He sat down and allowed himself a short pull from the waterbag. He thought of that momentary dizziness earlier in the day, that sense of being almost untethered from the world, and wondered what it might have meant.
Why should that dizziness make him think of his horn and the last of his old friends, both lost so long ago at Everest Hill? He still had the guns his father's guns" and surely they were more important than horns or even friends.
Were they not? The question was very troubling, but since there seemed to be no answer but the obvious one, he put it aside, possibly for later contemplation.
He searched the desert and then looked up at the sun, which was now slipping into a far quadrant of the sky that was, disturbingly, not quite true west.
He got up, removed his threadbare gloves from his belt, and began to pull devil grass for his fire, which he laid over the ashes the ebony man had left.
He found the irony, like his appetite, badly appealing. He did not take the flint and steel from his purse until the remains of the day were only fugitive heat in the ground beneath him and a sardonic orange line on the monochrome boundary.
He sat with his gun drawn across his lap and watched the southeast patiently, looking toward the mountains, not hoping to see the thin straight line of smoke from a new campfire, not hoping to see an orange spark of flame, but watching anyway because watching was a part of it, and had its bitter fulfillment.
You will not see what you do not look for, maggot, Cort would have said. Open the clumps the gods gave you, will you not? But there was nothing. He was close, but only relatively so.
Not close enough to see smoke at dusk, or the orange wink of a campfire.
He spread the flint down the steel rod and struck his spark to the dry, shredded grass, muttering the old and powerful nonsense words as he did, Spark-a-dark, where is my sire? Will I rest me?
Will I dwell me?
Bless this camp with fire as it was strange how some of the childhood words and ways fell by the wayside and we were left behind, while others clamped tight and rode for life, maturing the heavier to carry as time passed.
He lay down upwind of his little blazon, letting the dream smoke blow out toward the waste. The wind, except for occasional gyrating dust devils, was constant.
Above, the stars were unwinking, also constant. Suns and worlds by the million. Dizzying constellations, cold fire in every major hue.
As he watched, the sky washed from violet to ebony.
A meteor whittled a brief, amazing arc below Old Mother and winked out. The fire threw strange shadows as the devil grass burned its slow way down into new patterns, not ideograms but a precise crisscross vaguely frightening in its knowledge surety.
He had laid his fuel in a pattern that was not artful but only feasible. It spoke of blacks and whites. It spoke of a man who might straighten bad pictures in strange hotel rooms.
The fire burned its steady, slow blaze, and illusions danced in its incandescent nature. The slayer did not see. The two ways, art, and craft were welded together as he slept.
The wind whined, a seer with cancer in her belly. Now and then a perverse downdraft would make the smoke whirl and puff toward him and he breathed some of it in.
It built dreams in the same way that a small hassle may build a treasure in an oyster. The slayer occasionally moaned with the wind. The stars were as neutral to this as they were to battles, crucifixions, and resurrections.
This also would have pleased him. He had come down off the last of the foothills leading the mule, whose eyes were already dead and bulging with the heat.
He had passed the last town three weeks before, and since then there had only been the deserted coach track and an occasional huddle of border inhabitants sod places.
The huddles had worsened into single dwellings, most inhabited by pariahs or madmen. He found the madmen better corporation. One had given him stainless steel, Silva compass, and begged him to give it to the Man Yeshua.
The slayer took it gravely. If he saw Him, he would turn over the compass. He did not expect that he would, but anything was possible.
Once he saw a maleek—this one a man with a raven's head—but the misbegotten thing fled at his hail, cawing what might have been words. Or might even have been a curse?
Five days had passed since the last hut, and he had begun to suspect there would be no more when he topped the last eroded hill and saw the familiar low-backed sod roof.
The dweller, a surprisingly young man with a wild shock of strawberry hair that reached almost to his waist, was weeding a slight stand of corn with serious abandon.
The donkey let out a gasping grunt and the dweller looked up, glaring blue eyes coming target-center on the slayer in a moment.
The dweller was unarmed, with no bolt nor bah the slayer could see. Raised both hands in curt salute to the stranger and then bent to the corn again, humping up the row next to his hut with back bent, rolling devil grass and a periodic stunted corn plant over his shoulder.
His hair flopped and flew in the wind that now came quickly from the desert, with nothing to break it.
The slayer came down the hill slowly, leading the donkey on which his waterskins sloshed. He paused by the edge of the lifeless-looking corn patch, drew a drink from one of his skins to start the saliva, and spat it into the arid soil.
Life for your crop or Life for your own, the dweller answered and stood up. His back popped aloud.
He surveyed the slayer without fear. The little of his face visible between beard and hair seemed unmarked by the rot, and his eyes, while a bit wild, seemed sane.