by David Bruns
“Yes,” I answered automatically. Long practice had taught me the right answer to that question was yes—anything else was an argument waiting to happen.
She smiled and rolled her eyes. “Really? You couldn’t even pretend to think about it?”
This was the problem with long-term relationships. After living with me, she knew me better than I knew myself. I frowned at her.
“It’s true.” Even as my lips moved, my brain kept working to head off the argument. It was true, sort of. I had no idea if I loved her—I had no idea what that word meant—but I knew I cared for her as much as I’d ever cared for another human being, and that should count for something.
“Is it? Do you really love me?”
This was the longest conversation we’d ever had on this topic. Something was up. I sat up in bed and slid my arm around her. “I really do love you. Now, what’s going on?”
She picked at the hair on my chest. Gray hairs outnumbered blond, I noted. Then she straddled me with one fluid motion, the weight of her body warm in all the right places. My breath hitched in my throat as she nuzzled my neck.
“I’m pregnant,” she whispered.
I could almost hear my libido hitting the dirt. “You’re what?”
“You heard me.” She leaned back, studying my face. “I have a plan.”
“Dimah, the chances that it has the Gift—”
“He. And he has the Gift. I can feel it.”
I bucked her off me and sat cross-legged in the bed. She matched my posture, still studying me. I took her hands in mine. “Look, Dimah. Everything we know says the Gift is random—that’s why it’s called a gift.”
“Don’t you want to hear my plan?”
I blew out my breath. “Okay, tell me your plan.”
She shook off my hands and placed them on my knees. As she spoke, she slid her palms down my thighs. In a voice of hushed tension—sexual and the other kind—she spoke.
“We take over the clan—you and me and the child. Tarkon is weak. The only reason he’s not been challenged is because of you. You’ve kept the water flowing for him, so no one wants to mess with that.” Her fingertips reached my hips and she dug her fingernails into the flesh of my sides.
“You take over as clan leader, with me as your wife. The child trains under you. When your Gift fades, he takes over and you remain as clan leader. It’s perfect.” Dimah laughed as she came up to her hands and knees. She pushed me back down onto the bed.
In the other room, Shadow yelped in pain.
I pushed Dimah off me and ran to Shadow’s side.
* * *
The new Finder arrived in the settlement near sundown. He looked eighteen at most, pretty young to be on his own. I studied his rig through my spyglass. Top-of-the-line solar array—better than mine even—new sand tires, lots of tinted glass unscoured by sandstorms.
Young kid still dry behind the ears on his own with a new rig. This did not add up.
I dressed carefully that evening, putting on my best knee-length multi-colored jacket with gold trim and new sandals. I’ve always thought you could tell a lot about a man from the state of his footwear.
“I haven’t seen that robe in a while,” Dimah commented when I came into the sitting room. Shadow snoozed peacefully, but he’d been restless all afternoon.
“I’m headed to the saloon. I promised Tarkon I’d see him tonight.” That was a lie; I’d been avoiding Tarkon for the past two weeks. The water quality and quantity in our current well was dropping daily, and he was pressuring me to get him a new Find.
“You thought about what I said?” She caressed her belly. What a woman: pregnant and planning a coup all at the same time. Just since this morning, I could’ve sworn I’d seen her midsection swell a little right in front of me. I leaned over her chair and gave her a lingering kiss.
“I love you,” I said.
“Let’s keep it that way.”
“You’ll watch Shadow for me?” I thought I saw a cloud flicker across her features.
“Of course.”
I checked on my wagon en route to the saloon. That afternoon, I’d placed the last of the supplies inside and fully charged the batteries; it was ready to go now. I had water rations for two people for three months, and with some lucky Finds along the way, I could stretch it to four. Inside, I’d gathered every scrap of information and innuendo about the Great Water Hold that existed in the known world. The route was laid out, the vehicle was ready, there was just one piece of unfinished business before I made my run—our run—for it.
