by Kate Ormand
“Line her up!” Hardly-There called, and the rest of the team grabbed onto the trailer so that it kept pointing straight.
Kean was scrambling into the cockpit, inadvertently kicking both Essa and Barb. They did not notice in their excitement. Of all people, it was Hardly-There who had tears in his eyes at the moment of departure. Sad to lose the trailer he’d designed? Where was Hawkerman? It was all happening so fast …
The team leader made his way to the side of the cockpit. He reached over Barb and Kean to ruffle Essa’s hair. On the other side of the trailer, Cara was passing their hats to them.
Hawkerman squeezed Barb’s shoulder. Then he held out his hand to Kean, who took it and gripped it hard. It was their last communication, and he used the grip to say what words could not. Their hands held onto each other for a long moment.
Hawkerman let go.
Kean jammed his hat onto his head and tightened the strap.
“You all hold on,” Hawkerman cried to the team, and he and Wil hauled up the sail double-quick and clipped the lines to the holding rings behind the cockpit.
The wind was easy. It was all easy.
“Let her free!” Hawkerman called. “Now!”
They were off, slowly enough for Wil to run beside them for a few yards. He smiled and grimaced his good wishes, clenching his fists in encouragement.
The sail became round with air, and they picked up speed. Wil fell behind.
It had all been so quick. Kean had not said goodbye as he wanted to, and now they were so tightly packed in the cockpit that he could not even turn his head to look behind him. Could not get a last look at the team as the trailer slid away. Could not see Hawkerman and Cara standing side-by-side, waving anyway.
The craft was well-balanced and traveled smoothly. The white sands around them shone iridescently, glowing under the thunderous evening skies. Already that was all there was: dark sky and white sand.
The rain tore in from behind them; they could hear it well before it hit. Then it was like being bashed in the back by a giant wet hand, and the trailer really took off, accelerating with astounding swiftness. The gales pushed it hard into the ground, and the skis skidded over the soaking sand with a hungry licking sound.
Hardly-There’s theory about the length of the skis proved correct. The trailer shot over bumps and kept a steady course. The ground grew wetter. Kean and his crew grew wetter. It was impossible to see through the wild cascade of rain, impossible even to know whether night had set in yet. It was good to have another human body tight beside you in the soaking black maelstrom on the Big White.
Twenty-four hours later, time and motion and the roaring elements were still all mixed up, and still they charged along. In the cockpit, their heads nodded low, lolled with tiredness, and banged against one another.
Eventually they were so numb they were not conscious of movement at all, just bitterly cold and wet and aching to the bone. The trailer sped on, an aluminum arrow speeding through a second night on the desert.
Before dawn, the rain stopped, and the wind dropped below gale force. They could shout to one another. There was nothing to say, though.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes—are you?”
A second day on the Big White. The wind craft powered on. Nothing to see but flat white sand. They ate little and drank sparingly. Barb managed to get some sleep; Kean and Essa faced front and traveled on dully with eyes slitted or closed, neither awake nor asleep.
Near dusk they had one of those strange lulls in the prevailing weather and could get out of the trailer. The sand was like fire underfoot.
Within an hour the winds got up again and drove them steadily across the level ground. The accompanying rain did not return, however, until the middle of the night. There came a time when competing gales battered the trailer from all sides, sending it zigzagging—almost turning over—until it was blasted to a swaying stop, its sail flapping uncontrollably. When they were moving forward again, Kean had to wait for a glimpse of the moon and stars before he knew the wind had resumed its regular direction, or something close to it. It was not as strong as it had been: the trailer was moving much less quickly.
By morning they had finally outrun the rain.
By midafternoon, it seemed that they had outrun the wind itself. The sail sagged. The trailer slowed down further over the course of an hour, until it was only inching along.
They came to a stop under a burnished sky.
All around, the Big White. Flat and featureless, and glaring so hard that even Kean’s eyes hurt.
“Out,” he gasped hoarsely. “Rest up.”
It had become hard to move. They were stuck fast together by habit and exhaustion. He urged them on. “Come on. Something to eat. And drink.”
One of the storage compartments had taken a knock and spilled its load of water. There was no telling how much this might cost them. All three of them had headaches. They arranged the thermal skirt on the trailer and crawled underneath it with their thick leather pallets.
“Tell me we’ve only got a couple more days of this,” Essa whispered.
“No one knows. We know it ends somewhere, but we don’t know its shape.” Kean breathed slowly so he didn’t scorch his lungs. “A different route might be quicker—who knows? We’re going straight, anyway.”
Essa couldn’t help doubting his skills, and hid from her more experienced companions the fear she had. That dread that, if viewed in the moonlight from a long way above, their tracks might be seen to veer consistently to one side or the other. The fear that they were describing a circle in the endless sand.
