The Last Stormlord

CHAPTER TWENTY

Scarpen Quarter Warthago Range Scarcleft mother cistern and surroundings That night, Shale cried himself to sleep.

He took care Taquar did not hear him, as he was sure that the rainlord would not approve. Shale was not afraid of Taquar, not the way he had feared his father. The man had no wish to hurt him, he felt sure. But he could wither with a look, and Shale dreaded seeing disapproval in that judgemental gaze. At the first sign of a quivering lip or indecision or fragility, Taquar would raise an eyebrow and look at him-and it was a look that quelled emotion, that forced the masking of fears. Inside, he felt as if he had been reduced to a toddling child once more. In private, he cried, tearless sobs of grief. He'd lost all the family he had ever had. Even Mica was gone. The thought of that swelled inside him like a canker about to burst.

In the morning, Taquar looked at him in distaste as he swung himself out of bed. "You are feeling sorry for yourself, lad," he said. "Be grateful that you live when others have died."

"They were m'fam'ly," he muttered.

Taquar's expression was pure surprise. "You don't grieve for them, surely? You said your father beat you and your mother never did much for you, either. Your brother still lives, as far as you know. Your sister was just a babe."

Shale frowned at him. "She was m'sister," he said, thinking that was sufficient explanation.

Taquar shrugged. "Doubtless I do not know how you feel. I do not have a sister. And please remember not to slur your words. Copy the way I speak."

Shale pressed his mouth closed and went to wash.

After breakfast, Taquar sat him down at the table with the two bowls of water.

Shale stared at them resentfully. "What am I s'posed to do?"

Taquar sat opposite and reached across to tilt the boy's face up with his hand. "Before we start, I think I know what's bothering you. You think it's all your fault people died, don't you?"

Shale nodded, but in his heart he knew it was a lot more than that. It was everything. It was losing the only two people who had ever loved him: Mica and Citrine. It was fear of dying, fear of being hunted like an animal, fear of being gutted on a spear. It was fear of becoming what he was supposed to become, a stormlord.

Taquar did not notice his hesitation. "Well, it wasn't your fault. Nealrith or some other traitor was responsible, plus Sandmaster Davim and the men who followed them. You did nothing to deserve what happened to you, nor are you responsible for what happened. The only thing you have to do is to be worthy, so that they didn't die in vain. If you become a stormlord, then you become the saviour of a nation-of all the Quartern. And you can't even begin to imagine how many people that is. More than you've ever seen in your whole life."

Shale couldn't control himself well enough to risk speaking. He wanted desperately to please this man who had saved him. Who had such expectations. And yet…

"Shale," Taquar continued, more gently this time, "we who are rainlords or stormlords, we have to make sacrifices. For without us, thousands of people would die of thirst and hunger. We have to put them before our selfish needs. What I ask of you-what the Quartern asks of you-will never be easy. If I appear hard or unfeeling, that is the reason. You are one of us and must grow up to be a man of honour."

Shale wasn't quite sure that he understood the meaning of the word "honour," but he nodded anyway.

He was glad when Taquar changed the subject and returned to his lessons on moving water. He tried. He worked at it all day, trying to send the water from one bowl to another. For the first two hours, nothing happened, except that he became frustrated and helpless. He didn't know how he was supposed to do it, and the water never budged.

Halfway through the morning, Taquar came to sit at the table. "Close your eyes, Shale, for a moment," he said.

Shale did as he was asked.

"What am I doing with the water?"

"You're pourin' it into that plate thing."

"Not into the other bowl?"

"Nah."

"No, not nah. And yes, you are right. How do you know?"

He thought about that. "I can feel the shape of the water."

"Good. You can open your eyes." Taquar poured the water back into the bowl. "From now on I want you to think of the water as a shape, not as something in a container. I want you to change the shape, with your mind. Change it so that it will come out of this bowl and drop into the other."

Shale sighed and tried again.

He still had not raised as much as a ripple on the surface of the water by lunchtime.

When Taquar once again approached him, he cringed.

"It will come," Taquar said. "You can't expect to have it happen all at once. It takes years to learn how to be a rainlord, years more to be stormlord. One step at a time."

Shale looked at him in wonderment.

Taquar must have understood something of his surprise because he added, "You won't get beaten by me, lad. Not when you do your best to please. Anyway, take a rest. Here, eat this." He handed him food in a bowl.

Shale stirred the mixture and tasted it carefully. "That's real good. Highlord, what's-what's Scarcleft like?"

