2The First Day's Chase

Here is a thing they do not tell you about ruin: it is very quick, and then it is very slow. Quick, because it took me the length of one breath to sell the homesick wind and lose everything I was ever going to be. Slow, because the undoing of it took a thousand days, and I shall not rush them for you, though I rushed them badly enough at the time.

I did not stop to think, which was the first sensible thing I had done all day. I corked my stall — I, who never left the stall, not for the noon heat nor the merchant-feasts nor the once a caravan passed with a dancing bear — I threw the striped cloth over my shelves of blue bottles, and I ran into the white glare after a stranger made of wind, which is, I will grant you, not a plan so much as a direction. But a direction is where every good chase begins, and every bad one, and you cannot always tell at the start which yours will be.

The stranger was already small on the eastern road, a grey smudge going the way no one goes in the white hour, toward the far shimmer where the Salt Road runs off the edge of the known and down into the Bright Waste proper. On foot I would lose her by nightfall. On foot I would die by the third nightfall, a thousand days from water, which is the plain arithmetic of the desert and takes no bribes. I needed a caravan. And a caravan, blessedly, was watering at the Ninth Waystation that very hour, forty camels and a hundred souls bound east for the salt-cities, and I ran to its master with my heart going like a kicked drum and my fortune warm in my fist.

“Passage,” I gasped. “East. Fast as you go. I can pay — I can pay triple —” and I opened my hand on the three coins the stranger had left me, the warm strange metal, my whole unhaggled fortune.

The caravan master looked at the coins. Then he looked at me the way you look at a scorpion in your boot. And he stepped back — a big man, a hard man, stepping back from a girl of fourteen — and he said, in a voice gone careful, “Where did you come by wind-metal, child?” and would not touch it, not for all the east, and turned his shoulder to me and shouted his people on to loading, and that was my first lesson in the coins, which I will save for its proper place except to tell you this: the stranger had paid me in the only coin she had, and it was not a coin that buys bread.

So there I stood, richer than I had ever been and unable to purchase a cup of water with it, which is the sort of joke the Salt Road loves and I did not, then, find funny at all.

Now, at the tail of that caravan there was a boy. A water-boy, a nothing, a skinny brown reed of a child about my own age with a face like a question and a leather ticket on a thong round his neck — and I knew that ticket, every waystation brat knows that ticket, it is a bonded place on the caravan, water and a camel’s shade and a share of the pot, all the way to the salt-cities, earned or bought and worth more than gold to the likes of us. His name, though I did not trouble to learn it until it was too late to be rid of him, was Rafiq.

I will tell you plainly what I did, because I promised you the true telling and this is the part that does me no credit. I cheated him. I went to Rafiq with tears I did not feel and a story I made up between one step and the next — a dying grandmother in the salt-cities, a last chance to reach her, oh would he, could he, only lend me his ticket for the journey and I would pay him back tenfold at the other end, on my honour, on my mother’s grave — and I was the best talker at the Ninth Waystation, I could haggle a salt-merchant to tears, and what is one skinny water-boy to a girl who could do that? He gave me the ticket. Of course he gave me the ticket. He had a face like a question and I gave it the answer it wanted to hear, and he lifted the thong over his own head and put it over mine with his own hands, and wished my grandmother well.

I climbed onto that caravan on a lie, and it pulled east into the Waste after my grey stranger, and I thought myself clever. I want you to hear how sure I was. I had a bonded place, water for a thousand days, and the road running straight to the thing I chased, and I had paid for none of it, and I thought that was cleverness — the getting of a thing for nothing. I did not yet understand that the getting of a thing for nothing is only the borrowing of it at a rate you have not been told.

Because the boy would not shake loose.

He walked. That is all. He had given me his ticket and his shade and his share of the pot, and he had nothing left to ride, and he could have gone back to the waystation and cursed my name in comfort — but he was bound east too, it turned out, for reasons of his own that I was too pleased with myself to ask, and so he simply walked, at the tail of his own caravan, in the dust of the camels that used to be his to lead, keeping pace on his own two feet with the place he had given away. When I looked back from my stolen shade there he was, small and steady in the heat-shimmer, not calling out, not begging, not weeping — only coming, the way the tide comes, the way the truth comes, without hurry and without stopping, and I found I could not look at him for very long and I found I could not stop looking.

“He’ll die out there,” I told myself, and was ashamed, and was not ashamed enough to give the ticket back. That is the exact measure of what I was, that first day: ashamed, and not ashamed enough. Write it on my stall if I ever have one again.

We came upon the first of them at dusk.

A little caravan, eastbound like us, halted where no caravan halts — square in the open Waste with the night coming and the cold coming behind it — and its people were not making camp. They were sitting down in the sand, all of them, camels and children and hard old salt-men alike, sitting down and facing west, back the way they had come, and weeping — not with grief, I have seen grief and this was worse — weeping with a terrible sweetness, with longing, each of them turned toward some home behind the horizon and unable to rise and go to it and unable to go on, caught fast in a wanting so great it had stopped them where they stood. One old woman had her arms held out to the empty west and was saying a name, over and over, so tenderly it broke your heart, and would not be moved, and her son knelt weeping beside her, homesick himself, for a home three thousand miles and forty years behind him.

I knew that weather. God help me, I had weighed it out by the ounce a hundred times. It was the homesick wind, spilled loose and blowing wide, and it had passed this way not an hour before us, going east, and it had done to a whole caravan of strangers what it was made to do to one paying soul at their lowest hour — and it had not even been trying yet.

“What is wrong with them?” whispered Rafiq, come up beside me in the dusk, close enough now to be whispered to, and I opened my mouth to lie and found, for once, that I could not.

“I am,” I said. And east, under the first stars, the grey smudge went on toward the salt-cities and the one city beyond them, carrying my dearest bottle, and I got down off my stolen camel and started walking, because a girl who has done a thing like this has no business riding while a boy she cheated walks, and because the chase, I understood now, was going to cost me the whole way, and had only just begun to make its charges.