The saloon was noisy for a weeknight. I nodded to the regulars and nudged my way up to the bar. “Pure-clear,” I said to Roseth. She drew exactly four ounces of crystal clear water from the tap and set the glass in front of me. She was a pretty redhead whose beauty was marred by a dirty face, a scar across her right cheek, and a worn steel collar around her neck. Despite the fact that her owner ran a bar, she still retained the dried-out, gaunt look of a desert dweller.
“Come to check out the competition, Polluk?” she asked, eyeing my robes. “Be warned, he’s a pretty boy. I might have a go at him myself.”
“Zed wouldn’t like to hear that, Roseth.” I winked at her. She lived with Zed, the bar owner, who was old enough to be her father and rarely sober enough to care if she slept around or not. I set my hip against the bar and made a nonchalant show of surveying the room.
Roseth was right; he was a pretty boy. His curly locks were the color of morning sand and his eyes a beautiful hazel flecked with gold. He wore a sleeveless vest open to the waist, exposing a hairless, but well-muscled and water-fat chest. When he spoke, a faint smile twitched the corners of his generous mouth.
“See what I mean, Polluk?” Roseth said. “He’s like a picture.”
“Send him a drink.”
“He’s drinking aragh. Quite a bit, too.”
A Finder drinking liquor? I almost smiled.
“Send him a Pure-clear. A double.”
I let the drink get to the table before I made my way across the room. He was in my clan, on my turf, but he met my eyes without fear. Cheeky.
“Blessings of the Mother upon you,” I said.
“And also on you.” He stood and extended his hand. “Basr.”
His grip was cool and strong. “Polluk.”
“I know who you are. You’re the Finder with the dog. Everywhere I’ve been, that’s all they talk about—the freaking dog.” He grinned at me. “You make it tough for the rest of us to make a living.”
The other visitors at his table had melted away and I took a seat without asking. “You’re a little young to be on your own, aren’t you?”
Basr shrugged. “I get that a lot. My master lost his Gift shortly after I apprenticed with him. Slavers got him.”
“Just like that?” I let the unasked question hang in the air: did you give him a push out the door?
“Just like that.” He had the conviction of youth in his voice. “He’d lost his Gift.”
I sipped my water and stayed silent.
“I won’t be staying long,” he said.
“Oh?” I’d already contracted with this clan, so by rights he should have checked with me when he’d first arrived.
“I’m off as soon as I can resupply.”
I nodded and rolled the last of my water around my mouth. His gaze faltered, then he leaned across the table. “I’m searching for the Great Water Hold,” he said in a low voice. “I have a map—I have the map.”
I resisted the urge to spit out my water.
“The map? What does that mean?”
Basr smiled. “You’re not that old, Polluk. You remember your training. The Map of the Ancients.”
Everyone knew of the Map of the Ancients, but no one had ever actually seen it—at least no one that I’d ever talked to. And this kid claimed to have it?
“You must think I’ve been in the desert a very long time, my young friend. It’s a myth, like the rest of the bullshit t
hey fed us in training.”
He tossed off the last of his aragh, ignoring the glass of Pure-clear I’d sent him. He was drunk.
I reached across the table, picked up his glass of water, and drank it off. Then I stood. “Show me.”
His gait was steady but sloppy as we walked to his vehicle. He deactivated the alarm and opened the door. I wrinkled my nose when I saw the interior. A messy cabin is a cluttered mind, Ghadir always said. Organization is the key to survival in the desert.
“Well?” I folded my arms.
Basr propped his elbows on the table that folded down from the wall. “I bet you’ll never guess where it is.”
“I don’t have time for this, Basr. I’ll—”
He flipped the tabletop over and there it was. In hindsight, the key to the Map of the Ancients answer was so simple that I wondered why no one had used this technique before. We navigated by the Finding of water or we followed the direction of the sun, that was it. As long as the clan had water, we didn’t care much where we were. If we saw birds in the sky, we knew we were near a Hold City and we moved on.