"Large. Larger than anything you've ever seen."

Shale reduced the idea of large to something he could understand. "Twice as large as Wash Drybone Settle?"

Taquar threw up his hands. "Waterless heavens, lad, but you are ignorant." He rose and went into the storeroom and came back with a book. He undid the ties that kept the parchment pages in place between the end-boards, and turned the first pages over to find what he was looking for. "Here, this is Scarcleft." He pushed the page over to Shale. It had a woodcut picture and some writing underneath.

Shale studied it but had trouble understanding the drawing. Finally he realised he was looking at a settle of enormous proportions, tipped down a hill slope that was many times higher than the banks of the wash back home. He had seen slopes like that only on his journey to the waterhall. "Whassit say unnerneath?"

"What does it say underneath?" Taquar corrected.

Carefully Shale repeated the words.

"It says that this is Scarcleft, a city of the Scarpen Quarter."

Shale wanted to ask more, but he sensed that there was a limit to the amount he could pester Taquar at any one time and have him remain pleasant. The rainlord was already beginning to sound bored. He abandoned the idea of another question and said instead, "I wanna-"

"I want to-"

"I… want… to learn how t'read."

Taquar stared for a moment, considering. "That's an excellent idea. It will give you something else to keep you occupied while I am gone. It's easy enough." He indicated some of the writing on the open page. "Each one of these marks is the sign for a sound. We call them letters. There are forty-eight of them. Learn them all, and you can read. Look." He dipped a finger in one of Shale's bowls of water and drew a letter in water on the table. "This is the letter we call 'shi.' It says the first sound in your name. And this symbol is the second sound, and this the third. Sh… ay… el. Shale."

Shale's mind blossomed with the concept. So that's what reading was! Suddenly something that had always seemed so arcane was within his reach. He pointed to the words under the picture. "Which one says Scarcleft?"

"That one," Taquar said, pointing. "There are quite a few books in the storeroom. You may look at them while I am gone. Make sure your hands are always clean, and always tie the end-boards back on when you finish." Quickly he sketched four more letters on the table and explained the sounds they represented. "I'll teach you some more tomorrow before I leave, if you can remember these," he said. "Now, finish your meal." The next morning, when Taquar left, Shale watched him ride away with a growing sense of disbelief. The rainlord really was leaving, taking his ziggers with him. And he, Shale, was going to have to spend his time alone, unprotected.

It felt strange.

It wasn't that he had never been alone. He had, often-whenever he went into the Gibber to collect resin. The open space of the Gibber he had regarded as friendly; even its trackless and waterless nature had not scared him. He could always sense where the settle and the wash were. He could sense the water in the cisterns, in the ground. The familiar had never been far away. Sometimes he had worried about the people he might meet out there, but he'd never feared the place itself or the loneliness of it.

But now he felt trapped.

The grille was closed and he had no idea how to open it. What if Taquar never came back? The food would not last forever, and he had nothing he could use to force open the grille.

And what if his enemies came? What if Davim came?

He stood at the grille and watched as the speck that was Taquar and his pede grew smaller and finally vanished into the stony soil and dry gullies of the Scarpen.

I have got to find the way out of here, he thought. He considered the pipes into the-what was it called? Tunnel?-and shivered. If he tried that and got stuck halfway… No, I have to find out how to lift that grille.

But as hard and as long as he studied it, he couldn't see how it was done. All he knew was that it had something to do with moving water. Controlling water, that was the key. He had to learn, and learn quickly.

He went back to the table and the two bowls, one full, one empty. Taquar had actually not given him good advice: he had told him to concentrate, but in concentrating, he lost his affinity with water. It was not until he realised that the secret was focus and relaxation, not concentration and stress, that he could ripple the water at will. The next day, he slopped some of it from one bowl into the other, and he smiled for the first time since Citrine had died.

After that he relaxed still more. No one came to threaten him; there was no pressure from anyone to perform. Taquar was not there to watch his every move; he could advance at his own pace, to suit himself.

He was lonely. Without Mica he was bereft, and the pain of loss was welded onto him, part of his being. He knew what Taquar had said was true: the horror at Wash Drybone Settle had not been his fault. Yet it was still a tragedy that was undeniably linked to his gift, and that motivated him. If he could become a stormlord, then he could undo some of the damage. He could free Mica.

