by Peter David
She looked at me strangely. “What?”
I stopped, turned to face her. It was getting harder for me to breathe again, and it took all my will to get the words out. “This … is not a place of life. This is a place for … for the loss of life. The absence of life. You can die in the forest, in the sea … but there are living creatures there as well. Here … there’s nothing. Nothing. This is where Death resides. Here he has dominion … and we trespass here. We … will die here.” My voice choked, and I felt weak and helpless. “We are going … to die. Death will take us because nothing is supposed to live here. Nothing—”
“All right, all right, I get it,” said Sharee with sudden impatience. “Nothing is supposed to live here, you’ve made that clear. Death’s Domain. Maybe you’re right.” She shrugged indifferently. “Maybe … you are. Maybe this is Death’s stronghold, and we’re not long for it.”
I couldn’t believe her tone of voice. “Don’t you care?” I managed to ask.
“No.”
“You don’t care if you die.”
“No.”
“Nonsense,” I retorted. My fear was giving way to annoyance. “You’re just saying that. Everyone fears Death.”
“That’s everyone’s problem, then. But it’s not mine.”
Walking was not an easy task, even if I hadn’t been trembling. The sands kept shifting beneath us, and the lack of a regular surface was extremely hard on the bottoms of our feet.
“I don’t believe you,” I said flatly.
“Fine.” She shrugged beneath her cloak. “Don’t believe me.”
“You’re telling me that you don’t care if you live or die.”
“I didn’t say that,” she replied. She was shorter than I, but she navigated the sands with such assurance that it was a struggle just to keep up with her so that I could hear what she was saying. “If given the choice of living or dying, I’ll opt for the former. But I have no fear of the latter.”
“But that’s suicidal,” I protested. “If you have no fear of dying, then you won’t hesitate to wander into life-threatening situations because you won’t be deterred by the jeopardy of it.”
“There’s a fine line between refusal to be deterred and rank stupidity,” retorted Sharee. “Obviously one shouldn’t be such a fool as to walk blithely into traps because of a limited understanding of one’s mortality. Although if such creatures do exist, better that they make short work of themselves at a young age so they do not live to create more of their kind. But the truth is that the fear of death can get you killed.”
“How?” What she was saying made no sense to me. “And would you please slow down your infernal gallop?”
She slowed just a little, but not much. “Fear of Death can cause deadly hesitations, terminal doubts,” she said. “The scream of a great beast, and the threat of death that accompanies it, is designed to freeze prey in its place for the second or two the predator needs to reach its target. Or look at yourself. What possible good could come from being so afraid of death that you stand trembling in a desert? Fearing death can overwhelm your common sense, can make it impossible for your fundamental survival instinct to function at all. And what good have you done yourself then, eh? For that matter, what is so terrifying about death?”
“Are you about to romanticize it?” I asked sarcastically. “The pain of that final moment of—”
“Pain?” and she whirled to face me, and there was anger in her eyes that bespoke something truly frightening. “Dying is not painful, Apropos. Living is where the pain is. The moments leading up to death, they can be as excruciating as our fellow creatures can devise. Every moment of life is replete with pain, and yet you would cling with all the force and energy and desperation that you can muster to the agonizing privilege we call life. But death, which is the cessation of pain and suffering … death, which is the merest blowing out of a candle … that you would fear down to your very soul. It’s a lousy way to live, Apropos. A lousy way to live.”
I had been taken aback by the vehemence of her response, but then I pulled myself together and said simply, “It’s gotten me this far.”
“No. I’ve gotten you this far,” and she pointed behind me. “Look.”
I turned and gasped. I couldn’t believe the amount of distance that we had covered. The shifting sands were well on their way to covering our tracks, as I knew they invariably would. Even so, I could easily discern that we had come quite a ways. Not that we were all that much closer to anything of use … but at least we were farther away from where we had been.
