“One day, but not yet.” Charlie turned to look at Aleck. His face resembled his crop, a great, blighted turnip with a tuberous nose, fingerling ears, and skin like loosely scrubbed peelings mottled with the blemishes of time. A wide floppy hat kept the sun off his bald patch, and a thin gray mustache twitched across his upper lip like a roving caterpillar.
“You were a legionary once, right?” Aleck asked.
“Long time ago, but nothing happened.”
“Nothing ever happens. Why do we even have a legion?”
“In case something does happen, I suppose.” Charlie stared out onto the shifting sands and chewed thoughtfully on a parsley leaf. “We saw a fox once.”
“I didn’t think there were any foxes.”
“There aren’t, not anymore. He was the last one. Came out onto the road and just sat there as we all passed him by, gasping his last breath. We stood around and prodded him with the blunt ends of our spears.”
“What happened?”
“He died, just sat there and died. No more foxes now. That was about the time I decided to leave the legion and join the Dusters.”
“My Dad was a Duster.”
“I know. I was there when he rode out.”
“I was too young to remember, and Mum never talks about it. She gets angry if I ask about such things.”
Charlie shifted uneasily. He was indeed a man of few words, but one who believed in the narrative; always tell the story even if it was in as concise a manner as possible. “I was there on that morning, early, cold, and clear as a newborn’s eyes. Twenty of us were going, all on our bikes back then. Now they frown on that. ‘Waste of good bikes,’ they say. They all just rode over the perimeter and blew apart, not a sound, nothing, just following Clarence Elsby—the cult leader.”
“You survived though,” Aleck said, wide-eyed with amazement.
“I didn’t go. I pulled up at the line and watched them all vanish.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t feel like it was my time, or maybe it was simple cowardice. Now I just grow potatoes and wait for the end.” As if to emphasize his impending demise, Charlie coughed furiously and spat something nasty onto the ground.
“Waste of a good bike. That sounds just like Praetor Jones.” Aleck looked over to his own decrepit contraption slung across the bush. “He says the bicycle chain’s the most valuable bit. A rare commodity, he calls it.”
“Bike chains are hard to make. Still we patch them together, carefully preserving each link, stringing together new chains out of bits of the old. Each link has probably been on a dozen different chains by now, but we’re still running out. Young people should be learning to make new chains, not just patching up old ones.”
“Why ride out? Can’t people just die and end up in the cemetery?”
“Cemetery’s full.”
“Mum says that if someone rides out, they don’t become a wisp, like the ones that haunt the churchyard.”
“That’s true enough. Fill the land with wisps, and there’ll be no room left for the living.”
Aleck shivered at the thought of wisps. Everyone kept away from the churchyard after dark when the wisps came out. Even seeing one brought sickness and bad luck. But wisps didn’t only appear at the church, Aleck had seen one when coming home late from a friend’s house. It rose from a hedgerow down by a cluster of deserted cottages called the Lowdown. It looked like a curl of lightly glowing mist, twinkling in the starlight. It came up through the gnarled brambles, reaching toward him. Aleck still saw it in his nightmares, like the floating image of a severed forearm with a hooked hand, fingers streaming off into nothingness. He’d run and screamed and never stayed out after dark again.
“Besides …” Charlie said, “there are plenty other reasons to ride out. Nothing much to live for these days—no medicine, no future. Growing old is real uncomfortable.”
“It seems a terrible way to die though.” Aleck shook away a vision of being the last person left living in the Land … cold and alone and surrounded by wisps.
“The Dusters never believed they were going out to die. No, they believed they were being reborn as part of the living desert. As the sand pulled them apart, they were absorbed into its mind, a mind as big as the world itself.” He paused and chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip. “Charismatic man, that Clarence Elsby. Have you believe anything, he would.”
“A great mind in the desert?” Aleck gazed out across the sand, eyes full of wonder. “Could that be possible?”
“Don’t rightly know. Something’s out there, and it eats you alive if you cross the line. It watches, sits and studies as if we’re some preserved scene from the past, a museum exhibit like one of those paperweights you shake and make the snow fall. Perhaps there are other bubbles out there, all intriguing little examples of early twenty-first-century England. Except we’re not really preserved, more like just hanging on and slowly going under, like the foxes did. Once there were two thousand of us living here. Go count the stones in the cemetery; they outnumber us all now.”
Aleck moved to the edge of the Land, his toes coming close to the sharp perimeter rim. A soft breeze came over the boundary, but nothing else. At night the sand made sounds; it sang its sublime seismic symphony, deep, mournful notes that warbled up and down some impossible scale. So faint was the music that even a birdcall or a light breeze smothered it. Once, in a moment of exploratory madness, he had leaned far out, his toes crossing the boundary. He watched the tips of his shoes dissolve and felt a tingling on his feet just before he quickly withdrew. His mother had been furious. “Your shoes are ruined,” she had cried. “We’re not made of leather, you know.”
