“Maybe we see this green country soon,” Kræwk suggested. He bounced along on his camel’s back.
From the front of the howdah, Len looked down at the Camel Lord chief. “Not yet," he said in the desert speech. “North next. Then west to the big hills and the river-lands.”
Kræwk grunted. “We must talk to the Stone Pickers first.” He sounded unenthusiastic.
Behind Len, Kaelii added, “The wanderer comes from the stone teeth. There we find stones and trees as far as the eye sees. We need folk who build with earth and stone and wood.”
“As you say,” the chief replied. He sounded dubious.
“When we reach Stone Picker big village, tell other Camel Lords, watch caravan. You and chiefs come with.”
On the front slope of the camel’s hump, Kræwk’s young son broke free of his mother’s grip and threw himself onto the critter’s neck. The boy pointed excitedly.
A small, dusty mountain loomed ahead. The lesser Fangs. It’s been awhile.
Kræwk spoke rapidly with his wife, who scooted forward to secure their son. The chief turned his face up to Len once more and made a crosswise sign over his forehead. Len raised a hand in salute practiced keeping his wince on the inside. It’s for their sake, Kaelii says, not mine. I have to be a worthy chief. As if she discerned his thoughts, Len felt the encouraging pat of Kaelii’s slender hand on his back.
As Kræwk fell back in the desert-folk column, Kaelii came to sit beside him. Leastways she and Kræwk don’t paint the mark on their flesh. Too many of them do. Together they watched the Stone Picker settlement come into view.
The village on this mountain was larger than the one where Len and Egwae had found Big Len. Mayhap a dozen structures were big enough to see from this distance. And that’s just the east slope. The main building occupied the whole of the gently rounded summit.
“Look, mate,” Kaelii said in his speech. “Horn critters.”
Sure enough, dark dots turned steadily into knots of bovines spread across the mountain slope. The mountain was scarcely more than a foothill, compared to the greater Fangs. Yet the beasts stirred up yearnful feelings he hadn’t expected.
“Aurochs,” he told her.
When Kaelii didn’t repeat the word, he glanced over. Her expression was somewhere far away.
“Wha—”
“Quiet!” she said. She’s scared. “Hear the wind.”
There was a westerly breeze coming off the lesser Fangs. “All I hear is the sound of beasts and folk shuffling through sand.”
“Son of Ghrem!” Egwae’s voice, sounding from below, sent a chill through him. Wright, I forget she’s there.He peered over Big Len’s left side into the warden’s grey-green eyes. “To the south,” she said.
The instant Len obliged, his mind emptied and dread swept in. A blurry, narrow band was just visible betwixt the edge of the desert and the blue dome above.
There aren't any hills over yonder. The band was growing thicker by the heartbeat. “Dust storm,” he said with a calm he didn’t feel.
“Merciful Wind-breather!” Kaelii exclaimed. A stream of prayer to the sky-lord issued from her lips. Couldn’t hurt.
A cry arose behind them and echoed down the caravan. “Dust cloud!” Len snapped Big Len’s reins and looked back at the caravan. All eight clans—men- and women-folk, young ones, and critters—stretched halfway to the eastern horizon. I can’t protect them from this.
Desperate shouts filled the air, and unless Len imagined it, more dust than usual. The column dissolved before his eyes as every clan, family, and critter sought its own survival.
Big Len sensed the storm a-coming, or leastways picked up the urgency all around. After Len’s initial prompt, the stone-beast gathered speed till he reached a full-fledged gallop. Len’s body rattled to his bones, but he wrapped the reins around one arm and held his hat in place with his free hand. Kaelii clung fast to him and kept praying.
The cloud to the south had quickly become a rising wall of sand. On the mountainside ahead, Stone Pickers herded the aurochs into outlying buildings.
Try as Big Len might, the Camel Lords’ beasts, and even some of the lesser dromedaries, soon overtook him. The last of the Stone Pickers and aurochs vanished into their dwellings just afore Kræwk’s folk won the race to the mountain. They immediately set about ensconcing themselves in the boulders at the bottom of the slope.
Come on, boy. You’ll make it. We have to make it. Len’s heart thundered in his ears with every round of rumbling footfalls.
In the same moment Big Len finally skidded to a stop, the sun dimmed. But it’s only mid-afternoon. The looming wall of sand was blocking out the daylight. Sustained gusts buffeted the howdah. When the stone-beast clambered into the rocks of his own accord, Kaelii hugged him tighter, and he leaned into her. Though dark curls fluttered in his face, that was preferable to the sting of wind-blown dust. Kaelii held herself rigid with fright.
Big Len wedged himself betwixt several sizable boulders and knelt of his own accord. I wonder how many of these storms he’s seen. Is he even nervous?
“The coat!” Kaelii shouted over the whipping wind. “It will keep dust off.”
“I’ll get it! Wait a moment!” he yelled back, which sent sand spewing from his beard. Where do I think she’d go? The stone-beast was still settling himself when Len released Kaelii and his hat. He disentangled himself from the reins and snatched his cloak from inside the howdah while Kaelii grabbed water pouches and slung them across her chest. She pulled her palm kerchief over her mouth. Instead of putting the cloak on, Len held it aloft, over both their heads. Kaelii adhered herself to his side.
Egwae appeared next to the stone-beast’s head. Not a speck or a smudge on that tunic. “A crevice is there, under the boulders near the beast’s posterior. Shelter there.” They didn’t quibble with her. Len scrambled though the howdah and out the back. He turned to help Kaelii, but she pushed past him and hopped off Big Len’s rump to the rock-strewn earth.
