He clenched his fists hard, but still his eyes filled with tears that stung and blurred his vision. Mhara was gone. The greatest Yun, teacher, person he had ever known would not even be able to receive the proper burial rites she deserved. Raim raged against the gods. Why had they taken her in such a degrading manner? Mhara deserved to die on the battlefield, surrounded by glory. He picked up one of the rocks he had shifted and hurled it at the cliff wall. It bounced off without even leaving a chip, so hard and impenetrable was the stone. And as angry as he was with the gods, he was stricken with grief and guilt and fury with his own actions.
I killed her. And there is no way to make it right.
Had he just followed Mhara’s instructions from the beginning, she would still be alive. But it was his pride. It was his knot. It was his promise to defend Khareh. Mhara had tried to convince him that Khareh was treacherous, but he was duty bound to defend Khareh’s honour. Was that not justification enough? Well, he had done his job. He had protected Khareh, and at the ultimate cost. Now he would honour his mentor by obeying her final command.
You must go to Lazar.
He turned round to face the desert, and the immensity of it almost overwhelmed him. East and west, and as far into the horizon as he could see, dunes dominated the landscape, rolling and churning like a thunderous sky crashed onto the ground.
He took his first hesitant step forward.
A few minutes after he had made his decision, he regretted it, but by then he had already crossed over the first hill of sand and could see nothing else but the slippery, shifting golden ground. And going back would deny what he knew he deserved. He deserved this exile, now more than ever. He had no idea how to find the Chauk. All he knew was that he had to walk – and whether his feet led him to Lazar or to death, the gods would decide.
It shouldn’t have felt as hard as it did. After all, Raim had spent his whole life walking. If he started counting from the time he first stumbled across a thick red and blue piled carpet and into Loni’s arms, he must have walked the length of Darhan ten times over. It was the Darhanian way. Each tribe walked from one pasture to the next, following the turning of the seasons and the whims of the cattle and the goats. As goatherders, Raim’s tribe were nomads who put the needs of their animals before their own. Other tribes, he knew, might follow the rivers, watching for the telltale flicker of silver and gold amidst the translucent ripples that would indicate a large flock of salmon set in a firm lineor } div.shading-50CC f or tyrfish fit for eating. Yet, as random and unsystematic as their wanderings might seem to the untrained observer, they were as predictable as the rising of the sun and the moon. The elders called Naran, the sun, the greatest nomad in the sky, constantly wandering, cycling and searching for the ripest pasture for her herd, the Darhanian people.
But the sand was unlike any surface he had ever walked on. It seemed to defy him at every step. Each grain slipped out from underneath his boots. He slid and stumbled, discovered muscles on the insides of his legs that he had never used before. The sun that had once been so predictable and friendly to him now beat down relentlessly on his back. Every ray was a searing knife.
Raim’s life had been like one long march, with his feet as his principal companions. So when they finally gave out from under him it was in shock and in tears that he fell to the ground.
He felt so weak, with his knees buckled underneath him and his face in his hands. His head was bare and open to the sky. Summoning some strength, he took the left sleeve of his tunic in his teeth and pulled. The material ripped and he tied it over his head and down across his brow, to try to shield his head and eyes from the worst of the sun. At least now he could see without squinting. His legs had taken him down the path of least resistance, but he saw he had travelled halfway into a deep valley between two mountains of sand.
A few of the Rago berries from last night were stuffed deep into his pocket, and the deep-purple juices had dyed the bottom of his tunic and smelled foul. He took two out, held his nose and squeezed what was left of the juice into his parched mouth. The liquid stung his tongue and scratched the back of his throat, as if the droplets were covered in tiny spikes. Instinctively he spat the disgusting juice into the sand. He watched as the sand drank the moisture up greedily, and for a brief moment turned purple, then gold again, as if nothing had ever happened. He missed the saliva the moment it left his mouth and felt jealous of the sand. He popped the wrung out flesh of the berry into his mouth and savoured the coolness preserved within its skin, trying to ignore the taste. He had to press his hand over his mouth to keep his stomach from rejecting it.
Feeling slightly better nourished, he decided to work his way back up to the top of the dune. If there was any hope of finding the Chauk, he knew he would have to keep himself at the highest vantage point possible.
Last night, he believed the desert to be lifeless and still. He couldn’t have been more wrong. While it was true that Raim hadn’t seen a plant or animal since he left the cliff, the desert seemed to possess a life force of its own. It shifted before his eyes. Whenever he glanced behind him, the scenery looked different from how he remembered it; he could never find his way back. His footprints seemed deep and well-defined when he made them, but by the time he took five steps forward the first footprint had disappeared. He could feel the wind whipping low against his ankles, and sometimes the sand flew up into his face and eyes. Every orifice was filled with sand, even the gaps between his teeth and the tear ducts at the edge of his heavy eyelids.
There was another nagging feeling too, growing stronger by the moment. Thirst. He wondered how the Chauk found water in this desert.
