A time of ashes, p.24
A Time of Ashes, page 24
part #1 of Fate and the Wheel Series
To find his bearings, he had jammed an upright from the ship’s balustrade in the sand and marked the tip of its shadow. Since the first mark, the shadow had rotated about thirty degrees. If – and it was a big if – days here were similar in length to those in his own world, that meant roughly two hours.
The current shadow was much longer than the earlier one. Good: it was afternoon. The sun was rotating anticlockwise, meaning he was most likely south of the equator, although from the angle it was arcing overhead he was either inside or very near to the tropics.
All of which meant that sundown was not all that far away.
A line drawn through the first mark and the shadow’s current tip told him the direction of east-to-west. He began gathering pieces of burnable timber, lashing them in bundles to the base of his sharkskin backpack. Using a tooth which was less dulled than the first, he cut fillets of meat from the wounds he had made in the shark, filling the rucksack with them. On impulse, he added four more shark’s teeth to use as spare knives and, potentially, spear points. He had to chase scavenging birds away from smaller fish he had his eye on, which he threaded by their tails on to a bandolier of rope to be slung over a shoulder or tied to his belt.
As their numbers increased, the scavengers were growing bolder, making foul-tempered lunges at each other until their screeching began to wear at him. Having dismantled his sunshade, he was lashing its supports to his dispiritingly heavy backpack when something blotted out the sun.
He looked up with a start. A shape with giant, translucent wings dropped out of the sky. With a sound like flogging sails, it draped itself over the remains of the shark.
The creature raised its glinting head at him and hissed, its snout parting to display needle-teeth bigger than Murrin’s fingers. It resembled a gigantic bat, yet instead of hair, its compact body was sheathed in lustrous grey-brown scales, which intensified to fire-yellow over its head and chest. A powerful smell like a fowl-cage wafted over him.
Definitely time to go.
Heaving his backpack awkwardly on to his shoulders, Murrin grabbed a corner of the sunshade and backed carefully towards his sun-compass, eyes fixed on the now loudly screeching bat-reptile.
Now for the urgent question: which way?
In his own world, climatic bands ran very roughly east to west. Which meant that, ignoring the unpredictable influences of surface topology, and assuming this world was not entirely waterless and barren, the desert should be narrowest north to south.
Unfortunately, while he could, given time, calculate both latitude and longitude using his stick, there was no way to judge which of the desert’s surmised edges was likely to be closer. He could be half a day’s stroll from streams and forests and never know he was marching off in the opposite direction.
Well, such was life. The roll of a dice.
He scored a line in the sand, perpendicular to his east-west line, and sighted along it to a pointed dune in the distance. With the dune’s shape fixed in his head, he marched south through a battlefield of putrefying sea-life and the screeching things fighting over it, pulling the already stinking sharkskin about his head and shoulders.
As he left the unlikely carnage and headed out into the desert, he found his hand at his neck, holding Nirite’s pendant.
DISTANCES IN THIS PLACE were deceptive.
He had estimated an hour or two to reach his chosen dune, but after what felt like three he was still trudging along the same heat-shimmering sandy plain, his target seeming little bigger. Only when the alien sun was sinking, enormous and red in the west, did he reach the foot of the first escarpment of sand.
From its crest, he watched the sun drop behind the saw-tooth edge he knew, from his own world’s academic texts, was likely to be an encircling range of impenetrable mountains. They had hidden throughout the day behind heat-haze and dust. Moments after the sun’s final segment had winked into nothingness, the air began to clear. He could feel heat bleeding from it, the sweat which soaked his clothes growing clammy. A fitful wind was rising.
Worried that night-time cold might prove as big a problem as daytime heat, Murrin sat in the sand and began phase two of his survival preparations.