He spent hours moving water drop by drop from one bowl to the other. He slopped it, dribbled it, splashed, wasted it-but gradually he moved it. The day he moved the entire contents from the first bowl to the second in a steady stream he celebrated by going for a swim.

Within a day of Taquar's departure, he had found being cooped up in the rooms a physical irritation. He wanted more space, and so he gravitated towards the waterhall every evening. The rock walls of the cavern rose sheer from the water's surface in several places, which meant he couldn't walk around the lake. He could sense its depths-cold, bleak and dark-and one part of him was wary. He remembered the power of the rush down Wash Drybone, the way he had lost himself. Mostly, though, this still water held no fears for him. It fascinated. Its power, its weight, its immensity-his bodily need of it. He understood it, recognised it so easily, felt kinship with it. He knew, without consciously dwelling on it, that he himself was mostly water.

For the first few days he just looked. The lake, so large and still, seemed a sacred thing, not to be taken lightly. Now, though, he was a mover of water, a rainlord, and he saw it differently. He remembered how good it had been to submerge himself in water that day with Mica, and now it felt right to do it again. And so, to celebrate his success, he walked into Scarcleft's drinking supply.

The cold water moved over his naked body like a living thing, connecting with him and yet not blending with him. Toughened by a lifetime of desert nights covered only by burlap sacking, he was not bothered by the temperature. He waded in waist-deep, crouched down and let the water lift him, hold him, cradle him in the gentle, arousing embrace of a lover. This time, though, he controlled his urge. This time, it seemed right to accord respect to something that allowed him to have power over its very movement, to respect something that could have killed him with its own power. He remembered every moment of being hurled this way and that in the surge of the rush.

This time he didn't sink in the water like a token dropped into a dayjar, either. He splashed around on the surface, discovering that if he thrashed his arms and kicked his legs, he could move as he willed. He ducked his head under and tried to move water away from his nose and mouth, the way he had in the wash pool, but found he couldn't duplicate the effect now that there was no urgency.

Never mind, he thought. I can practise.

When the cold finally did drive him out, he felt cleansed. Uplifted. Jubilant. He was surely a water-mover. A rainlord.

I was born for this, he thought.

Then: Mica, one day I will use my power to save you. That same evening, he thoroughly explored the storeroom. As he uncovered one treasure after another, he found himself the possessor of an abundance of riches-more, surely, than any one person could ever want. There were extra blankets to keep out the cold of desert nights. There were supplies of oil and salt and amber. There was dried bab mash for pedes. There was the food that Taquar had left behind for him: strips of dried pede meat-which Shale refused to touch-nuts and nut paste, bab fruit, pickled kumquats, dried figs and apricots, salted eggs, raisins, honey and yam biscuits. There were odd items of clothing, both for adults and for children of different ages, and there was even a child's gold bracelet.

Reduner caravan women occasionally wore gold bangles, but Shale had never seen one with metalwork as finely executed as this. The centrepiece was a flat gold disc intricately carved with a word-which he could not read-surrounded by fruit-tree blossoms. It was obviously valuable, and Shale could not imagine why it was so carelessly tossed in amongst a pile of clothing. He laid it aside and turned his attention to other items. Extra pede harnesses, water skins, saddle cloths and cushions, pede packs, zigger-feeders… and books.

He opened every one of the books that night, looking at them by lamplight. He took exaggerated care not to knock over the lamp and spill the oil, or worse, set fire to the parchment sheets. Most of the writing was just strings of words he couldn't read. Fortunately there were eight or nine books with pictures, including one that had page after page of drawings, each carefully labelled, of living things-beetles, moths, sand crawlers, pebble speeders and pebblemice, ant sippers, night-parrots and the like-most of which Shale recognised. He grinned, delighted.

Before he had left, Taquar had taught him a total of twenty letters, twenty out of forty-eight, and Shale was desperate to learn the remainder. Once he knew each letter and the sound it made, he believed, he would be able to read, and that excited him. He had seen the city of Scarcleft, simply because there was a picture in the book; how much more could he learn if he knew what people wrote about the city? And now here was a chance to learn all the letters without waiting for Taquar to come back.

He knew what an ant sipper looked like, and the drawing he had in front of him definitely portrayed that little desert-living creature: long tail, furry nose, strong feet for digging, long tongue for eating ants. He traced out the letters underneath, two words, as should be expected. Ant sipper. And the letters he already knew were exactly where they should have been. His grin broadened: he could teach himself to read.