He kept aiming higher, keeping himself motivated by thinking that the next sandbank would offer a better view than before. The next one loomed before him like a giant pyramid and the line he was following was as thin and sharp as a knife blade. He moved as if in a dream. Slow and languid, his feet dragg?’ asked Raim.blyou ded in the sand. He was grateful for the feeling of heaviness. If he had been any lighter, he was sure he would be unable to anchor himself against the sliding dune. Yet, as he neared the top, the weather turned against him. The wind, bored now of breezing around his ankles, howled about his ears and shook him from his heat-induced stupor. It attacked him like a wild animal, and he tried to beat back the air with his arms, but it kept coming even stronger. It pushed him to his knees. Slowly, he began to slide down the side of the sand-mountain he had struggled so hard to climb. He threw his arms up towards the summit and clawed at the peak, trying to find something to grab onto. But it was as futile as grasping at air. He continued to slide – and when his arms gave up he started to tumble – all the way to the bottom.
His head thundered against the ground and Raim felt like he’d been hit with the hilt of a sword. He had fallen so that he lay on his back, his eyes tightly shut to avoid looking at the sun. He clutched his left arm to his chest. It was raw and bleeding. His arm had been bare to the sun’s rays since he ripped the sleeve to protect his head but now it blistered and oozed, the burn wounds ripped open by the fall and now full of sand, which stung like salt. It was then that he realized he was crying, and he cursed the salty tears for stinging his arm and for wasting the precious water inside his body, which he feared might be all the water he would ever have again.
Raim awoke feeling exhausted. The sun was no longer visible in the sky, hidden by the massive mounds of sand that rose up on either side of him. He knew the sun, now his newest and most oppressive enemy, was still there somewhere, for the sky was light above him. It was impossible to tell if it was rising or setting.
Sitting up, sand tumbled off his torso in thick streams. It blanketed his legs and feet so thoroughly that only the tips of his thick black boots were visible. If he hadn’t been so deathly tired he would have been frightened by how little the sand seemed to care for his existence. It would have swallowed him up whole, burying him beneath millions of tiny granules, preserving his body in suffocating, everlasting slee
p. Slowly he shook the desert from the rest of his body. For one more day, he would fight becoming a feast for the sand.
He set his hands behind his back to boost himself to his feet but he yelped out loud as if bitten by a snake. The shock was not from a bite, though, but from cold. Half-hidden in the sand, his hand had touched a warped black iron pot. As he lifted it out it was easy to see why it had been thrown away. Sand poured through the cracks in its base like a waterfall.
A spark, a flash of life pinched the base of his spine, sending tremors through his desert-weary limbs. He had no idea how long the pot had lain there, but it gave him hope that someone had passed this way recently. He leaped up, but his legs refused to cooperate and he resorted to scrambling on his hands and knees.
It became clear as he crawled further that the sky was darkening, the sun setting, and Raim would soon have to make a pivotal decision. Adrenaline was fuelling his movements now, every pace strengthened by this sign of human life. The darkness and relative cool of the night would make travelling easier, and he would be able to move faster and further. But he risked losing the potential trail to other humans that he had only discovered by the light of day.
There was an even more pressing problem. The back of his mind buzzed and he felt a dull thud of pain, beating like a ritual song behind his ears. His fingers trembled, half from total lack of control and a temporary settlement.SVnCC f half from the knowledge of the terrible pain still to come.
The last time he had experienced the paralysing effect of a soli, a heat-induced headache, he had been just a small boy, and his grandmother had been there to comfort him. It had been one of the rare times she had wrapped her arms around him, soft and firm – a touch of maternal comfort most Darhan children were denied. He yearned for that now.
‘Open your eyes.’ He heard her voice. His eyes had been squeezed tightly shut against the pain. And there she was in front of him, her robe shimmering in the heat. She reached up and massaged the creases out of his temple.
He relaxed into her embrace. ‘Grandmother . . .’
She lowered her hands and used her fingertips to prise open his clenched fists. In the centre of his right palm lay a simple white flower; it seemed to have appeared by magic.
‘Eat,’ Yasmin said. The petals were soft and fleshy, and edged with silver. Jarumba flower; the best cure for a soli. He put the flower in his mouth and bit down.
But his teeth clashed together and in a flash the illusion was gone, his grandmother nowhere to be found. A mirage.
Raim kicked into the sand, the tricks of the desert adding to his frustration. Why hadn’t his grandmother warned him about this? She was a medicine woman, a herb gatherer, a healer, a shaman! Her skills were renowned in all of Darhan, and she had had his whole lifetime to solve the puzzle of his secret promise. She should have known the Yun would not accept him if he had made another vow. But she had not warned him, and because of it he was now wandering, alone, in the most terrible place on the planet. How could he be punished so hard for a promise he hadn’t known that he’d made?
The memory – and the pain – prompted him to move. He resolved to crawl forward until either the sun or the sand or the monsters took him. Tales of the weird and unimaginable creatures that dwelled in the desert were rampant in Darhan. Most centred on the vicious biting flies that hovered like living rain clouds over the sand. He knew these were no fantasy, if only because he had seen the evidence himself after a small swarm of flies had attacked a tribe while they were travelling through the southeast region of Darhan. An entire herd of goats had perished as a result of the bites while the herdspeople fled to safety. Raim’s tribe had visited the scene shortly after, with the royal family. It could have been a herd of elephants that had trampled through that place, not simply a swarm of flies. The Khan’s advisers had been at a loss as to how the flies had travelled so far north. They eventually came to the consensus that the foul winds had brought them.
