The Desert

Story © 1997 - 2002 Gary Jensen. All Rights Reserved. Comments: WolfeByte!

Derek stands looking out the window.  The late sun throws dark shadows across his eyes, leaving the rest a stark contrast.  I wonder what he sees outside, as the wagon moves across the desert.  I sit cross-legged, oiling the steel of my sword, watching him quietly.  Dereks’ eyes flick to mine, then to the weapon I hold, staring at the death it represents.  The blade gleams even in the gloom where I sit, so far from the light of the window.

“You ever use it?”  Derek asks.

The voices remind me.  “Yes.” I say, “Long ago.”

He looks at me again and then at the sword.  “To kill people?”

“What else?”  I ask in return.  Derek looks away, out at the dead land.  I watch, wanting to know what he thought.

“I thought...”  Derek begins, “I thought, maybe animals, or something.”

I think about animals.  I think about my father and his voice, still accusing me, forever.  “Why kill an animal?  With a sword?”

“Tell me about it.”  He says.

“Why?  It was a war, with the Dark.”  He looks at me again.  I put away the sword.  “I try to forget.”

“Tell me.” He pauses. “The first time.”  We wait together, watching the dying light.  I wonder what to tell him, what will let him forgive me.  Time passes slowly in the growing dark.

“You killed me...” My dead father prompts me, his voice a loud whisper above the murmur of the others.  I am never to be allowed to forget.

“I was made this way.  It is what I wanted, I guess.”  I look at him, study him.  “I was a slayer.  Killing was easy, even then.”  We wait some more, wanting the dark to hide us.  I wonder why it matters.  “There at the Temple.  I was fifteen.  My father...”

“Confessssss!” He hisses at me.  The others laugh, but Derek just watches, looking away when I meet his eyes.  I remember...

My fathers blood a wet spray across my hands.  The sound like a ripping sponge as the blade parts his belly.  His startled, gurgling screams as he tries to hold himself in. My mothers scream as he falls.  The slick coils of his intestines as they fall between his hands across my feet.  The spreading red pool across the mottled marble floor, seeping into hidden places beneath the cracks.  The Wraith awakens and the screaming priests dying.  The laughing in my skull as I watch my fathers blood disappear into the metal of the sword.  The laughing that could’ve been God...

I can’t see Derek.  The light is gone from the world again.  I wonder how long we’ve been sitting in the darkness, and what I’ve said to him there.  I remember the laughing and what it said.  I shiver but it’s just a memory.

“Was it God?’  Derek asks finally, his voice close to me.  I never knew he moved.

“No.  Maybe.”  I wasn’t sure, even now.  “I don’t know.”

“God would not curse anything.”  He says.

“God has no rules.”  I reply.

The vehicle lurches to a halt, it’s archaic engine shuddering into stillness.  In the quiet we feel the wind rock it around us, throwing grit against the sides.  There is a rustle of cloth and the glare of a lamp being lit.  Shadows dance wildly on the walls.  One of the Strange Sisters stands staring at Derek, sitting across from me.  Her painted red smile looks psychotic in the jumping light.

“Dee, you and your friend can go to bed now.”  She tells him, with her twisted grin.  Her Sister enters from the cab behind her.  “We are.”  They finish together.  They disappear into the overhead sleeper.  We hear them undress.  They giggle and shush each other, trying to be quiet.

Derek sleeps easily, and I watch him.  The voices of my dead talk with me in the dark, reminding me of their deaths and the home I destroyed.  “...you killed me...” says my father, still surprised.

“Do you suffer for it?”  Another asks.  “Do we torment you?”

“He will find you...”  Nameless voice in the crowd.  I think of the Wizard.

“Already has...” chimes His brother.  “She will kill you, she is tainted...”

“Are you happy, child?” My mother asks me.

“Yes.”  I tell Dereks sleeping form.

“...but for how long?”

I awake beside where he was, the mattress still warm from his body.  The bell rings through the morning air.  The voices are still there.  “How long....?”  they echo from last night.  I shiver in air too hot to make me.

I slip from between the sheets, put my feet on the floor.  I watch a fly on the wall, wandering in the sun, joined by friends.  A shrill scream, “No!” comes through the walls. I move outside, the sword finding my hands.  “No!” again.

They gather around the Sisters.  The Witch stands smiling her secret smile, watching.  They pull the Sisters apart, dragging one towards her.  The other folds to the sand, sobbing, tears streaking her painted face.  The Tattooed man laughs.

I move towards the Witch, blade half drawn.  Derek is there, imposing his body in front of mine.  “Don’t.”  he pleads.

“Listen to your friend, killer.”  The Tattooed one watches me, smile gone.

“Kill them...”  says the Wraith, in my mind.

“You killed us.”  add the voices.

“Kill’em all!”

“Don’t.”  says Derek, “Please?”

I stop, the sword forgotten, held tightly.  The Witch smiles, knowing.  The Sister is held, kneeling before her.  Her shaman lover towers above her, enthralled by the Witch child beside him.  His tattoos gleam in the sun.

“Malik.”  The Witch addresses the crowd, and their God.  She waits, her eyes flicker to me a moment.  She smiles wider.  “Please, Malik, accept this creatures’ life.” We listen, the only sound their sobs.  “Bring rain for the rest, Malik, so we may yet live in Your grace.”  The Sister starts to struggle and scream again.  The Shaman laughs.

I watch the crowd move away to a killing place.  I go too, and watch her die.

In the night I listen to her sobs as the voices laugh and play in my skull.  I wonder that our voyage ends here.  The only trailers that still move are empty of sinners, sacrificed for rain.  The last Sister mourns the other one for three days, crying at night and watching others die in the light.  Derek sleeps.  When she comes in, her wrists bleeding from Christian-crosses, I am not surprised.  I hold her as she bleeds her life away.  We cry together.  When she is done, I carry her body to the desert.  Her blood brings the flies, even in the desert that seems so dead.

