Free Motherstone by Maurice Gee

meat and fruit and water.
    ‘The sands are close. We will not stop but go straight across. Slarda cannot be far away. She will hope to pick up our trail on the sand. But when we reach the jungle I can lose her.’
    ‘How long will we be on the sands?’
    ‘All night and all the morning. Perhaps we’ll sleep an hour, we’ll see. Before the hottest sun we’ll reach the jungle.’
    That did not seem bad. It was no great desert. And though she was tired she would rather keep going if Slarda was close.
    The night was black. She followed the rope. Soon they left the grass and climbed in dunes. Steen had some way of finding firm-packed sand and she found the walking easy at first. In places a brittle grass still grew. It pricked her legs. Later it was gone and the sand was finer, shifting and sliding. She felt as if she were trudging in mud. It grew harder to lift her feet. Steen let her rest twice but would not let her sleep. He kept a tension on the rope and she felt as if she were a broken car being towed along.
    At last he said, ‘Midnight. Sleep a while.’
    ‘Can I have some water?’
    He gave her his flask.
    ‘Have we got enough?’
    ‘There’s a water-hole halfway across. We should find it at sunrise.’
    She drank, and covered herself with a blanket. When he woke her she thought no more than a moment had passed. But he said, ‘Morning in two hours. We must get close to the water-hole. Slarda will find our trail. She will be fresh and we are tired.’ He led her among dunes cresting like breakers. Then he found a plain of hard flat sand and they walked more easily. Soon she felt dry grass brushing her legs. The sky behind them lightened and he took the rope and looped it in his belt.
    ‘Over the rise. Can you smell water?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘It is the smell of life in the sands.’ He moved again, but stopped uncertainly.
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘Ashes. Dead fires.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Hotlanders. I hope they’ve gone.’
    He went on until they came to the rise. It was like a bank round a fortified village. Steen put his hand back and stopped her. She saw his eyes gleaming in the dawn-light. ‘Stay here.’ He climbed, bent at the waist, and crouched below the rim of the bank. She lost hope. If no one was there he would have called. Then he beckoned, putting his fingers to his lips. She crept up to his side and looked where he was pointing, at the oasis. Colours moved about it as if a cloth were rippling on the ground. It took her a moment to understand that people, men and women, naked except for loin-cloths, shaven-headed, painted over their bodies blue and red, were moving in a silent ritual dance about the few black bushes, the yard or so of water.
    ‘They dance to welcome the sun. He is their god, or one of them.’
    ‘The god of fire.’
    Blue lines rippled through the red. Clusters, splashes, formed here and there; and suddenly the dance had a burning core, a concentration of red so bright it seemed to throb. The sun came over the bank. A shout rose to greet it, an exultant yell. That was all. The simplicity of it startled Susan. The Hotlanders broke up and moved to their morning tasks. She was able to look at one or two and see them more closely. They were tall and sinewy, with a mantis angularity. Their colours made them beautiful, yet in a way that was frightening. She got from them a sense of threat and savagery, a sense of suddenness. They would, she thought, see and kill, with nothing in between – a single action. They looked as if they could run all day, exist on a mouthful of water. The desert was theirs, they belonged.
    Iron age, she thought, looking at their weapons; yet they did not seem that civilized. The women, tall and stringy as the men, were painted blue. They were the axe and club warriors. The men carried whippy spears, red like themselves.
    ‘Is it war paint?’
    ‘No,’ Steen said. ‘It wards off the sun. They paint themselves differently for war. This must be a band on its way to