Other tales of the desert were more fanciful – just old men’s stories, or so he thought, until passing over the next dune brought him face to face with the skeleton of a great snake, the bones bleached white by the sun. The enormous spine curved round and round in a massive spiral. He hoped he would only encounter a skeleton and not the living, breathing beast. Suddenly, he realized that if giant snakes were real, then all the old desert myths could be true: like the birds that buried themselves underground and attacked good men’s promise-knots if they inadvertently wandered into the desert – although how anyone could accidentally find themselves in Sola was a mystery to Raim – or like the patches of sink sand that would swallow a man whole and drown him before he could think to cry for help.
More frightening than any reptile or bird was the sound that?’blyou d that suddenly swept high above his head, as if it were leaping from sand peak to sand peak while Raim was down in the valley. It was a voice – a human voice – but instead of hope, the memory of a thousand ugly stories of the savage people of the desert surged through his mind. Suddenly he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be found by men who might drink his blood to quench their thirst or use his skin as shelter from the sun – perhaps death was a better option after all. He shook his head violently, trying to shed the fears. He thought back to his Yun training. He could defend himself if the need arose.
Raim took a deep breath and remained as still as possible, trying to decipher the origin of the words. They weren’t in a tongue he recognized, though that still didn’t rule the speakers out as Yun warriors sent to find him. He felt a pang in his heart. He should have been experiencing his first few days as fully fledges="indented" a
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The moment he found the container of water, its inconspicuous brown leather spout poking through the sand, he pounced on it like a wildcat and bit open the seal with his back teeth. He had been tracking the Alashan pair for the better part of the night and his weak limbs were wracked with shivers. Approaching them seemed reckless, and he couldn’t think of a way to make an appearance without getting himself killed. So he followed behind, picking up occasional scraps that they dropped as they moved along.
The first gulp of water was painful, but delicious, sending his impossibly weak body into ripples of shock that nearly left him unconscious. He momentarily lost control of his fingers and lips, so the water poured continuously into his mouth and dribbled out, running down his chin and soaking his shirt. When he regained control he forced himself to take it slow, to conserve more. Despite himself, he took another sip. The temptation was just too great.
The improbability of the Alashan abandoning an entire container full of water did not strike him until it was too late. He wondered if he was suffering from a second wave of heat exhaustion. The tips of his fingers began to droop of their own accord, like wax dripping down a candle. The feeling trickled along his arms, loosening the joints. But as his knees buckled and all the muscles in his face slackened, he knew it was much more than simple tiredness. He had been poisoned.
Only seconds later and he was flat on the ground, his temple throbbing from where he flopped sideways – paralysed. His tongue fought to prise a gap between his lips, but they were sealed shut. His eyes and eyelids were the only external parts of his body that could move. He could feel his body try to tremble, but nothing happened.
A shadow crossed over his forehead and he rolled his eyes to the back of his head. A gaunt face, thin and hollow as a skeleton, peered down at him.
‘Genar – aik be maudin, cliq cliq.’
It was clear the man was speaking to him, but Raim didn’t understand a word. The phrase was repeated, louder, by another voice. Raim couldn’t see the other speaker.
They continued talking for several minutes in a clipped and confusing speech, the tone flat and repetitive. The vibrations from the low tones in their voices reverberated through his paralysed limbs. But he wasn’t immobile for long. The two men grabbed him – one by the feet and the other by the head – and carried him brusquely down the dun
e. At the bottom they forced more liquid down his throat and he dropped with a thud into unconsciousness.
The little finger on his left hand spasmed, but he stilled the rest of his body before it could give away any sign he was waking up. He kept his breathing in the slow, shallow rhythm of sleep. That much Mhara had drilled into him until it became instinctive; the seconds between his waking up and the Alashan noticing were the only opportunity he might have to gain some sort of advantage over his captors. She had been gone only a day but already she was saving his life.
Feel. Listen. Wait. Her words. Mhara had never exactly been expansive in her instructions, never saying more than she needed to.
Feel. Rope. Well-worn by the sense of it, with plenty of scratchy fibres grating against the skin of his wrists. Behind him was a sturdy wooden stake, taller than his head, but misshapen slightly so0">
Listen. He heard nothing. Not the footsteps of a nearby guard or the anxious whisperings of his captors. Not a breath of wind or a bird cawing overhead.
Wait. This was the hardest part. The silence bothered him the most. What if they had left him here, to waste away the night, attempting escape only to roast in the sun the next morning? Mhara, help me! What should I do now? But her voice would only ever be heard in his memory, and she would never teach him anything new again. He wasn’t ready for this. His learning wouldn’t have ended once he had become Yun. When training became action – that was when he was supposed to grow the most.
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