Travellers #2

by Jack Lasenby

Many days later we turned and followed a long ridge towards the coast. Although the sun’s ferocity dried up the rivers lower down, it was easier travelling there. We searched several beaches and found neither tracks nor ashes of old fireplaces. The Green Stone Valley was as far south as Squint-face and his men would come, we decided. “Grarff!” Taur said and pointed. “Keep going south.”

  And I told Jak and Jess. “That’s our best chance.”

  “You were right,” I said to Taur. “I wanted to find where the green stone came from. I wish now we hadn’t found it.” But I did not throw away the carved dolphin, and I wondered about the footprint we had seen in the Green Stone Valley.

  Chapter 17

  The Ice Ogre

  Bank to bank, a dry river poured shingle, its far side sand packed smooth. Taur and I cast about for sign.

  Neither smoke signals behind, nor tracks ahead. I thought of the murdered slaves, Cark and Otnip. “Perhaps Squint-face will forget us now,” I said aloud to Jak, scuffing the sand back to where we had left our packs. Taur returned shaking his head. “Gaw!”

  I bent to swing up my pack. Beside it was one small, perfect footprint.

  “Taur!”

  “Gahr?”

  “Someone ahead of us.”

  “Gaw!”

  “Look!”

  Taur bunted me aside. As it had done earlier, his splayed foot with wide-set toes obliterated the strange footprint.

  He pointed ahead. Keep going. Behind in the Green Stone River, Squint-face and his Salt Men searched for us. Keep going. Before they thought we might be heading south and followed. Taur looked at my face, nodded at my pack. “Gawk! Garph!” he called. Jak and Jess leapt up.

  I followed them, climbing on to safe, hard ground. “It’s because it’s a woman’s footprint, isn’t it?” I asked. “Why you don’t want to know about it.” Looking ahead Taur ignored me.

  Cliffs and defiles made it impossible to follow the coast. We swung inland, the sun defeated by steep-walled valleys. One morning we lowered ourselves and the dogs with flax ropes down bluffs to the bottom of a mist-layered valley where we crossed a cold milky river. Its water felt mealy, tasted gritty. Curious, we turned up it. The dogs hung back. The air inert. Tatters of mist. Few trees. The valley a sheer-walled trench, as if a giant finger had scooped it out.

  For a while I pretended it wasn’t there, tried to ignore it, then was forced to accept the fact: from side to side the valley ahead was filled by an enormous, protruding, green snout which climbed and disappeared into cloud. The brute stirred. I grabbed Taur’s arm as he grabbed mine. The air clanged coldness. Slowly, my eyes resolved the monster into one of the rivers of ice Hagar had never seen but described to me all those years ago. As a girl, she had been told stories about them by old people who themselves had never seen one. Now we stood before one of the frozen dragons of their fables.

  From its ice-fanged mouth, pans of ice cracked away and jobbled down the river. Ominous, the milky water knocked hidden boulders. A crash of air slammed from wall to wall of the valley. What I had taken for the stirring of a giant had been the toppling of a tower of ice at the frozen river’s end, its green-blue cliffs.

  The glacier’s irresistible grind had carved the vertical walls of the valley. It must once have reached all the way to the coast, perhaps into the sea itself – before the sun turned insane.

  Its cold was evil, yet we could not turn away. The tumble of undercut ice, the jar of water-buried stones jammed the air with roar, rumble, yet all seemed still, silent. The colossal prod of ice sliding off mountains out of sight: how high, at what remoteness to resist the sun! We backed away down the river, afraid to take our eyes off the monster.

  For days my thoughts were of the ice-ogre, of the mountain that ate the sun, as we kept south, crossing more milky rivers, and catching sight of another glacier between dark ridges, white as the glimpse of a thigh.

  I heard Taur tell the dogs the glacier was just a river of ice whose waters knocked, ran milky with ice and ground stone, and smoked with cold. But there was a threat implicit in the titanic landscape. “What’s the other side of the mountains?” I asked, but Taur just rubbed Jess’s ears, examined Jak’s feet, and bellowed, “Grarff!” We must keep on south.

