Nightpeople

by Anthony Eaton

‘The Shifting?’

  Dreamer Gaardi nodded. ‘How long have you been reaching, girl?’

  ‘Reaching?’

  ‘Touchin’ land spirits. Just like you were doing then.’

  ‘I … don’t know … As long as I can remember.’

  ‘Yeah?’ The old man raised an eyebrow in surprise. ‘What else have you reached into?’

  ‘Lizards, mainly.’

  ‘Warmbloods?’

  ‘When I can find them. I tried to reach a dog once.’

  ‘Phah!’ Dreamer Gaardi spat. ‘Those bastards’ll bite you any way they can.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Listen …’ He leaned closer. ‘Don’t go telling anyone that you can do this, eh? Especially not him.’ Dreamer Gaardi nodded towards Dariand.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Young ‘uns like you shouldn’t be able to feel the land. You don’t know it well enough to read it properly. And girls aren’t supposed to be able to reach at all. It’s not your business. Being able to do this means that you’re different from most people. It gives you power, eh? There are people around who aren’t gonna be too happy to discover that a little tacker like yourself has it.’

  ‘You mean Dariand?’

  ‘Nah. He’s got a better landsense than most, but even he can’t reach and touch the land spirits like you just did. You don’t want to tell him because you shouldn’t be letting anyone at all know you can do it.’

  Saria’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Are you saying I shouldn’t do it any more?’

  ‘You gotta listen more carefully, girl.’ Dreamer Gaardi took her chin gently between the fingers of his free hand. ‘There’s people in these Darklands who have a lot of hope ridin’ on you. You’re special, and this just makes you even more so. There’s never been a girl before who could feel the land. Ever. Especially not with these little fellas.’ He held up the insect. ‘That’s gotta mean somethin’, right? But it’s a serious business. There are things you need to learn to do it right, and people who’ll want to use you for their own bad business when you do.’

  ‘Will you teach me? How to do it right?’

  The old man’s face crinkled into a broad smile.

  ‘Nah, girl. From the way you woke me up then, it feels like you already got more power in you than there ever was in this old bloke. Dreamer Wanji’ll help you with it when we get back to Woormra. ‘Til then you just be careful, alright?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Good girl. Now get back to sleep and don’t tell anyone about this.’

  Saria crawled back to her sleeping place, her head still pounding. The last thing she noticed before she fell asleep was Dreamer Gaardi still sitting on the other side of the bush holding the insect close to his face.

  ‘Wake up, girl!’

  Dariand was shaking her, and groggily Saria crawled out from under the bush. It was twilight, the vault above already deep purple on its way to black and the first vaultlights shining brightly above.

  ‘Here.’ The usual mouthful of warm water and tough dried meat. ‘While you’re chewing that, I’ll get your shoes on.’

  She let Dariand lace the animal skins around her ankles and legs, not even complaining when he tied the thongs tight.

  ‘You alright?’

  ‘Fine. Sleepy.’

  ‘Well, you’d better wake up. We’ve a long way to go tonight. I want to be halfway through the dunes by morning.’

  A little way off, Dreamer Gaardi was watching the vaultlights.

  ‘Eh. Look!’

  Saria and Dariand followed the direction of his finger, straight up to where a tiny vaultlight, much smaller than the others, was slipping rapidly across the sky.

  ‘What is it?’ Saria asked.

  ‘Don’t know. But you see them sometimes at this time of night.’

  Saria followed its progress across the vault. Its movement was fast but unhurried, steady and dead straight. It gave the impression of never once having deviated from its course, never having sped up, never having slowed, even a tiny amount.

  ‘How come it moves so fast? The other vaultlights don’t move at all.’

  ‘They do. I told you last night.’

  ‘Not like that. Why?’

  ‘Nobody knows.’ Dariand lost interest and Saria continued to follow the strange vaultlight until it vanished over the crest of a dune to the nightwards of them.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  That night’s walk was harder. The red sand was soft and sucked at their feet, making every step an effort, and their course seemed to be taking them nowhere. Instead of angling nightwards across the dunes, they wound forwards and backwards around the bases, twisting through valleys. On occasion, Dariand would stop and clamber to the top of one and look around for a few seconds, but he always refused to let Saria climb up with him.