That night he fell asleep smiling. After a while he developed a routine. He kept the rooms, and himself, as clean as possible, just as Taquar had insisted he do. He couldn't see the point of sweeping up the dust (it was going to blow right back in again) or folding his blankets every morning (he would just have to unfold them again at night) or cleaning his teeth (he was going to eat with them again, after all)-but Taquar had wanted him to do these things, so he did. He came to like the feel of all this cleanliness. No grit beneath his bare feet, no greasiness on his skin, no coating on his teeth. It was pleasant, and there had never been much that was pleasant in his life before.

The water exercises tended to become boring after a while, and he didn't proceed nearly as fast as he would have liked. The gains he made were small ones: a little more control, a little more precision, one tiny step at a time. Fortunately, life in Galen's erratic household had taught him patience, and the son of a drunkard learned never to expect miracles, never, in fact, to expect.

Still, the loneliness continued. He started to feed a pouched mouse that came each evening at dusk, looking for insects in the hallway, but it remained shy. Sometimes he talked to Mica, telling him everything that happened, as if he could hear. He found himself longing for Taquar to return.

When the rainlord did return, it was a disappointment. After a few hours, Shale was remembering the man's remote coolness. He brought food and more books and more clothing, although Shale thought that last an unnecessary extravagance. He appeared content with Shale's progress with regard to water sensitivity. He complained that the floor hadn't been kept clean enough and scolded him for not washing his clothes.

"I've learned a lot of readin'," Shale told him. "I can read whole pages-"

"Yes, yes, I'm sure," Taquar said. "Now go and brush my pede." Shale subsided, hurt by the rainlord's indifference, and went to perform the task.

That evening, after the sun had set, Shale noticed a light out in the desert. He stared, so startled by the idea of someone being out there that it was a moment before he could even think straight. A fire, he thought. It was the flickering of flames from a distant camp fire. He blocked out the idea of the water behind him in the waterhall-which he had once found impossible to do-so that he could concentrate on whatever was beyond the grille. Finally he isolated one person, only one, and a pede.

He went back into the main room. "There's someone out there," he said. He was shaking, but flattened his tone so Taquar would not hear the fear he felt.

The rainlord's head swung up and he paused, focusing. "Ah. I have been expecting a visitor. Doubtless this is he." He laid down the book he had been reading by lamplight and stood. "That was well-sensed, Shale. I am pleased with your progress. I will ride out to meet him alone. There is no point in him knowing you are here."

"Whossit?" Shale asked.

For a moment he thought Taquar would refuse to answer. Then he said, "Who is it? I rule a city, Shale. There are matters that concern me that are better dealt with away from Scarcleft. Sometimes with men from other Scarpen cities, even Reduners. The man is a messenger, merely."

When Shale glared, he said, "Not all Red drovers are evil men, you know. There are moderate men among them who need to be cultivated. But who this is and why he is here is none of your concern."

Shale concentrated when the rainlord lifted the grille, trying to sense what happened. He thought Taquar moved water from one place inside the rock wall to another, through a pipe of some kind, and as a result the barrier opened. However, the rock blocked his feeling for the water within, so he found it difficult to understand precisely how it worked. I will in time, he thought. I must.

Taquar closed the grille behind him, and Shale watched him walk away. He had a loaded zigtube swinging at his side, and the insects screamed with rage at their close confinement. In their agitation, the odour they exuded was sharply tangy, the smell of toxins that kill with unimaginable agony.

He still didn't like them. "But how d'you know I am a stormlord?" Shale asked the next morning over breakfast. "And not just a rainlord?"

"Because you sense water with such ease. I knew right from the beginning, when we were in Wash Drybone Settle." He leaned back in his chair, rolling his mug between his hands. "One day you will bring all the water we need, from the sea, just as Granthon used to do."

"Is he still alive? Y'said he was almost snuff-er, you said he was dyin'."

"He is. And taking a long time about it, too. Fortunately for us."

"How long 'fore I can help him?"

"That depends on how hard you work. Several years at least. I don't know. I've never trained a stormlord before."

"Why don't y'take me to Granthon then? He'd know the best way t'train me. He went through it hisself."

The rainlord's face became curiously blank. "Because he is Nealrith's father. How long do you think you would be safe? Use your head."

Shale swallowed unhappily. Arguing with Taquar always made him feel vaguely threatened. He's not Pa, he told himself. He's not going to lam you. He said, "If he's snuffed it, he can't teach me nothin' and we're all in a heap of pedeshit."