“Yes, we are,” he’d said, his chin thrust out belligerently as her hand cracked into the side of his head. His ear smarted for days after.
“What do you think caused it, Charlie?” he asked, backing up from the edge.
“No one knows.”
Aleck tried to stare him down, willing him to reveal a truth with the power of his gaze, but Charlie’s narrow eyes could outstare a rock, and Aleck looked away. “But you know … don’t you? I’ve heard them talking, and they think you know what happened.”
“People think all sorts of stupid things. How stupid we get is inversely proportional to how many people there are in the world, Aleck. Always remember that.”
Aleck pondered the new fact, plotting a little graph of stupidity against population on the chalkboard inside his head. “What was it like? You know … when it happened.”
“It was quick. We just woke up one morning and everything outside this little circle was desert, everything else was gone. No sign, nor sound, no radio, no TV, not a plane or a bird or a bug flying over us. We’ve not seen or heard a peep from the rest of the world since that day … nothing.”
Aleck hopped to his feet and retrieved his bike. He stretched out a hand and gauged how far the sun was above the sandy horizon, around an hour of daylight left. Maybe it was safe to go back home now. “We should get home, Charlie, wisps will be coming out soon.”
“Wisps never hurt no one,” Charlie said.
“Why do you think the Romans didn’t invent the bicycle?”
Charlie scratched his ear and gave Aleck a sideways look. “That’s a funny question for any time of the day.”
“They built long, flat roads. You would think they’d invent the bicycle to go on them.”
Charlie chuckled. “A lovely image that is, legions of armed soldiers sweeping across Europe and North Africa on their pushbikes.”
“I mean, it’s not like a bike is that hard to make. We
manage to keep them going without a forge or plastic or anything really technical.” Aleck shrugged and mounted up. As he looked back, Charlie was still scratching his head and looking at him with amused bewilderment. Aleck enjoyed the feeling of leaving someone with a mystery to ponder.
Ambushed!
Aleck’s mother was waiting as he came back from morning patrol. There was no time for protest, or breakfast, as she grabbed his arm and led him out the house and through the center of town to one of the abandoned estates on the Westside.
“Where are we going?” He whined, trying to free his captive wrist.
“It’s a surprise.” She tightened her grip and forged onward.
A small group had gathered by the side of one of the ramshackle houses, tools in hand; they appeared to be waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.
“It’s your new house, Aleck. It’s all yours.”
“But …”
“The nice folks here have volunteered to help fix it up. It’s been decided that you can have it as nobody has lived here for so long.”
“But …”
“You’ll be the first, then we’ll move some of the other young folk in nearby, a right jolly little community you’ll have. Just think, Aleck—independence at last!”
“But …”
“It’ll take a few days to fix up, and then we’ll get you settled. You can do the legion patrol in the morning and the rest of the day, we’ve decided, you’ll take over some of the beehives from Jack Honeywell. He’s not getting any younger, you know. You can start a new apiary right here near the middle of town, away from the dangerous perimeter edge.”
“Bees? But …”
“Very important business, bees. Without them, we have no honey and the plants don’t pollinate. This is a big responsibility. I’m so proud of you, Aleck.” She dropped his wrist and wrapped him in a hurried embrace.
“But …” The number of objections was just too overwhelming. Aleck could only really focus on the single issue that had plagued him since he got up late that morning and missed breakfast. “But … who’s going to feed me?”
He looked up and saw Martha standing by the edge of the gathering. She turned away coyly, then peered back, meeting his eye with an expression of determination. “I’ll bring you food, Aleck,” she said, attempting a friendly smile.
“There, you see, lovely Martha will stop in and bring food, and if she can’t, then I’ll be just up the road.”
The tiny world swam before his eyes. He could see it all now, like an avalanche on the dunes. Once it started rolling, it was impossible to stop. The house, the food, the wife, the … whatever happened next. It was all arranged, all taken care of by Father Haslop and his committee. All he had to do was play along, and here, in the Land, there really was nowhere to run.
Aleck skulked around the northern perimeter, throwing stones and rocks out into the desert. They fizzled and vanished before hitting the sand. The game was to see how far you could throw a stone before it disappeared. It was a game that could get him in trouble if he was caught, as wasting the Land’s limited resources was a crime punishable by imprisonment—or at least a good thick-ear and detention from your mother.
No one usually came to this part of the Land. The smell of fermenting cattle waste kept visitors away. Jackson Cowherd, the cattle farmer, called it his Sherbet; he inhaled it in great loving lungfuls, as if it were the smell of fine roast beef.
Aleck flopped belly down amongst the fodder-beets growing next to the cattle pen and looked out over the desert, watching the shimmering heat distort the distant hills of sand and the fuzzy patches of dust devils skimming across the open plains. A steady stream of small clouds wafted over the Land. “Suspiciously regular clouds,” as Mother called them. “Someone sends us rain; they keep the heat out and the cold in.”
Someone, but who? wondered Aleck.
