Virginia Hamilton (9 page)

What eyes?

He never knew the moment Thomas slipped away. But, slowly, awareness came to him and revealed that his brother had abandoned him.

Tom-Tom. Why did you do this?

A largeness spread out inside Levi. Huge, it forced its way throughout his inner space. The fake persona squeezed Levi into a corner. It blanketed his mind. What remained of his senses gathered on the far side of knowing in a tiny puff of nothing. Thomas’ aura was all.

So it was that the brother waited. He clung to rocks a few inches from the ground. In case Miacis was already upon him, he pretended he needed rest. Dust gathered strangely around him, howling and blowing, streaming its way into rock crevices. With whistling force, it made its way under the brother’s fingers. Until it covered him, caking him in a putrid grime, which gave him the form and tint of some ancient gargoyle. He who had been Levi might never have existed. Yet Levi was present in form. He represented the two who were so much the same before the form took on a certainty of character. It soon became wholly the brother Thomas.

The brother Thomas crouched, unmoving, yet fierce. He felt exactly like some deformed creature carved from the stone. However, he managed to appear bold and defiant. He had a sudden unpleasant tingling in every joint of his body. And knew Miacis would soon be nibbling at his toes.

Not thirty yards away was the one who was truly Thomas. He was hidden at the side of another clutch of rocks. He intended using his clairvoyance to know what transpired between Miacis and Levi when Miacis arrived. As self in control of Levi’s mind, he had felt tingling and knew Miacis would soon be there.

There came a sharp tug on his foot. A painful nip at his left heel. Thomas leaped up and whirled around.

What—?

There was no one there. What had taken place must have happened to Levi. Over there, Miacis had greeted Levi by nipping at his heel. Over there, the brother sighed and climbed down the rocks. He spat dust from his mouth and snorted it from his nose.

Thomas, watching himself perform, had an urge to applaud himself, but knew better.

You win, I give up,
the brother traced to Miacis.
I’m too weak to outrun you. But there’ll be other times
—
right? So take me back, dog. I’m starving.
Spoken just the way the real Thomas would have.

Miacis’ shrill laughter pierced the gloom. It broke off in a wheedling bark.

Suddenly Thomas had a striking premonition that his best-laid schemes were blown. In one moment everything he had planned would fall apart, blasted by the dust into smithereens.

T
HOMAS HAD KNOWN: STORMS.
He’d even seen one terrible one with anvil heads seventy-thousand feet up, his dad had said. Out of that storm had come a violent twister that uprooted fifty-year-old trees before it lifted to vanish in darkest clouds.

At the age of three, he and Levi had witnessed the queerest weather of all. Sitting close together on the couch, they ate popsicles and peered out of the window. Thomas remembered how strange it had felt to be inside in a calm place when everything had gone wild outside. They watched a garbage can fly down the street. The lilac bushes bent over so far, their blooms touched the grass. All of the trees were on a terrific slant, as though they’d suddenly decided to lie down. He and Levi could hear a mournful howling outside their window. And Levi had said, Thomas recalled, that the sky did not look happy. What had seemed so extraordinary at the time was that he and Levi had seen nothing that could have caused all the bushes to bow down. And this, their first windstorm, had filled them with curiosity and had not frightened them in the least.

Thomas had witnessed these awesome forces of the earth and had not been harmed by them. Yet he certainly knew not to trust nature to be thoughtful toward humans. But nothing he could have imagined, nothing in the world, would have prepared him for the Rollers of Dustland.

Earlier, by the pool, Miacis had made confusing remarks about Rollers.

She had traced,
Not for the faint-featured, no siree, messengers. Fine sailing, though. Best of drum-rolling. Sure be, do!

Her odd English had been accompanied by definite word-sounds from her throat.

Now the Roller came. It was not only alien, it was not even a part of any nightmare that Thomas had ever had. It was unheard of.

The Roller started under his feet. He felt a tremble and a twitching down there beneath the dust. As the trembling neared the surface, it took on sound. Spreading outward, the sound grew, as if out of his heels. It lengthened in waves in every direction. Thomas was sure it was going to be a quake when all at once the dust started swaying to and fro. His feet slipped from under him exactly as though someone had pulled a rug out. Thomas fell hard on his shoulders, hitting rocks and scraping along them.

