Daywards

by Anthony Eaton

  They spoke little. All were aware, without saying so, that they were walking from their old, comfortable, secure life into something … new. Something unknown. And at nights Dara would fall asleep beside the fire, staring up at the vaultlights and enjoying the soothing throb of earthwarmth below her aching legs and feet. Sometimes she and Jaran would sleep back-to-back, just as they had as children. More often, though, it was Eyna who’d curl up beside her brother, the two of them sharing their warmth as the nights grew steadily colder.

  Often, Dara would wake in the small hours to find Ma Saria sitting silently with her eyes on the fire, her stare fixed and her mind a long way distant. During the days the old woman walked steadily and without complaint, her gait easily matching that of the other three. But Dara suspected, from the tired droop of her shoulders and the careful way she eased herself to the ground at each rest break, that the walk was costing the old woman much more than she was prepared to admit.

  Around them, the landscape changed slowly but inexorably. The ground underfoot grew drier and less pliable, the large, majestic trees of the forest gave way to scraggly, wind-bent shrubs, the dense undergrowth replaced by thorny, dried-out patches of desert-brush. The rich greens and browns to which her eyes were accustomed slowly became reds and ochres and even the sky itself took on a different hue – paler, more distant.

  Through all this, the one constant – always there below her – was the earthwarmth. Several times a day Dara would stop, draw it up into herself and then reach, down and out into the Earthmother, reassured by the amount of life she’d find around them and, of course, by the comfortable, familiar sparks of Ma, Eyna and Jaran. This last one, though, she always treated hesitantly now, allowing herself only the barest awareness of his consciousness before pulling back again, retreating into her own mind and closing it around her again like a protective cocoon.

  If Eyna and Ma were aware of what she was doing, neither gave any indication.

  Time stretched and blended, each day so similar to the previous and the following one that Dara began to lose track of how long they’d been walking. They’d been travelling for a lot longer than even her walk to the city with Jaran when, mid-morning one day, Ma Saria stopped abruptly.

  ‘Look.’

  She pointed ahead to where the horizon turned white – a long, gleaming smear of reflective brightness that stretched all the way from the south to the north.

  ‘What is it?’ Eyna asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Ma. ‘Guess we’ll find out soon, eh? Not a lot of life there, though.’

  Dara closed her eyes and reached, and, as Ma Saria had observed, there was a definite line of … not nothingness but of strange emptiness ahead.

  ‘Is it the Darklands?’

  ‘Nah.’ The old woman shook her head. ‘You’ll know when we get there, girl. Trust me on that. This place is just … empty land.’

  They continued towards the white line, the ground growing hard and crisp and the vegetation becoming increasingly sparse, until they found themselves walking across a broad, empty plain of glittering, hard-packed sand.

  Gradually, the white line resolved itself into a series of sand dunes, the long, curved ridges incredibly high and uniformly wind-carved. Soft, vertical waves of sand ran down from the peaks, and the white sand reflected the sunlight so effectively that Dara found she needed to shield her eyes from the glare.

  ‘We going through?’ she asked

  Ma nodded. ‘Don’t see any other way.’

  ‘How far do they go?’

  ‘You can’t feel it for yourself?’

  But reaching on that scale was too much for Dara to even contemplate. She’d have to open herself right out for that, and with Jaran there watching …

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  Ma Saria raised one eyebrow but didn’t comment, and Dara looked away.

  ‘Let’s … look … up.’

  Jaran started climbing the first dune, and the girls followed. It took ages to get up the slope to the razor-edged peak, which they peered over, expectantly.

  ‘Shi!’ Dara exclaimed.

  On the other side, a sea of sand, one undulating dune after another, each as high as the one they were on, and each a windshaped echo of all the others, stretched over every horizon.

  ‘We’ll never get through that,’ Eyna whispered, but Jaran smiled.

  ‘Not … too bad. Three days … at … most.’