After a bit of food, they sank into the familiar sleep that was like a sickness.
When they awoke at nightfall, they became aware of the utter silence, something greater and emptier than you encountered in even the most desolate places in the valley. It made conversation hard; you felt you had to have something really important to say if you were going to break this stillness.
So it was without much talk that they stowed the sail and tied on the lines to haul the trailer by hand.
The ensuing days followed the pattern Barb and Kean had known all their lives; that familiar routine of daytime rest and night travel. Through the day, the sun seemed hotter and bigger with every passing hour. When the sand became less hard-packed, they changed the skis for the wheels. An argument: keep the skis or leave them?
Barb said harshly, “Leave them. The wind blows one way, and we won’t be going back.”
Kean said there could still be high winds coming along to help them sometime. They took the time to strap the skis onto the side of the vehicle.
Attaching the wheels did not make the going much easier.
It slowed you down, the Big White. It wanted you to stay forever.
TWENTY-THREE
It slowed you down, the Big White. The sand grew finer and softer, and the trailer more unwieldy as a consequence. There was no sign of water, or plant or animal life. No albatross sailed the wide sky; they had not even seen an insect. Essa abandoned her fantasy that one morning they would see the ancient Bent Pyramid silhouetted on the horizon. There was all-too-plainly nothing here.
They were on the last two water bags. It was hard to ration them when you knew their contents were evaporating in the heat minute by minute.
Barb said, “Waterboy, you’re going to have to do your thing.”
Essa said, “I can’t. I don’t create it—I only sense when it’s there. And …”
“And it isn’t,” Kean finished for her.
Essa was suffering worse than the other two, and he was concerned for her. Already she had almost no pulling power when it came to shifting the trailer along. He wouldn’t let her ride it yet, though.
When they first saw the line of dunes rising out of the sand, all across the horizon, blocking their progress, they were stimulated out of their torpor. It was impossible to tell how big they were, and in any case, it took two days to reach them, and on
e water bag. The sandy hills rose up for six hundred feet, sculpted in graceful curves with razor-sharp ridges curling this way and that. The trailer bogged down immediately when they began the climb. Day had gone, and the moon was brilliant in the sky.
Essa said faintly, “Do we need the trailer?”
Kean asked, “Why do you say that?”
“It could be the end of the Big White on the other side—don’t you think?”
It was worth a look, anyway. Kean left the others and struggled up the sandy cliff, sinking ankle-deep into it. Streams and rivulets of the fine sand ran down behind him.
At the sharp line of the summit, where small winds argued about which should prevail, he looked back at the women. They heard him shout, and hope flared for just a second.
“It’s incredible!”
“What?” Barb called back.
“It gets lower. There’s a massive drop down to get on ground level again.”
He picked out a route to make the descent to a lower level of the Big White. They used the skis to get the trailer up the dunes. It took a day. Going down the other side took half a night. The skis had a tendency to bury themselves, and the wheels went back on. They staggered down the steep inclines, slewing sideways, almost overturning the trailer. It was lucky the vehicle was so light. Even so, there were long minutes when they were digging it out from where it had driven itself too deep. At the bottom, they were so tired they got under the trailer without even fixing the heat paneling.
When they surfaced from sleep in the late afternoon, the scale of what they’d come down from hit them. On this side, the dunes were mountainous.
“You know why?” Kean said. They didn’t. “There’s some reason that the wind changes round about here. To build these hills, it mostly has to go the other way.”
To him it seemed they had achieved something in reaching this demarcation point. Before nightfall, he felt differently. They’d traveled two hours. Behind them, the sand mountains towered into the sky, and ahead of them, the Big White went on and on. Lower, maybe, but just the same.
Unending.
Essa rode in the trailer now. She was very light in spite of her leather clothes, as Kean discovered when he lifted her into the cockpit.
Barb let her have the last of the water, the sip she herself was due. They hauled onward across the sand. Halfway through the night, Kean heard Essa whimpering or maybe calling in the cockpit. He was pushing, Barb was pulling, so he was the closest to Essa. He called to make a halt and went to her.
She said in a painful whisper, “Water.”
“We don’t have any,” he told her, sick to his heart. He had killed her. He had killed them all.
“Go left. Water,” she whispered.
The miniature cacti were nearly spherical and a pale yellow in color, with lime stripes on them. They did not stand out much from their surroundings, and without Essa’s directions, the little team would certainly have passed them by in the day, let alone when it was dark. They were not desert wardens, yet they shared the vital characteristic: they stored water. The taproots were like wire and must have gone down way below those of a warden. Cut open, the cacti tasted bitter. Had they been poisonous, the crew of the trailer would not have minded. Better to die with a drink of some kind than to have none.
When his swollen tongue touched liquid, hope and strength sprang into Kean.
