He wondered why he was so afraid. He wasn't even sure whether the rainlord would regard the opening of the grille as something worthy of anger. Maybe Taquar expected him to try. Maybe he wanted him to try. Maybe it was a test.
Shale sighed. Why did he understand so little of what was in Taquar's head? And why, when he thought of the rainlord, was it with a mixture of niggling fear of his ire and desire for his approval-of wanting to have the man look at him with pride the way Rishan looked at his son, Chert.
He took a deep breath and focused on the wall of the entrance hall, feeling the water inside. He was slow, much slower than Taquar. He was sweating by the time the containers started on their way down and the grille began its slow rumble upwards. He was weak at the knees by the time it disappeared into the wall above the entrance.
But he was free.
His initial steps outside were hesitant, as if he half-expected Taquar to come bellowing in a fury over the nearest hill. A ridiculous thought, and he grinned at the image. Then in a moment of wild exuberance he flew down the slope in loping strides, going faster and faster until his feet barely seemed to touch the ground. He was a desert elan escaping a hunter, a hawk liberated from a cage winging into the sky. He was free.
At the bottom of the slope, he tripped and rolled into a somersault. He sat up, brushing the dust from his knees, and laughed.
The liberation, the release, was so profound it brought a flash of brilliance and clarity to his thoughts. I've been a prisoner, a sandgrouse in a cage. All the stuff Taquar had been talking about? Safety, protection, responsibility, duty, the need to learn-it was all just words. He had been a prisoner, and it was Taquar who had latched the cage.
His shift in perception was so fundamental that it had a physical dimension, as if his shoulders were suddenly broader, his spine strengthened, his height taller. He stood up and took a deep breath.
His heart pounded in his chest. Outside. Under the sky. Free, the way I was once, wandering the Gibber. He began to climb the hill above the cavern entrance so that he could look out over the Scarpen.
Half a year earlier, still confused and torn with grief, still wearing clothes fouled with Citrine's blood, he had not absorbed much of his journey or the surroundings of the cavern in the hill slope.
Now he saw it all with wondering eyes. The brightness of full sunlight and the brilliance of the late morning sky assailed him, leaving him blinking like a night-parrot dragged out of its hole into the light. Heat baked the skin of his arms and seared through the cloth of his tunic to warm his back. The soles of his feet had lost their tough armoured skin, so the stones were sharp and rough beneath his sandals. The muscles of his calves, unused now to anything but a flat floor, shrieked their pain. Every time he looked up at the vault of the sky directly above he felt vulnerable, as if he was naked. When he disturbed a lizard and it exploded out from under his feet, he jumped and had to halt until his heart steadied. Part of him even wanted to turn back, to return to the sanctuary of the cavern, like a pebblemouse scurrying back to the protection of its hole.
He resisted the temptation and climbed to the top of the hill. And found himself looking out at the Warthago Range. When he had ridden in from the Gibber with Taquar, the lower foothills had blocked the view. Now he could see the rugged red walls and the fierce jags of its ridges and he could gaze on the height of the peaks that were a snare to the clouds when they came. He could contemplate the deep forbidding folds of its fissures, where the rains fell and drained into the mother wells. The sight robbed him of breath, rooted him in silent awe. What he had seen before only in woodcut prints became real.
He felt as if he had spent years looking only at shadows and reflections, and now he had stepped into the sunlight. Life is out here, he thought. Not down there in the cavern. Life outside might be ready to claw and rip at him, to tear through to his heart yet again-but at least it was real. He took a deep breath and smiled.
At last he turned his back and looked south, in the direction of Scarcleft and the sea, both too far distant to see. Even in that direction, the Scarpen was not flat. Nor was it a plain strewn with pebbles and crazed with washes, like the Gibber. There were gullies and fissures and hillocks. The soil was a different colour. Not purplish and shiny with mica, but sometimes yellowish, sometimes brown. The plants were different, too, not cautious miserable things that crept along the ground, reluctant to reach for the sun, but small bushes and the occasional tree reaching upwards on a crippled trunk, spreading arthritic limbs and gnarled fingers to the wind, from which it gathered life-giving moisture. He stood under the meagre shade of one and marvelled. A tree that was not a bab palm or a fruit tree. Growing out in the open, not in a grove or a pot in someone's yard, not jealously guarded and lovingly tended to yield its fruit and its wood, or its nuts and its bark.
His gaze scoured the flatter land in front of the hill and lit on a squat tower crouching like an obese toad on the landscape: a maintenance shaft, signalling the presence of the tunnel burrowing beneath the land to escape the sun. One book had described the structures built over the shafts as brick chimneys. He had asked one of his teachers what those two words meant, and as a result, he now knew what he was seeing. Thoughtfully, he retraced his footprints back to the cavern.
The next afternoon he left the waterhall again, this time with water skins, a battered palmubra, a blanket and a knife stuffed into a pack, all from the storeroom.
He picked his way down the hill once more and set off to take a closer look at the first of the maintenance shafts. It was further away than he thought, and the sun set long before he reached it. At dusk, he ate some of the food he had brought and then wrapped himself in his blanket against the gathering cold. In the early part of the night he slept without stirring, but as the desert lost its heat, he awoke shivering and spent the rest of the night huddled into a ball, dozing fitfully. He had forgotten how the desert chill could creep into your bones in the time just before the dawn.
At first light he set off again.
The maintenance shaft rose up out of the ground to twice his height, built to discourage the entry of desert creatures or wind-blown sand. It was bulbous at the base, narrowing as it rose, just like a bab palm. He marvelled at its construction, the neat pattern of clay blocks-no, bricks, harder than the sun-dried daub they used in Wash Drybone Settle. The top of the shaft was covered by a wooden lid. Footholds to suit a man had been excavated into the brickwork so that it was possible to climb to the top. When he did so, though, the result was disappointing. He could slide the wooden cover open, but underneath was a locked grating, the iron lock covered by a seal. There was no way in without breaking it open, and he had no means to do so.
He climbed down and sat in the shade cast by the structure, waiting for the midday sun to illuminate the interior.
When the shade shrank to nothing, he climbed up to peer inside again. Lit by sunlight, the tunnel running below the shaft was much larger than he expected, large enough for a man to walk upright. A narrow brick walkway along one side ensured there was no need to wade in the water that ran sluggishly down the middle. A ladder led down the inside of the shaft, to provide access to anyone who could open the grating.
Shale took it all in, then replaced the wooden lid once more and returned to the mother cistern. Each step back was a step away from freedom, but he took it nonetheless.
I must have patience, he thought. The time will come, and I will be ready for it.
If I stay, he thought, it will be because I want to, not because someone bars the door.