Chapter 37
Brine watched Ardose and Balthus a moment longer, just to make certain they weren’t moving towards the cave. It did not appear as though they were. Balthus had his back to Brine, his hands pressed down on the cane between his legs, and Ardose was screaming, red-faced, into the hunchback’s motionless face, both hands gesticulating to punctuate his message.
“So how come we ain’t usin’ the cave?” the red-head was saying.
Balthus, his face directed away from the disciple, his stooped body never moving as he spoke, said, “It has not come to that.”
“I say it has,” Ardose countered, pointing a hand to the west, at a place on the opposite end of the spur.
Brine followed the man’s finger and spied a cadre of men dragging one of their comrades by the arms. The boots of the dragged man were leaving grooves in the sand and, ahead of him, three more Lathians were down on their knees in a circle and scooping sand from the center, using their hands or, if they were lucky, a shield.
Brine’s eyes came back to the red-head with the gold hoop in his left ear and listened as the man said, “And I got three dead men what says the same.”
Balthus turned his head to the place where the latest body was being hauled away and said, “If we set out for the homeland without first slaying the monster…,” he paused for no discernible reason the disciple could see, “…you will have far more than three to place beneath the sand.”
Ardose made fists with his hands and let them tremble before his wildly shaking head. “But we don’t wanna go home, yeh old fool! We wanna set up in that cave! Is that so hard for you to get through your thick skull?”
Brine turned his head away from the confrontation and drew a deep, mind-cleansing breath. He didn’t know about the Lathian adviser, but the redheaded Lathian’s message had sunk into his skull just fine. If he were going to stay ahead of these savages, he needed to make his move now.
He turned his head to the rest of the clearing and assessed the remaining sixteen men. Just a quick look around, he thought. Quick look around, grab Godfry by the sleeve, and off we go down the wild, black yonder.
The closest Lathian sat about five or six paces to the right. He and his partner were on watch for this side of the spur, the north side. Per the red-head’s orders, men were stationed in pairs on all four sides of the spur, each pair within sight of the two on either side. The monster would not be using the spur for cover a second time.
The sentinel closest to Brine sat slumped in the midnight sand and did not appear to be excelling at his job. His partner stood further to the east (leaning on his spear and keeping his back to the other man), but this man was simply sitting on his butt and wiping sweat from his face.
Brine turned his head further east and spied the burial detail for the second time. Three of them were still down on their knees and raking at the sands and two of them, the two transporting the bodies, were now plodding away from the excavators.
Brine darted his eyes passed them and surveyed the area opposite the interment site. Over there, the remaining two bodies were still lying in the sun and growing smellier by the moment. On one side of them, two grim-faced sentries stood sharing a water skin, on the other a group of four men appeared to be shooting the breeze.
Brine studied the thirsty men for a moment and saw that one was staring at the rocks in the jut and the other at the boles in the wilderness, both of them with blank expressions in their half-masted eyes.
Not much of a worry there, Brine thought, giving the duo a frown. Those two look about as wasted as old Sweat-Wipe over here.
He moved his eyes passed the water-drinkers and rested them on a group of four at the western edge of the spur. These were the men who would accidentally find him out, for no other reason than they could. They had no quadrant of wilderness to survey, no distractions to occupy their minds… Well, none save for the tendon-snapping screams emanating in the south.
If there was any saving grace, it was that all four heads were turned towards the bole-line at the desert’s southern rim. If Brine had to guess, he would say the quartet was still trying to decide which would go first: their comrade’s brittle larynx or the man’s withering supply of blood. Brine could only hope the debate would persist for a little while longer.
He turned back to his greatest obstacle in the clearing (as usual, observing the man from the corner of one eye) and found Balthus soaking up the bulk of the red-head’s frustration. He wasn’t doing much, save for staring at Ardose like a rather unimpressive bit of wall, but he was staring at the man.
And not staring at the cave, Brine added, turning his eyes to the animated redhead and watching as he talked up a storm.