The highlord's expression changed from blankness through exasperation to something else Shale could not quite read, but the stare was unsettling. "You will stay here," Taquar said finally, "until you learn enough to look after yourself. Then I will take you to Scarcleft. Now go and feed the ziggers."

Shale obeyed.

As he lay in bed that night, his discontent grew. He wanted to rebel, but wasn't sure what he wanted to rebel against. His imprisonment in the mother cistern? Not being taken to meet the Cloudmaster? Not being able to search for Mica? His fate generally? Something was not right.

I got t'know things, he thought. Them books aren't enough, specially if I can't read proper. He wanted more. Much more.

The next day, he begged still more books from Taquar and continued to pester him with questions. Finally, the rainlord said, more in exasperation than in a spirit of helpfulness, "I'll ask a few of the Scarcleft Academy teachers to select books for you. In fact, I'll ask them to set you some written work to do and then I'll take it back for them to mark. That should keep you happy. You can ask them questions in writing instead of asking me in person. I'm no teacher."

"But I can't write! Can't read proper, neither."

"I can't read properly," Taquar corrected.

"Can't read properly, neither."

Taquar sighed. "Then you will have to learn, won't you? I'll teach you more letters and words today and you can practise writing them. However, if you have written contact with teachers, I will need your promise that you will not tell them who you are or where you are."

"Course not," Shale said.

Inside, his mind was already bubbling with ideas and questions to ask, answers he wanted. Something told him that the key to his future lay in how much he could understand of things he had never seen. That first visit of Taquar's set the temper of all his visits. He came bringing books, food and other necessities; he tested the progress of Shale's water sensitivity, made sure that the state of the rooms was to his liking and criticised if it wasn't. He started to bring lessons from Scarcleft Academy teachers and take back the completed exercises. He'd glance at them, but their content did not seem to interest him much. He was more concerned that Shale learn to speak properly; sloppy speech he corrected without fail. Shale soon learned to mimic Taquar's accent and grammar, until his speech was no longer an issue between them.

At first, Taquar came every ten days; then the time between visits began to lengthen, until it was usually thirty days. He never stayed more than four days, usually less. And on some visits, he walked out towards the light of a distant fire in the desert. He never mentioned the reason for it again, and Shale did not ask. He always loaded his zigtube before he went, but whether he ever had cause to use it, Shale never knew.

The water exercises became more complex and difficult. He had to move plain water through coloured water without mixing the two. He had to move water through a maze without letting it touch the sides or base. He had to identify which out of a number of different-shaped containers held more water-and sometimes the difference could only be measured in drops.

Gradually his knowledge of the Quartern increased as his reading improved and he learned to write sufficiently well to communicate with his teachers. A map he found in the storeroom was invaluable. The only other maps he had ever seen were temporary things drawn in the dirt by caravanners; this one was an entry point into another world that he had not known existed. He'd had no idea that the Quartern was so large. That Wash Drybone Settle was so small. That distances were so vast.

Or that he could be important in such a huge world. Shale was aware of the passage of time: he could see much of the sky through the bars of the grille, and he watched the constellations move. The way his arms stuck out of the bottom of his tunic sleeves told him he was growing fast. His clothes were becoming too tight.

He rummaged through the clothes in the storeroom, only to find there was nothing there that fitted. The garments were for women or children, and he was no longer a child. He held one of the tunics he found and fingered the intricate embroidery along the hem-finer embroidery than his mother had ever done-and thought of Citrine. Sadly, he reflected that he had already begun to forget what his little sister looked like.

And Taquar seemed to have forgotten all about her, and Mica, too. How could he ever rescue Mica if he never got to leave the mother cistern?

By the time the stars told him he had been there for about half a cycle, his frustration was a boiling cauldron of emotion in his chest, and he knew he had to do something, or go mad. He waited until Taquar came and went once more, and then started to work on opening the grille to the outside world.

He thought he knew now, at least in principle, how it was done. He had sensed Taquar do it often enough. He already knew about pulleys and weights from watching the building and repair of houses in Wash Drybone Settle, and observing some of the mine diggings maintained by a few settle fossickers. He now had enough water sense to understand that the grille was opened by transferring water at each end from full tanks to empty ones through pipes in the hollows of the cavern wall. As the empty ones filled up, they dropped down. The falling weight worked pulleys to open the grille. To close it, it was just a matter of moving the water back again. What scared him was the possibility of moving the grille up but not being able to bring it back down again before Taquar returned.

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.