Tomb - Appetizer
Treats of a Dark Desert Highway, Cool [Treats of Writing could not afford the rest of these lyrics]
You’re snacking on In Different Color, a fairy tale.
See The Menu for more treats.
“Why not camp by the giant jet crystal?” came Honeydew’s voice from where she rested nearby. “Why in the open?”
“Our guide said not to,” Mr. Grey answered sparingly. “Besides, it’s too hot to move.”
“Less hot in its shadow,” Honeydew clicked in halfhearted disappointment, but didn’t stir or press the issue.
The hot sand drifted across the dunes.
Mr. Grey lifted his head from its pillow-dune. “What did you say Tom?” he asked.
“I didn’t say anything,” answered Tom. He wiped at his shiny, running face with a dark, sopping handkerchief. Beads of sweat fell from the tiny cloth and vanished into the sand with an evaporating cloud and a hiss.
“I imagined it,” said Mr. Grey. He laid his head back beneath a makeshift canopy of anchor-shawl and violin case.
Tom, however, forgot his fatigue. He suddenly sprung to his feet and flung his head from side-to-side. He said, “Oh no, not this thing again! Where are they hiding?” His eyes roamed over and around the featureless dunes.
“What are you saying?” asked Mr. Grey. Honeydew also tossed a questioning glance, at their startled friend.
“The last time you imagined - these things I don’t do - was on the island. The cause was the Long Faces…”
Mr. Grey instantly rose from lying to standing, remaining perfectly stiff while rotating exactly 90-degrees around his heel-axis, and knocking the shawl-canopy over in the process. He swiveled his head from side to side in a controlled imitation of Tom. He said, “Instead of old tools, perhaps they lodge in the sand,” His even voice belied his heart’s beating; running first double, then triple time with his ticker.
“What was it the captain said?” asked Tom. “That chased them away?”
“‘Who is that I see’, I think.”
“Who is that I see!?” Tom shouted. “Who is that I see?!” Mr. Grey pushed a toe delicately through the light sand, as though expecting a Long Face just beneath the surface.
“What’s the big problem?” asked Honeydew. The two turned on her. She sat with legs crossed, looking first at Tom, then at Mr. Grey. Her eyes shone only a little, and she wore an expression of exasperation, alarm, and amusement.
“He imagines sounds of me,” said Tom. He pointed to Mr. Grey as if accusing him. “But I said no words.”
Mr. Grey nudged their suitcase stack with his foot, searching for Long Faces beneath. Honeydew said, “Maybe it’s The Wind blowing…”
Tom and Mr. Grey froze. They glanced at each other. They turned fully and slowly to Honeydew. Mr. Grey said, “Do you think the Wind’s nearby?”
Honeydew waved a hand vaguely through the air. “It’s open desert… Sand dunes everywhere. I’m pretty sure she visits.”
Tom and Mr. Grey relaxed; the latter with a noticeable droop of shoulder, the former in mind alone. Simultaneously they remembered the blistering heat. Tom wiped once more with the soaked handkerchief - the drops sizzled on the sand - while Mr. Grey wrapped the anchor shawl about his head like a shemagh. They sat down again, unconsciously closer to each other and to Honeydew. Honeydew slipped back beneath the shadow of her own robe and luggage canopy, and stared at the Sun Fish.
Mr. Grey, Tom, and Honeydew all heard, moments later, the softened patter of approaching footsteps. All three lifted their heat-heavy heads. Candlehead, Nuggets, the remaining partisans, and their shark-bellied guide walked in a line over the dry sea floor; crossing the sand from their own camp which had been a dozen strides distant. They carried rations and other supplies, and seemed ready to move.
“What’s with all the noise?” asked Nuggets. His normally-eager voice came out like a sigh.
“Sun Fish madness,” said the shark belly of their guide.
“We… just thought we heard something,” said Mr. Grey.
“Well pick up your stuff,” said Nuggets. “We’re moving again.”
Honeydew sighed. She tore her eyes off the spiny, golden fish floating over the great bubble of Antiquity, and began packing. Tom turned a pale and glum face over the endless sea of hot, sandy, dune-waves. He pushed sweat around his brow once more and said, “Is it much farther? To The City of Fountains?”
The shark guide answered, “Much sand still to pass over.”
“How can you tell the distance? The land’s unchanging.”
Honeydew looked the shark-bellied guide in the teeth and asked, “Why couldn’t we camp beneath that?” She jerked a thumb toward the giant tower of jet gemstone she’d referenced earlier. It leaned against the horizon, springing like a huge, smooth, obsidian cactus from the wavy sea-floor desert.
The guide shook his belly. “You’d have wanted to go inside. There’s no time for sightseeing in the desert.”
Honeydew flicked open her hand mirror with a snap and a glint. She smoothed out the wrinkles her robe had gathered while sitting. “Whatever. It’s just some rock anyway.”
Mr. Grey looked at Tom's slouched, still-sitting shape. He said, “Before we head out, why don’t we take some water?”
The other guides drew cowsowhorse-leather skins. Nuggets, however, stomped over to the three. He got beneath Mr. Grey’s mustache, poked him in the chest, and said, “Oh yes Mr. Grey, why don’t we take some water? Some ‘Plain Fish’ water. Regular water!” He marched to Tom and heaved him up, with effort. “You think I’m not, like, worn out? But I’m still walking. Stop being lazy.”
Tom’s only reaction was to slouch upright and shuffle to his mallet. The sight alarmed Mr. Grey more than a lost temper would have. “Is there a problem?” Mr. Grey asked, looking at Nuggets. “Is our water depleted?”
