Sand: Omnibus Edition (2 page)

Palmer looked from that swath of jewels to the dense band of frost fire that bloomed back into existence as the tent was closed. This band of countless stars stretched from one dune straight over the sky to the far horizon. It was impossible to see the frost fire in town, not with all the gas fires burning at night. But here was the mark of the wastes, the stamp overhead that told a boy he was very far from home, that let him know he was in the middle of the wastes and the wilds. And not just the wilds of sand and dune but the wilds of life, those years in a man’s twenties when he shrugs off the shelter of youth and before he has bothered to erect his own. The tent-less years. The bright and blinding years in which men wander as the planets do.

A bright gash of light flicked across those fixed beacons, a shooting star, and Palmer wondered if maybe he was more akin to this. Perhaps he and Hap both. They were going places, and in a hurry. Flash and then gone, off to somewhere new.

Stumbling a little, he nearly tripped over his own boots from looking up like that. Ahead of him, Hap ducked into the largest of the tents. The canvas rustled like the sound of boots in coarse sand, the wind yelped as it leapt from one dune to the next, and the stars overhead were swallowed by the light.

3 • The Map

The men inside the tent turned their heads as Hap and Palmer slipped inside the flap. The wind scratched the walls like playful fingernails, the breeze asking to be let in. It was warm from the bodies and smelled like a bar after a work shift: sweat and rough brew and clothes worn for months.

A dune of a man waved the two boys over. Palmer figured him for Brock, the leader of this band who now claimed the northern wastes, an imposing man who had appeared seemingly out of nowhere as most brigand leaders do. Building bombs one year, serving someone else, until a string of deaths promotes a man to the top.

Palmer’s sister had warned him to steer clear of men like this. Instead of obeying her, he now steered toward the man. Palmer set his gear down near a stack of crates and a barrel of water or grog. There were eight or nine men standing around a flimsy table set in the middle of the tent. A lamp had been hung from the center support; it swayed with the push and pull of the wind on the tent frame. Thick arms plastered with tattoos were planted around the table like the trunks of small trees. The tattoos were decorated with raised scars made by rubbing grit into open wounds.

“Make room,” Brock said, his accent thick and difficult to place, perhaps a lilt of the gypsies south of Low-Pub or the old gardeners from the oasis to the west. He waved his hand between two of the men as though shooing flies from a plate of food, and with minimal grumbling, the two bearded men pressed to the side. Hap took a place at the waist-high table, and Palmer joined him.

“You’ve heard of Danvar,” Brock said, forgoing introductions and formalities. It seemed like a question, but it was not spoken like one. It was an assumption, a declaration. Palmer glanced around the table to see quite a few men watching him, some rubbing their long and knotted beards. Here, the mention of legends did not elicit an eruption of laughter. Here, grown men looked at hairless youth as if sizing them up for dinner. But none of these men had the face-tats of the cannibals to the far north, so Palmer assumed he and Hap were being sized up for this job, being measured for their worthiness and not for some stew.

“Everyone’s heard of Danvar,” Hap whispered, and Palmer noted the awe in his friend’s voice. “Will this lead us there?”

Palmer turned and surveyed his friend, then followed Hap’s gaze down to the table. The four corners of a large piece of parchment were pinned down by meaty fists, sweating mugs, and a smoking ashtray. Palmer touched the edge of the parchment closest to him and saw that the mottled brown material was thicker than normal parchment. It looked like the stretched and tanned hide of a cayote, and felt brittle as though it were very old.

One of the men laughed at Hap’s question. “You already
are
here,” he roared.

An exhalation of smoke drifted across the old drawing like a sandstorm seen from up high. One of Brock’s sausage fingers traced the very constellation Palmer had been staring at dizzily just moments before.

“The belt of the great warrior, Colorado.” The men around the table stopped their chattering and drinking. Their boss was speaking. His finger found a star every boy knew. “Low-Pub,” he said, his voice as rough as the sand-studded wind. But that wasn’t the name of the star, as Palmer could tell him. Low-Pub was a lawless town to the south of Springston, an upstart town recently in conflict with its neighbor, as the two wrestled over wells of water and oil. Palmer watched as Brock traced a line up the belt, his fingertip like a sarfer sailing the winds between the two towns and across all that contested land. It was a drawn-out gesture, as though he was trying to show them some hidden meaning.