We watch the flies gather at the window, her blood long gone now.  The bell rings.  We look at each other, Derek and I.  His eyes show fear where before there was only glorious boredom.  I, too, felt fear for him.  I would be alone with the voices.

“It won’t be you.”  I tell him, unsure.  Derek says nothing.

We walk to the door and start outside.  I stop on the last stair and look around the circle.  The last vehicles, four left now, face the center where she and the Tattooed one stand.  In the bright sun, I squint against the glare from arid white sand and stone.  The constant wind blows it through our fading lives.  Forever, beyond the wagons, lay the dying place.

I walk and lean my back against the wall of our last home.  Derek stays watching from the door.  Others arrive slowly, reluctant.  We wait.

The Witch stands by the Tattooed Shaman, a slight child beside a feeble, drooling mad man.  She waits, watching, as pale as the sand on which she stands.  His tattoos are prominent lines on his sun-dried and darkened skin.  I stare at her, her dead eyes, and she also looks away.   I wish never to be alone. When we are all silent, she waits still a minute more.  Her eyes move across the gathered survivors.  Her gaze lingers on Derek, never touching me.  Her tiny brother, tainted now too, giggles, absurd in his suit.  She smiles. She faces me from the circle.  Walking towards me her eyes lift to my face.  She stops. 

Waiting before me, her eyes move away and then back.  I smile, sad and thinking of others I could never save.  Her smile fails at mine.  Minutes pass and I grow eager to be first, before Derek.  It would not hurt as much.  I stand straight, ready to go prepared, when she turns away.  The Shaman cackles, though nobody else finds it funny.  I still smile, though.

She walks slowly at first, then quicker around the circle.  Some cry already, and others shake.  I smile.  Derek watches, without doubt.  Her dance ends before him, as he knew it would.  She points.

Now when the man laughs, the others join in, safe again.  Derek fades into the black shaded interior.  I stare hate at her, and the voices whisper their evil thoughts.  Her brother giggles again, smiling with his missing teeth.  I also return to the dark. Derek sits, weeping in the dark.  The flies are gone, waiting at the dying grounds. I waste water on tears also, and sit near him.  He shivers in psychic chill, curling in on himself.

“We don’t have to go.”  I speak in rage and grief.  Perhaps fear of my weakness, or the thought of losing it.  He looks at me, blue eyes framed in dark hair.  His gaunt, naked torso glistens with cold sweat.  He can’t look for long, though he wants to.  “We can leave.  Run from it.”  I say, knowing the lie.

He knows too, looking at the dead wastes beyond the window.  We sit in silence. Tears stop and grief fades, never to die.

“I could kill them all.”  My smile returns.

“YESSS!”  the voices.

He rises and gets a shirt, covering pale flesh with black silk.  He brings his bag for faces to me.  He sits cross-legged before me, and closes his eyes.  I powder his body and his face.  I black his eyes, his lips.  Looking at me again, his sad eyes look from black holes in white skin.  We smile at his death image.  Then we wait.

We hear them move, restless outside.  Then they fall quiet and we know she has returned.  We move again.  I help him to his feet, giving support.  We walk out arm and arm and I leave my weapon.  We walk by the crowd, smaller then when the Sisters died. We walk by her and she doesn’t smile. We walk away from the circle of homes, towards the dying place, to die.  I let him lean on me, though he never needs it.  He stumbles but once, near a pile of stones.  I find the perfect one, without hesitation, and he smiles one last time.

The bone place is reached.  They crack like knots in a fire as we walk over them, forming a circle here, as we did at first.  The Witch stands across from me.  Our wills meet across the space, my primitive weapon hidden.  Derek walks from me, to stand alone in the middle of the ring.  She smiles.

“Thou shall not suffer a witch to live!”  She screams the words to the still dead air.  A silence as they gather their own rocks.  I wait, fearing he will not reply, wondering what difference a moment makes.

Then, “And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my savior.”  His voice is quiet and seems almost defiant.

“All go unto one place; all are of the dust and all turn to dust again.”  She replies.
He opens his arms to her, to hating her, crying, “My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”  The crowd murmurs with the voices in my head, at the words of the Messiah.  I weep again, feeling the weight of my stone.

She laughs at him, quoting, “The fool foldeth his hands together, and eateth his own flesh.”  She waits as the people move towards a frenzy. 

The final prayer, “To every thing there is a season...” Derek lifts his face to heaven and I look into her evil soul. “..a time to be born...”  she keeps staring at him.  The first stone goes wide.

I hear his prayer then, quiet and strong, “The lord is my shepherd, I shall not want...”  She never hears him, consumed by the Rite.  She never sees my tears as I will her dead.  The voices laugh at me, again.

“...time to kill...”

“...He restoreth my soul...”

“...to weep...”

“...Rightousness...”  The first stone to hit is low, bringing blood.  I raise my clumsy weapon, to kill once more as I have always done.

“...to mourn...”

“...The Shadow of Death, I will fear no Evil-”

The chanting stops, one voice fails in death and the other in fear.  My stone cracks his skull.  Blood sprays across the dust.  He crumples, a heap of flesh covered bones.  His bodies fluid is drunk by the thirsty earth.  The Witch screams.  The Shaman laughs.  Fear of me crawls like maggots through her skull.  I smile.

Watching them leave, weeping and smiling I hold Dereks body close. “It’s okay.”  he tells me, “It’s okay.”

“Jesus wept.”  I say and he doesn’t understand.

“It’s okay.  Okay...”

Nothing is okay, because, even though she fears me, come tomorrow, I would be next.