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"How did they do it?" Billin demanded, pulling away from her and tossing a chair across the room. One of the children woke at the noise, cried out.
"Shhh," Cirith said, heading for the children's room.
"Not on your life!" Billin retorted. "I want to know how they did it! How did those damn self appointed gods get everybody to answer the same way — 'Yes, Billin, so glad you had a good time there, Billin, we're so pleased that your journey was successful, now get the hell out and let us get some sleep, Billin' —"
Cirith came to him and took his arms and dug her fingers into them. "You must promise me," she said, "that you won't do anything to them."
"What do you mean? What could I do to them?"
"Promise you won't. Promise you won't quarrel with them, please, Billin."
"What do you think I could do? Hoom's the murderer around here, Wix is the adulterer, all I do is talk and now nobody's listening."
"Promise me, and then I'll tell you."
"Tell me what?" Billin asked, suspiciously.
"What they did."
Billin looked at her carefully. "I promise. What did they do?"
"I didn't want to tell you before you went out because you wouldn't have believed me and if you'd known you would have gotten so angry —"
"Get to it, Cirith, dammit, tell me what you know!" Billin paced to the window. "They told everybody for the last two days, while you mostly slept, they told them that you had been badly hurt in a fall and it damaged your mind —"
"I cut my hand, the bastards, where do they think my mind is?"
"I know that, but they told the others that you invented a dream place, a place where everything is perfect, but that it doesn't exist —"
Billin roared with rage. The child in the bedroom cried louder, and another cry joined in. "Do they say I'm a liar! They dare to call me a liar!"
"No, no, no," Cirith said. "They only say that you were hurt. They say that you really believe what you say, that your mind isn't working right — Stipock had a name for it, he called it ‘hallucinations', I think —"
"Stipock has a name for everything —"
"Billin, you can't fight it, the more you say you know what you saw, the crazier they'll think you are —"
"Cirith!" Billin said, striding to her, looking her in the eye, "do you believe them? Or do you believe me?"
She looked at him for a long time, but then she looked away. "I don't know," she finally said.
This time Billin did not roar, because this time his anger dissipated in despair. "If you don't believe me, Cirith —"
"I do believe you, I do, Billin, I want to believe you so much, but that's it — what you tell about is so perfect, how can I trust it? It makes everything here so terrible, and Stipock says that this is the best place —"
"He says that because of the iron —"
"I know, I know, please go to bed now, Billin, you're tired —"
"I can't sleep."
But he did, and woke in the morning still filled with despair. Because sometime in the night he had wakened after dreaming of the place he had been to. The dream had seemed so real. He had tasted the fruits again, and swum again in the bay, and drunk from the cold river and lain in the grass growing thickly on the riverbanks. He had felt the rain cover him again, beating warm and fresh on his skin, making him clean.
And he wondered if it had been a dream before.
And, once he wondered, he knew that it had. How could it be real? He closed his eyes and tried to picture the place, tried to imagine the taste of the berries. But all he could taste was the dust that always hung in the air; all he could see when he closed his eyes was red.
So he didn't speak of it anymore, not for weeks.
It was time for the rains to come. The rains didn't come.
"Don't worry," Stipock said. "These things vary by as much as two or three weeks."
After six weeks the rains still hadn't come; but the winds came on schedule. Last year the winds had been cooling, drying out the soaking earth (for that short time of rain and then wind, the colony had been bearable); this year the winds were hot and dry, the breath of dying, and after four days of dust and sand whipping into ears and eyes and noses and mouths, burning the skin of those caught outside, drying out or silting up every barrel of water, every cistern, filling every ditch, tearing leaves off the trees, after four days of that one of Serret's and Rebo's younger twins died.
They buried him in the sand during one of the brief lulls in the wind.
The next morning the dessicated body was in the open, the skin flayed away. The wind, by one of those cruel freaks of nature, had blown the baby so that it jammed its parents' front door closed. Serret swore as he shoved the door open that morning — screamed and wept when he found what had closed it so tightly.
They burned the body at noon. The wind kept putting the fire out.
And the next day two more babies died, and Wevin, Weerit's wife, died when her baby tried to come four months early.
They couldn't bury the bodies, and they couldn't burn them, so they carried them out into the sand and left them, knowing the desert would surely dry them out.
That evening Billin huddled into his last cloak and crept against the wind to Serret's and Rebo's house. While there he told them what the water had tasted like in the land he had found. But he knew they hated him for saying it, since they believed he was insane, and it made it hurt even worse.
And from time to time during the terrible three weeks that the wind lasted, Billin dropped a word here and there. "Fruit," he would say, "growing off the trees. Wet and sweet." The person he was talking to would frown and move away.
"Sweet water in a wide, cool river." And the person would lick his lips and then say, "Dammit, keep your madness to yourself."
"Rain," he would say, and a child nearby would say, "What's rain, Mama?" and the mother would weep and curse Billin for his cruelty.
And Billin cursed himself, for he, too, wondered if he were mad. For now that he himself doubted what he had seen, he didn't know why he kept talking about it, why every morning and every night and the hours in between he would keep seeing that fruit before his eyes again, bushes more red than green, and water.
"Am I crazy?" he asked Cirith.
"Hopelessly," she answered, and kissed him. But he didn't know if she was teasing; finally was sure that she was not.
And then the wind stopped. One morning everyone awoke to the sudden silence, to the sudden heat (even before sunrise) when the wind didn't penetrate the cracks in the woodwork.
They put on their ragged clothing and went outside to see. The sky was clear. The dust had settled (mostly) to the ground. And now, for the first time, they could see the damage. They saw their suffering by moonlight, and realized before daybreak that they were through.
The sand had built up against the trees, in some places ten or eleven meters above the old level. Houses that had been on level ground now seemed to have been built leaning against sand dunes that were higher than they.
The irrigation ditches were all gone, with no trace left of where they had even been.
Two hundred meters to the west lay the new course of the stream, a wide shallow trickling stream, full of mud and barely drinkable.
The few sheep were all dead, except a couple of lambs that had been kept indoors.
There was no scrap of food anywhere that was not impregnated with sand. That was no surprise, since sand was the main seasoning and the main flavor that they had known for months. But the people, as they talked, realized that all the children were complaining of the pain of defecating, for their stools were filled with sand. And now all the bellies were distended, because food was short.
And water less yet.