  We came out near the coast again, the sun rocking up the sky, an intensity like the Whykatto’s. Trees sparse. The snow mountains retreated east until, upon the evening skyline, they were distant daggers, gold, pink. Storms clashed and boomed inland, but no rain fell near the coast. We crossed dry shingle washes, trudged for ever, it seemed, down that western coast. And each day Taur and I looked behind.

  It happened early one morning, skirting a pool in a sun-dwindled river-bed, I was astonished once more to see the print of a naked foot. The same foot: narrow, instep high, toes slender. Taur stared south, refusing to look. The dogs showed no interest while I searched for more marks. But there was exactly the print of one foot only – toes, heel, and every part. A woman’s foot, shapely, narrow.

  There was a wind that morning. The sand dry. Yet the edges of the footprint were sharp-cut, so I was all the more astonished at the dogs’ indifference. The print had just been made yet carried no scent to them…

  West the sea, oily, sullen. East the dry river-bed disappeared between desiccated ridges. South stretched desert. A heat haze trembled so boulders in the distance wavered, detached themselves, floated above the shimmer of sand.

  “We can’t keep on south without water.” I knelt and examined the footprint again. Whoever had made it was heading straight into the desert.

  Taur dropped his pack and sat in the shade of a tall rock above the pool. By the way he shovelled the sand about with his feet, I could tell he was upset. It was the footprint had made him angry. How like a child! I turned back to it.

  “Urgsh!”

  On his knees, brushing sand aside with both hands, Taur pulled at something rounded, shapely as a woman’s shoulder. I dropped beside him and dug, too. The side and neck of a gourd emerged. Another. And another. A stack of empty gourds, each with a wood stopper. Whoever left the footprint must have used gourds the way Hagar and I had once used cooking pots to save our lives, that last journey across the Whykatto plain.

  So much of those grasslands had become desert, we almost died of thirst. We filled the cooking pots with water – something Hagar remembered from one of her stories – tied skins over their mouths, and carried them out by night into the Whykatto desert, building up a cache. We sheltered under our tent during the day, watered the animals, drank what was left ourselves, and crossed the rest of the plain during the next night. When we passed the old campsite of the Travellers, the closed-up door to the Cave where we used to see the Animals’ Dance, Hagar stumbled past, ignoring it. I pulled her arm, and she had croaked, “Get to the Narrower Ford.” That was all.

  I explained to Taur how we had crossed the Whykatto. “Ugrawh, Urgsh,” he nodded. It would take many days and nights. We would have to carry enough gourds into the desert to make at least two caches. Taur looked back the way we had come. “We could always go back north,” he said and grinned at my face. “Garugh! Or climb the mountains.”

  I spat on the sand. “Gurgh!” Taur shouted laughter and patted the gourds with his huge hands so they shuffled and roared like drums. Delighted, he rapped and rattled his knuckles along their sides. The dogs barked, Taur jumping, whirling amongst them, stamping, drumming till the desert itself seemed to shake. I watched and laughed and fell silent as I saw what he was doing.

  As Taur danced and leapt, he became both of us crouching tiny beneath the ice-ogre, the glacier. I recognised the way I walked, the slight limp of my game leg, how I stopped and looked around. I hadn’t known I looked like that, not until Taur danced it.

  With the dogs, he retreated before the glacier’s threatening snout, backing away. His drum now echoed the jar of rocks in the milky river. I stood open-mouthed, and Taur laughed and flung his drum down beside the others, a gourd again. “Gurg
h!” he shouted at my stare.

  We slept that day in the bank’s shade. The sun seared orange down a dazzled blue sky as we filled eight large gourds, rammed home the stoppers, and put four each in our packs, with the dried meat we carried. Four smaller gourds we filled and slung one each side of Jak and Jess. As the air cooled, I took my knife and carved across the burnt-clay bank: the ice-ogre of the glacier, and two men and two dogs tiny beneath its icicled jaws.

  “Gaur!” Taur said, pointing at his image.

  Sand, grit, black pebbles. Rounded hills of rocks we avoided. Crossed depressions glittering with salt, a crust which bore the dogs but cracked and lacerated our ankles. With the darkness, insects crawled everywhere on the sand, so many I was astonished there was food for them in that bare desert.

