Parched (6 page)

She lurched to her feet, her eyes roving from the boy's festering sores to his bony elbows and knees. His lips were cracked and bleeding, and his eyelids hung slack, the whites of his eyes yellowed and tacky. His pulse raced beneath paper-thin skin and his legs twitched as if he were still stumbling across the desert.

What was he running from?

The sores on his wrists and ankles looked like the marks a collar might leave, if it was bound too tight. Sarel's father had told her of people who collared their dogs, chaining them to one place so long that sores sprung up on the skin.

Who would do that to a little boy? A shiver rippled across her shoulders.

Who
was he running from?

The dogs swiveled, all at once, ears pricked, eyes fixed on a jumble of rocks just past the homestead. A chittering alarm sounded, and the small hairs at the back of Sarel's neck stood on end. Seconds later, a dark blur dove out of the clouds. The raptor screamed, then banked away from the rocks, a wriggling dassie rat trapped between its claws.

Sarel's hands were still clenched as she turned back to the boy lying at her feet. “I don't know why you want to keep him.”

Nandi ducked her head under Sarel's fingers, twisting her neck to look up into the girl's face.

Sarel felt the resistance leave her body in a long breath. The boy would need water, and food. Not that they had any to spare.

Sarel opened her woven grass satchel and frowned at the clump of fruit and aloe she had gathered that morning. Food that she had planned to take with her when they left the homestead for good. She spilled it all onto her mat and began cutting the aloe spears into short, juicy strips.

Fine. She would get the boy healthy.

But then he was on his own.

Light lay across Musa's face in uneven stripes. He could feel it warm on his cheeks and glowing orange against the insides of his eyelids. He lay on his back, on something almost soft, his legs and arms splayed at all angles.

He blinked. There wasn't ever any light in his shack, and Sivo never let him just lie around without his hands and feet chained.

Musa blinked again and rolled his head to the side. His breath caught in his throat with a rasping sound and he coughed, his whole body seizing.

Lying nose to nose with him was the largest dog Musa had ever seen. She had a black snout and soft wrinkles puckering the space between rich, brown eyes. Her coat was cinnamon-colored, lying like a thick blanket over hard muscles. The hair ran backwards along her spine, all the way up to her neck.

The dog whipped her tail through the air, and a pink tongue shot out and licked Musa on the nose. He jerked back, his hands flying up to protect his face. The air filled with dust from the dog's thumping tail, and Musa sneezed.

He lifted his hands away from his face and stared at his wrists in surprise. Strips of a green plant with a tough outer skin and a gooey underside were wrapped around them. He lifted a wobbling leg into the air and turned it from side to side. His ankles, too.

Sivo had never bothered to heal the boy's cuts and sores—as long as Musa could stand and shuffle around with his dowsing sticks, little things like wrists worn raw didn't matter.

Musa lowered his leg. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked around. He was in a large wire cage; there was nothing but dry desert grasses, withered shrubs, and hard dirt beyond. Someone had woven bark through the steel links in the roof, enough to shade a trough for the dogs, the mat he lay on, and another bed of sorts tucked into the opposite corner. A rock held open the chainlink door.

Musa sank down onto the mat. His arms ached from holding himself up, even for such a short time. The dog crept closer, sniffing at his breath and nudging his fingers.

The door was open. No one was guarding him, except maybe the dog. But she didn't seem to want to hurt him. He could leave. He wasn't a prisoner here.

Movement outside the kennel caught Musa's attention. A girl with white-blond hair cut in a jagged line at her chin strode through the yard, a dozen dogs trotting around her. Ruddy skin peeked out of patchwork clothes that hung from her like laundry on a line. She was thin, but she didn't look weak. Her head swiveled toward Musa, her pale eyes narrowing. Her whole body stiffened and her hands curled into the fur of the dog at her hip.

The Tandie had said that no one could survive outside the city. But there she was, frowning over Musa, her gaze moving from the dog at his side and back to him again. She shrugged a bulging satchel over her head, knelt beside him, and upended a scattering of fruit onto the ground. Her mouth pulled in a tight line as she sliced through the rind of a thin- skinned mangosteen and pried the halves apart.

