again and stepped toward Coal. “Tunnels collapse now and then. They’ll dig it again.”

“This is what I came here to tell you. It’s not gonna be safe down here much longer. You need to come with me back up to the surface.”

“Neither of us is going up to the surface, Coal. But you better tell me exactly what it is you’re talking about.”

“The tunnel didn’t just collapse. It’s somethin’ more than that.You’re just gonna have to trust me.”

“Why would I trust you?” She offered the cup of water to Coal.

“Because…” Coal stammered. Any calmness he had been able to muster now vanished, and glaring into the woman’s eyes his face began to tremble, his voice to snarl: “Because I’ve put my life on the line, I’ve traveled thousands of miles into the far west and up and down the edge of the world just to find a way to save this damn colony and now I’ve figured out the only way to do that. I didn’t need to come back here, but I did. I didn’t need to leave in the first place, but I did. I didn’t need to give up a life I could have spent with you, Bright. But I did.”

His trembling voice faded away and his eyes fell back to the floor.

Bright still held out the cup of water, her hand never wavering despite the droplets of angry spittle that only flown onto it from Coal’s mouth. She blinked slowly as the only indication of her impatience. “I could correct you as to the veracity of your last point, but I don’t feel the need just now. As for the other points, you didn’t need to do those things, but you did. Your reasons are your own, I’m sure, but those reasons are mysterious to me.” Now she withdrew the water back from Coal’s parched lips, and drank it down herself, never pausing to breathe nor looking away from Coal’s downcast eyes. Then she stood again, holding the stone mug threateningly in her hand. “I could finish the job of smashing in your head, tell Clay and his boys I found you like that. Or you can tell me what you’re about.”

Coal let out a long, tired sigh. His eyes shut and for a moment he might have been asleep. But he opened his mouth and mumbled words came out. “There’s so, so much to tell.”

“Then start by telling me whether you’re traveling alone. They were yelling about a fire being set in the fields. Did you have anything to do with that?” Coal started to speak but she interrupted him: “If you say you’re traveling alone and I find out you’re lying, I’ll smash your head in all the same.”

“I’m not traveling alone. But it’s not the ones who come with me you ought to fear.”

“Who do I ought to fear, then?”

Coal, his eyes still cast downward, smiled a bitter smile that seemed meant for no one but himself. “There are great fears and there are small fears. The great fear is the same as it always has been.”

“Sunset.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. A distant drip of condensation somewhere in the tunnels could be heard plinking, plinking away.

“But the smaller fear, and your more immediate one, is the outliers.”

Now it was Bright who looked sad. She sighed. “The outliers don’t have our numbers of men, and they have half the horses. It’s a pity they hold onto their thoughts of a full attack, because if they come up against the trenches they’ll be massacred.”

“Against the trenches, yes. But how long has it been since there’ve been any sorties or scouting parties of theirs seen?”

Bright paused to think. “Two moons. Maybe three.”

Coal nodded gravely. “Because they’ve been busy. Digging.”

A quiver went through Bright’s whole body, and then she froze stiff, her dark complexion going somehow pale. “The tunnel collapse?”

Coal nodded again.

She nervously sucked in a mouthful of the cool underground air. “They’ve dug all this way?”

“There’s no end to what men might do out of desperation.”

Bright stepped away, rushing to the opposite end of the chamber. Reaching down she lifted the hair-stuffed mattress that formed her bed, uncovering and retrieving a shooter that lay hidden there.

“You’re surprised?” she said, noting Coal’s unconsciously wide eyes at the site of the dangerous weapon in her hand. “It was my father’s. And yes, I know how to use it.” She took another glance at the ropes that held Coal fast to the wall, then strode to the door of the chamber.

“I’ll be back, if all is well. But if you’re right about there being an attack, then we may both be blessed with death before ever the sun sets.” She opened the hinged slab of granite that stood as a door, then swung it shut behind her.

* * * * *

Just to the north of the colony, a scout was weaving his horse in and out of the shallow hills from which the fire had sprung so intentionally. The burn marks, the unlit black powder and the hoof-marks led him farther and farther into the hills until the colony was all but out of view.