“Did yeh not see what that thing did?” Ardose was asking. “It killed three men without even tryin’, it ran off with a fourth, weaving through arrows and spearheads like a cat picking through weeds, and it did it all without cover. Your little pla—”
“No,” Balthus interrupted, allowing for one of his uncomfortably long pauses, perhaps the longest Brine had ever heard. “You gave the creature new cover.”
Ardose frowned at this, clearly not understanding what the hunchback had said, and then the other shoe dropped.
“I gave it nothing!” he said. “You were the one who wanted this stupid—this pig-brained…,” his mouth seemed to trip over itself as the passion and words struggled to break free, “—horseshoe formation,” he spewed at last. “That was your doin’, not mine.”
Balthus drew a cloth from the front pocket of his sleeping attire. It was dappled with brownish red spots and stuck together as he tried to spread the material apart. He brought it to his balding head and dabbed at the gleaming beads of perspiration.
“I have corrected for that,” he said, sliding the nasty rag down his left cheek. “Your men survey all sides of the desert.” He lifted his chin and blotted clear fluid around his neck. “The creature will not surprise us a second time.”
Ardose’s flushed look of anger lightened slightly and became a pale scowl of disgust. He watched Balthus slip the snot-rag back inside his pocket, seemingly mesmerized by what he was seeing, then said, “No, it won’t. ‘Cause we’ll be in that cave, plain and simple.”
There was more—Balthus leaning back against his cane, Ardose pointing at his men—but Brine turned away his head. He had seen enough and was ready to make his move.
It’s now or never, he told himself, and that was no joke, either. If the red-haired strategist had his way, the cave would be brimming with mercenaries, and if old Gray Eyes had his way, the clefts of the spur would be adorned with archers and pikemen.
He slid his hand onto Godfry’s twig-like arm and squeezed three times in a row. He did this to avoid suspicious glances from anyone who might have turned to monitor them from afar, and to the best of his knowledge it had worked. No one took notice of him…including Godfry.
Brine risked another look around the clearing, then brought his eyes to rest on the old teacher beside him. The old teacher continued to read from the Wogol. Brine applied additional pressure to the brittle forearm in his grasp, leaning into it and really bearing down on the flesh.
The old man’s eyes moved from left to right across the pages, his mouth muttering the sounds as he decoded the symbols. It was like the nerves in his arm had shriveled and died.
Brine checked the rest of the desert and found the Lathians going about their business; Ardose fuming at Balthus, Balthus looking sleepy in the sun, Sweat-Wipe rubbing at his face, Thirsty-Man One running the back of his hand across his beard and handing the water skin to Thirsty-Man Two, the burial squad moving to their second grave in the queue as the second dead Lathian was dragged across the clearing, face-down in the sand and shirt rumpling around his head, towed by one booted foot and one bare.
Brine turned back around and leaned his mouth to the bushy hair around Godfry’s ear. “Godfry,” he whispered.
Godfry jumped and spun towa
rds him.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s just me,” Brine said, giving the old man a moment to calm down. When it appeared he had, he said, “Are you ready?”
Godfry only stared at him, his look of wide-eyed surprise slowly sinking in a landslide of his own bewildered wrinkles.
Feeling his chest turn cold, Brine took a nervous peek at Ardose, then said, “Ready to go?”
Bewildered wrinkles still in place, Godfry turned to study the men around him, men who obviously weren’t going anywhere. He looked to Brine and shook his head, shaking it in the manner of one who wasn’t denying a request, but who had no idea what the request entailed.
“Into the cave,” Brine hissed, lowering his voice on the last word and checking Balthus in his periphery. “We just talked about this, Godfry. This morning. You patted me on the arm and told me to let you know when it was time—Remember?”
Godfry stared.
“Obviously not,” Brine said, exhaling sharply. “Look, it doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that we’re in danger and we have to leave—Right now.” He glanced behind him at the gravediggers, then Sweat-Wipe. “I need you to stand up as calmly as you can and move towards the cave, over there in the rocks.” He gave a nod without taking his eyes from his teacher. “Don’t worry about getting lost, okay. I’ll guide you by the arm like before. Okay?”
