Justin Allen

“Want to know why I brought you here?” Uruk asked, fling­ing the last of the now clean bones into the bushes.

Adah shrugged. As a slave she’d learned not to let her desires show. Cer­tain Niphilim – the women mostly — took great plea­sure in dan­gling hope before their cap­tives’ eyes, only to snatch it away.

“Let me show you some­thing.” Uruk pointed to the hole in the brush, through which they’d climbed the night before. “Sit here.”

Adah crawled over, one fist still closed around the remains of her break­fast, and was sur­prised to dis­cover that she could see the entire val­ley, from the store­house where she kept her brooms to the open field where the Niphilim did their exer­cises. She could even see the With­ered Hills, extend­ing south all the way to the horizon.

“What do you see?” Uruk asked her.

Adah squinted. “Build­ings. Work­ers.” When she was a girl, Adah’s father used to herd his goats into the high moun­tains, search­ing for fresh grass. He’d promised to take her when she was old enough. You’re just an ant from up there, he’d told her. Now, look­ing down this moun­tain, Adah saw that he’d been wrong. The peo­ple weren’t like ants at all. Even as small as they were, ants still had dis­tinct heads and abdomens. Their legs were read­ily iden­ti­fi­able. The peo­ple she saw were fuzzy, like fish seen through cloudy water. Adah couldn’t dis­tin­guish men from women, or Niphilim from slaves. From this height they were all the same.

“Look at the forge,” Uruk suggested.

She was sur­prised to see that there was no smoke com­ing from the chim­neys. “The fires are out,” she said. In all the time she’d been work­ing among the Niphilim, Adah had never known the fires to go out.

Uruk nod­ded.

“Why?”

“They are haul­ing every­thing into the mine,” Uruk said. “Tools, food, even the slaves them­selves. The army of Kan-Puram must be close.”

Adah squinted at the hills again, half-expecting to see sol­diers come pour­ing over them. But the hills were just as dry and empty as ever. The only thing mov­ing was a pale blue wave, nearly trans­par­ent, hang­ing between earth and sky. It cer­tainly didn’t look like an army. Nor did it resem­ble the grass­lands she knew to be on the other side of those hills. In fact, it looked like water. Adah gaped. She’d never seen the ocean, but she’d heard of it. A river with only one bank. That’s how her father had described it when she was a lit­tle girl. Adah pointed. “Is it the sea?”

“No,” Uruk said. “There is no water out there.”

“My father told me that there’s a great sea beyond the plains.”

“He was right. I have been there. Not so long ago.”

“You’ve seen the great water?”

“Many times.” Uruk pat­ted her on the shoul­der. “But it is so far away now that I doubt I ever will again.”

“If that’s not the sea, then what is it?”

“Maybe the sky reflect­ing off sand, like a moun­tain reflect­ing off a still pond.” Uruk shrugged. “When I crossed the desert, I saw it often. At first I hur­ried toward it, think­ing it was water. It never was.”

“You crossed the desert?”

Uruk nod­ded.

Adah wasn’t sure whether to believe him. It was a lot to take in. If not for the quiet assur­ance with which he’d made his aston­ish­ing claims, Adah would have con­sid­ered Uruk a liar. But this seemed like more than big talk, as her mother used to say. If any­thing, Adah sensed a kind of shame in Uruk. Because of that, she couldn’t help believ­ing every­thing he’d said – no mat­ter how ridicu­lous it might sound.

“How long have you been a slave?” Uruk asked her.

“Since I was thir­teen. Almost three years.” Adah looked down at Dagonor, won­der­ing who had been forced into tak­ing her place in Anth-Kane’s sanc­tum. A troop of slaves was march­ing past the tem­ple. From that dis­tance, the bas­kets they car­ried looked like enor­mous heads, bal­anced pre­car­i­ously atop com­i­cally under­sized tor­sos. “They aren’t even look­ing for me, are they?”

“Of course they are.” Uruk pointed. “In the hills, south of the temple.”

“Why there?”

“I changed the mark­ings, made it look like you ran that way. If they thought you were up here, they might even­tu­ally find us.”

“Why steal me at all?” Adah asked. “You still haven’t told me.”

Uruk looked at her.

Adah had never been so thor­oughly sized up in her life. It made her feel like a lit­tle girl again. Her father used to look at her that way just before telling her to wipe her nose. She couldn’t help won­der­ing if Uruk had noticed the welt on her cheek, or the blem­ishes on her forehead.

“I am look­ing for some­one,” he said at last.

From Slaves of the Shinar

The Over­look Press 2007

© Justin Allen