But I knew of old-timers that claimed the Ancients used the stars to guide their travels. Of course, these same tale-spinners also said that men floated their way across the Salt Ocean and flew through the air like birds, so their stories were just a wee bit suspect.
But maybe there was more to the myth. The Map of the Ancients used the stars. The device consisted of three rings: a center ring of constellations, an outer ring showing the day of the year, and a middle ring of numbers that ranged positive and negative.
“What is this?” I touched the middle ring.
“Angle,” he said. Basr took a triangular-shaped device off the wall. “You measure the angle between the star and the horizon with this—it’s called a sextant. The Great Hold is here.” He tapped the center of the star chart.
The map looked very old and was made out of some sort of laminate material that gleamed in the lamplight. I touched the outer ring; it spun easily under my fingers. “Where did you get this?” I asked.
Basr had pulled a bottle out from the cabinet behind his head. He uncorked it with his teeth and took a long swallow. He offered the open bottle to me.
“My master had it when he took me on. He was a thief and worse … a bad person. Mean. I was just a kid, after all.” Basr was slurring his words. “He was going to ditch me somewhere out on the sand and make a run for it. I showed him.” He grinned up at me, those beautiful hazel eyes full of hate.
“You turned him in, didn’t you, Basr?”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re damned right I did.”
* * *
“Where have you been?” Dimah demanded as I walked in the door. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
“What? I had some business—”
I stopped short when she pointed to Shadow. For a second, I thought maybe my friend had passed while I was out, but then I saw his chest heave up in a long, slow breath.
“He shit in my house again. You should have taken him out before you left.”
I knelt next to Shadow. “Go to bed, Dimah.”
“But who’s going to clean up this—”
“Go. To. Bed.”
I cleaned the mess off the floor after she left. Even his shit was pitiful now, a dried up turd. More like something that might come out of a rabbit, not a mighty Water Finder like my Shadow.
I turned out the lights and curled up on the floor next to him, my hand on his rib-etched flank. He tried to lick my face, his tongue rough on my skin. All of him seemed dried out now. Used up.
“Easy, boy. It won’t be long now,” I whispered.
He thumped the floor three times. That was our signal in the old days: three slaps of his tail against my leg meant he’d found water.
When my own Gift began to falter, I was just past my thirty-second birthday. Ghadir had been gone for two years by that time and the two of us made a good living. Then one day, in the middle of a show, I just lost the feeling. The familiar sensation beneath the soles of my feet was gone.
I panicked. I began to shake like I’d been struck with fever.
The crowd went silent, watching me lose my cool. One minute I was all patter and flash and the next a quivering boy with stage fright.
Shadow’s bark brought me back to the moment. I wonder if he’d smelled the fear on me. He trotted over to me like it was all part of the act and took my fingers in his mouth, leading me forward.
I played along, desperate to recover the good will of the audience. “The water’s this way, Shadow? Is that what you’re trying to tell me, boy?”
“Yes!” the children chorused.
The familiar feeling returned to my legs, the tingle that told me moisture was near. When the clan diggers struck water, I hugged Shadow so hard he yelped.
That was the beginning of the end of my Gift. I still had it some days, but the feeling was inconsistent, and I was never quite sure if I’d be able to perform. But Shadow picked up the slack for us both. The act actually got better as I learned to recognize his cues and play off him.
* * *
I stayed on the floor next to Shadow all night, my head never more than a few inches from his. I watched his black nose quiver with each breath and when his filmy eyes opened, I met his gaze. I dripped water into his mouth with my fingers and stroked those silky ears that I loved so much. Toward dawn, he grew restless and I carried him outside into the early morning chill.
Still in my best Finder robe, I sat down in the dirt and watched Shadow make his halting way around the yard. He had dirt on his nose when he finally got back to me, and he was wheezing. I cleaned the crust of dusty snot off his face with the sleeve of my robe and gathered him into my lap. He curled up nose to tail, just like he used to do when he was a puppy.
