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Chapter Twelve
Eris
The pressure increased to accept the mating the elders wanted for me. I had barely a moment to myself because my potential mate was around every bush and shrub. He watched me so much, I began to think he’d given up everything else.
As if that wasn’t enough, I was taken off my job as assistant healer and assigned the worst jobs in the oasis. Mostly related to cleaning up human waste. With the water table below us so critical, we couldn’t take a chance on contamination, so someone had to carry the buckets a good distance away.
And that someone was now me. Previously, the same person never had to do it for more than a week at a time, but I’d been informed it was my job indefinitely. Or until I decided to cooperate and do things the way they wanted me to.
The buckets had to be carried out at least three times a day and then scrubbed out with sand. We had outhouses…but they were just boxes with the buckets inside them.
It was a horrible job, and one determined to break me down. Not only for the obvious reasons, but while I could do one of the trips at dawn and one at dusk, the third one involved draping myself in yards of fabric and going out in the heat of the day.
And while I didn’t want to admit weakness, it really was awful. And the smirks of the man who claimed to want to marry me as he watched me suffer added a dimension of humiliation that probably had the opposite effect from what he or any of the elders might expect.
Determination and trust became my watchwords. Each night after I carried the disgusting mess to the pit dug a few hundred yards out on the plain, I shifted and ran under the stars or the clouds or the hanging moon. I didn’t have much to depend on, but I did have the stars. They seemed to be changing more than usual, although my mind told me that wasn’t possible.
I was still trying hard to remember something about that in one of the books that had disappeared from the storage area. Something that had been tickling the back of my mind since that time when I first noticed the constellations shifting.
Determined to find that memory even without the books to help me, I ran extra far out into the plain and found a flat-topped boulder to lie on. With home completely out of sight, I closed my eyes and tried to picture the pages of the books. To see the charts. I’d looked at them so many times, I squeezed my eyes closed tight. Laid my muzzle on my paws, and placed myself back in that storage room before it was stripped.
Narrow windows allowed in muted light while still keeping out the worst of the sun’s glare and heat. Thicker walls than most of the other buildings protected the contents from all temperature extremes. When I’d thought that perhaps the elders moved the books to a better place, I’d been utterly foolish. What did we have that was better? The building must have been constructed to store them when there were better materials to construct things with. It didn’t look like much, but the more I considered it, the more I recognized how well made it was and suited to its purpose.
The books had been lined up on shelves, a couple of the larger ones set on stands where anyone could easily open and study them, or use them for research. The maps and charts were rolled and stored in baskets in a wall unit. It was the most remarkable place, and one where I spent many happy hours absorbing the wisdom that remained to us.
Where had they put it all? It wasn’t as if they had many options…and probably none that would keep them from harm. They really would go to any lengths to try to put out the light of the Prophesy, wouldn’t they?
But I needed to keep the picture of the room with all its items still in place in my mind if I was going to help my memory bring in what I needed.
One of the charts had not been in a basket but pinned to the wall. I’d looked at it so often, I had to trust that if I allowed my mind to open, I could bring it back. It had been unusual in that it held so many stars in different colors, they were almost like layers. Galaxies and clouds of stars and other things I didn’t even have names for. I fixed them in my mind and opened my eyes.
As if I’d never had a hard time in knowing before, I could see the chart superimposed over the sky and watch the movement of the stars behind it. They were coming into focus, coming closer to the way they looked on the chart.
I wanted it, but I didn’t need it. I’d spent so much time with that chart, I had never before tried to compare it to what lay overhead. I was nearly positive that it was closer to matching the chart. And if that was true, then did it mean that my mate was coming soon? I could feel them out there, but if they didn’t come soon, I wasn’t sure what would happen.
