The Song of the Dunes

[Miranda]

Sea waves are green and wet,
But up from where they die,
Rise others vaster yet,
And those are brown and dry.

They are the sea made land
To come at the fisher town,
And bury in solid sand
The men she could not drown.

She may know cove and cape,
But she does not know mankind
If by any change of shape,
She hopes to cut off mind.

Men left her a ship to sink:
They can leave her a hut as well;
And be but more free to think
For the one more cast-off shell.
(- Sand Dunes by R. Frost)​

Sevarcos II

A cart drove between two massive bloodwoods and stopped. These were the ruling trees on the remote outskirts of the city, rising above the involved scrub and sand with the simplicity of true grandeur. So the cart stopped, grazing the hairy side of a tree, and the Dewback, sweated and stolid as the tree, sighed and took root.

The man who sat in the cart got down. He rubbed his hands together, because already it was growing cold, a curdle of cold cloud in a pale sky, and copper in the west. On the air one could smell the braziers of cooking in the distance. The desert world grew uncomfortably chill at duskfall.

As the man rubbed his hands, the friction of cold skin intensified the coldness of the air and the solitude of that place. Birds looked from twigs, and the eyes of passing beasts of burden were drawn to what was happening.
The man lifting a bundle from a cart. A black Bha'lir lifting his leg on a termite nest. The lip drooping on the sweaty Dewback.

Then the man took an axe and struck at the side of a hairy tree, more to hear the sound than for any other reason. And the sound was cold and loud. The man struck at the tree, and struck, till several white chips had fallen. He looked at the scar in the side of the tree. The silence was immense. It was the first time anything like this had happened in that part of the desert.

More quickly then, as if deliberately breaking with a dream, he took the harness from the Dewback, leaving a brown-black pattern of sweat. He hobbled the strong fetlocks of the beast and stuck the nosebag on its bald face. The man made a lean-to with bags and a few saplings. He built a fire. He sighed at last, because the lightning of his small fire had kindled in him the first warmth of content. Of being somewhere. That particular part of the desert had been made his by the entwining fire. It licked at and swallowed the loneliness. The man was at home in the dunes. A child of the desert.

By this time also the black Bha'lir had come and sat at the fire, near, though not beside the man, who was not intimate with his animals. He did not touch or address them. Though he had named the beautiful, ferocious feline predator Sheikh. It was enough for his beasts to be there, at a decent distance. So the Bha'lir sat. His face had grown sharp with attention. He would protect his master, through pack loyalty alone.

The man, Namir "Flying Snow" Korrero, was a young man. Life had not yet operated on his face. He was good to look at; also, it would seem, good. Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that was the irony of agility.

All around, the desert was disappearing. In that light of late evening, under the white sky, the black limbs of desert-trees, the black and brooding scrub, were being folded into one. Only the fire held out. And inside the circle of its light Namir's face was unconcerned as he rubbed tobacco in the palms of his hands, a square of tinkling paper stuck to his lower lip.
The black Bha'lir whistled through his pointed nose. In the light of the fire the bristles of his muzzle glistened. As he watched for an end to this interminable act.

There was the sound of tin plate, steaming tea on tin, the dead thump of flour. Birds babbled, settling themselves on a roost. The young Dewback, bright amongst his reptilian skin, and the young and hungry Bha'lir were there, watching the young man. There was a unity of eyes and firelight.

The gilded man was cutting from a lump of meat. It made the Bha'lir cavort like a mad, onyx spirit. The man was throwing to the Bha'lir, while pretending, according to his nature, not to do so. The Bha'lir gulped at the chunks of fatty salted meat, the collar working forward on his neck, the eyes intent within his head. The man ate, swallowing with some ugliness, swallowing to get it down, he was alone, and afterwards swilling the hot, metallic tea, almost to get it finished with.

But warmth came. Now he felt good. He smelled the long, slow scent of chaff slavered in the nosebag by the munching Dewback. He smelled the smell of black wood burning. He propped his head against the damp saddle discarded by the Dewback. And the cavern of fire was enormous, labyrinthine, that received the man. He branched and flamed, glowed and increased, and was suddenly extinguished in the little puffs of smoke and tired thoughts.

And then he slept, tomorrow he would finish his journey, and greet the great capital city of Sevarcos II after months of roaming the desert. He would finally return to his home, his place amongst the Merkatua...