Sea & Sky

Chapter 1-2

Ugh. The smell of the rank cheese spread through the stuffy space.

“Maybe we should go outside.”

“No! The men will come back!”

“Which men?”

“The big ones with the red faces.” Her eyes were wide. “They burned everything. I ran away from them. Please, please don’t make me go outside.” She shrank away from him.

“All right, all right, calm down.”

“Have they been back since they . . .” He gestured helplessly in the direction of Arukat’s house. He should probably have asked a whole raft of other questions first, but he’d been too preoccupied with his own needs. But what had happened to her parents?

“They come into town and steal people’s things. If people try to defend themselves, they’re killed.”

“They come every day?” It unsettled him to hear a young girl like that talk about death.

“Most days. Usually in the morning or at night. I hide in here.”

My, she was dirty. Had she lived in here with the goats since he left?

Javes found a mug that was relatively clean, and poured milk. “Any bread left?”

She shook her head. “The goats ate it.”

Not the only thing the goats had eaten, by the look of things.

Javes drank. The milk was on the verge of going off and he had to hold his breath in order to get it down. Ugh, ugh, ugh. He had some leftover salt meat in his packs, but he’d get it later. Tomorrow, when he could see enough to find it without having to carry a light into the yard.

He pulled the blankets off the bed, sending goat poo bouncing over the floor. The mattress was reasonably clean, he thought. He sat down.

“What’s your name again?” Pashtan had introduced her when he first came, but he’d forgotten.

“Tali.” She sat with her arms clamped around her pulled-up knees.

“Well then, Tali. Tell me exactly what happened, when it started and where everyone went.”

She told him that one morning when she was milking the goats, there was a lot of noise in the town, and when she went to have a look, a lot of men in black leather were running through the streets. They had horses and carts. They stopped in front of her house and went into her father’s junkyard. “I couldn’t see them, but I heard them yelling at my father and smashing everything up. They asked him where something was, and he said he didn’t know what they were talking about, and each time he said he didn’t know, they smashed more things to bits. They said my father wasn’t allowed to sell to anyone else.”

“Do you know what they were talking about?”

She shrugged, and gave him a shifty look.

“Did your father tell you not to talk about it? He was selling windwalker artefacts, wasn’t he?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. I don’t know what those weird things are. They scare me. My father should never have started buying from the windwalkers.”

“Do you know who he was selling to?”

“People from out of town. I don’t know. He always tells me to go inside when they come to the yard.”

“So, these men, what did they do?”

“They smashed the house, and then they set fire to it. They put my parents in a cart and rode out of town. No one knows where they are.”

“Did you see the men?”

She nodded, her eyes wide. “They were very big. They wore black and a couple of them had shaved heads and had red paint in their faces.”

“Did they write the letters on the fence?”

“They did. I don’t know why they did that. No one can read it.”

Knowing Aranians, and especially the high-class ones who bore the red tattoos on their faces, Javes figured that the words were probably some obscene insult, like the turd in the shed. What he couldn’t figure was what they were doing here and why they had singled out Arukat’s shed. He shouldn’t have sold to someone else? Did Arukat sell to Aranians? He’d never seen Aranians in town. The border—if one could speak of borders in this desert—was a least a full day’s ride away.

“Did they go to other people’s houses?”

“Oh, yes. They smashed the telegraph office, pulled down the wires. They wrote all over the town hall and inside the bathhouse. They stole all the grocery shop’s food.”

“Are there any guards in town?”

She gave him a blank look.

In Tiverius, the town guards were employed by the doga’s local arm. He had definitely never seen any guards since coming to town, and Ysherra had no doga office, so he guessed that answered the question. “What were the men doing in the rest of town?”

She didn’t know. In fact, the detached way in which she told her story disturbed him. He would have expected a girl whose parents were taken away to cry or be upset, but she seemed numb more than anything.

“So while this was happening, you hid here all the time?”

She nodded. “Yes, with the goats. You should have seen what they did to my father’s donkeys. The goats saw that, too, and they wanted to come inside.”

Javes shuddered, seeing ribs and chunks of meat in the desert. “Where did the men go?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t understand what they were saying to each other.”

“How many of them were there?”

She shrugged. “Many. Maybe a hundred, maybe more.”

“And they have been back since?”

“A few times.”

It worried him. Aranians in town. What for?

Well, the goats would have to stay outside for the time being, but Javes did worry about his camel. It was a silly and sometimes stroppy beast, but he liked it and would hate for something to happen to it. Unfortunately, camels didn’t fit inside the house.

Javes attempted to clean the smell of goat from the bed. He turned over the mattress, only to find that the fabric on other side was badly worn. He put a blanket over the top, but the straw still stuck through the rips in the cover. The fact that he used the blanket meant he had no blanket to sleep underneath. There were additional blankets for winter, but he needed light to find them in the cupboard, and the goats had probably eaten them. He also had a blanket in his packs, but again he couldn’t be bothered to rummage around in the dark.

