Down a Lost Road (9 page)

With the pot set to heat over the low
flames, he dipped into a clay jar and scooped out a gourd full of
something that – from where I sat – seemed to resemble cornmeal. I
tried to guess what he was making. Grits? Corn pone? But he just
threw the stuff unceremoniously into the pot, swirling it around
with the ladle he had used to fish out my poultice. I grimaced.
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t exactly the kitchen savvy kind of guy.
Still, I was so hungry that I didn’t really care what the stuff
tasted like.

I drifted back to sleep, then woke some
minutes later to find Yatol still crouched silently by the pot,
stabbing at it now and then with the ladle. I wondered if I should
offer to help, then decided watching him try to cook was more
amusing. Eventually he pulled two clay bowls from the stack of
cooking equipment, blew the dust out of them, and slopped in two
ladlefuls of…what was that, anyway? Gruel? He produced a couple of
spoon-shaped utensils from somewhere, wiped them off on his shirt,
and stuck one in each bowl.

He brought one over to me and deposited it
in my hands. I peered curiously at the contents. It looked kind of
like really lumpy, sticky grits. I tilted the bowl a little, but
the mass didn’t move. Suddenly I realized Yatol was still standing
there, watching me. I met his gaze, trying not to look skeptical.
He lifted both hands, bowl and all, in an annoyed shrug.

“
What?”

I bent my head to hide my wicked grin. But
the more I tried to stifle it, the more it wanted to surface.
Finally I dissolved into laughter, the image of him stabbing
fiercely at the gruel popping into my mind every time I had almost
managed to sober up. I risked a peek at his face and found him
scowling at me.

“
I’m sorry,” I gasped,
cracking up again. “It’s just…it’s…”

He turned away suddenly. A little pain
touched my heart, and I tried to be serious. I hadn’t meant to hurt
his feelings… Yatol wouldn’t really get that upset about something
so silly, would he? He covered a face with one hand, shoulders
shaking. Laughing. After a moment he turned back to me,
stern-faced, and pointed his bowl at me.

“
No comments. At least I
can make—” He paused, examining the gruel and sniffing it
experimentally. “Something…edible.”

I grinned at him, and then the most amazing
thing happened. He actually grinned back. A tingling rush of
vertigo swept over me, and I dropped my gaze. For a second I even
forgot that I was hungry. Of course, one glance back into the bowl
and I wondered if I still was. Yatol had already set to eating his
breakfast, and I really didn’t want to make him feel bad, so I
tried a bite. It actually wasn’t terrible, despite its
interesting
texture. Could have used some milk and brown
sugar, but at least it was “edible” as Yatol called it, and
surprisingly filling.

When I finished I got painfully to my feet
and hobbled over to him, handing him the bowl with an apologetic
smile.

“
Didn’t die yet, I see,” he
remarked, straight-faced.

“
Not yet,” I said. “It
wasn’t half bad. Thanks.”

The corner of his mouth quirked in a smile
and he got suddenly to his feet, kicking sand over the fire. I
flinched, expecting darkness, but a dusky light filtered in from
the mouth of the cave. I hadn’t realized it was that close to
morning. Of course, now that I thought about it, Yatol
had
just given me breakfast. I turned away abruptly to hide a blush and
a smile – he tried to make me
breakfast in bed
.

Yatol scoured the two bowls with sand –
apparently that made them clean – and stacked them by the pots and
jars. Dishes taken care of, he went to the back of the cave, where
a broad wooden chest languished against the wall, sand-strewn and
moldering with disuse. I hadn’t even noticed it before. What else
didn’t I know about this place? I’d thought at first that it was
just some natural cave, but apparently it was a well-provisioned
hideout of some sort. Interesting.

As Yatol shoved back the lid I wandered
over, curious to see what it held. To my surprise, its contents
were perfectly preserved, almost as though they had just been
stored. Yatol pulled out a few articles of clothing, holding them
briefly before dumping them into my arms. Then he quickly began
filling two small leather pouches with various items from the chest
and the clay jars, food and flint and a bunch of other things I
couldn’t identify off-hand. He placed one of the pouches on top of
my lump of clothes and glanced up at me with a bland look.

“
Put those on.” He got to
his feet. “I won’t be far.”

He stopped to fill a few leather sacks from
the water urn. I watched him sling them over his shoulder and
disappear from the cave, then went to the entrance and peered out
after him. He strode off, but I frowned when I saw that he masked a
limp.

After I convinced myself that no one else
was around, I hid in the shadows of the back wall to change my old
clothes for the new. They seemed almost medieval in style, the
cream tunic and tan pants made from some sort of soft fabric, like
cotton or fine linen. The tunic fell long, nearly to my knees, and
I could just make out the remnants of worn embroidery around the
cowl neck. All the pieces were basically big squares, even the
sleeves that fastened close around the wrists with wide leather
bracers. The pants fit curiously too, but I managed to tie in the
too-large waist with the braided belt.

With the bandages on my injured fingers I
just barely got the bracers and belt tightened. I couldn’t manage
all the other ties and knots, so I ignored the lacing on the pant
legs and left them wide and long. I gazed wistfully at my well-worn
sneakers, then sighed and tugged on the flimsy sandals.

I glanced down at myself and almost laughed,
wondering what I would look like to anyone who knew me on Earth.
The thought jarred me like an electric shock. I dropped my old
clothes in the sand and sat down beside them shaken. The words kept
turning over and over in my mind –
on Earth
. I tried to tell
myself to get a grip, that this wasn’t the first time I’d thought
about it, that I’d been able to get back home before and I would be
able to again. It didn’t matter. I pulled up my knees and bowed
over them.

