The people study his artwork but do not interfere.
He draws a shape in the desert between the strewn bones and the city. And in this new language he is learning, he calls it himself.
There's a pain in his leg and he winces, scratching the charcoal stick across the paper, grasping his thigh. There's no blood, no sign of injury, no smudge on the paper.
He swam in darkness again, his captors' drug in his blood, the pain of its gentle injection into his leg fading as this new memory cuts in.
Older now, fit and healthy and a full part of the settlement in the valley, he takes a walk with the woman who found him and who has become his guardian. She has been promising this walk for some time. He has been asking more and more, and as adulthood approaches, his need to see, know, and understand has grown. It is a long walk, past neighboring villages in other valleys, across a wide plain where different-looking people live in stilted buildings, tending walking plants that provide balms and medicines for everyone in this land. He has seen these people before on trading trips, and he stops for a while to converse with them. Their language is as alien to him now as his guardian's was when he first arrived out of the desert. Some of them try, however, and they call him Man from Sand. He is, it seems, something of a legend.
The walk opens his eyes to how vast the Heartlands are. From the top of one hill they can see the next, and the next, rising toward an uncertain horizon, and he understands that this place is much larger than the vague place he came from. Perhaps he could walk another ten days before reaching its far edge, where the desert would enclose it with its fiery landscape. He hopes they do not have to go that far. Man from Sand he may be, but he would happily never set eyes on the desert again.
"Why is everyone so fascinated with me?" he asks his guardian as they continue on their journey.
"Because you came out of the desert, and there is nothing beyond."
"There's the city," he said. "Sometimes I still dream of it."
A troubled look crosses her eyes. Even with age settling in her skin, she is as beautiful now as when she found him.
"Those dreams are nightmares," she says. "And those drawings…"
"No one believes them," he says, because no one ever has. Sometimes even he thinks of them as only a dream-a city built entirely in his mind, a hundred times larger than their largest village, which will fade over time. But sometimes he can almost taste the dampness of its stone, smell the market streets, and see the towering spires rising toward its center, hear the excited chatter of its many inhabitants echoed between buildings and down alleys. He can see the woman who might have been his mother back then, tutoring him in a language that stays with him now; he can accept the vastness of the place, the imposing concentration of buildings that are so close they seem to be constructed on top of one another. He can see the city and himself in it, and there is a sense of loss that he cannot comprehend, even in dreams.
"Only because they cannot be true," she says.
"My skin is paler than anyone's, even in the sun. And that language I can speak-"
"Is not one you should!" she snaps. A thousand times she has told him this, refusing his attempts to explore the language with her. He has been referred to physicians and mythmakers, and all of them have reached the same conclusion: that he was infected by a desert sprite, one of the cruel phantoms that stalk the sands close to the Heartlands, and it has jumbled his mind. Sometimes, in his darkest moments, he even believes this himself. These physicians and mythmakers have done their best to cure him of the affliction, but still the words come to him, and with the words are images, and those images carry the weight of memory.
He's confused, and his guardian says that this journey will help cure his confusion.
They walk for several more days, passing many small settlements and accepting the hospitality of their inhabitants. It's an exploration of food and drink as well, because everything here is affected by landscape. Wines taste different from valley to valley, and fruits and vegetables pick up diverse tangs from the soils. The land is rich and lush, and Rufus's strange memories of the city are sour and tainted in comparison.
At the pinnacle of one hill, he looks to the east and sees a stain on the landscape. It is miles distant-such distances that he is still becoming used to-but even from here its scope is huge. It is many shades of gray, smothering the landscape in that direction, filling valleys, crushing hills. The sky above it is similar in color, as if leached of blue vitality by what lies beneath. He can see the shattered remains of giant towers reaching to the sky with skeletal fingers. Around their feet lie other tumbled ruins, and all his senses seem affected by the sight. He imagines the smell of ash and age, tastes grit on the clear air, and hears mournful whispers of faraway breezes. Around this unknown place, the hillsides are green and the trees proud and tall. Lushness surrounds the ruin.
He is shocked silent for a while. This is not his city, though its scale is staggering, yet it is the first time he has been aware of its existence-no one has mentioned it, and it appears nowhere in the Heartlanders' lives, songs, stories, or history.
"Where is that?" he asks, voice barely rising above the breeze. He imagines the breeze coming in from that ruined place and talking to him, but he does not know its language.
"Somewhere nobody can go," she says.
"You never told me," he says. "It's never been mentioned. All those drawings, my dreams, my visions of the place I came-"
"Because it is nothing like your drawings!" she snaps. "That is…" She waves one hand, eyes averted. "It's a skeleton of old times. There's only disease there, and death."
"Have you ever been?"
"Why would I?" she asks, and there's an innocence about her. "Why would anyone? The land around it is left unfarmed and wild, so that its badness can be locked in. And even from this far away, it's death. Look what we have here!" She indicates the beautiful countryside around them. "Why would anyone want to go there?" And they carry on walking without once looking back.
That place disturbs him for some time. A cancer in the Heartlands, a blank spot in the landscape's lush presence-and also in the consciousness of those living there-its solidity is a terrifying thing. He can understand the Heartlanders subconsciously steering clear of somewhere like that, but their denial is a conscious decision.
That's not my city, he thinks, and though it is often on his mind, he never speaks of it again.
Days later, sitting beside a campfire watching children from a small village putting on a dance show for them, he feels another pain, this one in the back of his hand. He cries out and raises his hand, but that confuses him, because it never actually happened -and there was darkness once more, and the distant whisper of Dragarians in wonder, and more memory.
"This is it," she says. "Last time I came here I was not much older than you." There are travelers and traders in the Heartlands, and he has spent enjoyable days back in the village mingling with them. But there are also those who choose not to travel, and his guardian is such a person. Her life is full and rich, she is contented, and other than her pilgrimage to the Heart and Mind-the single journey that everyone must take at some time-she has hardly ever been far beyond her own valley.
This valley is very different. From a hilltop, he looks down and is amazed. On the floor of the valley is a giant structure-except when he looks closer, he sees irregularities and anomalies that indicate that it's something natural, not man-made. It is dome-shaped, its surface a deep red with darker, almost black striations webbing out from the center. Steam or gas is emitting from openings around its edge, and it is these rising and dispersing clouds that bring into context just how large the thing is. They drift slowly, their movement minute compared to the red dome, and because he's concentrating on one such steam column, he does not see the eyes.