“Not bad, eh?” Sharee asked with a smirk. “And there were you, shaking with such dismay that you couldn’t move from the spot. If it weren’t for me, you’d still be trembling and yammering about Death’s Domain. For gods’sake, Apropos,” and she smacked me on the upper arm. It hurt. “You’re a knight,” she continued. “You may have come by the title in the oddest way that any knight ever did, but a knight you are. Down deep within you, you must have some strength of character. Stand up! Be tall! Be proud!”
We stood there, we two, as the sands migrated around us. She with that challenging look on her face, and me feeling weary and nervous despite all her high-sounding words. “Once,” I said finally, “back in the days I resided near the Elderwoods … a great storm came through. A great, powerful wind. Tacit and I were out in the forest at the time, seeking passing merchants to prey upon. You remember Tacit. Master of woodcraft. Eyes like a hawk, ears like a rabbit, attuned to nature. Tacit sensed the storm on its way moments before it arrived. We took refuge in a cave, and I remember watching from just within the cave’s mouth. I couldn’t have been more than ten at the time, but it was the most frightening sight of my young life. The sheer ferocity of the wind was … well, it was awe-inspiring. And in the course of it, I saw weeds bending in the wind, whipping about, but staying rooted in their spots. Meantime the wind, howling, screaming like a thousand angry souls, hammered against mighty, powerful oaks. Some of the trees held up for as long as they could, and then snapped over, crashing to the ground with a noise that I can still hear.
“When the storm passed, I walked about the woods and marveled at the fallen oaks. That such majestic things could be toppled by … by air. By nothing. It was mind-boggling. And as for the weeds … they were still there. Every one. And they were already standing back up as if nothing had happened. Because they knew which way the winds blew, Sharee, and they bent with the prevailing breeze. They lived, while the oaks died. There’s something to be learned from that.”
“You would truly rather be a weed than an oak?” I had never heard her sound quite so pitying.
“I wouldn’t rather be one, but it certainly presents a lesson on living.”
“If you learn anything in your life, Apropos,” she replied, “it’s that there’s a world of difference between living and not dying. That’s all you’re doing at the moment: Not dying. But only when you discard your fear of dying can you truly call yourself one of the living.”
I shook my head. “You simply do not understand.”
“Yes. Yes, I do. The problem is that you don’t.”
I sighed. “I knew you would say that.”
We continued to walk until close to noon, when the intensity of the sun simply became too much for us. Traveling in the desert during the day is never the best of ideas, but we had done so in order to try and put as much distance between ourselves and the possibly pursuing Beliquose as possible.
I still had the gem on me. I was surprised that Sharee had not tried to take it off me, and could only conclude that she was simply waiting for a moment when rescue or salvation was in sight. In that way we wouldn’t have an ongoing grab-back-and-forth of the jewel, which might be diverting but was a waste of time and energy.
Upon ceasing our forward trek, we pitched camp as best we could considering we were in the middle of nowhere in inhospitable terrain. Despite Sharee’s efforts, my terror for our surroundings—or lack of surroundings, as t
he case may be—was still as palpable as before. I dealt with it by keeping the hood of my cloak pulled low over my eyes, and my gaze raptly upon the ground. The expanse was still solidly there in my imagination, but at least that wasn’t enough to prevent me from moving forward.
Obviously our greatest concern was the rationing of water. We had food as well, but we could afford to be minimal in its distribution, for the human body can survive far longer on no food than no water. I took but a mouthful of water from one of the skins, swirled it in my mouth and then swallowed it. Sharee did likewise.
I looked far into the distance ahead of us, in a direction that appeared to be southeast. The mountain range looked no closer to us than it had before. The air was shimmering in the heat; I’d never seen the like. Suddenly struck by a thought, I asked, “Those mountains … are they the ones the gem came from?”
“Maybe.”