Pain numbed him in flashes of cold. His mind seemed blank; for a moment he could not utter a sound. The dust slipping away stunned him; he realized he was sliding away with it. But the rocks had not moved.

Thomas grabbed them and held on. Without warning, his clairvoyance ceased. The connection he had with his fake persona inside Levi’s head went out like a snuffed candle. He was all of himself back inside himself again.

And heard Levi cry out from the gloom: “Tom-Toombs!” Through the swirling, seething murk, the sound was forlorn and full of fear.

“Lee?
Lee?”
Thomas yelled at the top of his lungs. Have to get over there, he thought. “Levee!”

He didn’t want to let go of the rocks. If he could just hold on, he’d be safe, he knew he would.

“Don’t let go!” he hollered over at Levi. Sputtering and coughing as dust filled his mouth. “Hold … hold on … Lee!”

A feeling rose in him, pure and sweet, like the kite he and Lee had flown in the field at home when they were ten. It was brother-love, making Thomas need to protect the weaker one of them. He heaved himself up. Against his will and good sense, he pushed away from the rocks, realizing that by now Miacis would know that the one she had nipped on the heel was not Thomas. He spun around, already on his way to Levi, only to crash back for protection at the sight of what lay before him.

The dust was rising. It came up like a curtain, pulling in on itself from a wide distance around. Like a vast body of water, it surged and lifted, curling into a gigantic wave.

Roller.

It rose higher and higher, never breaking and falling as any wave would. A hundred feet up and up, as far as Thomas could sense through the stinging dust, which fast moved away from him. The ground had been cleaned to bare, hard earth. Almost all of the dust had by now been lifted into the vortex of the Roller. And so immense, so solid, like a mountain, the stupendous wave began moving.

It rolled side to side with a grating sound for at least a half-mile. Then it rolled forward and back at angles, making pulsating noises. From a distance on the left it advanced with the dust floating up within it, as snow rises and falls crazily in a paperweight.

It rolled toward Thomas. A tremendous force commenced pulling at him. Sucking at him with such power, it tore him from his hold on the rocks. And it pulled his hair straight up from his scalp.

What hair?

“Stop … stop it!” Thomas shouted. He found he was sobbing, and his breathing was clear of dust for the first time.

“Stop it? Why, certainly we’ll stop it. Bender, fleer see how I gather deep-words? How we dislike escapers. How far I learn-speak? Clear before you time, runaway. Ha! Clean before you past. I take you Justice dwelling, sucker!”

Miacis, skulking, slithering on her belly out of the enormous rolling wave. She was actually speaking in a darting, animal voice. It was husky, yet soft. She had finally learned how to do it. Her huge, empty eyes shone through the murk, glinting red in their centers. Behind her outsized ears, her breathing membranes glowed savagely.

Miacis slithered on her back. She stretched, seeming to lengthen, then curved herself forward. She stood on her hind legs to tower above Thomas. The bristle-hair of her underbelly glinted golden, like spikes of polished steel. She was eight, ten feet over him.

Miacis roared. The unearthly rumbling pierced Thomas’ head and mind. He screamed in terror. Then his fear howled in defiance.

Thomas leaping for Miacis with one of the bone claws she had hewn for him clutched in his fist. He lunged for her throat, with all of the will he had in him in the bone claw’s thrust.

So sudden an assault took Miacis by surprise. Thomas had dodged her forelegs and was close in on her vulnerable underside before she could move to stop him. The shock did not last long.

Thomas raked the claw across her chest, leaping up high against her to do so. The claw caught on the bristle-hair and became tangled.

Miacis whined a deadly sound.
Runaway! We dislike dust-runners. But now me have me dummy-drummer Tom-Tom!
This she traced in stinging lines across his mind. And tightened her arms around him. Soon Thomas was surrounded. He was smothered in fur.

And felt her dewclaws make tiny punctures. Something cool, dizzying, flowed under his shoulderblades.

Miacis roared and yipped.

“We have to get a move on, stop for the other one. Knew you must-a had him with you. Felt no him back there lying down beside me and Master.”

Thomas was wrenched forward by the Roller’s pull. Noise poured down from above. He was rising over Miacis’ head. But then she began rising too, and she was soon right next to him. The two of them rose in the immense, rolling dustwave.

