DUST by Hanna Day
The
dust was everywhere. It swirled around Joel in howling eddies, so thick he thought
he would choke upon the air. He ran his tongue along his teeth and tasted grit;
he wondered if he would ever be rid of the taste.
Joel crawled forward on his belly, the dust stinging his
eyes and blowing through his clothes. He opened his eyes blearily, and then
shut them again as another gust of wind blew dust into them.
The storm had taken him by surprise, like the stories
always said they would. The black-and-white textbook photographs couldn’t
possibly portray the majestic storm clouds or their sudden, violent fury.
He cried out wordlessly, unable to call upon the ancient
magic to save his dehydrated body. There was no water for him to draw upon. If
the dust didn’t choke him to death, then the sun would sap away any life
remaining in him and shrivel him up until he was nothing but bones.
Joel pushed himself to his elbows, though the force of
the wind threatened to push him back down.
Why did he ever think he could do this? Dust particles
threatened to blow away his clothes, his flesh, even his bones away. He
stopped crawling, intending to become part of the land. He curled into a tight
ball and clamped his hands over his ears to block out the wind.
The
dust bit into him and tore his clothes apart like the serrated teeth of a
mythological monster, but he did not care. He had failed; he deserved to be
torn apart by the wind. Perhaps if he did not move the dust would eat him away
in minutes, and his pain would end.
Joel started as someone placed a hand on his shoulder.
“You lost, boy? Or are you looking for someone?”
The woman’s voice came from above him, muted as the wind
rattled his ear drums. Joel almost didn’t hear her, since her thick accent
rasped against his ears. He opened his mouth to reply, but coughed as dust
poured into it.
“I see,” the woman said. “Come inside for a little while.
I’ll get you something to drink.”
The woman bent down and pulled Joel to his feet. Joel
took off his neckerchief and coughed again. An old woman stood before him, wearing
goggles coated with red dust and a handkerchief over her mouth. She carried a
lumpy green sack on her back, the contents rattling with every move she made.
“Where are we going?” Joel asked, his voice a croak.
“I was on my way home, picking up trash.”
Together they walked slowly against the wind, heads bowed
and collars upturned to protect their fragile necks. He kept his hands on her
bony shoulders to orient himself, too weary to care that she spoke softly to
him as they walked, as if to a weary child. He looked at nothing but the hot,
dry, cracked earth beneath his dragging feet.
Seconds stretched into minutes. Since walking into the
dust bowl Joel had lost all notion of time. His pocket-watch had stopped
working sometime after he left the first checkpoint. His chapped lips began to
bleed. Licking the dust from his lips only made him thirstier.
“We’re here, boy,” the woman said, taking his hand gently
off her shoulder. “You’re safe for now.”
The woman placed his hand on a wooden door. He could feel
the roughly splintered wood on his callused hand, and he wondered if the weak
wood would crumble with a single push.
“Dazed by the heat, I see,” the woman said, pushing his
hand out of the way to reach for the doorknob. “Most folks who are trapped in
the storms are. Come on.”
She pulled the door open, and darkness greeted them. Joel
stood there, afraid. What was this place? The woman muttered something
incomprehensible in her native tongue before shoving him inside.
The woman dropped her sack onto the wooden floor and
slammed the door shut behind him, causing the floorboards to rattle. Every
window that had been there was boarded up tight to block out the wind. The
woman lit an oil lamp, which shed light upon a cramped kitchen. Snakes seemed
to slither through the walls as the wind found its way through the cracks.
“Sit down, boy.”
Despite himself, he obeyed. He wiped the thick reddish
dust that coated his skin with a towel and shook his hair clean. He frowned at
the mess on the floor, though the woman didn’t seem to mind. Now that he was
safely inside and away from the storm he saw the woman taking note of his worn
uniform. Joel wore a long-sleeved uniform of deep navy blue, the white stripes
running along his sleeves marked him as a Rainmaker student from the royal
province. It was no longer pressed and pristine, but now stained an ugly shade
of reddish-brown. Pity. His teachers would reprimand him for failing to keep
the suit clean. After all, it didn’t truly belong to him.
The
woman went to the kitchen counter and got water for him through a rusty pump,
an archaic thing that churned out water deep within the ground. He watched in
silence as it spluttered out dirty water into a bowl.