“Nope, we’ve got wellfuls!” Nuggets walked over and shoved his waterskin into Mr. Grey’s hands. “You can have mine, Mr. Grey. Since you’re so thirsty! All that you can drink, Mr. ‘Master Fiddler Man’. All the…”
Nuggets had a long diatribe in store for Mr. Grey, to which Mr. Grey would have listened. Before he could rush into it, however, a bagpipe squeal cut Nuggets short. All turned to Candlehead.
A scatter of shiny pebbles lay glimmering in the sand. Candlehead squeezed from his bagpipes a short, jazzy enchantment. The party listened patiently. When Candlehead finished, he walked over to Mr. Grey and Nuggets, took the waterskin back from Mr. Grey, and returned it to Nuggets’ hands. Nuggets uncorked the cap and sipped.
“Ohhh, cool-mint flavored. YumyumyumyumyumyumYUM,” said the young partisan. His face smoothed.
The other partisans drew gulping neckfuls of water from their skins. Smiles and babble replaced stern reticence. Candlehead set a patronizing hand on Nuggets’ shoulder. The shark-bellied guide turned to the trio and said, “Enjoy your mint, but make ready. We should move.”
Mr. Grey saw Tom still held himself dejectedly. He made a halfhearted swing of the mallet to get it over his shoulder, missed the holster, and dropped it in the sand. His body heaved with a sigh. He bent to pick it up. Honeydew wore a frown too, captured perfectly in her hand mirror.
Mr. Grey took a soundless, tiny sip from his own water. “Candlehead got our skins too,” he said.
“I preferred mine plain,” said Honeydew without taking her frown off the mirror.
“Mint’s the worst candy flavor,” said Tom.
An idea struck Mr. Grey. He capped his waterskin, took the violin from its coffin, tuned it, and tossed a handful of shiny pebbles from his purse. They landed with soft thuds in the sand. He played two short enchantments: one a simple back and forth along the scales, and the other a melody of slow and quiet notes. Tom and Honeydew gave him odd looks. When he finished, Mr. Grey said, “Try some water now. Yours should be plain, Honeydew; yours chocolate, Tom.”
Honeydew popped the cork with a thumb and sniffed the water. She said, “I’m not thirsty right now. But thanks,” Mr. Grey loosened the bow’s hair and interred the violin.
Tom gulped loud and long at his waterskin; the container seemed bottomless. He smacked his lips like a drunken man when finished. He picked and stowed his mallet. He turned to Mr. Grey with a polish to his steel eyes, and said, “That was good thinking.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” said Mr. Grey. He finished buckling his violin, and lifted it and his suitcase off the hot sand.
“Why didn’t you do it first? Before Candlehead?”
“I didn’t see the problem; the tasteless water. I didn’t notice.”
“Or you didn’t want to help,” Beneath his sweaty brow, Tom’s eyes glinted suspiciously on Mr. Grey.
“It was for the best. They flavor their own water, and we flavor ours.”
Honeydew said, “Is all Glory Days this way?” She roamed her dark eyes; across the wavey dunes, like ground and sifted amber dust; up the bubble-dome, glimmering in the heat; at the lone obelisk of dark crystal marring the hazy horizon. “Just ‘nature’?”
“Isn’t it picturesque though?” Mr. Grey asked. “I know it’s scorching, but there’s a certain…”
Mr. Grey struggled to find the word. Tom found it for him. “It is beautiful,” he said. His eyes still carried their bags; they also shone with feverish brilliance. He scanned the same features of the landscape as Honeydew, but their reflections in Tom’s eye seemed enhanced. The wavey amber dunes rolled and crashed like shipbreakers of a caramel ocean, churned up by primordial shuddering of the world’s bones; in Tom’s eye. The glimmering bubble-dome captured the water, and the fish swimming behind, like wet canvas, painting an under-ocean view for all to see; in Tom’s eye. In Tom’s eye, the crystal loomed ominously - like a grand-enchanter’s crooked fastness, built in some secluded marsh on slowly-sinking foundations - daring them to enter.
Honeydew said, “But it just happened; the bubbles, the sand, the cliffs, the fish. They came from nature. No effort made them; no price paid for their being. Where’s the achievement in that? Where’s the viewing worth?” she sighed. “Museumtown had some neat stores. But I expected more, from a place called ‘Antiquity’.”
“There’s more than nature here,” said the shark-bellied guide. He’d drifted closer - Nuggets in tow - and eavesdropped their chatter. “That’s not just a crystal. It’s a tomb.”
Honeydew perked up. “Can we look inside?”
“Normally it’s closed,” said the guide. He sounded unsure. He looked not at the crystal, but at the hazy dunes’ edge.
“Jodee will open it up,” said Nuggets. “All Antiquity, freely visited!”
Mr. Grey said, “But what about privacy? Or preservation? How would those be kept? Are her changes for the best?”
No answer came from those close by. Mr. Grey’s question received, in response, only the same whispering voice from earlier. Mr. Grey said, “You know something, Tom? I think it’s the partisans. That I’ve been hearing.”
Tom let out a breath of relief. But the shark-bellied guide stopped it in Tom’s throat. He said, “No, it’s not the partisans.”
“Who’s whispering then?”
“Thunder with the breath of flame… The Wind,” The shark-bellied guide pointed. Honeydew, Mr. Grey, Tom, the partisans, Nuggets, and Candlehead, turned and looked.
Streaking toward them across the desert, The Thick and Sweaty Wind blew in a furious storm. A wall of jagged glass flew before her. She’d built it from picked grains of sand, turned to razor shards by neon arcs of lighting. The wall glittered, and a rage-whisper thundered over the dunes with each electric flash.
“The tomb’s open today,” said the shark-bellied guide.
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
Ready for the Entrée?
Still hungry? See The Menu.