Storytime: Dunes.

August 1st, 2012

It’s so beautiful up here.
Look left, look right, look ahead, look behind: all the same, all perfectly smoothed and ghost-silent dunes, every size but each one just the right shape, the shape of a life-of-gold. Look up above, and the sky’s an empty blot with no clouds to hug your eyeballs and reassure them that the world is a small place, manageable and tame.
“My knees are killing me. How are your knees not killing you? You have two on each leg.”
I sighed – the quiet kind, the kind that gets muffled and strangled by your mouthguard before it can reach anyone’s ears – and repeated myself for the fifth time in ten minutes: “we’re almost there, Mr. Tallbeck. Just a little farther.”
Tallbeck was lacking in my discretion and swore openly and foully to himself as he wrestled himself upwards through the sand: old swearwords, no doubt, curses passed down through the dusty generations of his family from eldest uncle to youngest nephew, as was proper, and devout, and civilized. That was how the world worked and anything else was simply unnatural, as I’d been rigorously informed at least once per hour since the beginning of my employment. I’d never regretted a necessary evil so much. Hast Tallbeck, he’d introduced himself as: traveller, explorer, tourist, and hundred-and-sixty-pound-load. And the humans say me and my kind remind them of insects; I’d seen sand fleas with more flesh on them than Tallbeck.
“Your triple-damned dunes are getting into my socks now, Aro! How is that even possible, hey? I’m wearing three layers of clothing tied down with more rope than a narrow-quashed Matagant frigate!”
Because you didn’t tie the knots properly after I showed you and you were too stone-stubborn to ask for a repeat lesson or so help from an ignorant savage, I didn’t say, because I needed the money. Well, sort of. “Nearly there,” I repeated, calmly, steadily, just as I’d say to little brother Bacca. “Almost there.”
“How you blithering beetlebodies manage to wander around here all day without baking to death underneath those shells of yours is beyond me. Is it all the iron you eat? It’s all the iron you eat, isn’t it. Fifty-fingered-fountain of showoffs, you are.”
I made a null-comment of a murmur, and to my relief my client subsided into muttering fumes again, cloaked by the rushing ssshhh-shhhh-shhh of falling sandgrains and the occasional near-bellow of a grunt.
Think of the money, I repeated to myself carefully, clicking my mandibles together in a quiet little marching chant. Think of a half-hundred Matagant coins tucked into your chinbag from a spendthrift, loudmouthed tourist of the world, and what you can get with that. Yes, father will be angry, yes, mother will put on that disappointed face of hers she inherited from grandmother, yes, Bacca will be told all sorts of things about you – mostly by what isn’t said about you – but it’ll all be worth it in the end. Even after you’ve had to lug this dismal clod’s belongings a hundred miles from town for him because he packed what feels like his own weight again in rocks. I could’ve carried enough metal to keep me fed for a thousand-mile journey and not suffered as much under the load.
And there it was, as easy as that: the crest of the dune, the tip of the wave, hundreds of feet above the sea – that little blue line on the horizon we’d departed days ago. On a whim, I held out a single finger and erased all of it from existence. Add one digit, minus however many thousands of miles of water and fish and whatever else was out there.
“Burn it to Bashera, that’s a hike and a half and no mistake,” panted Tallbeck. He sat down and almost sunk up to his spidery waist, triggering another spate of sputtering and curses. “So, this is your auntie or whatever it was then?” he asked, with one of his charming eye-rolls.
I hummed a little bit of one of mother’s old sleep-songs to myself to resist the urge to hit him, covering it up with a small cough. “No,” I replied eventually. “This is Grandmother Uy. There is only one aunt of mine in this desert – Cha – and she’s miles and miles down the coast, near the Nagezzy Delta. There aren’t many that aren’t old enough to have had at least a few children that go down into the sand. There’s thousands of mothers, fathers, and grandfathers out there. Not so many aunts, uncles. No sons or daughters. Too young to have earned it, too young to bear it. It takes a strong, full mind to bear the burden of the life-of-gold.” Even as the breath left my mouth I wondered why I was wasting my words on this man.
“Right, of course,” he said. I could practically hear those green eyeballs turning this time. It made me sick to watch – how you could see without compound lenses was beyond me, but how you stopped yourself from throwing up when that happened couldn’t even begin to be imagined.
“Right right right. Very poetical and all that.” He wriggled uncomfortably in the sand, sinking a little deeper despite his efforts. “Tell me, where is the well?”
The well. Of course he’d wanted to know about the wells, it was the first thing everybody asked. I’d been looking forward to this. “You’re sitting on it.”
Holding in my laughter as the moron surged to his feet took a pretty nasty bite to my lip, but it was doable. “Jeremiah ripping apart jackrabbits!” he spat, nearly falling over again. “You just leave them open like that!?”
“Not much choice. Whatever we raise, they’ll cover up. And if we made them big enough to stand strong – well then, they’d get left behind. Grandmother Uy isn’t about to be pinned to the spot by any of her grandchildren’s tricks; the moment she wants to move, she’ll slip it off and glide away.”
“Crotchety old saltsniffer,” said Tallbeck. “Reminds me of my mother-in-law, hey?”
I was very good by now at not altering my expression, but I drew the line at faking laughter. Thankfully, Tallbeck wasn’t about to wait for my input. “Well, regardless… how do you know the well’s down there?”
