Sand and Ash, Page 2

hair before shaking the sweat from his palm.

  Gemènyo chuckled. “Shimusògo run.” It was the clan’s motto.

  “Shimusògo run.”

  They both headed into the valley. Their bare feet slapped against the stone, but Rutejìmo could barely feel the impact. His feet were heavily callused from constant running on sands and rock. Only during the rapid slowing, when he dug his feet and hands into the ground, did he feel the drag of the earth against his soles.

  They passed a pair of teenage boys dragging a box of supplies to the guard post. They left behind a trail of dirt and Rutejìmo followed it back with his eyes until he spotted where the two cut through the fields to shave a few minutes from their route between the cooking area and the entrance.

  Gemènyo pulled his pipe out and clicked his tongue in disapproval.

  One of the boys looked up and blushed before grabbing the box and dragging it faster.

  Rutejìmo chuckled and shook his head. It wasn’t that long ago when he did the same thing. He had no doubt the punishment would be the same, planting the next round of crops underneath the watchful eye of one of the clan’s elders.

  “Hey, Jìmo?”

  Rutejìmo smiled at the familiar use of his name. “Yeah?”

  “Want to play cards tonight?” He gestured up to the side of the valley to where their homes were carved into the rock. All of the cave entrances where simple holes in the stone with the occupied ones covered by a red or orange blanket with the owner’s names. Gemènyo’s home was a few rods, just under thirty feet, past Rutejìmo’s bachelor cave.

  “Are your wife and mother joining in?”

  “Probably not. Faríhyo is cooking, and her mother is on cleanup,” Gemènyo gestured to the large cooking area in the center of the valley, “so both will be out chatting until lights out.” He took a long, dramatic deep breath. “I can smell her lovely cooking even from here.”

  “I doubt you can smell anything with that pipe burning.”

  Gemènyo hefted the pipe in his hand and swished it around, tracing lines in the air.

  Rutejìmo could tell he was writing something obscene. With a grin, he slashed his hand through the smoke. “Old men like you shouldn’t use words like that.”

  “Old men like me and Hyonèku shouldn’t have to invite young men like you over for cards.”

  Hyonèku was Gemènyo’s best friend. They grew up together and were comfortable enough to share everything with each other. They also treated Rutejìmo as a treasured younger sibling, something he didn’t get from his own brother.

  Rutejìmo shrugged to cover the brief moment of discomfort. They headed up along the narrow paths leading to the family caves. “What am I going to do? Sit in my cave alone for the night?”

  “No, but there are other things you can do. Things most young men do.”

  Rutejìmo rolled his eyes. “I’m not into chasing around the girls, if that is what you mean. Most of them run faster than me.”

  “Oh no,” Gemènyo chuckled, “I would never suggest the young courier try to actually find some companionship on his own. These old bones,” he began to limp, “need the company in case I fall.”

  With a chuckle, Rutejìmo smacked him on the shoulder. “Well, Mènyo, if you need some help I’ll ask Tejíko. I’m sure she’ll…” He grinned at the mock horror Gemènyo displayed at the mention of Rutejìmo’s grandmother.

  Gemènyo shuddered. “Fine, fine. I won’t mention it again.”

  “Yes, you will. And if it isn’t you, Nèku will say something. I’m just not,” a guilty memory rose up, a dark-skinned woman with horse tattoos across her back, and he struggled to complete his sentence. “… not ready yet, I guess.”

  “You’re thinking about Pabinkue Mikáryo again.”

  Rutejìmo looked up with a start and cringed at Gemènyo. “What?”

  Gemènyo smirked and gestured to a necklace Rutejìmo wore around his neck. “I can tell when you play with that.” The black leather was snug around his throat, and a large, chipped-off tooth hung from it. Mikáryo had broken it off a large snake that would have killed him. A lesson, she told him, but one that Rutejìmo still struggled to understand.

  With a blush burning on his cheeks, Rutejìmo snatched his hand away. He looked across the valley. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Gemènyo stepped closer and patted Rutejìmo on the shoulder.

  Rutejìmo’s shoulders and back tensed, but he nodded and continued walking along the trail. They passed the lanterns that would light the trails at night. At the moment, the crystals were dark while they soaked up the sun.

  “Jìmo,” Gemènyo said in a softer voice.

  His stomach twisted, but Rutejìmo looked back over to his friend.