Yatol’s voice outside cut into my thoughts
and I jumped up, brushing the unbidden tears from my eyes. I
managed to redo my hair in a messy ponytail and tossed my clothes
into the chest.

“
Yeah, I’m ready,” I
called.

Yatol appeared in the mouth of the cave and
took one look at me. I thought I saw him wince, then as quickly as
he had come he turned and left, running a hand through his hair. As
he turned away the strangest expression flashed across his face. It
hit me like a blow to the stomach, or that cold cringing feeling
you get when you see someone aggravate a wound. I ran to catch up
with him.

“
Yatol? What’s the
matter?”

“
Nothing.”

He paused long enough for me to join him.
His eyes shone with some deep grief, maybe even a twinge of regret
that made me strangely uneasy. I wondered if I’d done something
wrong. If somehow I reminded him of someone else.

I swallowed and let my gaze follow his,
across the barren sand toward the distant horizon. A pale light
filtered across the land, the gentle advent of dawn. And I thought
of home, where dawn was always full of birdsong and glistening
treetops. Here there was only empty desert and empty silence,
mimicking the void I felt inside.

“
Yatol, what is this place
called?”

“
Arah Byen.” He gestured to
the lightening horizon, where a dim orb lingered just above the
land’s rim. “All that is the
ara
.” He pointed to the sphere
itself. “And that is Olte.”

I thought there was something peculiar about
the sun, but couldn’t quite place it. As I gazed absently at it I
said, “So,
ara
is the dawn? And this is, what, the
Dawn-Land?”

“
In a manner of speaking.
Of course, it’s only really true in this region, but no one thinks
of that anymore. We’ve called it that since the
beginning.”

Even in the balmy warmth, I shivered, then
pointed to two pale objects hovering by the opposite horizon.

“
Are those
moons?”

“
Yes. Maka and
Hyot.”

“
We have only one. It’s
much bigger than those.” I shuddered again. “I used to think I
wanted to walk on the moon. It seemed so far away, so impossible.
And now, I’m walking here…somewhere in the universe I don’t even
know where. I can’t even tell which way the Earth is from
here.”

Yatol didn’t offer any explanation, only
smiled and started to walk. Suddenly something struck me as funny.
I put my hands to my head and stared up at the strange heavens, and
laughed for all the confusion in my heart. And then I dropped to my
knees on the dusty ground and just cried, sobs racking my whole
body while a sick pang tore at my heart. I heard Yatol’s quiet
footsteps coming toward me, then felt his hands light on my
shoulders.

As if I wasn’t confused enough, my stomach
flip-flopped. I covered my face with my hands but couldn’t stop the
tears. And suddenly I found his arms around me, strong and
comforting. I couldn’t keep crying, not with him holding me. The
sobs faded to a few racking breaths, and I let my head lean against
his shoulder. All too soon he released me, dropping his hands to
his thighs and rocking back on his heels to look at me. I felt
suddenly embarrassed and couldn’t meet his gaze.

“
I’m sorry,” he murmured.
“I can’t explain what I don’t really understand myself. Legends say
that once the sun governed our days and nights, but not anymore.
The light of
Mekaema
isn’t like the light shed by sun or
moon, but it provides for us.”

I gazed up through burning eyes at the
strange sky, starless overhead but strangely luminous. Even at its
darkest point, at the zenith, the light dazzled my eyes. Strange,
strange world. I lowered my eyes, and through the wavering curls of
heat I glimpsed the silhouette of a dark fortress. I scrambled to
my feet.

“
That place…that tower.
What is it?”

“
That,” said Yatol, “is the
place we just escaped. It is called the Gorhiem
Bolstoed.”

“
It’s hideous,” I said. I
wanted to say something else, but a deep fear clung to my throat
and drowned my voice.

“
If we hadn’t escaped, they
would have broken us, and then executed us.” He turned away,
beckoning me. “Too many of my people have already stained those
floors with their blood. Our blood! It used to be ours, until the
Ungulion came in force in my father’s day, and drove out our
defenses.” He pointed to the horizon ahead of us. “They hold
another Citadel, too, in the land that is dark.”

“
Is it always dark?” I
asked, running to catch up with him. I kept trying to work out how
that was possible, but couldn’t. “The planet doesn’t
rotate?”

He glanced at me over his shoulder, a little
half-smile quirking his mouth. “I don’t know. They forgot to teach
us that in the academy. But I do know that
Mekaema
always
touches this face of the world, and so they call it blessed. The
other side, the dark side, always opposes
Mekaema
. Of
course, the sun-side isn’t totally dark or cold. We still get a
little light and heat from Olte, but not enough to sustain us.”

That explained why I had been able to gaze
at it, then, and I said as much. “But if Olte gives so little
light, how do things live here?” I scowled at the desert. “I mean,
where things actually live.”

“
Mekaema
’s light
brings warmth, light and darkness in their proper times. But the
dark face of the world is cursed, and feared. It is called the
Morsta Khay, but we call it K’hama, the Void. The myths say that
when the Ungulion came, they brought with them a huge rock that
became the cornerstone of their Citadel, and that the world
shuddered when it was established.”

“
Like an
asteroid?”

By the look on his face I could tell the
word held no meaning for him. I tried to imagine the Citadel,
flooded in darkness on the other side of the world. I slowed up,
staring in dread toward the horizon.

“
Yatol…we’re going there,
aren’t we? That’s what I’m doing here. We’re going to the
Citadel.”

Yatol swung around and came back to me,
clasping my shoulders and looking me in the eyes. “Merelin, let it
pass. We aren’t going to the Citadel. Not now.”

“
But I know…” I still
stared past him, dazed. “I have to go.”