Musa swallowed, saliva trickling into his mouth as he watched her lick a drop of juice off her palm.

“Why are you helping me?”

The girl flinched at the sound of his voice. She arranged the fruit on a leaf and slid it over to him, shifting to unwrap the vines that held the aloe in place around his ankles.

Musa looked away from the angry, glistening flesh underneath.

“Who are you?”

Her hands stilled. She didn't look up when she spoke.

“Sarel.” She formed the word thickly, as if it were unfamiliar on her tongue. “Eat.”

Musa picked up a mangosteen and placed it in his mouth. He chewed and tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry and instead he sputtered, choking. Sarel exhaled in a sharp burst and pulled him upright until he was hunched over, spitting the seed into his palm. The dog was on her feet now, nosing her blunt head under Musa's chin and licking the juice from his jaw.

Musa stared at the massive head in front of him. “I've never seen a dog friendly like this—somebody's pet. In the city, dogs are wild. They're mean.”

“It's people that make dogs mean,” Sarel said in a clipped voice. “And they're not my pets.”

Musa tried another bite. He swallowed, this time without choking.

Sarel tied off the vines that held the fresh bits of aloe in place around his ankles and moved up to his wrists. She peeled back the yellowed strips one by one.

Musa didn't ask any more questions. As soon as Sarel finished the last knot, she backed away from him. She slung the empty satchel over her shoulder and hurried out of the kennel, as if she couldn't get away from him fast enough.

The dogs shook as they stood, whipping a spray of dust into the air and trotting after her. Sarel hadn't gone a dozen steps when the big one with the watching eyes rubbed up against her, shoving her snout under the girl's hand. The tension in Sarel's shoulders slackened and her body settled into a shuffling rhythm as they set out again into the desert.

Musa rolled onto his side and folded his knees into his chest. She was the one acting like a mean city dog—scared and bone-thin and ready to bite. So why was she helping him?

It didn't matter. He had made it. He could feel the water, a constant thrum at the base of his skull. Underground, just south of where he lay, wide around as a lake.

In the morning, when he was feeling stronger, Musa would find a new pair of dowsing sticks and mark out the edges—see if he could find a place where the water came aboveground.

If it ever did.

But he couldn't let
her
see. If Sarel found out what he could do, she might betray him, like Dingane. Or use him. Hurt him, like Sivo.

No, he wouldn't tell her anything. He would have to find the water without her watching. No one would have that kind of power over him again.

Everything Sarel owned was spread out on the mat in front of her. A bone-handled knife, a square of leath-er pierced with a dozen sweet thorn needles, a long-stemmed ladle, and a blunt shovel blade with a branch lashed to the place where a handle should have been.

Three deflated water bladders were stacked in her lap. Sarel nodded as she counted, her forehead pinched in concentration. Six more lined the fence, belled out with all the water she could scrape from the grotto pool. There was enough left in the gaps between stones to last the pack the few days more she'd need to find fruit and nuts to equal the water. It took twice as long, gathering food for Musa, too. But she was almost ready.

She rolled up to her feet and paced the length of the kennel, stepping over the sprawled dogs in her way. Musa was sleeping in the corner, an arm draped over Chakide's ribs. They had to go, whether he had recovered enough to travel or not. Sarel swatted through a cloud of gnats, slapping at the air long after the swarm had gone.

Back and forth she paced, back and forth.

And then she stopped and swiveled, peering across the homestead to the curve of stones that marked the grotto entrance.

They had to go. But she would take something from this place with her.

Sarel swiped the knife off her mat and shuffled down the grotto path. She checked over her shoulder, to make sure no one was watching, and ducked down the curving stairs. Her eyes went straight to the spout and the ring of burnished stones that surrounded it.

Sarel unfolded her knife and dug at the mortar around a white stone with a black vein through its center. She worked carefully, leaning into the mosaic wall and squinting in the dim light.

With a
click
that echoed through the small room, the stone dropped from the wall into Sarel's palm. Her fingers curled around its smooth edges and gripped tight.

