The Spiral - 1 - The Dune

Part 1 of 6 · All parts

Bodum lay face-up on the dune in a patch of red-capped flowers, halfway up the last great swell, where the lee side sheltered such things from the wind. His heart was going too fast for the little it had to work with, and he could hear his own shallow panting, like a dog. He raised a hand against the noonday sun and blinked hard at the black spots swimming across his vision.

Get up, he thought, but could not.

An inch from his eye, specks of red lay in the sand. He had been seeing them for hours, a fleck here and there in the lee of the dunes with the scrub where the wind had let it lie. So small were they that he had taken them for spots in his vision, then, when he last fell, for blood, his own, until he turned his hands over and found them only cracked and dry. The thick scatter of it looked like something had come this way bleeding and had not stopped to die.

Higher up, the flecks had become flowers: fleshy, cap-headed things, wound-red, their stalks the color of old bone. Burl-flowers, his Dungirii guide had called them, one of the few things she had said since they left his lands. Lying now among them, he understood the specks were their seed. From a distance they looked like the blooms in the valley beneath the King’s Teeth. He had brought Hemma a bundle of them the day before he left. Four days ago. It felt like forty.

The cramp took him then, low in the gut and through the thighs, his body wringing itself for water that was not there. He rolled to his side and brought up a mouthful of gray-white sauma, and watched it soak into the red at the foot of a flower - and could not, for a long moment, remember what either of those things was called.

Sauma, the Dungirii Waysalt in his goatskin, sat warm as spit. It tasted of chalk and ash with a bitterness that lived at the back of the throat long after the swallow. It was the only thing the rite allowed him. It turned and focused the mind, giving Waysight to the ungifted, or so it was said. He took it in sips at the crest of each swell, as instructed. It slaked nothing. It was not meant to.

With each subsequent swallow the flecks in the sand fluoresced, their numbers growing, as if the bitter liquid were drawing them to the surface. His guide had told him to expect this, but he found the effect no less unsettling. He had not eaten in three days, and somewhere in the second night the hunger had stopped being a feeling and became an idea. In its place were the mouthfuls of sauma, heavy as stones in his gut. Three could carry a man through a day. He understood, with the taste of it in his nose, that the smell of it might kill him before the sun did.

Behind him, twenty paces back, his Dungirii guide had stopped. He knew it without looking. That was the distance she kept, and had kept for four days, always behind him, so that he climbed each rise not knowing what lay beyond.

A poor guide, he thought. He had rested more since dawn; every crest now, where yesterday it had been every third. When they stopped, she came no closer, only squatting on her heels facing windward, weighing sand in her hands, and listening to the wind. Symbols and scars ran the length of both her arms, wards carved and inked in Orosi and Dungir against the Drift. He wondered how many times she had crossed these sands in his father’s service, and which of those marks had been for him.

On the first day, he asked why he must go first. She was the Waybinder, after all. His guide. The way was his to find, she had said. He had asked what would happen if he fell. Then you will get up, or you will not. That had been the whole of her answer, and he knew, without turning his head, that she would not come.

He got a hand under himself. The linen strips of the emmun, prayer ribbons, had fused to his forearms. Sweat and dust and the Tower Keeper’s hard knots had welded the name-inked strips into a single sleeve of faded cloth from wrist to elbow. As he pushed against the sand, he felt the linen of each ancestor’s ribbon pull at his skin like stitches. He had stopped counting them. Somewhere on the climb, he realized he had stopped feeling sure of the order - the Litany of Stewards - back to the last king, Kalipyr, which he had known since he was a boy. He was kneeling now and his left palm was bleeding. It had found the edge of something beneath the sand. It was sharp as any blade, likely the first of the glass. He wiped it on the ribbons because there was nothing else, and left a dark smear across a name he could not read.

It took three tries to put his feet beneath him. When he stood, finally, the world still moved very slightly, like the slow, heavy shift of a kneeling camel. Determined, he took a deep breath, and pressed forward, careful to keep his eyes on the sand; so steep was the climb up the great dune. The hide boots he wore were especially unwieldy this high in the slipface of the lee. He forced himself to climb the last ten strides to the crest before he let himself raise his head to look.

The silt that had run for days in great swells gave way here to sandstone; a channel as wide as a river lay carved through it from his feet to the horizon. Too straight to be a riverbed, he wondered at it. Black stone shouldered up through the sand in its course, in hogbacks and rubbled moraines, scattered or stacked aslant, sharp-edged and glassy. It appeared as if great hands had pried loose the slabs from the slag bed beneath and piled them carelessly in heaps. Threads of red burl-flower criss-crossed the floor. And beyond, at the far limit of the heat-shimmer where the pale sky met the channel before him, something rose within it that was not a hill.

“How much farther?” he asked. He did not expect an answer. He had asked the sand as much as her, the way a man speaks to a horse or a dog.

“That is the Threshold, my reeve.”

He turned, startled, the sudden movement nearly sending him back to the ground. Her speech was rough with disuse and age. She did not look at him; her head turned instead, past him, at the thing.

“There we make camp tonight.”

Bodum looked in the direction of her sightless gaze, and the thing at the edge of the world was no longer something that was not a hill. He squinted and could just make it out - shafts of black stone splayed from the mouth of a cave at its center, like a halo crown forged for a dead god. He shuddered. At that distance, it would be midnight before they could make camp.

“Walk,” she said.

He took another mouthful of sauma. His stomach nearly rejected it, but he forced it down a second time. As it went down, the red flecks in the sand turned from rust to blood.

He thought of his wife, and of the flowers.

He had brought them to her the day before he left, a bundle of flowers from the valley, and she had taken them the way she took most gifts, reluctantly. “So it’s true, then. Salt and sand and prayer ribbons, and you come back a Reeve.” She set all but one on the table beneath the window, turning it in her fingers as she spoke. “Your father came back, which not all of them do… and never said a word about it.”

“No Steward does.”

“They weren’t married to me.” She was smiling, but she was watching him the way she did. “A thousand years of men walking into the desert, and not one of them came home with anything to say… or the ones who came home talking, had gone mad. Either there’s nothing out there, Bodum, or there’s something none of them could bear to tell their wives.”

“It’s what’s done. Back to the last king.”

“And there’s a reason he was the last.” She said it the way everyone in Highseat said it, as a thing settled a thousand years ago. “We shield the west from the Drift in the east, and our lands from the kings of the west. A man with a goatskin does it, apparently, once in a lifetime. No king does that. No king would.” She turned a stalk in her fingers. “The Ashriders’ prophet walked into the same Glasslands and came out a god. You walk in and come out a Reeve. I’d like to know what the difference is.”

“What you come back to,” he said and smiled.

“By deeds,” she said. “Not gods,” he said reflexively. “I know.”

She touched the flowers. “These will be dead before you’re back.”

“Then I’ll bring more.”

That was the whole of her: she believed nothing the Keeper said and everything her husband was, and she had let him go.

He exhaled a long breath and began the long descent into the valley.