He scraped at the back of the sharkskin sheet, tossing the gristly flesh he pared from it into the night. He would have kept it to eat, but its ammoniacal smell was enough to make his head spin. A gibbous moon rose in the east as he worked. It was larger even than the sun, and a cool blueish-purple. A fraction of a degree above hump-backed dunes in the south, just discernible against the star-peppered sky, the mountains were an irregular edge. Left of a distinctive notch in that edge was a prominent peak, like the tip of a silhouetted thumb.
He would head for that peak, he decided. At least until a better marker or destination presented itself. He had no real idea whether his course was likely take him out of trouble or further in – but, well, he had nothing else to aim for, and this was likely to be his most reliable nocturnal landmark for a while.
The taste in his mouth was foul. His tongue felt like gummy leather. While he didn’t exactly feel ill yet, he doubted he could survive more than another day of such heat without drinking. With the sharkskin prepared, he dug a depression in the sand, lining a small well in the bottom with a piece of unscraped skin. Then he folded the sun shelter into a shallow inverted cone, suspended it from stakes driven into the sand around the pit, and cut a slit at its base, directly above the well.
The incipient wind he’d worried about had died. He’d been so absorbed in his task that he hadn’t noticed. There was barely a breath of movement.
Maybe he wouldn’t die of thirst tomorrow.
He felt deathly tired now, but forced himself to prepare a fire, a good distance from the pit. Using a shark’s tooth, he scraped sun-dried fibres from a piece of balustrade for kindling. Then he shaped a larger sliver into a roughly cylindrical stick which he ran vigorously back and forth in a notch in a larger piece of wood until the notch began emitting aromatic smoke.
It wasn’t easy. The motion required was exhausting, and his choice of wood far from ideal, but finally the kindling he placed around the notch flickered into flame. Blowing on it, he carefully transferred the kindling to the core of his tiny pile of wooden fragments, and watched, satisfied, as the blaze took hold.
Never thought I’d have to do this in earnest, he reflected, jamming spikes of wood into the sand to hold the fillets of shark he had skewered on them over the fire. He lay on his back as the fish cooked, as limp and boneless as the marine creatures whose fates he had so recently witnessed.
Used sparingly, he had firewood for perhaps another five nights. Besides cooking, what he’d experienced so far inclined him to be very wary of visiting animals. It was too small to put out much heat. He was probably receiving more warmth radiated from the ground than he was from the fire. Hugging himself, he realised he should have made more clothes out of the shark. Damn.
Then again, what he could carry was limited.
As he prepared to gut and slow-cook the fish, it occurred to him that it might have been prudent not to light the fire on a ridge, where it was probably visible for days’ travel on all sides. He also wondered whether he should have made his makeshift dew-trap in a hollow, where cool air was likely to collect.
Then again, ultimately his only way out of this bizarre situation was for someone to find him, or him to find them. The risk of that someone proving hostile was just one more he would have to add to the list.
IN CONTRAST TO EXPECTATIONS, the char-grilled shark proved succulent and delicious. He had decided to boost himself with a proper feed, and collapsed against the dune with a sated sigh. He was steadily evolving a plan.
Unfortunately, that plan was becoming no more attractive as the depth of his predicament grew clearer.
He was unlikely to find food here, or be able to kill it if he did. With what he had, he was reasonably confident that he could keep himself mobile, if not exactly healthy, for around twenty days. If this world was populated, that gave him at least a chance of running into someone.
Whether he survived that long would depend on how much dew he could collect. Also on what beasts roamed these endless sands. But even assuming he made it to relative safety, what then? No language he knew was likely to be spoken here, and Fat Chance’s sole encounter with an unfamiliar society had been hostile from the start.
Then again, perhaps there was some equivalent in this world to the centres of learning of his own. It was a trait of sentience, surely, the desire to learn? There had to be scholars, of some kind. No matter what the sociological or linguistic barriers, such people could be communicated with. Reasoned with. If he could learn one of the languages in use here, then he could find the scholars. Find them and warn them about the murder of the gods, the spread of the Corruption, and the dangers ahead.
But then what?