“They tell us.”
“Right, right, right.” Eyeroll. Again. “So, do you leave markers then?”
I shrugged.
“Mmm. But how can you check if the damned thing’s all coated over with sand? Wouldn’t you want to make sure your, ah, offerings haven’t gone missing? There’s a lot of valuable stuff down there, from what I’ve heard… life-after-gold necessitates gold, does it not?”
I grinned a bit through my mouthguard. This was the fun bit. I’d talked to others who’d sunk to my current job; they said it was most satisfying when your client had brought a shovel. “It doesn’t go missing. There’s a half-hundred feet of sand between us and the well’s bottom at Grandmother Uy’s heart. We don’t need to check after we send her body down the well with her presents.”
“You bury it all… forever?”
I shrugged again. “They take care of it themselves.”
“The damned winds out here – and I expect that once this cherry-burned thing gets moving, not much of the well will stay put anyways, am I close, hey?”
Shrug. I was pleased to see that it was irritating him immensely: possibly the one thing he and my mother had in common.
“Well, well, well. A little bit of a joke at my expense?”
Self-awareness? No, never heard of it – did you mean ‘put-upon’? I can do put-upon, yes sir, if my name isn’t Mr. Hast Tallbeck. “No. We don’t really talk about the wells much. It’s a common mistake.” I need that money, damnit. Don’t go reneging now.
“Pfaugh.” He glared at the small sinkhole forming where his ass had rested. “Well, it’ll do anyways. I’ll just have to use more of the stuff. Pass me my pack, will you?”
Now, if I’d been just a little more tired at that moment, things might have gone differently. As it was, I had enough spare energy left to stop with the pack in my hands and ask: “what?”
“The pack, of course.”
“No. What do you need? What stuff?”
Tallbeck’s big green eyes sucked themselves in a little, the face they were trapped inside too fleshless to bring them down to slits. “Stop dawdling and give me the pack.”
This was probably my money on the line now, but every single action performed by Tallbeck in the last thirty seconds had shifted that a little lower on my priorities. “Tell me.”
Tallbeck had a thing in his hand. It was small and grey and plain and looked exactly like one of those Terramac machines you can only find in the biggest markets that deal in goods from far-away-and-farther, the kind that can heat up little shards of iron and send them spitting at you faster than an arrow shot by a diving eagle. This was probably because it was.
“Do I have to repeat myself to you?”
“No need for threats now, Mr. Tallbeck,” I replied evenly. I wondered if anywhere on my carapace was thick enough to deflect the shot. Probably not, and even if so, probably not before it punctured somewhere a lot thinner.
“No need for this sort of digging-around either, yet here we are. Now, kindly hand over my pack to me – carefully.”
The man’s voice had that horrible sneering smugness in it again that showed he was smiling, but I was too focused on the machine from the Terramac. It seemed to be open-mouthed, ready to scream. “You aren’t going to shoot me, Tallbeck. You’d have to carry your pack back yourself, and there’s no way you’re going to lift this thing and make it more than five feet.”
“On the contrary,” he said. How had he gotten that machine into his hand so fast? One moment it wasn’t there, then all of a sudden it was. Had it been there all along and I’d just never noticed? No, no, don’t let the mind wander! “Once all the Matagant explosives have been emptied out of it and used, I suspect it’ll be a light load. Minus, of course, the twenty or so pounds of gold you so kindly informed me you little sand-fleas leave down at the bottom of these things?”
“It won’t work.”
“Give me a reason why. Now give me my pack.”
Time was starting to slow down in my head. But if there was a fight, best to start it on the right foot. “This pack is full of explosive devices.”
“Yes! Congratulations, hey? You do have a brain somewhere inside there!”
“I am holding it directly in front of me and you are threatening me with a weapon. That shoots red-hot metal.”
It took him a minute to think over that, and while he was thinking instead of firing, I threw the pack at him.
A good throw, but an awkward missile – the pack clipped his arm and spoiled his aim as I threw myself at him: a shot for my head went through my right arm, sending it white hot in my brain. Time to wrestle, time to use all the tricks father taught me when I was little – take his feet out, down he goes, grab his arms. Ah, can’t grab his arms, not with one arm, not with a weapon in the other that’s already wobbling my way, inching my way. I can’t hold both his hands.
Headbutt. Oh, that’s put him off his aim, now I can AH!
I recoiled backwards for a moment, nose pouring out blood by the cupful where the hard, cold surface of the machine from the Terramac had smashed it sideways, and that was all that Tallbeck needed. A foot found a grip, his hand grasped at my jacket, and I went down spinning in the sand, sending it flying into the air and into my eyes – ah, it hurt!
The sky was there again, big and empty and lonely, and then Tallbeck filled it, made me wish for loneliness again. His hand was full of death and his eyes were full of anger, and I’d never felt so small.
“GRANDMOTHER!” I called as his fingers slid on the machine’s lever.
He stopped for a moment, just a moment. Long enough for a laugh (a chuckle really), a shake of the head, and a quick roll of those green eyes.
They had just started to widen when the sand squealed under his feet.
And he vanished there, too fast to see him drop, but down into the sand, into the life-of-gold he’d gone; Hast Tallbeck, traveller, explorer, tourist, and thief. And not more than a half-second too soon, because that was when I passed out.