  Gemènyo finished tapping more weed into his pipe. “I’m not saying give up on Pabinkue Mikáryo; just realize that you will probably never see her again. It has been ten years.”

  Images of Mikáryo drifted across his mind—the tattoos on her back, the black fabric wrapped around her body, the way her loincloth hung from her hips when she knelt in front of a fire—until he tore his thoughts away. “I know.”

  “Though,” he glanced at Rutejìmo with a smirk, “she clearly made some impression. Sure she didn’t crawl into your sleeping roll when we weren’t watching?”

  Rutejìmo groaned and rolled his eyes. “No, she was threatening to kill me the entire time.”

  “Not what we saw,” Gemènyo said with a smirk.

  Stepping back, Rutejìmo punched Gemènyo in the shoulder. It was supposed to be a playful hit, but it impacted harder than he intended.

  Gemènyo stepped back, his feet scraping the edge of the path before he regained his balance. He drew deep from his pipe before blowing the smoke in a cloud around him. “Come on. Throw your stuff in your cave, and I’ll meet you down at the fires.”

  Rutejìmo nodded.

  Gemènyo disappeared in a blast of air and sparkles of fading sunlight. The smoke from his pipe flew after him, swirling in a vortex to mark his travel along the narrow path up to his own home. He stopped at the entrance to wave at someone, and the wind brought the cloud of pipe smoke into a haze around his head.

  Rutejìmo pushed aside the blanket covering the entrance of his own home and ducked into the darkness. He lived in one of the smaller caves in the valley with only one common room and a hall leading into two smaller rooms. Inside the door was his travel pack, sitting where he had dropped it off before running. Bracing it on his shoulder, he walked past the nearly empty main room and into his bedroom.

  He spilled the contents of his pack out on the bed and sorted through the mess. He didn’t use his travel rations, but he had to refill one of his water skins. He returned items to his pack after checking them, so he would be ready to run on a moment’s notice. He had a roll for sleeping, a small tent, and an alchemical gel for cooking. A trio of travel lights, small globes with a clockwork mechanism, settled into their customary place inside his bag.

  Outside of survival gear, he had a book of poetry and his voting stones. Each of the black rocks with white ridges represented one year of being an adult in the clan. Another thirty rocks were secreted underneath his bed, but he was still a year away from pulling out the next one.

  It took him only a few minutes to clean up from months of travel and prepare for the next trip. He knew that Gemènyo would be at least another hour—he had a wife and two children to regale with his adventures on the sands. Normally his wife would have run the Kidorīsi and Mafimára route, but she was pregnant with their third child. Rutejìmo had taken her place for the last five months while she succumbed to the care of retired couriers in the valley.

  After twenty minutes of stalling, hunger finally evicted Rutejìmo from his cave. He set his full pack right inside the entrance before leaving. As the blanket slid into place, a girl’s voice interrupted his thoughts.

  “Great Shimusogo Rutejìmo?”

  He turned to the speaker as she stepp
ed out of the darkness. It was Mapábyo, Hyonèku’s adopted daughter. The teenager was right at the cusp of womanhood, and everyone wondered when Tejíko, the clan elder and Rutejìmo’s grandmother, would send her on her right of passage.

  Unlike the rest of the clan, her skin wasn’t the warm brown of the northern clans but the deep black of the south. She and her parents were part of a six-month caravan trip that Hyonèku had joined when Mapábyo was four. Her parents died during a raid and no one stepped up to take care of the young girl. Hyonèku, who had already fallen for the girl, carried her back across the desert to join the clan.

  She wasn’t born into the clan, but she had the body of a clan runner. She was thin and muscular, with little fat to grace her curves or chest. Her bare feet were heavily calloused. She wore a white tunic with a red skirt wrapped around her waist; it was an outfit that Rutejìmo hadn’t seen before, but the skirt used to be her adoptive mother’s. Her bare ankle sparkled with a steel bracelet that rested on the ridge across her foot.

  He smiled and gave a low bow. “Good evening, Mapábyo. You look nice.”

  She held her arms behind her back and inched into the light of the lantern. Her eyes, a deep green flecked with lighter lines of emerald, flashed in the light. “Could I bother the Great Shimusogo Rutejìmo with a question?”

  He chuckled. “Of course, but call me Rutejìmo at least.”

  She smiled and inched closer to him. Her long, black hair had been braided into a thick line down her back. Twisting her foot on