Wild Magic

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Faharmoy ate a tuber he’d buried beneath the fire to cook during the night, then walked out of the camp taking with him only the coarse brown robe he’d worn there, the old leather sandals that were near to falling apart, the crooked hardwood staff he’d found one day, sandpolished and as tall as he was. Food he left to the “whims of his god, but he took the water skin, pushing his arm through the fraying strap, settling the damp weight against the small of his back.

The two years that had passed since he came here had seen the drought harden on the land, streams dry up, the River sink until the sandbars showed. Grass was dry and brittle; most of the brush was dead.

He walked without hurrying, his long easy strides taking him across the land with deceptive speed; he could walk all day now without tiring, swinging the staff, chanting Chumavayal’s Law or meditating as he moved.

An hour before sundown he searched for food, found a few meaty beetles and some withered tungah roots. He made a small fire, roasted the beetles and the roots, ate them with a stolid indifference, washed the food down with two swallows from the skin. He poured sand over the fire and stamped it down to smother the tiniest embers, then he slept.

On the third day he came to a scrub farm, deserted and silent.

There was a dead cow in a rickety corral, all ribs and skin, mummified by the heat and dryness.

Swaying listlessly in the desert wind, a short frayed length of rope hung from the end of a cracking well-sweep. When he reached its mudbrick coping, he dropped a pebble into the well. After a while he heard a clatter, no splash. Dry. Deep and dry.

He sighed. Dropping to his knees and stretching his arms wide, he chanted Chumavayal’s Blessing on the land and its people. He kept up the cycle of prayer until his mouth was dryer than the dust, his throat was raw and his lips cracking-until he felt Chumavayal’s touch on his brow.

He took a swallow of water from the skin, held it in his mouth for several minutes, then let it trickle down his throat. Another sip, then he slapped the stopple home and started on his journey once again.

On the fifth day he came to a dry canal and followed it to a village. Three men sitting on a bench in the meager shade of a dead tree looked up as he stopped beside them.

“The fields are empty,” he said. “Where are your children?”

“Crops ha’ fail again, Prophet,” one of them told him, an unlettered Naostam he was, his ancient hands twisted and knotted by a lifetime’s hard labor. He jerked his thumb at the canal. “Y’ see how that be. No crop ‘thout water. Nothin to keep ’em here. Mal Rostocar, he send rations for the old ’uns, s’ we starve slow ‘stead o fast, but the young ’uns got to do fer theysefs.”

“Do you have any kassos here? Abosoa? Adjoa? Anachoa?”

The old men snorted, slapped their knees, and hid toothless smiles behind withered hands. The one who’d spoken before said, “Last well he go dry, suckin yungis run like they’s tail on fire.”

Faharmoy shifted his grip on his staff, frowned. “Do you have ghosts that need laying?”

The speaker shrugged. “They’s good folk, don’ bother us.”

Faharmoy scowled at the ancient, defiant faces. There was nothing he could do here; these men were like stones, they wouldn’t hear anything he said. He shook his head and started on. Clean the heart of the corruption and the body would have its health again, but as long as there was poison in the cities, there was nothing he could do for the land.

He walked through other villages, some with other old men sitting on benches talking about other old times, some empty except for the wind and now and then ghost fragments that he chanted to rest before passing on.

The fields were empty and slowly blowing away with the furnace wind. The canals that watered this once productive land were dry, even the dead fish stranded in them were so old there was no stink left, only tatters of gray-brown skin and arrangements of delicate white bone.