This wasn't right. It had been fiery hot. Now he was freezing.
Brutha opened his eyes. Desert stars, brilliant white, looked back at him. His tongue seemed to fill his mouth. Now, what was it . . .
Water.
He rolled over. There had been voices in his head, and now there were voices outside his head. They were faint, but they were definitely there, echoing quietly over the moonlit sands.
Brutha crawled painfully toward the foot of the dune. There was a mound there. In fact, there were several mounds. The muffled voice was coming from one of them. He pulled himself closer.
There was a hole in the mound. Somewhere far underground, someone was swearing. The words were unclear as they echoed backward and forward up the tunnel, but the general effect was unmistakable.
Brutha flopped down, and watched.
After a few minutes there was movement at the mouth of the hole and Om emerged, covered with what, if this wasn't a desert, Brutha would have called mud.
“Oh, it's you,” said the tortoise. “Tear off a bit of your robe and pass it over.”
Dreamlike, Brutha obeyed.
“Turnin' round down there”, said Om, “is no picnic, let me tell you.”
He took the rag in his jaws, backed around carefully, and disappeared down the hole. After a couple of minutes he was back, still dragging the rag.
It was soaked. Brutha let the liquid dribble into his mouth. It tasted of mud, and sand, and cheap brown dye, and slightly of tortoise, but he would have drunk a gallon of it. He could have swum in a pool of it.
He tore off another strip for Om to take down.
When Om re-emerged, Brutha was kneeling beside Vorbis.
“Sixteen feet down! Sixteen bloody feet!” shouted Om. “Don't waste it on him! Isn't he dead yet?”
“He's got a fever.”
“Put him out of our misery.”
“We're still taking him back to Omnia.”
“You think we'll get there? No food? No water?”
“But you found water. Water in the desert.”
“Nothing miraculous about that,” said Om. “There's a rainy season near the coast. Flash floods. Wadis. Dried-up river beds. You get aquifers,” he added.
“Sounds like a miracle to me,” croaked Brutha.
“Just because you can explain it doesn't mean it's not still a miracle.”
“Well, there's no food down there, take it from me,” said Om. “Nothing to eat. Nothing in the sea, if we can find the sea again. I know the desert. Rocky ridges you have to go round. Everything turning you out of your path. Dunes that move in the night . . . lions . . . other things . . .”
. . . gods.
“What do you want to do, then?” said Brutha. “You said better alive than dead. You want to go back to Ephebe? We'll be popular there, you think?”
Om was silent.
Brutha nodded.
“Fetch more water, then.”