"Nah. Better get back and see if Ma and Pa's all right."
"Y'know what? I don't care. Neither of them cares as much as-as a grain of sand for us. And Pa will be in a real rotten temper. Come on, Shale. We'll prob'ly never see water like this, never again."
He waded back into the pool. Shale wavered and then followed. They played, washing away the accumulated dirt of a lifetime, laughing and giggling at the strangeness of their appearance, at the feel of it.
Only later, when his skin was soft and shiny and golden brown, did Shale suddenly sober up. "But we're not like ord'nary folk, are we? Not you 'n' me. Ord'nary folk live in real houses and have water allotments and don't get beat up by their pa." He looked up at his brother. "An' ord'nary folk don't know when the rush's comin' down. I felt it, Mica. A feeling inside my guts. Pa's goin' kill me."
Mica didn't reply.
"You reckon he'll make me go with a Reduner if one of them wants it?"
His brother wrung the water out of his clothing and wouldn't look at him. "He's never made me do it."
But Shale knew that didn't mean a thing. He pulled on the remains of his smock. "I won't do it," he said as they headed across the groves to where their house had once stood on the opposite bank. "Least of all for 'im."
"The bastard'll clobber you proper."
"Not this time. Not no more. 'Cause I'll clobber him right back. I'm done with his wallopings."
Mica stared at him, eyes wide.
Not all the shanty houses had been demolished by the force of the water. Further away from the bank, several huts belonging to other waterless families still stood, and they found Galen leaning against one of them, talking to Ore the stonebreaker and Parman the legless. He scowled at them as they approached.
"Where the waterless hell have you whelps been?" he yelled at them. "You know your mother's birthin' that new brat of hers and you two off enjoyin' yourselves somewheres, without a thought to what trouble we're in. We got no house, and no jars neither, just when there's water out there for the having!" He jerked a finger at Mica. "You, get back down into the wash. Pick up anything you can find that's of any use. There's wood there, Mica, washed down from the hills, I wouldn't wonder. You know how valuable wood is? Get back down there!"
Mica gave a despairing look at Shale but didn't dare say anything. He slunk away towards the wash.
Shale stood his ground, waiting for his father to speak to him. It weren't m'fault, he thought. None of this was my fault. The bastard's got no right t'be angry. I was the one what warned him.
Ore laid a hand on Galen's arm. "Go easy on the lads. They could've been dead y'know."
"Mind your own damn business, Ore. Them's my get, and I'll deal with them my way." He grabbed Shale by the arm and pulled him around to the back of the shanty house where they couldn't be seen. He shoved Shale up against the stones of the wall, bruising his back with his roughness.
"Now you listen to me, Shale, and you listen good." He lowered his voice and hissed in the boy's ear. "That talk of knowin' 'bout the water comin' down aforehand? I don't want t'hear it. Not a word. That's shaman stuff, and nobody wants no shaman stuff. You talk 'bout that, and I'll beat you as you've never been beat before, till your tongue comes out your arse. You understand me?" He fitted his hand across Shale's cheeks, and pinched them inwards towards his nose. It hurt.
Fury bubbled up. Shale slammed his forearm against his father's. He was nowhere near as strong, but Galen was taken by surprise and his hold was broken. "You should of listened t'me," Shale said defiantly. "I tole you what was goin' t'happen, but you wouldn't listen! Weren't my fault the jars 'n' stuff was lost."
He raised his chin and met his father's gaze. His heart pounded as he waited for the inevitable blow.
It didn't come. Galen dropped his gaze and wiped his hands on his smock, as if he wanted to rid himself of taint. "You've even been in that water, haven't you? You sandcrazy?" He stepped back, his voice soaked with loathing.
There was panic there, too, and the shock of understanding left Shale shaken. Pa was afraid, deathly afraid, and his fear quivered his voice as he spat his words out.
"Shaman-taint! I wish you'd never seen the light of day, and that's the truth. Now get back down into the wash and help your brother. We got t'find some of our stuff. Or other folks' stuff. Unnerstand? We got no dayjars now!"
Shale ducked past his father and walked away, only too glad to have escaped so lightly, but the words echoed on in his head: I wish you'd never seen the light of day.
Rage welled up in his throat. I didn't ask t'be his get, he thought. Weren't my fault I am. And side by side with his anger, there was triumph. The beatings might continue, but even if they did, he knew he would never truly be afraid of his father again, not now that he had seen fear in his eyes. That night he crept into the makeshift shelter they had built of stones and palm fronds, where Ma now lay with her new baby sleeping in the crook of her arm. The child, named Citrine, was tiny and perfect, and Shale thought her as beautiful as the gem she was named for. He tucked a finger into one tiny hand, and the babe tightened her grip around it. The flood of love he felt for something so small and fragile staggered him. Fiercely, he thought he would do anything to protect her. If ever Pa raised a hand to her, he would kill him. If anyone ever raised a hand against her he would kill them. She was his, his charge in this world that held so much pain and uncertainty. She, he decided, would never know what it was like to go thirsty or be hungry or be beaten. Never.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Red Quarter Dune Watergatherer Sandmaster Davim sat on his pede at the top of the dune they called the Watergatherer. To the east and west, the red line of the dune humped away as far as he could see. To the north, it fell sharply to the plains. This, the front edge of the Watergatherer, was a wall of fine red dust unsullied by any plants or growth, a slope steep enough to make walking difficult. Its top edge, towering five hundred paces up, was as sharp as a sword cut. An occasional playful gust of wind tore grains away from the cut in flurries.
The back side of the dune was different. There were gullies and dips and hollows and valleys carved into the long, more gentle descent of several miles to the distant plain. The red sand of this sculpted slope was dotted with vegetation: a prickly bush here, a sand-creeper there; a clump of smoke-bush behind that. Bare surface showed through, but the plants maintained a precarious existence, oblivious to the slow inching of the dune that carried them forward.
The red dunes of the quarter were waves swallowing up the land in front only to discard it behind two or three decades later as lifeless as the skeletal remains of a masticated meal. The Red Quarter had sixteen such dunes, spaced equidistant from one another, all on their inexorable slither northwards to extinction, a long slow demise as they eased themselves into the expanse of the Burning Sand-Sea, a desert so hot and vast that not even a pede ventured there.
The dunes were birthed in the south, perhaps by the eroded red rock of the Warthago Range or the red earth of The Spindlings. The plain they traversed was also red, although the earth was coarser and its vegetation sealed it tight against the depredations of the wind. It was covered with low bushes, rocks, the odd waterhole that was sometimes no more than a bowl of dust-until the next parallel dune ten or fifteen miles away.
Davim scanned the country carefully from his vantage point, watching for the man he expected. His fellow conspirator, he supposed, but he preferred to think of the man as the Traitor, for such he was to his own kind. Once Davim had respected him, though not now. Conspirators they might be, but Davim despised the treachery, useful as it was, that was bringing the Scarperman to him again.
As yet, there was no sign of him. The only people he saw were his own followers, camped in one of the dune hollows on the gentler slope, together with the meddle of pedes that were the pride of his clan. He looked for a distant telltale plume of smoke or the glint of sunshine on metal-anything that would tell him there were other people out there somewhere-but he saw nothing. No man alone, no band on the move. Nothing.