The look on Godfry’s face, as the old man panned it about the clearing, told the disciple it was not okay.
Looking back to his student, Godfry said, “Danger, you say?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Brine said. “Now please, Godfry, we need to get going.”
“I don’t see any danger,” Godfry said, taking another look around. “Does old Bal know about this danger?”
Brine winced, but staved off a frown. “Godfry, we’ve discussed that, too.” He peeked at the two men swapping the water skin. “We don’t have time to tell him. It’s that bad. So come on. We need to go.” He pulled the old man’s arm.
Godfry pulled back. “I don’t think ole Ba—”
“Forget Balthus,” Brine hissed, yanking back harder.
“Bal would want to know—”
Brine would never know what hateful force took control of him just then, he would only remember the tension in his muscles and the heat in his cheeks and the spray of sand from all around as he began to drag the old man in the yellow robes and lime-green monkey arms.
He must have given Godfry a terrible jolt as he took off backpedalling for the spur. The old man was now sprawled out behind the disciple with both legs kicking and his free hand swatting Brine with the Wogol.
Brine had the old man’s right arm in a death grip and was leaning back from it, hissing down at him, every few paces or so, “Stop it! Stop it, Godfry! You’re making a scene!”
Spitting at the sand and beard that infiltrated his mouth, Godfry stopped whacking the young man and said, “Sam’s Boy, I think…,” he rolled over on his face and began eating granules. He spun back over and said, “I think I see the problem. You see…,” he spun over on his back and groaned at the pain this inflicted. Spinning back to his front, he said, “The real danger left the clearing. That thing with the barking cough…,” he paused to suck wind, “…it ran off into the boles. I’d say we’re perfectly safe right—”
Having heard enough already (and in no mood to hear about the Amian virtues of their Lathian guides), Brine gave Godfry’s arm a vicious tug and sent his face into the sand.
“We’re not safe,” Brine snarled, heaving back on the canary-tinted sleeve with sharp, pulsing yanks. “These people are not our friends.”
With his elderly charge now enjoying a four course meal of Harriun Sand, Brine checked the mini-desert to either side. So far, no one had even bothered to look over. He lowered his head and carried on.
I’ve already dragged this old coot halfway across the Harrin, he thought. What’s twenty more paces between friends?
From the blur of yellow fabric and blowing sands, Godfry said, “My Stick,” and Brine caught sight of something long and brown slip from the maelstrom of writhing limbs. A moment more, something square and brown was ejected from cacophony of tiny stones and Godfry said, “My book!”
Brine kept hauling back on the old man’s arm, jerking it like the line of an anchor caught in the shallows. As for the stick, Godfry could lean against Brine if he needed to (and he had been), and as for the Wogol, there were several being printed in Valley of the Rock each day. They would live.
Just a little longer, he prayed. Just a little bit longer.
He made another wobbly arc with his head and surveyed the clearing. On his right, Sweat-Wipe was turning to face him, but his attention lay on the bulge of the Harriun. Behind Sweat-Wipe, the circle of gravediggers—dripping sweat and thrusting shovels—looked like they were still trying to keep the sand from pouring back inside their graves.
Almost there, Brine begged, moving his eyes to his left and finding Ardose spewing forth his curses and gesticulating at the spur, his green eyes looking up when they should have been looking over, his caustic body language distracting Balthus from the escape occurring behind him.
Please, oh God, please!
Brine checked the four men at the far edge of the spur and found them engaged in their palaver. He checked Thirsty-Man One and Two and saw them swapping water and standing a few paces behind the gaggle of four, Thirsty-Man One swigging heartily from the skin and Thirsty-Man Two, now with two wet streaks darkening the corners of his beard, staring right at him.
Like the spinning mechanisms of a grist mill after someone drops a steel wrench in the gears, Brine’s body slowly broke down in the sand and stopped what it was doing, first his legs, then his arms, then the rest of him.
He stood there in the sand, a trickle of ice water running down his spine, and stared at Thirsty-Man Two.