Shadow closed his eyes and let out a long sigh.
When the first rays of the sun touched our yard, I was still sitting in the same position. I tried to will the sun to go backward, to retreat behind the hill again and never come up.
I refused to look down as the light sharpened the gloom around me. Instead, I begged every god I could think of to give me a few more moments with my Shadow.
I never shed a tear over Shadow’s passing. I just let the weight of him rest heavy in my lap, let his body drain of warmth against my thighs. The settlement had just begun to stir when I stood up with Shadow in my arms.
I needed to move swiftly now. For both of us.
Shadow had lost so much muscle mass I was able to tuck him under one arm and mostly hide him with my robe. On the way out the back, I picked up a shovel and slung it over my other shoulder.
The desert in the early morning is beautiful. The sun at a low angle highlights the sand but leaves pools of mysterious darkness. The clean, chilly air even holds a hint of moisture. I walked in a straight line north for maybe a kilometer, then gently set down Shadow’s body and dug.
It was over in a few minutes. I said my last goodbyes and heaped the sand on him. I knew it was foolish to avoid the reclamation process, but Shadow didn’t belong to the clan, he belonged to me. On the way back to the settlement, I made sure to obliterate my tracks. By the time I made it over the second dune, even I couldn’t have found Shadow’s body.
Dimah was serving Tarkon chai tea when I returned to the tent. Her eyes took in the dirty robe and the dusty sandals, but she said nothing. The clan leader might have been old and frail, but his mental faculties were still there.
“Where’s the dog?” Tarkon asked. He had a wheezy voice. Sand lung, they call it.
“Gone.” I had to blink back tears. It was the first time I’d said it out loud.
“So you’re just back from the reclaimer?”
I accepted a cup of chai from Dimah and said nothing.
Tarkon set his gray-whiskered chin. “We need a new Find, Polluk. You’ve put me off long enough and the clan is worried. I want you to do it today.”
I shook my head.
Dimah intervened. “Polluk would be happy to do it, Tarkon. Maybe in a few days. He’s just lost his dog…”
“Today. If you don’t want the job, I’ll give it to the other Finder. He seems eager enough.”
“He’ll do it,” Dimah said. “Today at sundown. Count on it.”
Tarkon was barely out the door before she whirled on me. “What’s the matter with you? This is our chance to take him down. He’s practically begging you to take over.”
“Sit down.”
“I will not sit down. You need to—”
“Sit down, Dimah.”
She lowered herself to the ground carefully, her eyes watching my face.
“Do you love me?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I have something to tell you.”
Her hand went to her belly when I told her the truth about my Gift and Shadow. She took the half-drunk cup of chai out of my hand and sucked it down in one gulp. As her eyes flicked around the tent, she twisted her fingers together.
“But you said it comes and goes, so you might be able to get a Find today, right?”
“It’s possible, but I have a better plan.” I told her about the hunt for the Great Water Hold.
“That’s not a plan, Polluk, that’s suicide. I’m pregnant and you want to go chase a myth?”
“There’s a way, but I need your help.”
* * *
I watched Basr leave his wagon and head for the center of the settlement. I let dusk settle a little more firmly around the camp before I approached his vehicle.
It had taken some persuading to get Dimah to agree with my plan. The Map of the Ancients turned the tide in my favor. I showed her the information about the Great Hold I’d collected already and described how Basr’s map would lead us right to the greatest Find in all of history.
From that point, she’d taken over. While I took a nap, Dimah met with Tarkon and the other clan leaders to explain how my recent loss left me unable to perform the Finding ceremony, but that I would offer to pay Basr to take my place. She even met with the young Finder to arrange for his services. All I had to do was steal the map and meet her at the wagon. By the time they finished digging on Basr’s Find, we’d be long gone.