The pack returned, tails high, prancing around Icibi and Buttu and Thando, who dragged a bloodied wildebeest between them. Musa watched the dogs, their muscles bulging, drag the animal across the dirt. Weakened by hunger and dehydrated as it was, their kill was still three times the size of the biggest dog.

Nandi rose and sniffed the carcass. The other dogs waited, licking their jowls, tails sweeping up a cloud of dust. Nandi sank her teeth into the tough hide, the muscles of her hind legs straining against the ground as she pulled. She ripped off a leg and brought it to Sarel, who took the offering and began stripping away the hide, draping lengths of flesh and sinew over the links in the fence.

Musa winced at the dripping blood. “Aren't you going to cook that?”

Sarel ignored him.

“Won't we get sick?”

“Do I look sick to you?” she snapped.

Musa didn't answer. Instead, he began collecting sticks and bits of dried grass and tucking them under his arm. Like a chicken pecking at feed, he bent and righted himself again, making a slow loop around the homestead.

When he returned and dropped his pile of sticks, Musa scraped away a bare patch of earth downwind from the kennel. He paused for a minute, leaning against the steel post, waiting for his breath to slow.

Next he set out for rocks, his whole body leaning back to offset their weight as he carried one at a time and arranged them in a tight circle. Then he turned his back to the wind, dropped a tuft of brown grass into the center of the ring of stones, and hunched low to the ground, rubbing a pair of sticks together until a thread of smoke rose into the air.

Each day, while Sarel was out foraging for food, he had walked to the dry riverbed, to the edge of the water. His limbs trembling with the effort, he had stood above the vast underground lake, the strength of it humming through him.

Musa had seen the scorched rectangle where a house had been and the pair of rocky graves in the middle of the yard. He had seen enough to know why Sarel turned away from the fire, cringing as if the dry crackle of twigs grated against her eardrums. To understand why she crouched, ready to break into a run at any moment.

Musa fed the tiny flame that burst from the tinder until it crackled into a small fire. He speared the strips of meat and dangled them over the flame. The juices popped and sizzled as they fell onto the coals. His stomach gurgled as the oily scent rose into the air, his mouth filling with saliva.

When a pocket of sap burst, loud as the crack of a gun and scattering a spray of sparks across the dirt, Sarel shot up into the air.

Musa ducked his eyes away from the terror that washed across her face. He shifted until his back was to her, until his thin frame blocked the dancing flames from her view. He waited until the meat had cooled and he had stamped out the last of the coals before he brought Sarel her share.

She took it and she ate. But it was late, the stars high overhead, before the tremors coursing through her thin frame finally stopped.

Sarel picked her way along the path to the kennel, and the dogs padded quietly behind her. It had been a long day, but her satchel was full of aloe spears and wild pears and sour figs.

It didn't matter where she walked—the earth was parched, dotted with a few hardy plants that somehow sucked enough moisture out of the ground to stay alive. Even those few were smaller and shriveled and harder to find.

With a long sigh, Sarel closed the chainlink door behind her, latching the pack inside for the night. Musa's eyes flew open as the U-shaped bolt clanged shut, and he flung his hands up to shield his face.

Sarel lowered her eyes while his breathing settled back to normal, squeezing herself between Nandi and Buttu, who were turning in tight circles over her sleeping mat. She rolled onto her back and tucked her arms under her head as the dogs flopped on either side of her.

Dusk bled into dark, broken only by the lonely call of a banded owl.

 

Sarel woke suddenly in the middle of the night, her hair matted with sweat, her cheeks wet. She gasped for breath, blinking back the memory of guns and blood and suffocating smoke.

She reached for Nandi, but the dog wasn't there.

Sarel propped herself up on her elbows and looked around. It was quiet, except for a thin scraping sound to the south. The full moon shone out of a clear, cold sky. White light glinted off the chainlink fencing and the moist tips of the dogs' noses, off the chalky white deposits that marked the steep hillsides in the distance and the flickering leaves of the sweet thorn trees that danced on snatches of wind. The open kennel door swung inward, clanging like a bell as it struck against the steel post and swung out again.