Outliers for sure, he kept thinking to himself. Who else could it be? Nobody, that’s who. There was no one else. But he’d never seen outliers use a trick like this before, and the fire powder they’d used to steak the ground was different than any he’d seen or smelled before.

The hills were quiet now that they sheltered him from the wind. Cliff, the captain, had sent him out here on his own when the rest of the scouts headed back at the news of a possible tunnel incursion from below. All alone, he was uneasy.

The hoof-prints that he followed looped around and the trailing scorch marks faded away. The weeds all around were trampled, and he began to see the signs of human footprints as well, scattered all around in the telltale signs of a struggle.

“Damn outliers” he muttered to himself as if by necessity. But the more he studied the scene, the less it felt like the responsibility of the small, unruly colonies that surrounded Rockhome, with whom skirmishes had been fought on and off for as long as the sun had lain west of noon. He didn’t know what felt different precisely. Maybe it was the lack of other horse prints in the dirt, whereas the outliers never attacked without their horses. Maybe it was the human footprints which, the closer he looked, appeared more and more to have been made by barefoot people. And maybe, just maybe it was the severed head, mounted on a spike that protruded from the neck of the propped and seated torso. Outliers were a lot of things, but they weren’t monsters who made trophies of their kills.

“Gods of the sun, Talc!” The scout leapt from his nervous and bucking horse, recognizing

the head as that of his fellow scout who had ridden out on a patrol on the very horse that had galloped back riderless into the colony with flame on its tail.

“Who the hell did this?” he shouted, partly to himself and partly to the unseen enemies he dreaded were nearby. Out of instinct he drew his shooter from the holster on his back.

For a long moment he had no answer to his shouted question. The wind softly whistled over the topes of the hills, brushing past the dry weeds and brambles.

Then something stirred behind him. He whirled around in time to see something quickly dart behind the cover of a short hill.

“Who’s out there? Come on. I know you’re here.”

He stared at the top of the hill where he had seen the slight movement. Shaking, he walked forward, going around the right side of the hill in the reluctant hope of intercepting whomever it was that had been spying on him from above.

Rounding the hill, he came to a narrow gap between two mounds of dirt that were man-high. As he stepped between he saw his quarry standing quiet and still a few yards in front of him. It was a young boy, with no more than twelve summers of age.

“What are you doin’ out here, boy?” But the words were no sooner out of his mouth than he realized the strangeness of the boy’s appearance. His hair was long and tied into a tail, dangling nearly to his knees. His skin was lighter than most, and his face oddly-shaped for what the scout was used to seeing. Mostly, it was his clothes that were bizarre; instead of leather and yucca thread, his seemed to be made of a smooth, scaly texture like but unlike snakeskin, while the sleeves were adorned with soft, white tufts the scout had never seen.

“Where you from, huh?” As soon as he spoke the scout heard crunching footstep behind him. Spinning around he saw that he was face-to-face with a tall, fierce woman, with hair shaved short and face covered in tattoos.

The scout was barely able to make out the weapon she held - a long wooden handle with a blade of equal length folded into it - when she spun it in his direction. The blade came disconnected from the handle and whirred through the air.

From instinct alone the scout managed to pull the trigger of his shooter, sending up a puff of smoke and a noise that echoed through the shallow hills. But nobody from the colony heard it through the wind. The spinning blade was the last sight the scout ever saw.

“Any signal yet?” asked the fierce woman of the strangely-clad boy, after she had finished removing the scout’s head. The boy shook his head back and forth.

The woman with long strides leapt up the hillock and lay atop it. The boy crawled up beside her and together they lay gazing at the colony, their bodies pressed into the hot dirt.

“Until we see his smoke signal, we wait.”

The boy turned a doubtful eye toward her.

“Trust him,” she said in a growl. “He has kept his word thus far. We will wait for his signal, even if it takes till the sun sets.”

For the sun had not dropped any farther below the horizon since they had set fire to the fields. Nor had it moved visibly these last few moons. But dropping it was, slowly, inexorably out of the sky which it had dominated for generations uncounted, since before history had been recorded or stories had been told.