“I’ve
seen young people like you before around here,” the old woman said. She took
out a filter, set it over another bowl, and then poured the tainted water
through it. “You waterlogged students don’t know how to deal with the dust. Where
are you from, boy?”
“A
land of rain and thunder,” he replied, unsure if she knew the city’s true name,
which was in a different tongue. His native tongue.
“A
faraway land, then.” She poured Joel a glass of water, which he took
gratefully. “A fisherman’s boy?”
He
sipped the water and grimaced. There was a bitter taste to the water here, as
though it would never be clean.
“Yes,”
Joel replied, surprised. “How can you tell?”
“I’ve
done of bit of traveling myself, when I was a younger woman, of course. Your
dusky complexion and accent betray you. But I can also tell that you’re not
partial to the dust, and you never will be. Children of Water never acclimate.”
“We
don’t acclimate. We force the land to acclimate to us.”
Her
pale eyes flashed in amusement. “How did you end up here?”
“I
came here for a test.”
His
teacher had sent him and his classmates out to the dust bowl. Traveling into
the heart of a dust storm and performing one last final test amid the dust would
demonstrate if he had mastered the art of extracting water from the earth.
“Ah,
I see,” the woman replied. “Do you think you passed?”
Joel
looked at his hands, dust embedded in the fleshy creases of his hands. “I don’t
know.”
The Rainmakers prided themselves on their ability to
control water from the natural world. It had become a science only the most
dedicated students could study, as talent alone was not enough to become a
great Rainmaker.
The walls trembled as another gust of wind rocked the
house. The oil lamps flickered. The pots and pans hanging from hooks on the
ceiling rocked gently. Joel looked up, his hands shaking as he imagined the
walls coming down upon him.
“It’s like the end of the world,” Joel said.
“I’ve lived with these storms all my life,” the woman
said. “I can’t live without them.”
Joel certainly could. He would take a hurricane—such as
the ones that plagued his home shores—any day over dust storms. They were
predictable and folks could prepare for an oncoming storm, while the dust storm
jerked folks into death without much warning.
“So,” the woman said, throwing Joel a bag of dry jerky. “You’re
a student of Water come to change the nature of the dust storms.”
He caught the jerky and set it on the table. “Yes, though
I failed.”
Joel closed his eyes and tried to imagine water all
around him, just as he had been taught seven years ago. Rainmaking, an ancient
magic practiced throughout the colonial empire, originated from the northern province.
Potential students, who were recruited from all provinces whether they wanted
to or not, went to the Oasis to be baptized in the True Water. True Water bubbled
from a trickling fountain residing in the Jungle Oasis, where special priests
baptized potential students with True Water. Not drinking water, or rainwater
or water from the salty sea, but Water in its purest form, untainted by the
natural world and bubbling up from deep beneath the earth. True Water that
allowed a student to understand water in its many forms so that he or she could
learn to control it. The baptism was a simple ceremony, one that Joel
remembered well. For the moment the priest dipped him into the deep water a
refreshing coolness came over him, one that swept through every atom of his
body. All at once he had felt at home in the water and understood the element
as he never had before, and so had discovered his affinity for the curious
magic.
Those who grew up in the watery provinces, such as Joel, tended
to possess more affinity for the ancient magic. They could call upon the water
in the air, in the plants, in the clouds, even the water within the human body.
With some practice exceptional students like Joel could breathe underwater. Rainmakers
were primarily employed by the government and dispatched to agricultural areas
suffering from drought, or brought in to stop floods or to erect dams.
Joel reached into his pocket and took out a single seed.
The test was simple: go out into the dusty storm and coax the seed into a
flower by the next morning. He had tried so many hours ago to draw water from
deep within the ground, to draw water from the insects and animals that passed
by, and even draw from the water within himself to feed the seed. But then the
dust storm forced him to stop and blew him away far into the dust bowl, too far
away to call for help and just far enough for him to get lost.
“Is it that important?” the old woman asked. “So what if
you can’t work for the emperor as a licensed Rainmaker?”
“If I fail, then I can never go the Royal City. I’ll be a
fisherman again.”
“Is there anything wrong with that?”
Joel said nothing. Seven years of his life wasted—and for
what? To fail his final exam and be sent back home? Joel wasn’t certain if he
could help his parents anymore; he no longer had the muscles of a fisherman,
but the mind of a Rainmaker scholar. He was no longer useful to anyone anymore.