When I awoke, the sky was black and huge, scattered with a million lights, and my arm had stopped its throbbing, changed to a dull ache. A quick inspection showed that the machine from the Terramac had bored a hole all the way through, searing it shut as it went, trapping the blood inside. I thought about what could’ve happened if Tallbeck had simply brought a knife with him, and winced.
Still, there was an errand to do before I left. One hand on the heart, one hand on the surface of the well.
“Sorry for the trouble, Grandmother,” I whispered in the back of my throat. Little mumbles, tiny tremors, barely audible but a faint buzz through my body, down through my palms and into the sand.
You only had to ask, great-great-great-great-great-grandson, she sighed, a trickle of force on my fingers, a stirring travelling up through my arms and into my chest. Her whispers came from a body twice the size of her dune, the body of the life-of-gold.
I tell each and all of you this, every time I speak to you and I see the troubles on your faces: you only had to ask.
“I know. Wanted to handle it myself.”
And you all always say that. Just like your father?
I winced, thought of all that money on Tallbeck, all that money down under two hundred feet of Grandmother Uy. “Yes. Yes. Damnit. I’m sorry, Grandmother. He needs the surgery, but he can’t pay and he won’t let me try to help.”
More fool the both of you. Here.
The grains at my fingertips stirred, gleamed. Take them.
I scooped up a handful, let the tiny golden fragments drain into my palm as the sand fell away. “Grandmother?”
Take them.
“These are you, Grandmother. These are for you, from us. These are your mind-food, your fuel for your memories and your body, to let you grow under the sand until you reach the sky. These are what keep you from haring off into the Ever-After, keep you standing and singing here under the sun.”
And as long as you and all my other children are alive, I am doing that already. Take them.
Besides, I have more.
I sighed – out loud and clear this time, no need to hide this from relatives – and took the grains of gold. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Far too few to engage the treasure-lust of a tourist, but enough to pay one miserable old man to operate on a stubborn old man.
“Good-bye, Grandmother,” I said. “I will travel here again and visit before I’m married.”
A little sooner, if you don’t mind, she whispered under my feet as I walked away, slipping down her sides. And bring your family. Don’t want your father to think he’s getting out of this mess clean and shining.
“I won’t.”
And Aro…?
“Yes, Grandmother?”
The dune rippled underfoot, sending me to the base of Grandmother Uy in a dusty, confusing instant. I ducked just before Tallbeck’s pack could smash into me.
Take this thing with you. It chafes against me.

It chafed against my right side, too. Still, the walk back to the coast? Much more pleasant. And quiet.

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