  The air felt warmer about our heads than near the ground. We travelled through a clear night until chill succeeded the day’s flame. Stars as large as the tent lamps of the Travellers hung and flickered just above our heads. We kept looking back to a mountain we had crossed to reach the great river-bed. Keeping it behind us, I knew, would hold us on the right line.

  Lights appeared ahead and vanished. I shook myself and laughed. “It can’t be the Salt Men!” Jess whimpered. I touched her head, and a ball of light ran down my arm and along her back. A little shock, and it had gone.

  Taur touched me. Light ran along his arm and I felt as if an invisible stick had tapped me hard. “I don’t know what it was, but it didn’t hurt us.” I shook myself again and laughed for the dogs’ sake. They looked confused.

  Taur stopped and piddled, and the light ran down his piss, disappearing into the ground. He jumped and laughed. “Gurgh!” His voice vanished into the desert night.

  We rested and travelled on, the sky choked with more stars than I had seen before, so many their twinkles jostled, and I thought I could hear their sound, a musical rustle.

  “Desert travellers make great star-gazers.” It was something Hagar once said when I asked about a large star above the Whykatto. I shivered, walked closer to Taur, and the dogs pressed against us.

  Our steps and the dogs’ trot over gravel beat rhythmic until we struggled on through sand again. By the time grey smudged the east, the insects had disappeared leaving only fine tracks. Some looked as if they had been made by mice.

  Taur pointed to a pimple on the skyline. We walked and walked until it turned into a hillock. Closer it reared a jumble of ancient walls lapped by sand.

  We buried the eight large gourds of water in their shade, and ate. At every move we sweated. Jack and Jess panted. All day, pestered by flies, we moved as the shade shifted. I found myself blaming Taur and the dogs for bringing the flies, sat apart to show my annoyance. It didn’t help when I looked at Taur and saw he was grinning.

  Except for the mountain, now a tiny triangle on the northern skyline, there was no other landmark. The afternoon burnt away. The air cooled. I climbed the walls. Twin peaks showed in the south, further away than the mountain behind, perhaps another two days’ travel. I looked down. There between my feet was the clear print of the strange foot, pointing towards the twin peaks. I took it as a good sign and pressed my own foot into the sand. My print so broad and square beside that other, I laughed. Below, the dogs looked up and grinned. Taur looked up, too. I said nothing.

  We ate, shared the water from one of the smaller gourds, all four of us, left some gear at the cache, and began our return as night rushed on. By dawn we had emptied the remaining three small gourds and were in sight of our starting point.

  Next night we added another eight large gourds to our cache. By the third trip we had twenty-four large gourds of sweet water there and all our gear.

  We carried the first eight gourds of water another march into the desert. A sharp wind cut through our cloaks. The dogs huddled close when we rested. We were all pleased to continue. There was no landmark where we finished at dawn, but the twin peaks loomed high. Another day should get us there. Taur marked this cache with our spears, lashing them together, driving them upright in the sand, our foot bindings fluttering pennants from the tip.

  That night we returned to the first cache. A rising moon would show us the hillock of walls, especially once we could see the mountain in the north, but dawn came and no hillock. It was only after a low mist burned off that Taur saw the hillock away to our right. We reached the walls, but not before the sun was high. It was hard, trying to explain to the dogs they could not drink all they wanted.

  Next night was easier. The moon lit the twin peaks. In first light, the pennants flapped from the spears.

  I scratched a picture in the sand, two men and two dogs, all laden, before we set off deeper into the desert, on what we hoped was the last leg. Seven of the large gourds still full; another distributed between the dogs. Our loads were lighter. I said to Taur things were working out, but he just grunted, trudged on. When we stopped for a rest, all the dogs’ gourds were empty.

  Taur found hair cracks that had opened up, he thought, through the movement of the gourds against the dogs’ sides. He had noticed them licking themselves, he said, but had thought nothing of it.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” I demanded, and Taur rolled his big eyes. I knew it was not his fault. Whatever the cause, we could not go back, had barely enough water to carry us to the peaks which now seemed as far off as ever. They swam out of the mist, retreating, disappearing whenever we seemed to be getting near. I saw trees, grass, and water, heard music – a tinkling fountain, the winding of pipe music. Then we were back trudging across a pebble mosaic, the air heating. I thought of Hagar’s story about a man who perished in a desert, chasing a thing she called a mirage. When I asked Taur, he had seen nothing. He carried a pebble in his mouth, urged me to do so. “Gurgh. It keeps your mouth moist.” I thought it was a stupid idea.