The old woman poured herself a glass of whiskey. “You’re
not the first student I’ve found during a dust storm and you won’t be the last.
The Rainmakers always send their young students into dust storms for their
final exams.”
“They do?”
She simply looked at him. “How many of your classmates
returned last year?”
“Only a hundred out of a class of three hundred and
twenty.”
The statistics suddenly seemed absurd. Joel looked at the
bag on the floor, and kicked at it. Bones—bleached white from the sun—clattered
onto the floor.
“Don’t worry, I didn’t kill them,” the woman said. “I
found those students yesterday. I collect their bones, you see. It’s been my
job for nearly four decades. I return them to the university’s clerk, who then
passes them back to the families, and then I am paid for my troubles.”
He felt nauseous. Were these his friends? Elihu, whom he joked
with just yesterday? Or perhaps Joanna, the woman he had dinner with just last
Saturday? He gazed at the bones, trying to remember facts from his anatomy
class. Maybe his friends hadn’t died. Maybe they were still out there and
managed to find water to make their flowers grow.
“Why
would they let us die?” Joel asked, his voice cracking.
“I don’t know. That’s something you’ll have to figure out
for yourself.”
“But I’m alive,” Joel said, looking down at his hands. “Shouldn’t
that count for something?”
“Be careful, boy. I’ve met your kind before, and the dust
changed them. It has changed you as well, even if you don’t realize it yet. So
you were baptized with Water, now you are baptized with Dust. Water brings
life, yet in the end we all turn to dust.”
She spoke like an old prophet from the Holy Hymns.
Perhaps if Joel had paid attention in theology, then he would have recognized
which old prophet she was referring to. The wind outside moaned again, though
this time he shook with terror over the bones of his classmates lying on the
floor.
Joel looked at the water pump and attempted to draw the water
out of the pipe. He breathed in slowly and closed his eyes, trying to listen
for the water flowing through the pipes. Tried to imagine the coolness of it
upon his skin and the relief it would bring to his parched throat. But after a
long minute, nothing happened. He opened his eyes, a growing terror that he had
lost his ability to call upon water rising to a crescendo.
“Well, I’m certain you don’t want to stay here,” the woman
said. “Let me refill your water bottle, and you can be on your way.”
He looked strangely at the woman, as though seeing her
for first time. His mind reeled from shock, and he stumbled over his words. “I
suppose… I suppose I should go.”
The woman went back to the water pump, and as she filled
his water bottle Joel allowed his mind to wander. Students who failed their
final exam would be shipped back to their home province in disgrace. Either
they came back from the dust storm or not at all. Would it be better to stay
here, in this acrid land?
“Here you go, boy,” the woman said, handing him his water
bottle. “Take that jerky and this map as well. I have no more need for them.”
His chair creaked as he stood up. He brushed back his
dark hair from his eyes and looked apprehensively at the door. “I don’t know
where to go.”
“I can’t help you.” The woman paused to listen the wind.
“The storm will end soon. You can start your life anew by leaving my home. I
have work to do, and you’ll only get in my way. Perhaps find out if your
friends have died.”
Joel sighed. He wished that someone would tell him what
to do, that someone would reassure him that he hadn’t lost his ability to call
upon water, but he had to face reality sometime. Joel was a practical young
man. Dwelling on the nonexistent would not keep him alive; his attention would
be better spent on practical tasks.
“I should do that, shouldn’t I?” Joel grimaced. “I’m
sorry. You don’t care. You benefit from the bones.”
“Whoever said that I didn’t care?” the woman asked. “You
never asked how I feel about picking up the bones of talented young folk. It is
disheartening. Maybe you’ll find a better way to test students.”
Perhaps he would.
“Thank you for your kindness,” Joel said. “I’ll be on my
way now.”
Joel braced himself for the wind before opening the door.
The dust was settling down, and the wide dust bowl was once again bathed in
sunlight. He could not tell how long it had been since he entered the dust
bowl. Time passed differently during the storms. A day, maybe two, or perhaps a
week had gone by without his knowledge. Or maybe he had, as he initially
believed, only been out on his own for a few hours. Who knew?
The locals say the
dust scours everything clean. Perhaps it had even blown away any magical
ability Joel had left. He wanted to believe that the dust somehow blew away his
talent. He didn’t want to believe that he was not exceptional enough, that his
own talent had failed him and left him to die. Joel slung his water bottle over
his shoulder and walked out into the dying storm.
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