Egwae had made her way onto the beast’s back just as quick. Such was the growing gloom that the warden’s white tunic was all he could see clearly of her. “Make haste!” she commanded. Instead of finding her own cranny to cower in, she sat herself at the front of the howdah. I don’t reckon I’ve seen her sit afore.
“No dawdle, mate!” Kaelii called. Len jumped after her. The warden will see to herself. Kaelii, scant more than a silhouette now, beckoned to him. Sure enough, a pace from Big Len’s hindquarters, two of the boulders left a space big enough for the both of them. Sand flurries chased him into the crevice, where he tucked himself next to Kaelii. She nestled close as could be. Together they huddled under the cloak as he held it across the opening.
Utter darkness descended outside their makeshift refuge. An especially ornery gust tried to tear the garment from his hands. Kaelii’s hands brushed over his as she helped him hold their goat-hair shield in place.
Len’s breaths came ragged. It’s not the dust. Not yet. A crushing weight bore heavy on his soul. “I can’t protect them. I promised. But I can’t.”
“Whole life they live in wastes. We know how survive little dust cloud.” Kaelii’s kerchief muffled her reply but didn’t dampen her ferocity a lick.
The weight on him lifted just a bit. If he had to be in a tight spot like this, he was grateful for the distraction of company. Her company, anyway. Bloody fangs, I could’ve been holed up here with the warden. It was a shame he couldn’t get a semblance of privacy from Egwae—and the chiefs, and everyone else—without all their lives hanging in the balance.
“Egwae is brave,” Kaelii said in a tentative tone. “She watches you. Good mate.”
A chortle set him to spluttering. Not all the dust is keeping out. “Sorry. She’s my warden. Not my friend. She protects me because she must.”
The howling wind assailed their hideaway. Even with Kaelii’s help, holding up the cloak was noticeably more of an effort. Sand is piling up. He didn’t fancy getting buried alive. Not that I have much choice. One problem at a time.
Kaelii cleared her throat roughly and coughed. “You want Stone Pickers build house? Len’s house?”
“I suppose I hadn’t pondered much on it. Mayhap” When she didn’t answer right away, he tried putting more of his thoughts to words. “It’s part of my purpose. What I have to do. I want our folk to build things and grow things. Because I can’t build and grow them my own self.”
Silence persisted, save for the roar of the sandstorm. “I want stone house,” Kaelii said at length. She was half-shouting to be heard. “In Len’s fangs. There wind from sky talks loud.”
“Louder than the wind out there?”
“No make fun,” she protested.
“I’m not,” he assured her. “I think I’d like a stone house. What more do you want when we get to the valley—the green country?”
“A child,” she said at once. She continued in a more measured way. “A child make me happy. Make my mother and father happy, too. First time I make them happy.”
“Your kin-folk seemed pleasant enough when we met.”
Kaelii snorted and then coughed. “Try be their child.”
“I was a child, too, back in the day.”
“Len was boy in Fangs, yes. I meet your mother and father?”
Didn’t see that coming. “They’d like you,” he said.
“That no answer.”
Sky-lord save me from this woman. The darkness had somehow turned darker. Storm’s not letting up. The sand piling on the cloak posed an uncomfortable strain on his arms now. “Not sure they want to see me. In fact, I reckon they don’t.” The admission stung him deep.
“Kin are—many? Mess?”
“Complicated. And a mess besides. But in my family, I’m the messiest.”
“Why you say that?”
Shame whelmed him over. He felt like telling her his story, the whole of it, but held back at the last instant. “I’m like them,” he said finally, “yet different.” The words spilled out betwixt sips of air. “I wanted to do things the way I saw fit. Sometimes, that was good. Sometimes bad.” Worse than you could imagine. He was feeling more trapped in the space, of a sudden.
“I had my thing to do, too,” Kaelii said. “My kin not know why.” She’s having a harder time breathing, too.They not need know. But they kin. Like mates. No throw away.”
The shame that swallowed Len up at her words contended with the sweetness of her voice. He concentrated on the feel of being squeezed beside her.
“Len?”
“Yes?”
“Mayhap we make stone house in Fangs? Real mates, you and me?”
His cough was only partly the fault of the dust-clogged air. Don’t go lying to yourself, Len. You want the same as her. But what he wanted and what he could have were separate matters. Something was sorely amiss inside him. He was broken like the Fangs and dry like the wastes.
“I’d like that, Kaelii.” He’d given a truthsome reply, yet he remained a muddle inside.
They had to use their breath more sparingly now. The last of their conversation hung betwixt them while they waited for the chaos on the other side of the cloak to subside. Wright, I hope you heard her praying afore.
Len had allowed himself to slip into a kind of stupor when the wind slackened. He didn’t trust his senses till a faint light bloomed at the edges of the cloak. Storm’s passed. An indistinct voice was calling. Gradually, more light crept in, and the weight of the sand lessened.
Dust swirled around Kaelii’s sand-streaked face. She smiled. Something bright and fierce crowded out the consternation in his soul. He smiled back.
At last he dared to push the cloak aside. Kaelii released her grip on it, too. “We good, mate,” she croaked with a wide grin. “See, a little dust.”
Egwae stood in the haze at the opening of the crevice. “Son of Ghrem,” she said. Is that a touch of relief I spy? If so, it was gone too quick to be certain.
“Hello there, Egwae,” he greeted her. Kaelii handed him a water pouch for the scratch in his throat. The warden arched an eyebrow. Her eyes flicked betwixt them.
“We go now,” Kaelii broke in. “Time a-wasting.”
So it is. More than I knew.
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