Murrin’s head was beginning to hurt. He had, he realised, fallen into the trap of thinking too far ahead, daunting himself in the process.
First things first. A survival strategy.
Travel during the day made little sense. Exerting himself in that heat would suck water out of him faster than he could hope to replenish it. The nights, however, seemed clear enough for navigation by the mountains and the moon. He could sleep through the day beneath his sharkskin, or perhaps bury himself in the sand to stay cool, travelling at night, when he would expend energy anyway, trying to keep warm …
Except that night was the only time when he could gather dew.
Murrin hurled a handful of sand at the fire. It seemed an insoluble dilemma. Unless his pit generated unlikely quantities of water, his choice lay between waiting in one place to die when his food ran out, or dying earlier and equally uselessly by trying to travel without water.
He studied the sky. The stars were, again, unfamiliar. On his own world, they had been scattered across the sky. Here, they appeared as a band, narrower even than on some of the worlds Fat Chance had passed through. The motion of the Wheel was different, too. It was just edging above the horizon. At home, it should have been setting.
A vast, wishbone-shaped flock of creatures which flew like – but were not – birds passed overhead, heading for the Wheel’s visible limb. Their shrill cries chilled him. But perhaps, he thought, they were a good sign. Water lay somewhere in the direction he was heading. Possibly not far away.
Perhaps a compromise could be made?
He would wait here tonight, he decided, and sleep. Then, if he had sufficient water in the morning, he would journey on during the day and for half of the following night, relying on the coldest pre-dawn hours to provide his water. If this system worked, he would travel only during the relatively cool hours after sunrise and before sunset, and during the first half of the night.
Despite the air’s growing chill he fell asleep beside the fire, his hand reaching for where Tik’s pocket would once have been.
CHAPTER 20
____________
An Ocean without Water
DESERT, ON ALL SIDES.
To all intents and purposes, it was endless.
Murrin sank to his haunches atop the dune, pulling his multi-purpose sharkskin over himself as he collapsed backwards in the sand. For a while he just lay there, an arm across his eyes, listening to his pulse hammering out of control and his breath fluttering like a dying thing in his throat.
Gradually, the breathing slowed. He ran a desiccated tongue over cracked lips, knowing he could not yet afford a drink.
Three days.
Part of him was satisfied to have kept going so long. Another quailed and whined at his predicament, wanting the green bays, plentiful seas and comfortable libraries of his home so acutely it almost made him weep. It felt wrong, this huge, lifeless land. It instilled in him a kind of panic.
The dew pit had been a semi-success. The first night’s air had precipitated perhaps two tankards-worth of sweet, fresh liquid on to the sharkskin sheet, funnelled first in beads and, by morning, rivulets into the pit he had dug. Yet even this had not been enough. And it had since proved as he had feared: the less time the trap was set up, the less water he got.
The first whole day had almost finished him. He had toiled through the dunes, flies pestering his wounds, panting and running with sweat despite his parasol. He had given up towards late afternoon, lying in a fever with his head shaded by the sharkskin, too weak to erect a proper shelter, and finding the sand much too hot to gain any relief by burying himself in it.
He had rallied after sundown, but too little to make more than a snail’s progress. He slept around midnight, having long since drunk every drop of water in his sharkskin pouch, already thirstier than he could have imagined.
Since then, despite his attempts to adapt to the environment into which he had been so unwillingly thrust, he had grown only thirstier. He hallucinated sinister, formless presences on the horizon, or the desert as a boiling turquoise ocean. For a while he had watched as Mad, Screaming Runtile of the Twitching Eyes cavorted before him, screaming and twitching for all he was worth, describing little backwards dance-steps in the sand in pace with Murrin’s dragging feet.
‘You see?’ he howled, capering and prancing. ‘You old buffoon. This is precisely what happens when one looks for Things One Wasn’t Meant to Find. Don’t you realise yet? I am you!’