  We had to shelter on the southern wall of a dune as the sun bounded up, brassy, clanging with heat. I said to myself the sun could not make a noise, but heard its sneer of metallic triumph.

  In the side of the dune we dug a hole, airless, a living grave soon abandoned. We rigged our cloaks between spears and bows, the ends pegged to arrows in the sand and, under that, lay as far apart as possible. But the shelter was too small to avoid touching. Again, I grumbled and blamed Taur and the dogs for my discomfort.

  When I was a small boy, Rose, my sister, said I was bad-tempered. I thought I had grown out of it. Certainly I had never been bad-tempered with the animals. I remembered that now, felt bad at blaming Jak and Jess for what was not their fault. And tried to think of all the good things about Taur, how he had risked his life for mine. How even now he was grinning and rolling his great bull’s eyes at me, trying to make me laugh.

  At evening we gave Jak and Jess a few laps of water, wet our own lips, and stumbled on. Some time during the night the twin peaks disappeared. Despair no long mattered. We dragged our feet through loose, shifting sand. The dogs suffered more. Sometimes they lay, first Jak and then Jess, refusing to move. We pulled them up, shoved them into stumbling on. Once I kicked Jak, and he looked at me, his eyes glazed in the starlight. Once I sat down myself, collapsed, and the dogs fastened their teeth in my tunic and dragged me to my feet, Taur encouraging them. I remember drawing two lines in the sand with my finger to show a hawk had flown over.

  Single file we trudged, strung out. I became aware of a third person walking beside me – long dark robe, cowled beneath a black scarf – but did not dare look round. I knew she was raising and lowering a spindle as she walked, thread spinning out of a bunch of fleece she carried in her left hand in the manner of the Travellers. And because she was beside me, I kept walking.

  Grey wisps strung a spider’s web in the east. I could see we had spent the night climbing a vast, slow-backed dune so high its crest had hidden the twin peaks. Triangular summits floating gold in the dark, they sprang to view now as we breasted the dune. Too tired for relief, I looked listless down the dune’s southern scarp, at what seemed mist,
and realised my phantom companion had disappeared.

  Taur and Jess caught up to us. In the rising light the mist below the dune turned from white to opal and through it floated a crescent lake of sapphire-blue water. On its far side I saw trees, grass, and red flowers – like the earlier mirage. Taur sniffed, and I realised these were real, we were smelling them. Ducks flighted off the lake. Herons stalked its edge.

  The dune’s scarp beneath us was made of grains of quartz, shifting, shimmering, a sheen like a kingfisher’s wing. Taur croaked. Jak and Jess tried to bark. We let ourselves slide down the iridescent sand, the dune vibrating as though the strings of a musical instrument twanged. Downhill we leapt. The sandhill thundered and rang like great bells.

  Tumbling, rolling, the colours shifting, the dogs howling at the ringing sand. The air trembled. Afraid, I clutched my bow, felt for an arrow. Then we were at the edge of the crescent lake, its blue water so still it reflected four haggards. We dived in through our own image, smashing the picture, drinking, laughing. My recriminations and bad temper vanished. Taur went under and came up heaving me clear of the water. I tried to shove his head under, but he tossed me backwards with a jerk of his thick neck.

  He still carried the last empty gourds. We jammed in their stoppers, put them in our packs, lashed spears, bows, and arrows on top. This time we slipped into our own reflection in the crescent lake. Taur hung on to our floating packs. Heads slick, Jak and Jess followed as Taur kicked, and I towed him towards the trees, flowers, grass the other side. Safe across the desert from Squint-face and the Salt Men.

  Chapter 18

  The Garden of Dene

  What followed seemed a dream. Still seems a dream. Yet there are times when it comes back to me as real as the ice-ogre in the cold valley north of the desert. Sometimes the memory returns to haunt me as a nightmare. Is it then a dream about a dream? And how does a dream return in the high cold light of day?