  The thought of three days spent in the middle of that lifeless ocean sent a shiver through Dara, but there didn’t seem to be any choice. Sliding back down to the base of the dune, where Ma Saria waited patiently, she glanced at the other two. Eyna still seemed concerned, but Jaran had a serene expression on his face.

  ‘Big?’ Ma Saria asked, and all three nodded.

  ‘It’s … not too … bad … though,’ Jaran said. ‘We … have water, anyway.’

  This was true. They’d refilled their flasks a day earlier at a small spring, and if they were careful it would last three days.

  But then what? Dara wondered.

  She didn’t get a chance to voice her concern, though, because Ma Saria was already away again, following the line of the dune until it dropped low enough for her to make her ponderous way over the crest and into the first of the inter-dune valleys. In this way, they wound back and forth for hours, single file through the trackless, white wasteland.

  ‘How do you know which way to go?’ Dara asked at one point, and Ma Saria smiled.

  ‘Done this before. Long time ago, though, and in different country to this. Still, sand is sand, I reckon.’

  ‘What … country?’ Jaran asked, and the two girls stared at him in surprise. Even after the weeks they’d been walking, Jaran still remained silent for the most part.

  ‘When I was a girl. Back home in the Darklands. When my dad took me from the valley, we spent a few days walking through sandhills like this lot. Red sand there, though.’

  ‘You can still remember it?’ Dara asked.

  ‘Course I can, girl. Just like you’ll always remember the colour of the rocks and trees back at the escarpment. You never lose your home country. Once you’ve tasted it, reached it, then it’s a part of you. That’s something you never lose.’

  That night they camped in a deep valley. There was no wood for a fire and nothing to hunt, so they simply walked until well after sunset and then settled on the cold sand, chewing on some dry meat and a handful of nuts and washing it down with careful sips from their water flasks.

  Three more days of this! Dara thought as they settled down to sleep.

  She lay listening to the moan of the wind between the dunes and the rumble of Ma Saria’s snoring, and tried hard to ignore the itching sensation of the sand, which had managed to seep in to every nook and cranny of her clothes and body.

  Sleep refused to come, and eventually she sat up, hugging her arms about herself against the chilly breeze and watching the night. Around her, the dunes were painted silver by the moonlight. If she looked closely, she could see a glittering shimmer on the surface of the sand. Idly she traced her fingers through it, feeling the cool sensation of it running, water-like, between her fingers.

  She slid to her feet and, leaving the other three slumbering, climbed carefully up the side of the nearest dune, digging her fingers and toes deep into the soft sand and sending gentle cascades slipping away below her. At the peak she flattened out a space to sit, and stared at the silver-tipped dunes rising out of dark troughs in every direction like a frozen, spectral ocean.

  Dara felt lost. Dislocated. When Da Janil had died and Ma Saria had first presented the idea of travelling to the Darklands, it seemed natural and obvious. But now she was sitting in the middle of a sandy wasteland, in the middle of the night, far from everything she knew and loved, and Dara wasn’t certain any more. Her brother – her twin – had turned against her and then been damaged, and even Eyna, who’d always been so stable and grounding, even she was different out here. Someone el
se.

  A soft sigh escaped her lips and she closed her eyes.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’ The sudden sound of Jaran’s voice made her jump.

  ‘Shi, Jaran! You scared me!’

  ‘Sorry. Didn’t … mean to.’

  He sat down beside her.

  ‘Not … your fault, you know.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘M … me. This …’ He waved his hand at his mouth. ‘Nightpeople did … this. Not … you.’

  ‘I know that,’ she snapped, sounding more churlish than she’d intended.

  ‘No … you don’t.’ He took her arm in his own and leaned against her. ‘You think … should have been … you.’

  ‘Can you reach?’

  The abrupt change of topic earned her a quizzical glance.

  ‘Like … you?’

  ‘Eyna thinks you can.’

  ‘Do you?’

  Dara looked away. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never considered it.’

  Beside her, Jaran was silent, a thoughtful expression on his face. ‘Perhaps,’ he finally replied.

  ‘That’s not an answer,’ Dara retorted. ‘You either can or you can’t.’