Murrin’s bladder hurt. He had not urinated for more than a day. And the landscape had offered no clue as to where he should be aiming. No rise in the underlying plain to hint at any line of hidden springs. No valley, canyon, or even a depression which might hide pools, a river, or underground water where a well might be dug. Not even hardy bushes which might be cut for their sap. Every direction looked the same. His sole landmark was the notch, visible at night, guessed at during the day, leading him on like another hallucination.
He put up the shelter, knowing now to do so before the sun got too hot and he became too weak.
This was the hardest part, he thought. The waiting. Lying sleeplessly in the sharkskin’s stifling shade, wasting time, moisture and energy doing nothing which brought him closer to getting out of here.
AT SOME POINT, he heard a sound. A faintly abrasive hiss, like sliding sand.
Careful to move only his eyes, he saw that approaching him rapidly across the dune was a snake.
It was a handsome beast: a light shade of gold, with projections like scaly horns above unblinking bronze eyes. It was a fraction longer, he reckoned, than he was. And it was headed directly towards him, zigzagging efficiently sideways in a kind of standing wave, leaving a track of staggered parallel grooves.
Remarkable, he thought. The snake had clearly evolved this method of locomotion to minimise contact with the hot sand.
It side-slithered into Murrin’s pool of shade, and crawled brazenly over his stomach. Murrin did his best not to react. The snake was likely to be lethally venomous. Evolving where water and food were so scarce, no snake worth its salt would want to chase after wounded prey. Watching from a corner of his eye, he waited until its head was an arm’s length from him, clenched his fist …
… and brought his arm-guard down with all his strength, just behind the creature’s head.
The tail lashed his face, then coiled itself around his arm. Ignoring this, he rolled sideways, grabbing the snake’s trapped neck with his free hand. The creature twisted with surprising strength, fangs like hypodermic needles already hinging out of its gaping mouth. He could clearly see the venom dripping down their backs.
With a quick, regretful movement, he broke its neck.
As its subsequent squirming subsided, he sawed off the snake’s head with a shark tooth, lay back in the sand, and drained every available drop of blood into his mouth. The taste was metallic, but refreshing. Could I make arrows tipped with the poison? he wondered.
Minor problem: no bow.
What about a spear?
He took a mental inventory of his remaining pieces of Fat Chance. There was nothing long or straight enough. He put a forearm over eyes which were throbbing in the glare, even beneath his sunshade.
So much for thinking ahead, idiot.
Well, he told himself, he could not expect to have thought of everything. Without the parasol, his brain would have cooked by now. And the snake was a stroke of luck he felt was not undue. The blood perked him up sufficiently to sit in gloomy thought as he pulled the skin off the hapless snake like a long, wet sock.
He didn’t know how much longer he could keep this up. Every muscle ached. The sharkskin was proving unexpectedly durable, but the same could not be said of his feet. Two days ago, in desperation, he had cut holes in his crude boots for ventilation. Now his skin was mixing with sweat, blood, shark juices and sand to produce a hellish abrasive paste. Perversely, he had also developed painful cracks in his heels because of the dryness and heat.
He unbound a stinking foot and examined it in disgust. He’d seen healthier on untreated lepers.
He left his feet to air off and waited for evening, cooking a section of fresh snake over the smallest fire he could manage.
Then he slept.
HE HAD LEARNED to position himself beneath the sunshade so that evening sunlight shone on his face, waking him. Blinking and squinting, he struggled to his feet, finding that he had to tighten his belt a notch to keep his trews up.
He did not feel quite so bad now. While the fish and shark flesh had cured well in the desiccated air, cooked, fresh meat seemed to have supplied energy which they could not. He set out for the horizon with the sun sinking on his right.
He had not noticed before, but the dunes were growing. They had seemed uniform because their separation was also increasing. Wondering if this explained his persistent underestimation of distance, he tried putting an encouraging geographical gloss on the discovery, but had no way of knowing if it was a good sign.