The last few days had been busy and his new abode was almost complete. There was very little glass in the Land and no one knew how to make it anymore, so they built wooden shutters and fitted them over the window openings. They patched the leaking roof with stone tiles reclaimed from other abandoned houses, then set about reboring the water well, shoring up its sides, and capping it with a new bucket-and-winch mechanism, all held together with wooden pins and cow-hair ropes.
Several cats, borrowed from neighbors, were shut inside the house to cull its resident rat and mouse population. In only a few more days it would be fit for habitation, and Aleck could begin his new life as a soldier-bachelor.
With a hiss and a whistle, a large dust devil whipped past only feet from the perimeter. Startled out of his malaise, Aleck watched the dust devil change direction, moving along the perimeter as if scouting along its razor-sharp edge.
Another seemingly random spurt of motion sent the spinning vortex straight toward Aleck; then, with a quiet pop, it crossed the boundary and hovered, stationary, in the cow pasture, as if waiting.
Frozen in fear, Aleck realized that this was something new, something that probably shouldn’t be happening. He wondered if the desert was about to come alive and destroy them all, turning the Land and everything in it to dust in a single breath of wind, as many had long speculated must happen.
The devil shifted shape, winding down to solidify into a crude four-legged form that looked like a small table. A bland spherical knob extruded from one end, then widened until it resembled a head and neck. Its blunt footless limbs stumbled around on the loose dirt like a newborn calf taking its first steps. After a few seconds, it gained stability and stood still and upright, then the head started scanning from side to side, as if peering around.
Aleck almost screamed, he almost ran, but instead he lay there trembling. His fingers gripped the earth so tightly they pierced the ground, grubbing up handfuls of roots and pebbles. The sand-colored quadruped stumbled toward one of the cows. The beast looked up, only mildly startled, as if unable to distinguish the new arrival from the natural surroundings. The devil closed the gap and a nose-like protrusion extended from its head toward the cow’s snout. The cow simply stood there, chewing its cud, eyes blank and uncomprehending.
At the instant of contact, the cow startled backward as if seeing the creature for the first time. The sand-figure exploded into a cloud of dust, and reformed back into a dust devil as it fled for the perimeter, making a louder and more urgent whistling noise as it crossed over and skipped away into the desert.
Aleck jumped up and ran, leaving the bemused cows staring at his back. The whole of Tattledale could hear him yelling, long before he reached the town hall.
The invasion bell tolled loudly in the church tower, but was unable to drown out the shouts and mutterings of the gathered villagers.
“Liar!”
“Malingerer!”
“Any excuse not to take on responsibility or go about his duties.”
“I saw it, I tell you,” Aleck stuttered. “A thing made of sand. It came out the desert and moved around like it was alive.”
“Someone’s been at Father Haslop’s grog stash, by the sounds of it.”
Aleck hung his head in despair. He was beginning to doubt his own mind under the heat of cross-examination from the village elders. His mother and Martha stood off to the side, their eyes full of concern for his sanity.
“And you say this thing looked just like a cow?” Father Haslop wore his church robe and flat black hat, but his face was bright red, either from tension or from a healthy premeeting dose of grain alcohol.
“It turned into a cow, but it was still made of sand.” Aleck’s voice tra
iled off, realizing how absurd it sounded, even to his own ears.
The frightened murmuring of the crowd grew louder and Father Haslop shook his head, clearly on the verge of passing some judgment.
“I’ve seen them, too.” The quiet voice came from the doorway.
The crowd kept babbling, and no one except Aleck heard the voice. He turned and saw Jackson Cowherd leaning on the door frame with a long stalk of grass protruding from the corner of his mouth.
“I’ve seen them too,” he said louder. Slowly the crowd stopped talking and turned to face him. He just stood chewing the stalk, like one of his docile ruminants.
“Tell us more, Jackson.” Father Haslop silenced the people with a wave of his hand.
“Couple of times now, I’ve seen ’em come over and try to talk to my cows.”
There was a stunned silence, made even more palpable by the sudden stilling of the church bell.
“And you never thought to mention this to anyone,” shouted Father Haslop, a furious red vein pulsing on his forehead.
“Not really. You’d all think I was nuts or drunk, like the young fella there.” He nodded at Aleck.
“Well … it sounds like the Devil has been walking amongst us,” said the father, crossing himself feverishly with a long, pointed index finger.
“They probably think the cows are the smart ones,” said Jackson, rearranging his hat and flipping the grass stalk to the other side of his mouth. “Because they don’t go riding off into the desert to die … not very smart, that.” He turned away and sauntered out the door as if nothing profound and lifechanging had happened, leaving behind a stunned audience.
People hugged and fussed as they stared at Aleck with wide, fear-filled eyes and wondered just how long before the sand devils came churning in from all directions and turned them all to dust.
Morning patrol was extra somber and serious the next day. Everyone, even Aleck, turned up on time, fully armed with spears and shields. Praetor Jones instigated a regime of warmup exercises and mock combats before the legion set off on extended patrol.