  ‘You need to save your energy.’

  Morning found them still winding between dunes. That day they slept again under another clump of brush, and it was well towards the end of the second night when Dariand called them to a halt.

  ‘Saria. Come on.’

  Without waiting, he began to scramble up the soft, steep slope of the nearest dune.

  The climb was harder than it looked. The sand was even softer than in the valleys and she understood now why they’d taken such a circuitous route. Her feet and legs sank up to her ankles, and she had to claw with her hands just to keep moving. Dariand seemed to spring up the slope without sinking in. When he reached the top, he turned to watch her.

  ‘Try not to fight against it. Move with the flow of the sand. Don’t try to dig into it with your toes; flatten your tread as much as possible.’

  She did as he told her and found herself climbing faster, though without his graceful ease.

  At the top she fell to the ground beside him, panting heavily.

  ‘Look up.’

  The landscape on the other side of the dune was dramatically different. It stretched away in the dim vaultlight, flat in every direction. Here and there shimmers of silver indicated the dried-out remnants of small lakes and between them the land was empty, undulating gently and pitted with rocks and craters and the occasional scraggly tree. Far off in the distance to their right a couple of dull lights shimmered.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The Darklands plains. You were born out there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You can’t see it from here. You came from Woormra – still a long way over the nightwards horizon.

  ‘What are those.’ She pointed at the lights.

  ‘That’s Olympic.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A town. Like Woormra.’

  ‘Town?’

  ‘A group of people living in the same place. Those lights’ll be their night-watch men. We’d best get moving. Olympic’s not close, and I want to be in and out of there before dawn.’

  ‘We’re not staying there?’ Saria didn’t try to hide the disappointment in her voice. After growing up in the valley, the idea of lots of people in the one place was something she’d like to see.

  ‘No. We’ll be there just long enough for me to sneak into the town and fill our water-skins.’

  ‘Will I get to see it?’

  ‘Not close up.’ Dariand noticed the expression on her face. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get plenty of time to explore a town when we get to Woormra.’

  ‘How many towns are there?’

  ‘Not many now. There used to be a lot of them dotted around the plains. Most started getting smaller and died off and the few people left in them moved somewhere else, like Woormra or Olympic.’

  Saria studied the tiny, flickering cluster of lights down on the plain.

  ‘How long will it take to get there?’

  ‘A while. Then we’ll find somewhere for you and Gaardi to lay up, while I go in and get water. I can be in and out without anyone from Olympic even knowing about it.’

  ‘What if somebody sees you?’

 
‘I’m a nightwalker.’ Dariand threw her an amused grin. ‘They won’t.’

  ‘We gonna fill up the water-skins at Olympic?’ As if out of the darkness itself, Dreamer Gaardi materialised on the top of the dune beside them.

  ‘Yeah. Just me going in, though.’

  ‘I reckon that’s a good plan.’ Gaardi nodded.

  ‘Best get on with it then.’

  Without further discussion the three of them slid down the side of the dune, waded through the last of the soft sand, and set their path. As she walked towards the guardlights of Olympic, something about them threw a fluttering of apprehension through Saria.

  ‘Why don’t you want them to know about us?’

  ‘Not us, you.’

  The first glimmerings of dawn were lighting the vault as they crouched in a low hollow, peering at Olympic just a little distance away. There wasn’t much to see. Most of the town was hidden from view by a barrier of thorny branches, twisted and knotted to form a crude fence running all the way around the perimeter of the town. Beyond it, Saria could make out the dark, squat shapes of huts clustered close together.

  ‘What are all those branches for?’ She pointed at the barrier, and Dariand snorted.

  ‘That’s the Olympic mob for you. One Darkedge isn’t enough for them. They gotta have their own.’

