But there had been a dream in this day's sleep, and she shivered in memory of it. She had held dreaming hands beneath sandflow where a name (Duke Nicholas Romanov) had been written. The name had blurred with the sand, and she had moved to restore it, but the first letter filled before the last letter was started.
The sand would not stop.
Her dream became wailing: louder and louder. That ridiculous wailing---part of her mind had realized that the sound was her own voice as a tiny child, little more than a baby. A woman not quite visible to memory was going away.
My unknown mother, Alexandra thought. The Bala Garrasaid who bore me and gave me to the Sisters because that's what she was ordered to do. Was she glad to rid herself of a Seppanen child?
"The place to hit them is in the spice," Alexei said.
How can he think of attack at a time like this? she asked herself.
"An entire planet full of spice," she said. "How can you hit them there?"
She heard him stirring, the sound of their pack being dragged across the tent floor.
"It was sea power and air power on Eser," he said. "Here, it's desert power! The Szganys are the key."
His voice came from the vicinity of the tent's sphincter. Her Bala Garrasaid training sensed in his tone an unresolved bitterness towards her.
All his life he's been trained to hate Seppanens, she thought. Now, he finds he is Seppanen because of me. How little he knows me! I was my Duke's only woman. I accepted his life and his values even to defying my Bala Garrasaid orders.
The tent's glowtab came alight under Alexei's hand, filled the domed area with green radiance. Alexei crouched at the sphincter, his stillsuit hood adjusted for the open desert---forehead capped, mouth filter in place, nose plugs adjusted. Only his dark eyes were visible: a narrow band of face that turned once towards her and away.
"Secure yourself for the open," he said, and his voice blurred behind the filter.
Alexandra pulled the filter across her mouth, began adjusting her hood as she watched Alexei break the tent seal.
Sand rasped as he opened the sphincter and a blurred fizzle of grains ran into the tent before he could immobilize it with a compaction tool. A hole grew in the sandwall as the tool realigned the grains. He slipped out and her ears followed his progress to the surface.
What will we find out there? she wondered. Seppanen troops and the Sordoi, those dangers we can expect. But what of the dangers we don't know about?
She thought of the compaction tool and the other strange instruments in the pack. Each of these tools suddenly stood in her mind as a sign of mysterious dangers.
She felt then a hot breeze from surface sand touch her cheeks where they were exposed above the filter.
"Pass up the pack!" It was Alexei's voice, low and guarded.
She moved to obey, heard the water kubaliters gurgle as she shoved the pack across the floor. She peered upward, saw Alexei framed against some stars.
"Here," he said and reached down, pulled the pack to the surface.
Now she saw only the circle of stars. They were like the luminous tips of weapons aimed down at her. A shower of meteors crossed her patch of night. The meteors seemed to her like a warning, like tiger stripes, like evil spirits clamoring for her blood. And she felt the chill of the price on their heads.
"Hurry up," Alexei said. "I need to collapse the tent."
A shower of sand from the surface brushed her left hand. How much sand will the hand hold? she asked herself.
"Do you need my help?" Alexei said.
"No."
She swallowed in a dry cough, slipped into the hole, felt static-packed sand rasp under her hands. Alexei reached down, took her arm. She stood beside him on a smooth patch of starlit desert, stared around. Sand almost brimmed their basin, leaving just a dim lip of surrounding rock. She probed the farther darkness with her trained senses.
Noise of small animals.
Birds.
A fall of dislodged sand and faint animal sounds inside it.
Alexei collapsing their tent, recovering it up the hole.
Starlight displaced just enough of the night to charge each shadow with menace. She looked at patches of blackness.
Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient that only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils smell.
Presently, Alexei stood beside her and said: "Grady told me that if he was captured, he could hold out.... this long. We must leave here now." He shouldered the pack, crossed to the shallow lip of the basin, then climbed to a ledge that looked down on the open desert.
Alexandra followed automatically, noting how she lived in her son's shadow.
My grief is heavier than all of the sands of the deserts combined, she thought. This planet has drained me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow's life. I live now for my young Duke and the daughter that is as yet unborn...
She felt the sand drag her feet as she climbed to Alexei's side.
He looked north across a line of rocks, studying a distant escarpment.
The faraway rock profile was like an ancient warship of the seas outlined by stars. The long swish of it lifted on an invisible wave with syllables of boomerang antennae, funnels arching back, a pi-shaped upthrusting at the stern.
An orange glare burst above the silhouette and a line of brilliant purple cut downward towards the glare.
Another line of purple!
And another upthrusting orange glare!
It was like an ancient naval battle, remembered shellfire, and the sight held them staring.
"Pillars of fire," Alexei whispered.
A ring of red eyes lifted over the distant rock. Lines of purple laced the sky.
"Jetflares and phasguns," Alexandra said.
The dust-reddened first moon of Dyuna lifted above the horizon to their left and they saw a storm-trail there----a ribbon of movement over the desert.
"It must be Seppanen 'majiggers hunting us down," Alexei said. "The way they're cutting up the desert---it's as if they were making sure they stamped out whatever's there---the way you'd stamp out a nest of insects."
"Or a nest of Romanovs," Alexandra said.
"We must seek cover," Alexei said. "We'll head south and keep to the rocks. If they caught us in the open---" He turned, adjusting the pack to his shoulders. "They're killing anything that moves."
He took one step along the ledge and, in that instant, heard the low hiss of gliding aircraft, saw the dark shapes of ornimajiggers above them.
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