Two weeks later, they were still going, all alive, sick only from fatigue. Essa was out of the cockpit and doing her pitiful best to make the trailer go faster. There had been more incidences of the cacti and locating them was her real contribution.
The heat was less. There came the moment when they elected to travel by day.
Later, there were insects and larger life-forms. You can eat a scorpion if you can catch it. The team began to feel a slow swell of excitement, like a very small crowd awaiting a very big occasion. This was almost like normal living.
Nights later, the ground felt different under Kean’s boots. There were blades of grass struggling through the sand. On the next morning, there was no doubt: the Big White had surrendered and was becoming a dry savannah where light breezes blew and bent the grasses.
When he heard the yelping of wild dogs, Kean stood taller, a man who felt confident of living a good few years yet.
The pack animals were wary, and it took Barb all her skill to shoot one. It was nothing like a charjaw; finer-featured and smaller, with a reddish tinge to its pelt. Tasted fine.
The first true waterhole was one more day’s journey. They shared the joys of the muddy pool with a squirmation of colorful water snakes.
Now there were deer to be wondered at: large deer, big-eyed and round-bellied from good feed. The sun was nothing compared to that in the valley. The savannah rolled on and grew greener. Kean’s clear eyes saw the green becoming richer still on the horizon.
He saw a dust cloud, too. Coming nearer.
Men, riding horses.
They wore clothes of woven materials. Their horses stamped and fretted: incredible, high-strung beasts. Kean knew what they were without being told; he had heard tales of them often enough. The riders did not get within shouting distance of the trailer. They only paused to look, and then veered off on some mission elsewhere on the savannah, apparently incurious about the travelers.
There was a farm next. Only a small wooden building. The travelers passed it by because the farmer required them to—he very obviously wanted nothing to do with them. He was small and bearded, and wore the faded, lightweight clothes the riders affected. When he shouted at them, it was in a quick-fire voice, speaking a sibilant language they could not begin to understand.
Kean smiled courteously and they kept going. If the people here were not violent to them, he had no wish to make them so. “We don’t know the rules here, and it looks like they don’t speak our language. We got to be extra polite. We don’t need anything from them, anyhow. We can live off the animals we hunt.”
There were bizarrely tall trees with fresh leaves and shiny trunks, and more waterholes. The extraordinary joy of a day’s calm rainfall pattering down.
The land began to rise up around them, forming hills proportioned much smaller than they were used to. Essa felt she could just sit and look and be happy.
Here the farms became bigger, and the farmhouses, too. The people were more prosperous—and ruder. The breathy, whispery language they spoke, or shouted, was hard to imitate even roughly; the sounds got caught in your throat. So far nobody had understood the words the three travelers spoke to them when they tried to communicate. The crops were not only grain—some were composed of green plants, too, with a glorious sheen on them. If you avoided the cultivated land, the farmers were content to let you pass through, after a little abuse. There was order here, and—
“Water,” Essa said. She was hatless and looked healthy. Kean liked to look at her and did so now. She was smiling.
“We’ve got all the water we need,” he told her.
“I know,” she said, and smiled more.
Another hill to climb, in the comfortable morning sunshine. The grass so vividly green. A herd of wild horses off to their left; to their right a wide track, beaten down by use. They joined the track, pulling the trailer along it with ease.
A man and woman came by on a tall wooden cart drawn by bullocks, going the other way. They had a baby with them, a fat little despot enthroned on his mother’s lap. The man smiled and chattered to them in a musical speech they had not heard before. The Wanderers grinned back and indicated their incomprehension, which earned them a more mistrustful goodbye from the family.
The team pulled on up the hill and breasted it, and there was the sea.
The verdant land tumbled down to where a sprawling town made of wood reached into the lazy gray-blue waters with jetties and walkways. There was no sandy beach; one moment there was dry land, and then a mangrove swamp confused the boundary between the water and the countryside.
The sea was big.
You just knew it was bigger by far than the Big White, although it was not as empty. There were scores of tree-clad islands to be seen protruding from its depths, and a hundred little boats plied between them. The islands were all shapes and sizes, some relatively flat, others as sharp-featured as mountain peaks.
Farther out toward the horizon, there was only sea. Vast and still. The breeze from it had a tender touch.
Barb said, “That’s … that’s just …” and stopped.
Kean and Essa smiled at one another.
Looked at the sunlight playing on the distant water.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their part in Wanderer’s journey to the page, I must thank Carol Reyes of Cecily Ware Literary Agents for her faith in the book; Adam Newell of Titan Publishing for his advice on the American publishing scene; Laura Stiers for first pitching the novel and then editing it; and, as ever, my wife Joanna for her love and support. Finally, I thank Mary Chapin Carpenter for her album Stones in the Road, which I listened to constantly during the time I was writing Wanderer.