“Springston,” he announced, pausing at the middle star. Palmer’s thought was
Home
. His gaze drifted over the rest of the map, this maze of lines and familiar clusters of stars, of arrows and hatch marks, of meticulous writing built up over the years in various fades of ink, countless voices marked down, arguing in the margins.

The fat finger resumed its passage due north—if those stars really might be taken to represent Low-Pub and Springston.

“Danvar,” Brock announced, thumping the table with his finger. He indicated the third star in the belt of great Colorado. The map seemed to suggest that that the buried world of the gods was laid out in accordance with their heavenly stars. As if man were trapped between mirrored worlds above and below. The tent swayed as Palmer considered this.

“You’ve found it?” Hap asked.

“Aye,” someone said, and the drinking and smoking resumed. The curled hide of a map threatened to roll shut with the rise of a mug.

“We have a good guess,” Brock said in that strange accent of his. “You boys will tell us for sure.”

“Danvar is said to be a mile down,” Palmer muttered. When the table fell silent, he glanced up. “Nobody’s ever dove half of that.”

“Nobody?” someone asked. “Not even your sister?”

Laughter tumbled out of beards. Palmer had been waiting for her to come up.

“It’s no mile down,” Brock told them, waving his thick hand. “Forget the legends. Danvar is here. More plunder than in all of Springston. Here lies the ancient metropolis. The three buried towns of this land are laid out according to the stars of Colorado’s belt.” He narrowed his eyes at Hap and then Palmer. “We just need you boys to confirm it. We need a real map, not this skin.”

“How deep are we talking?” Hap asked.

Palmer turned to his friend. He had assumed this had already been discussed. He wondered if the wage he’d been promised had been arrived at, or if his friend had just been blowing smoke. They weren’t here for a big scavenge; they were here to dive for ghosts, to dig for legends.

“Eight hundred meters.”

The answer quieted all but the moaning wind.

Palmer shook his head. “I think you vastly overestimate what a diver can—”

“We dug the first two hundred meters,” Brock said. He tapped the map again. “And it says here on this map that the tallest structures rise up another two hundred fifty.”

“That leaves …” Hap hesitated, waiting no doubt for someone else to do the math.

The swinging lamp seemed to dim, and the edges of the map went out of focus as Palmer arrived at the answer. “Three hundred fifty meters,” he said, feeling dizzy. He’d been down to two fifty a few times on twin bottles. He knew people who’d gone down to three. His sister, a few others, could do four—some claimed five. Palmer hadn’t been warned they were diving so deep, nor that they were helping more gold-diggers waste their time looking for Danvar. He had feared for a moment there that they were working for rebels, but this was worse. This was a delusion of wealth rather than power.

“Three fifty is no problem,” Hap said. He spread his hands out on the map and leaned over the table, making like he was studying the notes. Palmer reckoned his friend was feeling dizzy as well. It would be a record for them both.

“I just wanna know it’s here,” Brock said, thumping the map. “We need exact coordinates before we dig any more. The damn hole we have here is a bitch to maintain.”

There were grumbles of agreement from the men that Palmer figured were doing the actual digging. One of them smiled at Palmer. “Your mum would know something about maintaining holes,” he said, and the grumbles turned into laughter.

Palmer felt his face burn. “When do we go?” he shouted over this sudden eruption.

And the laughter died down. His friend Hap turned from the dizzying map, his eyes wide and full of fear, Palmer saw. Full of fear and with a hint of an apology for bringing them this far north for such madness, a glimmer in those eyes of all the bad that was soon to come.

4 • The Dig

Palmer lay awake in a crowded tent that night and listened to the snores and coughs of strangers. The wind howled late and brought in the whisper of sand, then abated. The gradual glow of morning was welcome, the tent moving from dark to gray to cream, and when he could no longer lie still and hold his bladder, Palmer squeezed out from between Hap and the canvas wall, collected his bag and boots, and slipped outside.