  ‘Well, they gotta keep out bad spirits like you, eh?’ There was a mischievious undertone to Dreamer Gaardi’s words and the two men shared a grin before Dariand returned to the task of slinging waterskins around his neck.

  ‘I should be back before sun-up, but if I’m not then take the girl and settle somewhere out of sight, eh? If I have to, I’ll hole up in town for the day and meet you here tonight. I’ll leave a water-skin with you, just in case.’

  ‘Okay.’

  While the men were talking, Saria continued to study the town. It looked silent and empty and vaguely cold, but intriguing all the same. She wished there was some creature nearby she could reach into, so she might study the place more closely.

  ‘Are you sure I can’t come with you?’

  ‘Positive.’ Dariand responded without hesitation. ‘If there’s one bunch we don’t want finding out about you, it’s the mob sleeping on the other side of that fence. If there was anywhere else we could get water in this part of the plains, we wouldn’t be here at all. Now you stay with Gaardi and keep out of the way.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘No! You don’t know the first thing about this place and you’d mess things up for everyone. Trust me.’

  Trust me. Saria was getting sick of hearing those words.

  ‘Back soon.’

  Dreamer Gaardi nodded and Dariand melted away into the gloom.

  Saria followed the old man back to the bottom of the hollow, out of sight of the town and they settled onto the cold sand to wait for Dariand’s return. Lying on her back, she watched the vaultlights slowly fading and thought about the last few days. Her life in the valley seemed so far away, like something she’d lived seasons ago instead of just days. Despite what Dariand had said, it seemed impossible that she’d never return there. With a sudden jolt, she missed it terribly. She missed the security of understanding everything going on around her. She missed knowing what she could and couldn’t get away with. Surprisingly, she even found herself missing grumpy old Ma Lee.

  ‘Dreamer Gaardi?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Why is it so important that I go to Woormra?’

  She thought Dreamer Gaardi wasn’t going to answer, but then the old man started talking;

  ‘It’s been a lotta years now since we had a birth in the Darklands. Thirteen seasons, by my memory. Even before that, it was always a long time between proper, clean babies. And since that night you were born, nothing.’

  Saria’s brow wrinkled in confusion. The old man’s words meant nothing to her.

  ‘What’s a birth?’

  ‘The beginning of a life, girl. When you come outa your mother and into the world. It’s the start of you bein’ a person of the land. And here in the Darklands, that means a lot. ‘Specially since the Nightpeople started takin’ any clean babies away. You’re the last one in a long time, and after you there ain’t gonna be any more.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Dreamer Gaardi laughed. ‘All us old-timers are past it now. There’s not enough of us left who are young enough to be parents.’

  ‘Parents?’

  The old man frowned.

  ‘Sorry, girl. I forget you don’t know ‘bout this stuff. Ma Lee was never big on teaching, was she?’ He thought for a moment. ‘All of us, you, me, Dariand, we all got a father and we all got a mother, and they’re the ones that give us life. We come from them, and we are of them. When two people get so close that they know one another’s spirit and can mix their spirits together, then they can make a new life, one that’s the best and worst of both of them. That’s parents.’

  ‘How can somebody give life?’

  ‘A long time ago, before the Shifting, before the Darklands, there was the land, we call her the Earthmother, and there was the sky – the Vaultfather, and where these two met, right out there’, he pointed to the horizon – ‘came all the life; coldbloods and warmbloods and all us people. Right?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘So this land below us and the vaults up there above are like everyone’s parents. All of us come from them, outa them, we’re made up of their life put together, and finally in the end we all go back to them. And just like everything living is out of the Earthmother and Vaultfather, each one of us is out of a mother and father. They make our flesh with theirs and our blood with their bleeding. We’re a part of them, just as much as they are of us.’

  The old man smiled, as though he’d made everything clear. Saria looked thoughtful.

  ‘Where are your mother and father?’

  ‘Ah, they’re a long time gone back to the Earthmother. A long, long time. My mother was a singing woman and my father came from the high valley lands, like Ma Lee. He was a strong Dreamer. Used to reckon he could feel the land right out to the Darkedge.’

