Heir of Beasts

Ch. 3.4- Sh'turen's Tears

We camp that night in a small tent supported by stakes driven deep into the sand. They're flimsy fabric shelters, little holes we crawl into the escape the vastness of the desert night. The desert after the sun sets is unsettling, almost otherworldly. The sky is vast and uninterrupted, its stars glowing like the lights of faraway cities and casting long shadows on the dunes. The sand seems to turn to water under the moonlight, undulating and rippling as the shadows shift. For a moment I feel like I'm underwater, sunk deep to the ocean floor.

I settle into my sleeping roll and pull Halima close to me, sharing her warmth. They let her sleep with me; I gather I'm supposed to take this for a kindness. I can hear Sholu saying how magnanimous it is to let a prisoner keep a servant at all. But he still controls my access to her, picks the times and places of our meeting. He never lets me forget that he has all the control.

Not for long, I promise myself, wrapping the blankets around myself and the little maid. The sun is long set and the heat is slowly leeching from the desert, leaving us shivering as the night air creeps in through the gaps in the tent. He might have all the control now, but soon I'll be able to remove Halima from the equation, to put us on a more level playing field. She will be safe, and I will be free.

Kaza remains with us, despite my protests. Perhaps I don't protest as loudly as I should; the guard's presence still chafes at me, but my fiery anger has faded to a dull burn after hours of conversation forced by the monotony of desert travel. I feel a terrible kinship between us, a similarity of purpose and of sin. We both drank the same poison; we might as well share the same tent.

"You should rest," I yawn, looking at Halima. "We leave at sunrise."

"How long will it take us to get to Rizsava?" She asks me.

"Eight, maybe nine days."

"Two weeks," Kaza corrects, pulling his own blanket tighter around him. "If we were just a few riders eight days might be possible, but with a caravan this large we won't be there before a fortnight."

A fortnight in that little carriage... my mind sinks at the prospect.

With nothing to look forward to but another day spent locked in a tiny box and jostled to and fro, we lie down and try to sleep. Halima squeezes my hand and closes her eyes. Kaza begins to snore lightly. I close my own eyes, expecting to lie awake with the worries swirling around inside my head, but my body is so tired from the travel I find myself pulled swiftly towards sleep.

I wake before sunrise, the sweat of an unremembered dream cooling on my brow. I instinctively reach over to Halima, trying to lay a hand on her sleeping form, but all I find is a blanket. I sit up and rub the sleep from my eyes, letting them adjust to the moonlight.

I look around and quickly notice I'm the only one in the tent. Halima and Kaza are gone, leaving two empty sleeping rolls. I'm about to run out into the night to find them when I hear a voice on the other side of the tent flap.

"That's Ocharya's chariot, isn't it?" A high voice asks.

"Yes," a lower voice answers. "And that cluster of bright stars next to her are the viper. Follow my finger up, you see those three stars, see how they make a point? That's the head of the coyote."

"Where's the tail?"
"That one right there, next to the chariot's wheel."

I crawl forward and pull aside the tent flaps. Kaza and Halima are sitting on the sand just outside it, heads turned up to the night sky.

"You're awake, miss," Halima says, startling when she notices me. "I hope we didn't wake you."

"It was a dream that woke me," I tell her. "Not you."