Gods, the woman could be absolutely infuriating at times. Well, at all times, really. I was tempted to curse her out in frustration at her manner, but I withheld my invective. First, it was too damned hot to become so worked up, and second, it was never a wise move to hurl invective at someone who was a magic user. Which immediately prompted a thought that I voiced as we lay there, huddled beneath our cloaks to keep the pounding heat from searing us. “Do you feel as if your magiks are reaching their potency again?” I asked. “Because we could really use a rainstorm about now.”
But she shook her head and there even seemed to be a hint of despair. Nothing. She had nothing.
I nodded and looked off to the mountains once more. ” ‘Maybe,’ ” I echoed her nonanswer about the mountains, with a tone of undisguised disgust. “What is it about you weavers that you so treasure and covet secrets?”
“We don’t covet them,” she retorted. “We hoard them. Your type covets them. And believe me, if your kind knew what our secrets were … you wouldn’t want them.”
For a long time, then, we simply sat there, conserving our energy, eating minimally and waiting for the sun to set. The entire time I kept worrying about Beliquose and his people catching up with us. I told myself that they had to rest as well, and would be no more inclined to traverse the Tragic Waste under the pounding sun than we were. I even tried to convince myself that Beliquose might have turned back, given us up for lost, assuming that the fierce seas would have put an end to us. But I kept having the feeling that I was just kidding myself. That any moment we would catch sight of him upon the plains behind us, bearing down upon us at high speed, and us with nowhere to hide, nowhere to hide …
It was not a mindset conducive to relaxation.
I dozed off every now and again. Restful it most certainly was not. Every time I would approach any sort of deep sleep, I would find myself back in Ba’da’boom with the shadows coming for me, or traversing the Finger with the oceans crashing around me, or Bicce leaping upon me while my tavern burned around my ears.
I woke up, startled and sweating, to realize that the sun had nearly gone down. I glanced a short distance away to see Sharee, curled up and snoring softly. I felt a surge of envy and anger. How could she possibly be sleeping so soundly?
Gods, the fire, the shadows, the flight across the Finger … how brief a period had that all occurred within? Days, weeks ago, I was happy and comfortable, and in no time at all my entire life had unraveled … all because of that woman, lying there sleeping with such serenity that one would have thought her an utter innocent. Instead of slumbering comfortably in my bed back at Bugger Hall, I was flat on my back in a damned desert, trying not to let my newly discovered fear of wide-open spaces paralyze me into uselessness.
That was when I realized she was watching me through slitted eyes. “You’re awake,” she said rather unnecessarily, and her voice was hoarse and fractured from thirst. Without a word I handed her one of the water skins. She shook her head. “I can wait.”
“No, you can’t,” and my voice didn’t sound much better than hers. “You’ll be no good to me if you collapse.”
“Your sympathy is gratifying,” she said with no humor in her voice, but she took the skin anyway and drank down the slightest of draughts.
We stared at each other for a moment, and then I asked something that had been preying upon my mind. “Why didn’t you leave me?”
She tilted her head slightly. “Leave you? What do you mean?”
“When I was …” I searched for a judicious word. “Disoriented,” I finally said. I kept my focus upon her, trying to limit my awareness of the vast expanse that surrounded us, lest I dissolve into paroxysms of anxiety again.
“You mean when you were lying there and no good to me?”
I winced at the word choice since it was obviously my own from moments before. She seemed rather pleased with herself, that she had thrown that back at me. But I wasn’t about to back down at that point. “Yes. That’s right,” I said with as much candor as I could muster. “I was no good to you, no good to myself. Why didn’t you just walk away, leave me behind? You’ve no love for me, certainly. Indeed, you hate me for what happened with the ring. I should think that you could have just taken the opportunity to go on your way … or even slip a dagger between my ribs in revenge.”
“Weavers don’t have all that much interest in revenge, as a rule,” she said.
“Not much interest? You try to blow me out of existence with a lightning bolt.”
“Well … I never thought much of that rule,” Sharee admitted.
That actually seemed to be slightly akin to a joke, but she wasn’t smiling. “We deal in forces of nature,” she continued. “Nature has a tendency to notice things and react accordingly. Foul actions beget foul consequences, Apropos. Your punishment will come.”