  ‘The Darkedge?’

  ‘Yeah. These Darklands are a pretty big place. You can travel a lot of days and not find the Darkedge, but it’s out there. A long way off to the nightwards, days past Woormra, and a long way daywards, on the other side of the hills. As far as you and me are concerned, the Darkedge is the end of the world. Stoppin’ the outside comin’ into the Darklands, and stoppin’ the Darklands goin’ to the outside. Only thing that comes over the Darkedge are Nightpeople.’

  Saria remembered that strange, distant humming which had raised such a reaction in Dariand.

  ‘So everything is Darklands.’

  ‘Yeah. All this.’ He gestured around him once again. ‘Burning land. Once it used to be home to a lotta different folk – Dreamers like us, and also Skypeople. But in the Shifting this place all got burned up. And when you get into one of them little fella crawlies, like the other day, that’s what you’re feeling. The burning just like they do.’

  There were more questions she wanted to ask, but it was hard to know where to start.

  Dreamer Gaardi stared up at the sky. ‘It’s getting too light. Folk in town’ll be getting up real soon and I don’t reckon we’re gonna see Dariand again until tonight.’

  ‘What’ll he do?’

  ‘Him? Don’t worry about him, girl. That bloke can vanish like a night spirit. He’ll tuck himself away in town somewhere and none of that mob’ll be any the wiser You and I better move, though. Don’t want to be caught out here in the sun all day, eh?’

  He climbed to his feet and picked up their remaining water-skin. As she followed him away from Olympic, Saria glanced back over her shoulder. In the growing light, the town seemed harmless; just a shambling collection of old tin and wood sheds crouching on the sand behind its protective barrier of thorns.

  They walked only a short while before the old man stopped beside some smal
l clumps of scrub.

  ‘These’ll do for the day. Under you go.’

  Saria crawled under the nearest bush. There was only enough room for her, and Dreamer Gaardi walked a little further away, finding another well-shaded hollow for himself.

  ‘Sleep now and I’ll wake you later, eh?’

  The old man fell asleep in an instant, but Saria, despite her fatigue, found sleep elusive. She lay on her back, staring up through the tangle of branches into the lightening dayvault and turning over in her mind all that Dreamer Gaardi had told her. The old man’s words seemed to spin around and around in her head, leaving her with nothing but unanswered, unanswerable questions.

  Her confusion turned to anger. She hadn’t asked for any of this. She hadn’t wanted to leave the valley, to be dumped here in the sand with no idea where she was going. She hadn’t been asked whether she wanted to go to Woormra. She didn’t know who Dariand really was, or why she should trust him. All she had were aching legs and an endless list of questions. She sat up.

  Who was she? she wondered Why had she been born when nobody else was? What was so special at Woormra that Dariand had to travel all that way back to the valley to get her?

  The sun finally broke the horizon, and daylight flooded across the land like a wave. Immediately, the tingle of earthwarmth shivered through her.

  Saria!

  The call surged out of the sand and the vault at the same time. Both distant and immediate. And full of promise. The promise of answers, the promise of somewhere she was supposed to be. Of somewhere she belonged. The urgency of it was stunning.

  And then it was gone, leaving only a kind of faded afterglow that prickled her skin into goosebumps.

  Silently, Saria crawled from under the bush, surprised to find the sun high in the dayvault. Time seemed to have slipped past in a rush.

  A gentle snore from Dreamer Gaardi reassured her that the old man was still asleep and hadn’t noticed her moving. Above, the sun glared down, but she shivered again, despite the heat.

  She needed answers – something to at least help her get her bearings, so that she had some idea where she was, if not who she was or where she was going.

  The town was only a little way away and where there were people, she figured, there’d be food and water, and therefore animals. She’d be careful and nobody would catch her, but she’d find a creature of some sort and borrow it for a while. Just long enough to reach into it and use its senses to ‘explore’ the town a little. Perhaps even to find Dariand’s hiding place.