  ‘Sometimes I … just … know. Where things … people … are. Is that … it?’

  ‘It might be. I don’t know. You should ask Ma.’

  ‘Perhaps. But … rather ask … you … sis.’

  ‘Look.’ Dara pointed up into the sky, where a silver pinprick of light was trailing quickly from the nightwards to the daywards horizon, the line of its route inscribing a perfect arc across the night. ‘Sky … eye,’ Jaran said.

  ‘Do you think they can see us?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘That’s your favourite answer at the moment, isn’t it?’

  That earned her a grin, but it quickly faded.

  ‘Would you … mind?’ he asked.

  ‘Mind what?’

  ‘If … I could … reach.’

  ‘Of course not!’

  He didn’t reply, but his expression spoke for him, and Dara gave the question more thought. Would she mind? If she was being honest, then possibly she might. Reaching was the one thing she could do that Jaran couldn’t. If that was gone, then she’d be just the same as him. No longer special.

  She met his stare. ‘Okay, then. Perhaps. But it wouldn’t matter.

  His expression indicated that this was an answer he was more prepared to accept.

  ‘Try … me.’

  ‘Try reaching you?’

  He nodded, staring hard at her. ‘Please.’

  ‘Ma Saria says it’s dangerous, if you don’t know what you’re doing.’

  ‘You know … Try.’

  Dara chewed on her bottom lip. Around them, the night and the sand were motionless, as though they were trapped in some small bubble of time. Only the progress of the sky-eye across the heavens gave any indication of the wider passage of time.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Jaman.’

  Carefully, Dara reached towards her brother’s neck, and Jaran stayed completely still, his eyes half-hooding over as he made a conscious effort to relax into himself.

  His skin was hot to the touch and, the moment she felt that spark of contact, almost against her will Dara felt herself slipping out, earthwarmth pounding from somewhere below the cold sand and into her, and her mind gliding gently, inevitably, towards the spark of Jaran’s consciousness, which now filled the night around her.

  There. Told you.

  His voice in her head. Normal, like before. No more stuttering or forced pauses. Now his thoughts were her thoughts.

  Around them the horizons slid away, just like the first time Ma Saria had reached through her. Around them was cold sand, then warm earth, then water, trees, and … something else. Something new. Air.

  Air?

  I can feel the rocks! Jaran’s surprise intruded into her own awareness, and she could taste his shock.

  You can’t usually?

  No. Just the sky.

  Somewhere, sky knew how far away, a nightbird pounded its way between the trees of a coastal forest. Dara gasped as she felt the swift whirl of its passage through the insubstantial air, the weaving of it between tree trunks as solid as stone.

  Further away a cloud bank, warm humidity rising high above the cold land below, built like a wave rising thousands of metres above the coastal fringe.

  Here was a colony of bats, each whirling invisible in the darkness, every single one a pinpoint in a ballet of impossible precision.

  And here … right out as far as she could reach, the dull ache of cold, lifeless plascrete, where ancient, crumbling towers lanced the vault of the sky, just as they spread cancerous across the face of the Earthmother below them.

  Even in the middle of all this, Dara soared.

  Shi! Jaran’s ‘voice’ was filled with the same awe that she was feeling. It’s enormous.

  You can reach the sky? Dara had to fight to clarify the thought as her own, to separate it from their shared consciousness enough to make herself ‘heard’.

  You can reach the earth! The realisation – so obvious, she’d have thought – was filled with such a sense of awe that it set something bursting inside her and she felt the urge to plunge deeper and deeper into this shared well of awareness that they’d somehow formed around themselves. Jaran was feeling it too.

  We should stop.

  But there’s so much more.

  It’s dangerous.

  Beautiful

  Stop.

  It took every bit of determination she could muster to pull her mind back from the warmth, back into her cold body, back into the detached night. But slowly Dara recovered enough of herself to slide again into the familiar confines of her own mind.