Tali insisted on sleeping on the floor. There was the couch which had served him as a bed, but no matter what he said, she wouldn’t go anywhere near it. On closer inspection, there were wet patches on the cushions, and they smelled funny—probably goat’s piss.

Javes was too tired to worry about it. He slept.

Javes woke up when it was still mostly dark. He stared into the darkness until he remembered where he was: Pashtan’s house, the devastation of Arukat’s house, and Tali, who lay sleeping on the floor.

His stomach rumbled and gurgled. He’d hardly eaten anything last night. The sky through the little window next to the door showed a faint blue tinge. The back of the house looked out to the west and so if the sky was blue there, the sun must be about to come up.

He rose, walked around Tali and stumbled through the dark to where he had left his packs near the door. He was rummaging through his bags for some raisins or anything to eat when there was a sound from outside. Footsteps?

Heart thudding, he froze and listened.

Some shuffling and thumping sounded very much like a camel. He fumbled around for some sort of weapon, found the broken broom and went outside. No one was getting his hands on his camel or his goats.

He opened the door, looking into the yard in the pale predawn light.

The camel stood in the pen, curiously looking past the side of the house in the direction of the street. The goats were all asleep in the shade of the broken shed.

Javes patted the camel’s neck and walked along the side of the house as quietly as he could.

An unfamiliar cart with two horses stood in front of Arukat’s house. People in town didn’t use horses. The cart was a flatbed vehicle with a simple wooden bench for the driver. The back was filled with various metal junk.

The sound of soft voices came from the back yard, and the clinking of metal.

Javes went back into the back yard of Pashtan’s house and peeped through a hole in the fence into Arukat’s yard. He could see two men, but there might be others, who were collecting bits of metal in a heap. A third man came into view.

These were not Aranians, but peddlers who came to scavenge. He dragged a bucket to the fence, turned it upside down and climbed on top of it so that he could see over the fence.

“Oy!”

The men looked up. One had a face with deep canyons, dry and engrained with dust like the desert , hidden under a cloak with a cowl. The other two were larger, younger, possibly his sons.

“What are you doing here?”

“Getting the stuff,” the old man said. “It’s not that he’d be needing it.”

His mouth was missing several teeth.

“His daughter lives with me. You’re stealing from her.”

“Well I’ve never seen no one here.”

“That’s because she’s afraid and hiding.”

The two younger men gave their father uncertain looks. One had been carrying an armful of metal junk that he put down.

The old man nodded. They collected their empty baskets and made their way back to the cart. Javes followed them on his side of the fence and met them in the street.

“Nice horses.”

“Don’t worry about us. We’re going already.” He jerked his head at his sons.

“I was just wondering if you knew any more about the Aranians who did this.” He glanced at the burned house.

The old man shrugged. “They’re Aranians. What other explanation do you need?”

“What’re they doing here? Is it common for Aranians to come here?”

“You’re not from here, are you?”

“Neither are you.”

The man gave him a blank look.

“People here don’t use horses. Too hot for them.”

“Aw, all right. We’re from out Watya-way.”

“All the way out there? What are you doing here?”

“You know, looking for stuff.”

“What sort of stuff?”

“Mostly metal. Things that people find.”

“People. Like, windwalkers?”

He cast a shifty glance to the side. “What do you know about those?”

In other words: yes. “Not much, not much, but saw one, once. At the Field of Bones.”

The old man snorted. “Robbers of the dead, that’s what they are.”

“You’re selling this ‘stuff’ to the Aranians, right?”

“Why are you asking if you know it already?”

“What do they do with it? Why do they pay so much money for it?”

“There’s smart people who can make it rain, more than can be said about the loafers in Tiverius, who are still talking about whether or not they’ll build the railway they promised ten years ago. Tell you what, the railway will never happen because we haven’t the people to use it, because it doesn’t rain so no one wants to live out here. Make it rain, and it solves all the problems. The people can grow their crops, they can eat, the towns will fill up and the railway will be built. That’s my view on things anyway.”

“And these Aranians can make it rain?”

“Sure can. They got all kinds of magic.”

A chill crept over Javes’ spine. Magic was what the meteorology department measured as sonorics. It was related to low pressure cells and rain. The dust devils caused sonorics spikes. Were these artificial phenomena?

The man continued, “Anyway, we best be out of here.” He flicked the reins and the horses started moving.

Javes watched them leave, his hand over the pocket where he still kept the globe that Karlen had given him in the graveyard. He couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone was looking for artefacts like this, maybe even this particular one, and that the Aranians were looking for Karlen. Not that Javes knew where Karlen was, or even who he was. Karlen had been wrapped up in cloth like all windwalkers, and Javes had not even seen his eyes.