The air was still crisp from a cloudless night, the sand having shucked off the heat soaked up the day before. Only a few stars clung to the darkness in the west. Venus stood alone above the opposite dunes. The sun was up somewhere, but it wouldn’t show itself above the local dunes for another hour.

Before it could beat down between the high sands, Palmer hoped to be diving. He relished the coolness of the deep earth, even the pockets of moist sand that made for difficult flow. Sitting down, he upturned his boots and clopped the heels together, little pyramids of scoop
¹
spilling out. Slapping the bottoms of his socks, he pulled the boots back on and laced them up securely, doubling the knot. He was eager to attach his fins and get going.

He checked his dive pack and went over his gear. One of the prospectors emerged from the tent, cleared his throat, then spat in the sand near enough to Palmer for it to register but far enough away that he couldn’t be certain if it was directed at him. After some consideration, and while the man urinated on the wall of a dune, Palmer decided this ephemeral range of questionable intent was between four and five feet. It felt scientific.

A wiry man with charcoal skin emerged from Brock’s tent: Moguhn, who looked less fearsome in the wan daylight. He had to be Brock’s second-in-command, judging by the way the two men conferred the night before. Moguhn lifted his eyebrows at Palmer as if to ask whether the young man was up to the day’s challenge. Palmer dipped his chin in both greeting and reply. He felt great. He was ready for a deep dive. He checked the two large air bottles strapped to the back of his dive pack and took a series of deep and rapid breaths, prepping his lungs. There was no pressure to get all the way down to the depths Brock was asking. His dive visor could see through a couple hundred meters of sand. All he had to do was go as deep as he could, maybe clip three hundred for the first time, record whatever they could see, and then come back up. They couldn’t ask more of him than that.

Hap emerged from the tent next and shielded his eyes against the coming dawn. He looked less prepared for a deep dive, and Palmer thought of the people he’d known who had gone down into the sand, never to be seen again. Could they feel it in the morning when they woke up? Did their bones know that someone would die that day? Did they ignore that feeling and go anyway? He thought of Roman, who had gone down to look for water outside of Springston, never to be found and never to return. Maybe Roman knew that he shouldn’t go, had felt it right at the last moment, but had felt committed, had shaken off the nag tugging at his soul. Palmer thought maybe that’s what he and Hap were doing at that very moment. Moving forward, despite their doubts and trepidations.

Neither of them spoke as they checked their gear. Palmer produced a few strips of snake jerky from his pack, and Hap accepted one. They chewed on the spicy meat and took rationed sips from their canteens. When Moguhn said it was time to go, they repacked their dive bags and shrugged on the heavy packs.

These men claimed to have dug down two hundred meters to give them a much-needed boost. Palmer had seen efforts such as these, and every diver knew to choose a site as deep as possible between slow marching dunes—but two hundred meters? That was deeper than the well in Springston his baby brother hauled buckets out of every day. It was hard to move that much sand and not have it blow back in. Sand flowed too much for digging holes. The wind had many more hands than those who pawed at the earth. The desert buried even those things built
atop
the sand, much less those made below. And here he and Hap were banking on pirates to keep the roof clear for them.

If his sister were there, she would slap him silly and haul him over hot dunes by his ankles for getting into this mess. She would kill him for getting involved with brigands at all. That, coming from someone who dated their kind. But then, his sister was full of hypocrisy. Always telling him to question authority, as long as it wasn’t hers.

“That all your stuff?” Moguhn asked, watching them. He kept his black hands tucked into the sleeves of his white garb, which he wore loose like a woman’s dress. Stark and brilliantly bright, it flowed around his ankles and danced like the heat. Palmer thought he looked like the night shrouded in day.

“This is it,” Hap said, smiling. “Never seen a sand diver before?”

“I’ve seen plenty,” Moguhn said. He turned to go and waved for the boys to follow. “The last two who tried this had three bottles apiece. That’s all.”

Palmer wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “The last two who tried this?” he asked. But Moguhn was sliding past the tents and between the dunes, and he and Hap with their heavy packs had to work to catch up.