  Below her bare legs, the sand was suddenly cold. She was hardly aware of Jaran collapsing onto his back beside her. Overhead, the billion stars filled the sky with their liquid glow. The sky-eye was long gone, the night still. Dara fought back tears as an incredible sense of loneliness overtook her.

  ‘You … alright?’ Jaran’s voice. His own again, every word a labour.

  ‘I’m fine. You?’

  ‘Ama … amazing.’

  ‘You reach the sky.’ It wasn’t a question. She didn’t need to ask.

  ‘I … guess.’

  ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘Don’t know … Just always … have.’

  It made no sense, but somehow, all the same, it felt right.

  ‘Could you feel the Nightpeople, when they were flying? And the drones?’

  He nodded. ‘Felt … cold. Empty.’

  ‘That’s how they felt to me on the ground, too.’

  They sat in silence, while overhead another sky-eye, this one moving along a diagonal path to the first, tracked from horizon to horizon.

  A thought occurred to Dara. ‘When you left me in the city, in the tower, could you feel me then?’

  Jaran stiffened. The sudden tension in his body was almost imperceptible. If she hadn’t been so attuned to him at that moment, she might have missed it. It was answer enough.

  ‘You could.’

  Jaran looked away, taking a handful of sand and studying it closely as he let it run out between his fingers.

  ‘Had to make … sure … you’d be safe.’

  ‘Then you must have known when I escaped.’

  He nodded. ‘Harder to … follow … though … when …’

  As he spoke, the intervals between his words grew longer and longer, until he stopped completely, frozen into speechlessness by shame and embarrassment.

  He didn’t need to say any more. Dara knew, and the knowledge put her own thoughts into a confused whirl. He’d put her somewhere he could keep track of her, but that was cold comfort. And once he’d known that she’d escaped, he hadn’t come back to check, hadn’t even waited really.

  Except that he had, she suddenly realised, remembering his dawdling during the long walk back to the escarpment.
He’d hoped she’d catch up. And that’s just what she’d done, though not in the way he’d planned.

  ‘Sorry,’ he offered, the word catching in his throat.

  ‘It’s okay. At least you were keeping an eye out for me, even if I had no idea. Does Uncle Xani know you can do this?’

  ‘Reaching?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No … nobody. Only … you.’

  ‘And Eyna.’

  ‘Eh?’ Jaran looked confused.

  ‘She says she’s been able to feel you reaching for ages. She was the one who told me about you.’

  ‘Thought … must have been … Ma.’

  ‘You thought wrong then.’

  Jaran glanced back down the dune, towards the deep shadow where the other two slept.

  ‘We … should …’

  ‘Get back down there,’ Dara finished for him. ‘You’re right. Big day ahead tomorrow.’

  She started to haul herself to her feet, but before she could do so Jaran reached out and brushed his hands lightly across the side of her neck. The contact was fleeting but long enough for the words to form in her mind.

  We’ll be all right, sis. We’ll stick together from now on.

  There was no need to reply. Dara grinned at her twin, and then the two of them leapt side by side down the soft dune in enormous, joyful bounds.

  ‘Had some pretty strange dreams last night,’ Ma Saria said.

  Dara glanced sidelong, but the old woman’s face was giving away nothing. Ahead, perhaps a couple of hunded metres away, Jaran and Eyna were scouting for an easy climb over to the next dune valley, paying Dara and Ma no attention whatsoever.

  ‘Yeah? What sorta dreams?’

  But the old woman didn’t answer her. Not directly, anyway.

  ‘You wanna hear a story?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘It’s an old one. Told to me a long time ago now, by Dreamer Wanji, back when I was a girl probably younger than you are now.’

  Dara was intrigued. She thought she’d heard all the old Darklands stories, but the way Ma was talking it sounded like this might be something new.

  ‘A long, long time in the past, long time before my mother’s mother, long time before the skycities, and a long time before the Darklands and the shifting, everything on the land was rich and alive, eh? Earthwarmth flowing everywhere and into everything. Everyone who lived on the earth knew the Earthmother, and everyone could feel her and feel into her and through her, just like you and me and your cousin do now.’