Endings and Beginnings
The sun had barely set that evening when Pelagia awoke to a furious din of
chipping, cracking, and raised voices. The voices were what truly shook her
from sleep; so many throats were shouting and whooping that she was unable
to pick any individual one from the babble. She crawled to the door,
peeking out the flap of the tent, and squinted at the darkening sky.
Something within her still felt uneasy at rising when the great stat itself
was retiring, though she understood the reluctance of the desert folk to
travel beneath the merciless eye of heat it became in their land. The
clamor issued from the direction of the great insect she and Shasa had
encountered the previous night. Once Pela had fully awakened, she shuffled
over the dunes to investigate. All about the exposed sections of the
creature were members of the tribe; those with weapons were chipping away
at the shell, sawing at the mandibles, or scraping about the undamaged eye.
Shasa was among these; she had procured an awl from somewhere, and was
gleefully poking at the chitin protecting the creature's insides. Upon
seeing Pela, she let out one of the long whoops that had roused her from
sleep, leapt from the top of the creature's head, and bounded across the
sand to meet her friend. She gestured toward the slain monstrosity as
though it were a precious gem.
"See? It had tough skin. Our weapons are already in need of sharpening, and
the stars have hardly moved at all in their circle. They had only just
begun to come out when we began."
Pela was uncertain why this news should bring such delight to the desert
folk, so she merely smiled, watching them hack away at the ant lion as
Shasa continued.
"We will only take some of the shell now... when it has lain in the sun for
some time, we will come back this way. By that time, the sun will have
burned the foul bits from inside, and only the shell will remain. Perhaps
it will bleach white, like bone. We can make arrow and spear heads from the
shell, and... oh, all sorts of things."
Pela raised an eyebrow, skeptical.
"All sorts of things?"
Shasa threw back her head and laughed, unperturbed.
"We will figure something out. Too bad we can't eat it."
Pela was unable to suppress a grimace of disgust at the words; the creature
smelled /foul/... but then, so did many fish before they were cleaned.
"I feel the same way, in truth." Shasa admitted. "I'm glad it is of more
use in other ways. Now. Before we continue, I want to ask you something."
She tapped her stone, now simply a perfect sphere of sandstone with an
archaic symbol etched in the center, dangling limply from her staff. "I
told you where I came by my stone. Where did you find yours, and what did
it tell you?"
[Ali: Tell me of the waters of your homeland, Muad'Dib.]
[Laris: Well, they're, uh... large. And watery. ::nodnod:: ^_^]
Pela glanced down at her bracelet. "Well, it... was the strangest thing.
I was diving for oysters, and-"
Shasa blinked. "You were what?"
"Diving," the girl repeated, this time more slowly in case the
difference in their accents had confused her.
Shasa refused to elaborate, but the intense furrow of her brow told Pela
that the absence of water in this place was inhibiting her
understanding.
"You see.. back home, we search the waters for oysters. It's a hard
shelled creature, the insides can be cooked and eaten, but some of them
carry pearls, so-"
Shasa frowned again, making a small noise in the back of her throat.
Pela bit down on her lower lip gently, she could see that this would
take a great deal of explaining in the future. An idea struck her, and
she opened the pouch on her belt, retrieving one of the tiny, precious
spheres. "We look for these," she said simply.
Shasa leaned forward, squinted critically, and the furrow left her brow.
"Oh. What is... how did you... how much are they.." It was clear that
her merchant's sense was already working away on this new development.
Pela pressed the item into her hand gently, and Shasa continued to gaze
down at it as the taller girl spoke. "But one day I was diving, and I
started to black out from the pressure. I had a dream there, where I was
in a strange city, full of empty-eyed people. My face was covered in
ash, so I walked to a fountain and washed it away. When I looked down
into the fountain again, I was..." her eyes widened. "...wearing that
same uniform that appeared when I used the stone last night. When I woke
up from the dream, another from my clan had pulled me back to safety,
and instead of a pearl, that oyster contained the stone." She twisted
the firmly tied bracelet on her wrist a bit, running her thumb over the
smooth oval surface. "So that is all I have to tell... except that I
want to find that city. I want to know what it means."
Shasa tilted her head to one side, trying very hard to make sense of all
this
diving and oysters and pearls. Well... the pearl made sense. It was
perfectly
round and smooth, and the starlight glinted off it in a way that made it
resemble the precious stones she had seen set in rings and brooches in the
city.
She had never one quite like this one, however. She heaved a great sigh and
handed the tiny sphere back to Pela, making a mental note to try and haggle
it
out of her one day... not now, however, when she might talking about this
'giving things away' again. That made Shasa nervous.
"I only know one city," she told Pela, but it is /the/ city, as far as I
know.
It isn't far from here. I will accompany you there. If you are meant to find
this city because of your stone, perhaps I am meant to go with you because
of
mine."
Pela smiled, tucking the pearl back into her belt pouch, about to nod, then
looked toward the shell left by the creature they had slain together, her
face
clouding over.
"What about your tribe? Don't they need you to find water for them?"
Shasa laughed at that, then turned to watch the rest of her tribe gleefully
picking the ant lion apart section by section.
"They do," she agreed, "but the entire tribe was going to the city as
well. Now
there are two reasons." She frowned for a moment, considering. If these
dreams
meant something truly significant, something that would require her to leave
the
tribe for any real amount of time, it meant something she had even begun to
ponder. It meant that she might have to procreate. "Bother..." she
muttered.
"Is something wrong?" Pela asked.
"Not yet." Shasa answered, shrugging. "We shall have to see, I
suppose. Tomorrow
night, we'll head for the city, and see what is fated to happen
there. Besides,
I want to see what Abdul thinks of that thing's... mmm... 'hide.'" She
pointed
toward the insect with the butt of her staff. "I'll be surprised if it's the
most unusual thing this stone draws me to."
"You get that feeling too, do you?" Pela commented wryly. The
water-finder only grinned.
"Well, come on then, if you have all your things packed," Shasa said,
pulling the mask that had been hanging around her neck up to cover her
nose and mouth. "We're losing night fast, and I have to make arrangements
with the chieftan if we're to go tonight." with a gesture, she turned on
her heel and began walking away.
"Wha..?" Pela blinked in confusion. "Aren't we waiting for everyone else
to take down the camp?"
Shasa cast her eyes skyward for a moment in exasperation. "No, we'd best
go on ahead. Especially if there are going to be more strange monsters
hanging about. I don't want to endanger the rest of the Clan. They'll
catch up to us at the next stop on the trade route."
"Oh," was all Pela could think to say in response as she jogged across
the sand dune to catch up with Shasa. "So.. what *is* the next stop?"
Shasa jabbed a finger in one direction. "North, several days' walk.
There's a mountain with a whole Clan living inside-" she paused, giving
her friend another gesture. "Hey, sort of like you! Anyway, we never go
*in*, but they'll send someone up to the camp for trading. Probably
because most of them are horrible, eyeless cave-mutants." She gave a
shudder.
Pela's eyes suddenly got very round, though she looked off to one side
and pretended to be interested in one of the many identical sand dunes
to hide it. "...eyeless... cave-mutants?" she repeated in a tiny voice.
Shasa nodded, looking quite grave. "'s what I said. But don't worry,
none of them have come out to feast on our insides. Not yet anyway!" She
gave a chuckle, and set back into her brisk walking pace.
Pela simply stared after her, lagging behind for a moment or two before
she came back to her senses. "...suddenly giant monsters popping out of
the sand don't seem so bad..." she muttered softly, and set off again,
following the desert nomad across the sands.
x