“Merrily, merrily,” crooned Miacis.

Up and up they went. Thomas could hear the rise, although he could not now move any part of himself. He wondered, briefly, how was it she could drug him by pricking him with her claws when he had no body here. But the thought would not hold still.

Going up the Roller was like a lifting, the way sails fill and balloon. He reached the Roller’s crest. There at the height Miacis pushed and tugged at him until his head poked through the top of the Roller.

I have no head. I am not! Not here!

But the sensation was real enough. The Roller held his arms up. The top of it was taut, like the skin of an umbrella. Miacis sat neatly to one side of him. She growled contentedly, licking her dewclaws.

In a moment the Roller stopped. Somehow Miacis flowed down through its dust. A short lifetime of churning noise idling, and she was back, with Levi.

Lee!

Levi hung there, facing Thomas. His arms were spread out the same way. Thomas saw that their hands were touching, although he felt nothing. He could find no way to contact Levi’s brain.

Their arms made a crooked circle. Miacis leaped into the circle. Sitting tall, she blinked brightly at them, unseeing.

Their heads lolled. Both of them tried desperately to speak. They tried to make sense out of everything. Thomas could not mind-trace, nor open the mysterious corridor between him and his brother. With each passing second, both of them grew more disoriented.

Above the pounding, grating, immense Roller, the sky was blue as far as they could see. The air was cool and crisp, like a fall day. The sun, not terribly warm in this season, shone in its normal brilliance. On a gust of wind, rusty leaves rose and fell. Thomas longed to touch them. Ached to make them crumble. There was a thin scent of … he could not name it … mind confused … scent of … smoke!

Levi, too, tried to follow the fall of leaves with his unsteady gaze. As if the leaves were the last straw, he fainted dead away.

Thomas felt himself going, too. He fought against losing his senses. Fought hard.

…. Nothing stands alone in Dustland. This, Thomas recalled knowing in a tangle of other thoughts:

All things are joined in Dustland. Then, why Miacis?

All went dark for Thomas.

The Roller moved and hummed and carried them on. Miacis relaxed between the boys, circled by their arms. She flicked her tail. Looked at it, sensing its golden light. Its curl, its switching and thumping, felt marvelous.

This Roller a goodly Roller, thought Miacis.

She appreciated the Roller. She did not know what force it was. Never had she questioned the phenomenon. Rollers lived as she lived, always, so she believed. They were and she was. They rose, came and went. Fell. Each time of coming, one of them carried her on high to the wonder of all, Star.

“Speak me, hold me. Touch. Warm me,” murmured Miacis.

She lifted her face, her eyes open to the sun. Blind eyes now. She had no memory that they had been any other way. Never had there been a blue sky for her. She had no knowledge of blue. And yet she had an instinct for its shade; the hue of it was the depth of her sightlessness. For her, the all of all things was goodly Star.

The sun made no answer. Miacis accepted its warmth as greeting enough. Let it slide under her fur to her skin. For this time, it was all she needed. However Star might speak to her, she knew that warmth was part of the message.

The Roller thundered. Miacis sensed sparks down in it, and lightning strands of powerful frictions. She knew the dust eventually would overheat the Roller. When the dust heated hotter than the hottest turn-time of Star, it would need room for expansion. The circumference of the Roller could not expand fast enough. It would blow out in a mighty explosion. Dust bursting free in sheets. Miacis knew; she had felt them slip past her, as if pulled to the ground by magnets. Veils, sheets, patterns of dust spreading out over the land. She had never seen this. Believing was not necessarily seeing. She knew all she needed and nothing more.

“Home now. Master dwelling,” she said softly in her new voice as the Roller progressed across Dustland.

The identical boys remained unconscious at the Roller’s height. The golden beast watched over them. Now the Roller’s peripheral force literally pulled creatures into it. Small beasties, legs churning, struggled in front of it, trying to stay out of the vortex. Large lumps of things held on to one another, hoping to gather enough power to stay free. Huge things, like bundles of cotton with brown twigs sticking out in all directions, bounced in frantic jumps ahead of the Roller. One such outlandish bundle got caught in the Roller force and came charging back. With an ear-splitting pop and snap, its legs hit the Roller and broke. There was a sickening whunk as it burst against the Roller energy and splattered in every direction.