Chapter Five
The sun is going down. They have no water and Nut has lost the trail of the camels that he has been tracking. For two days he has carried Erdu and he is spent. The blind man mumbles miserably, his leg mutilated, infected, oozing.
Nut collapses under the weight. Erdu lies on the baking ground, his life slipping away. The sinking sun is so hot that the bushes seem to be on fire. Nut tries to walk on alone. He ambles in circles. He collapses.
* * *
Nut’s eyes fly open in the sun. His blistered lips part. The blind shaman looms over him, standing there in the heat waves.
Erdu yanks the amulet from around his neck and tosses it to Nut. The pouch is made from the withered skin of a woman’s breast. It contains the skull of a vulture, the tail of a fox, and the paw of a weasel — the remains of scavengers, devourers of corpses.
Nut stares up at the blind man. Suddenly, Erdu’s hair smolders. His skin drips from his face. His flesh sizzles and pops, leaving a leering skull atop a horrifying skeleton of bones.
Nut falls backward, striking his head on a rock.
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Chapter Two
Nut and Erdu are perched on a windswept, rocky crag, eating insects that Nut has found. The blind man has saved some pieces of root, but he does not share them with the boy. Erdu is telling a story about a beautiful place to the West, in the realm of the setting sun. An island far away from the woes of this world. And a giant tree with milky breasts.
As Erdu rambles on, he strokes the horns of the goat skull that Nut has found. Erdu’s wrinkled hands wrap around the dry horns. His empty eyes turn upward. He mumbles, “This is a wild goat. Not raised by humans.”
“Why would humans be up here?” asks Nut. “There is nothing to eat.” Nut has not even seen a rabbit since they left the village, countless days ago.
Erdu says, “The black rock brings them food. Now stand up.”
They get to their feet. Nut leads the way along the steep trail, the blind man holding onto the boy's shoulders as they stumble upward. High above them, the cone-mountains fume in the distance. On and on, wild and lost.
* * *
“Stop!” says Erdu. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” says Nut.
“You can’t, but I can. Listen!”
Nut scans the crags and pinnacles. He sees nothing. But when he closes his eyes, he can hear a faint sound.
“Camels,” grins Erdu. “We will follow the sound. But we must be careful. They must not hear us, or see us, or they will kill us.”
* * *
Hidden high overhead, perched on a rocky ledge, Nut watches the three men. They sit around a campfire, eating dried meat. They are wrapped in furs. Nearby is a hut made of skins. Camels lie grunting in a crude corral. The air is foul and the sun is lost in a grey and sullen sky.
Behind the men looms a shattered wall of black rock, glassy in the haze, like a great dark hole in the white snow that covers the mountain. Nut watches the men. They finish eating. Then, one-by-one, they crawl into the hut. Nut watches. He is cold and his feet are bleeding.
Towards nightfall the men emerge from the hut. They stretch their arms and legs. Then they gather up wooden wedges that have been soaking in melted snow near the fire. They stare at the rock face, and then climb up onto it. They drive the wedges into cracks in the rock wall with stone hammers. When they are finished they clamber down and sit by the fire, smoking from clay pipes and quietly talking. They build up the fire and go into the hut.
Nut watches for a long while, then carefully makes his way in the darkness back to Erdu. He snuggles up next to blind man, who is sleeping like death.
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It is morning. Wooden wedges lay at the base of the rock face, along with scattered chunks of glassy black stone. Nut shivers in the cold and foul air. He watches. He waits.
Eventually the miners emerge. They stretch. They toss wood onto the fire. They sit and eat. Nut is hungry. He has been watching them for days without food.
When they finish eating, they stoke the fire. Then they climb up onto the rock face. Using deer antlers they pry out loose blocks of stone that roll down the slope. They climb down. They push the blocks of rock into the fire.
They sit and smoke their pipes. After a while they get up and dump snow onto the hot rocks, causing them to spit and pop and shatter and burst. They stand at a distance from the fire and smoke their pipes.
Then, when the fire has died back, they pick through the ashes with leather gloves, collecting jagged pieces of black rock and placing them into large leather bags. The bags are piled behind the hut.
Nut watches, and that evening after the men have driven their wedges and smoked their pipes and gone into the hut, then he knows that it is time. He is agonizingly cold.
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