But Jalno did not awaken.
Bímer came over later, his face dirty and dejected. He said there wasn’t anything there.
Beres knew Jalno would find the machines when he woke up.… But what was it Jalno said the machines would do? Anyway, Jalno would know how they worked; that was good enough. Bímer felt his father’s forehead. It was cold. He shook his body, vigorously. Beres was about to protest when he saw the look on his brother’s face. They looked at each other for a long moment, while the setting sun painted their hair red.
Bímer said, “These things happen. One day you fall asleep, you sleep too deeply, and.… Can’t you see him? Nobody sleeps with his eyes open.”
What he meant was, their father was going to disappear, turn into sand or dust. He was dead.
“Dead?”
Yes; asleep forever. The symbols, maybe. Probably the power of the symbols.
But what were they supposed to do with him?
Leave him, just leave him there. It might be a good idea to shovel some sand over him. Sand, to keep the others from seeing him. Before long he’d start turning real ugly.
Beres looked at his brother, wide-eyed: why would he get ugly?
Bímer shook his head and spit onto the sand. Because his flesh would start falling to pieces, he said, and then it’d turn dirty and black and smelly. He’d seen it once before, near the valley. The same thing had happened to their uncle Gorse. Didn’t he remember? Well, Bímer himself had been very young then, so Beres probably wasn’t even born yet. Bímer recalled how Jalno’s brother had lain on the grass, surrounded by some of his children. Crilma and Solmes had been there, and Vet, too.
Beres was deep in thought. Suddenly he laughed. Well, that had happened near the valley. The valley was bad. But things must be different here.
Bímer refused to answer him; he stared at his brother, all serious. Disconcerted, Beres lowered his gaze. When he looked up again, his eyes were full of terror. What would happen to their father? Would it hurt him when his flesh fell off?
Bímer nodded. They hugged each other. Night fell quickly, so quickly they had to grope in the dark to find Jalno’s body and cover it with sand.
2.
Next day, the men gave up. The whole business of looking for machines made no sense. Nobody knew what the machines did; nobody even knew what they were. Jalno was the only one, and now Beres and Bímer were saying they couldn’t expect him to help them anymore. So there was nothing left to do, the men said, and they took off in different directions. Borles straggled behind, and then went back to join the brothers. He liked the idea of the machines. If they’d let him, he’d keep clearing the sand and whatever else was there until he uncovered the machines.
Beres said okay, and looked at his brother.
Bímer nudged him with his elbow, sighed, and halfheartedly started digging.
It was tiresome working under that sun, then having to walk hours to hunt for water and food among the rocks and tangled vegetation out west of the flowers. They spent most of their time doing that, or arguing about the best way to clear the site. Every once in a while somebody would pass by and stand there watching them for hours, then move along. Or somebody would come and tell them how they should be doing it, giving instructions, until Beres threw rocks and drove him off.
One day Borles sat down on a rock and said he’d been tricked, that Jalno had tricked him. Without stopping to think Beres punched him in the face. Borles quickly went back to digging. After countless days of hard work they gave it up for good. There weren’t any machines. Yes, Borles said, they’d been tricked. Jalno had made all this stuff up just to play a joke on them. Beres punched him again; then he and Bímer set off for the valley, maybe because they’d grown very curious about how bad it could really be, maybe because they were sick of the desert, or maybe, as Borles thought, because they’d gone crazy.
It’s sun fever, Borles thought. But he wasn’t about to stay in the desert by himself, either. He’d gather his stuff and follow them; probably he meant to convince them, or maybe the poisonous proximity of the valley had convinced them all, or at any rate he’d convinced himself. Regardless, it wasn’t a good idea to stay behind in the desert. Plus, Beres and Bímer must know that in spite of all their disappointments, he still had the idea of the machines stuck in his head, nagging at him. Jalno had once told him about these things, had given him explanations he hadn’t entirely understood, maybe because Jalno hadn’t had a very clear notion of the machines himself.
To tell the truth, Jalno had never been nice to Borles. He used to call him the Etruscan Shrew, and Pigeon, and also Noahsark. Though Borles realized those were meaningless words, the contemptuous way Jalno said them irritated him. Besides, his name was Borles, not Noahsark or anything of the sort. Well, now there’d never be another Jalno. He’d fallen asleep and would never wake up again, and that was wonderful. Beres and Bímer weren’t bad people—especially not Bímer, because the other one was too quick with his fists, and one day he’d learn what Borles was like when he got really mad. Hopefully that would never happen and Beres would learn to control his fists.
And Borles, marching absentmindedly, had entered the valley and the forests. When he looked up and realized where he was, terror overwhelmed and paralyzed him.
It couldn’t be. You couldn’t enter the valley, and if you did.… Everything was different there, even time. Even he himself—wouldn’t he soon turn into something else? He remembered Jalno once telling him, “Noahsark, never go past the edge of the desert, because beyond it lies the valley, and no one has ever returned from there.”
On that occasion, Borles now remembered, he’d thought Jalno was just trying to scare him for some obscure reason. All of Jalno’s reasons were obscure. So what if nobody ever came back from the valley. What did that even mean, after all? Maybe they didn’t come back because they liked the valley, liked it so much they decided to stay there forever. That’s what Borles had thought at the time. But now Borles was looking around, his throat tight. Why had he followed Bímer and Beres? They didn’t seem to be around, and he was alone and scared. He saw the slippery mist oozing through the leaves at his feet, caught the scent of dead, fermented things, sensed the slow but relentless breakdown of the symbols, the movement of blindly yearning masses of heat, the whipping, flogging foliage, and the humidity. He hunched, expectant.
“Beres,” he dared call out. And the wind blew over his lips, and a little later he heard his voice, far away, bouncing off the black foliage.
He was certain he had heard not only the almost unrecognizable tone of his own echoed voice but a sound like footsteps on very soft sand, on sand mixed with mud. It might be Beres and Bímer, he thought. But there was also something else, a crunchy, absurd sound. From under a leafy branch Borles watched the patch of forest to his right. A few steps away water was flowing, a stream; one part of his mind was captivated by the mystery of running water.
“Noahsark, water flows in the valley.” That sound of water moving over stone and symbols, running off, sweeping everything away to the other side of the world.… “Pigeon, you even have to be careful of the water you drink, when you see it running. Do you