Beetle black eyes never blinking, Thirsty-Man Two raised a hand and wiped the patches of wet from his beard. Beside him, Thirsty-Man One had his head cocked back and was chugging fluid like a drowning man. When he’d had his fill, Thirsty-Man One lowered his chin with a mighty, Ahhh, and handed the skin to his partner, taking notice of the look in his partner’s eyes and lowering the skin to his side. He turned in the direction of his partner’s stare and locked eyes with Brine.
Brine swallowed hard, unable to do anything but return the stare.
If you stand there long enough, Ruggy, the belly-fire whispered, the whole band’ll be staring at you…until they march over and start pounding you in the sand, that is.
Very slowly, as if submerged in a vat of pudding, Brine lowered his head to his crap-caked sandals and took a seat beside the prone figure in the canary-yellow robes.
Oblivious of the harsh eye contact occurring between Brine and the Lathians, Godfry sat himself up, brushed absently at the sand and offal in his beard, and opened his mouth to speak. He was probably going to ask just what the devil had gotten into his young friend, or if his young friend had seen his book and where it had got to, but before he could utter the first syllable, Brine held up a finger in the universal signal for, Not, right now.
That silenced Godfry cold, but it did not last long. After a few moments, the old man leaned forward and tried again.
Brine shook the finger this time and released a prolonged groan.
Godfry leaned back from him, returning his attention to his grooming.
Brine didn’t mean to be rude to his elderly teacher, but he needed to hear the sands behind him. He needed to hear the crunch of footfalls so he’d know when to tense for the boot heels to his back and the knuckles to his forehead, the knees to his love-handles, the elbows to his face.
In the direction of the two water-guzzling Lathians, he heard the sloshing of a skin—the glug-glug of fluid down a throat—and the satisfied gasp of the drinker. For a time, he waited to hear the sound of the non-drinker bearing down on him from the side, but that sound never ca
me, only the glugging, only the gasping.
Around him in the clearing, he heard the thud of shovels, the mutter of chit-chat, the wet slap of Sweat-Wipe dabbing at his face, the dull shushing of calf-muscles on sand as the last of the dead were dragged by the arms to their final resting place in the ground.
The one sound that was different, however, was the sound of Ardose’s voice. It had change from the obstreperous shriek of a man who felt his proverbial back pressed against the wall, to the slurring, almost drunken tones of a man who just picked himself off the ground and cannot remember where he’s been.
“We’ll, uh…We’ll…um…,” the redhead’s voice trailed off, silent for much longer that any coherent man should be, “…we can give that a try…I guess…I think. We ain’t, uh….,” his voice faltered once more, his tone shattered, his train of thought wrecked, “….We ain’t tried this yet, so…so I…,” more silence, more inarticulate throat noise, “…no harm in…in tryin…,” a stupid pause, “…no harm there.”
Brine kept his eyes on the ground. He didn’t need to look over his shoulder to know the rawboned mercenary was wearing a glassy look in his eyes and a slack expression on his face. He could hear the man picking himself off the ground and staggering off to the edges of the spur, slurring his orders to the men.
Worse than this sound, was the sound he heard shuffling towards him. It was the harsh stab of a cane driven into sand, the soft susurration of slippers gliding over stones. Something stooped and watchful was making its way to a perch beside the cave.
Brine lowered his head a little more and turned away from the place where the Lathian adviser was climbing up the spur. He focused, instead, on the sound of Godfry crawling away from him through the sands, the sound of hands and knees making tracks to the Wogol, the sound of leafing pages as the old man opened the book and flipped to no place in particular.
Brine reached over his shoulder and pulled his wauk into his lap. He raised his other hand and prepared to count the braids, and to pray, then hesitated.
He thought about the feeling he felt while listening to God, the feeling from his prayers and from his reoccurring God-Dream. He wondered what it was, what is really was.
He didn’t have an answer for that question, and neither did the belly-fire, that other omniscient voice that seemed to know things that the disciple did not. All of a sudden, the belly-fire was strangely quiet. Perhaps too quiet.
Brine closed his eyes to the sun, but his thoughts were not prayers.