“What, this isn’t it?” I asked, indicating the desolation around me. “My tavern gone, I’m back to having nothing in the world, on the run from ruthless barbaric lunatics. That’s not enough punishment for what happened?”
“That’s up to nature to decide.”
“Weaver’s riddles,” I snorted in disgust, taking a small drink of water for myself. My lips were parched and cracked; they barely seemed to notice the moisture upon them, as if they’d lost the capacity to absorb it. “You didn’t answer my question. Why burden yourself with me?”
“Because,” she said brightly, “I’m the hero of this story. You’re my sidekick. Or have you forgotten?”
“Ohhhh no,” I told her.
“Oh, yes. A sidekick is always required in such endeavors, in order to make the hero look as heroic as possible. To provide a contrast. You’re a contrast to my heroism.”
“And you are a contrast to sanity. I am no one’s’ sidekick, and I will be the central figure in my own heroics … such as they are,” I finished with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
She shrugged. “Would you have left me behind?”
“In a heartbeat.”
“You lie, Sir Knight.”
“Don’t call me that. And I never lie.”
That caused her to burst out laughing. Despite the constraints of her parched throat, nevertheless it was as musical as the other time I’d heard her make that noise. It was also somewhat more annoying. “I never do,” I repeated defensively.
“You?”
“Yes.”
“Never lie.”
“That’s right.”
“Apropos,” and she shook her head, “how can you say that with a straight face?”
“I never lie,” I said again, and then added quietly, “I just have a different definition of truth, that’s all.”
“That definition being,” she said, “whatever enables you to survive from moment to moment.”
“I am not going to dignify that comment with a response,” I said archly, and with that I planted my staff firmly and got myself to standing. I hopped slightly before I achieved my balance, as I usually do whenever I first arise. I had become painfully aware in my life that the act of walking is really just a form of controlled fallin
g. You push off with one foot, start to topple, and your opposite foot prevents the fall while balancing you for the next step. Since my right leg was not up to the challenge of hindering a fall, it was left to my staff to make up the difference, and it sometimes took me a few moments to position myself.
Sharee, still on the ground, watched me. Then she said, “Back on the Finger, when the seas almost claimed me, you hauled me out. You didn’t leave me when you could have. Why not?”
“Because you got me into this,” I told her. “And if I’m going to suffer, I was going to make damned sure that you were there right beside me sharing in every moment of joy. That’s why.”
She didn’t look like she believed me. I didn’t especially care. Instead I looked ahead to the mountains, so far off into the distance. “Are we actually walking toward anything, or just away from something else?”
“There are cities,” she said, “beyond that mountain range.” There was something in her voice approaching genuine excitement. “You wouldn’t believe it, Apropos. Cities like none that you have ever seen. Cities dedicated to art, to the sciences. Cities filled with wonders such as you cannot possibly conceive. People of peace, people of learning. And there are cities filled with bazaars as well, crammed with peddlers hawking wares of such exotic nature that it staggers the imagination. Delicacies as you have never known. Tell me, Apropos … have you ever heard of … chocolate?”
I rolled the word about in my mouth. “Chaw-ko-lit?” She nodded. “No. Should I have?”
“It’s a sweet. Small, brown, and round …”
“Sounds like shit.”
She shook her head vehemently. She seemed like the little girl I could only imagine that she once must have been, back before she grew up to become my own personal tormentor. “No. It’s amazing. I have no idea where they get it from, but you will see … you will see …”
“See with what? Obtain it with what?” I patted myself down. “We do not exactly have money in abundance. Some coins, yes, but we’ve no reason to assume that such currency would be accepted where we were going.” My voice hardened. “Tell me this time, and save your talk of secrets: Will we acquire riches in passing through the mountains? Is that where the true cache of gems came from? You lampoon me for what you call lack of veracity, but are less than forthcoming yourself. Well?”