The Burning Shore - Smith Wilbur - Страница 85

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At nightfall they rose out of their beds and shook themselves, throwing off the sand. They drank in a transport that was almost religious, but again Centaine could not force herself to eat, and then O'wa led them off.

Now there was no novelty or fascination for Centaine in the night's trek, and the heavenly bodies were no longer marvels to gaze upon with awe but merely instruments to mark the long tortuous passage of the hours.

The earth beneath got its character from loose sand that gave under each step and ragged at her feet, to hard, compacted mica flats where the flowerlike crystals called desert roses had edges to them like knives; they cut through her canvas sandals, and she had to pause to rebind them. Then they left the flats and crossed the low spine of a sub-dune, and from its crest saw another vast valley yawn before them.

O'wa never wavered or showed the least hesitation.

Although Centaine realised that these mountains of sand would walk before the prevailing winds, endlessly changing shape, trackless and unknowable, yet the little man moved through them the way a master mariner rides upon the shifting currents of the ocean.

The silence of the desert seemed to enter Centaine's head like molten wax, deadening her sense of hearing, filling her eardrums with the sussurations of nothingness as though she held a seashell to her ear.

Will the sand never end? she asked herself. Is this a continent of dunes? In the dawn they halted and prepared their defences to resist the siege of the sun, and in the hottest hour of the day as Centaine lay in her shallow grave-like bed, coated with urine-damp sand, she felt her baby move within her more strongly this time, as though he too were fighting the heat and the thirst.

Patience, my darling, she whispered to him. Save your strength. We must learn the lessons and the ways of this land, so that we will never have to suffer like this again, Never again. That evening, when she rose from the sand, she ate a little of the dried fish for the baby's sake, but as she had feared, the food made her thirst almost insupportable.

However, the strength it gave her bore her up through the night's journey.

She did not waste strength by speaking aloud. All three of them were conserving energy and moisture, no unnecessary words or actions, but Centaine looked up at the sky as it made its grand and ponderous revolution, and she could still see Michael's star standing across the black void of the South Pole from her own.

Please let it end, she prayed silently to his star. Let it end soon, for I don't know how much longer I can go on. But it did not end, and it seemed that the nights grew longer, the sand deeper and more cloying around her feet, while each day seemed fiercer than the last and the heat beat down upon them like a blacksmith's hammerstrokes on the iron of the anvil.

Centaine found that she had lost track of the days and nights, they had blended in her mind into a single endless torment of heat and thirst.

Five days, or six or even seven? she wondered vaguely, and then she counted the empty egg-bottles. It must be six, she decided. Only two full bottles left. Centaine and H'ani each placed one of the full bottles in their pack, sharing the load exactly, then they ate the last shreds of dried fish and stood up to face the night's journey, but this time it did not begin immediately.

O'wa stared for a while into the east, turning his head slightly from side to side as though he were listening, and for the first time Centaine detected a fine shade of uncertainty in the way he held his small head with its crownlike nimbus of arrow shafts. Then O'wa began to sing softly in what Centaine had come to recognize as his ghost-voice.

Spirit of great Lion Star, he looked up to Sirius shining in the constellation of Canis Major, you are the only one who can see us here, for all the other spirits avoid the land of singing sand. We are alone, and the journey is harder than I remember it when I passed here as a young man. The path has become obscure, great Lion Star, but you have the bright eye of a vulture and can see it all.

Lead us, I beg of you. Make the path clear for us.

Then he took the egg-bottle from H'ani's satchel and drew the stopper and spilled a little of the water on to the sand. It formed small round balls, and Centaine made a little moaning sound in her throat and sank on to her knees.

See, spirit of great Lion Star, we share water with you, O'wa sang and replugged the bottle, but Centaine stared at the little wet balls of sand and moaned again.

Peace, Nam Child, H'ani whispered to her. To receive a special boon, it is sometimes necessary to give up what is precious. She took Centaine's wrist and pulled her gently to her feet, and then turned to follow O'wa over the endless dunes.

With the silences deafening her, and weariness a crushing burden to carry, and thirst a raging torment, Centaine struggled on, once again losing all sense of time or distance or direction, seeing nothing but the two dancing figures ahead of her, transformed by the rays of the waning moon into tiny hobgoblins.

They stopped so suddenly that Centaine ran into H'ani and would have fallen had not the old woman steadied her, and then quietly drawn her down until they lay side by side.

What, Centaine began, but H'ani placed a hand over her mouth to quieten her.

O'wa lay beside them, and when Centaine was quiet he pointed over the lip of the dune on which they were lying.

Two hundred feet below at the dune's foot began a level plain, awash with soft silver moonlight. It reached to the very limit of Centaine's night vision, flat, without end, and it gave her hope that at last the dunes were behind them. Upon this plain stood a scattered forest of longdead trees.

Leprous-grey in the moonlight, they lifted the blighted and twisted limbs of arthritic beggars of an uncaring sky.

The weird scene invoked in Centaine a superstitious chill, and when something large but shapeless moved amongst the ancient trees like a monster from mythology, she shivered and wriggled closer to H'ani.

Both the San were trembling with eagerness like hunting dogs on the leash, and H'ani shook Centaine's hand and pointed silently. As Centaine's eyes adjusted, she saw that there were more living shapes than the one she had first spotted, but they were as still as great grey boulders.

She counted five of them altogether.

Lying on his side, O'wa was restringing his little hunting bow, and when he had tested the tension of its string, he selected a pair of arrows from the leather band around his forehead, made a sign to H'ani and then slithered back from the crest of the dune. Once he was off the skyline, he leaped to his feet and slipped away into the shadows and folds of windblown sands.

The two women lay behind the ridge, still and silent as the shadows. Centaine was learning the animal patience that this ancient wilderness demanded of all its creatures. The sky began to bloom with the first promise of day, and now she could see more clearly the creatures on the plain below them.

They were huge antelopes. Four of them lying quietly, while one of them, larger and more thickset in shoulders and neck, stood a little apart. Centaine judged that he was the herd bull, for at his shoulder he stood as tall as Nuage, her beloved stallion, but he carried a magnificent pair of horns, long and straight and vicious, and Centaine was reminded vividly of the tapestry La Dame d la Licorne at the Muse de Cluny, which her father had taken her to see on her twelfth birthday.

The light strengthened and the bull gleamed a lovely soft mulberry-fawn colour. His face was marked with F darker lines in a diamond pattern, that looked as though he were wearing a head halter, but there was that wild dignity about him that immediately dispelled any suggestion of captivity.

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