133 - You Said That On Purpose!

“Three full days...” Kyrus set one foot in front of the other, putting a toe into the slightly worn spot on the wood.  He turned to Werfas who walked up the endless hill with him.  “They say the storm’s still going strong.”

“Yeah.  Hara went up to water everybody’s birds.  It’s not easy hauling that weight without dripping into the reservoir.  She says its still howling bad.”

The reservoir that Kyrus had fallen into was completely transformed.  The program that the ever-resourceful Amir had come up with had grown a whole series of shallow stone tanks up the wall, all the way to the seep hole where the fizzy mix of alkaline and fresh water still trickled in.  The reservoir had been divided into different basins... really by making the stone underneath grow up in walls between.  The zon had put their heads together with stepda and helped out – clining the basins deeper and such.

A water wheel had been moved from the main basin, replaced with a new one, on da’s say so, backed up by the Emir-al and... even in this storm the Lin delivered reports and orders.  The note that said it was from His Radiance just said one word. “Approved.”  It was his because it glittered in the paper and nobody else got letters printed like that.

So now that they’d recovered from their adventure Ky and Werfas, as a ‘gesture of good faith’, as da and stepda said, walked the pump.  The wheel they walked in had wooden slats so they wouldn’t slip and a bar for them to hang onto, so they could trudge a couple thousand litres of water up out of the contaminated basin and through the stone step-filters, into the smaller ‘clean’ reservoir.

The Amir had winked at them and told them not to worry, he’d set up the new wall as a one-way membrane as well.  It looked to Kyrus that the wall between the clean and the polluted was moving over, slowly, as more and more filtered water was poured in behind it.  If it kept up, eventually it would be one basin again, full of water drinkable by humans and other terran creatures. It disturbed the sala’rs though and they’d gone into hiding in the main reservoir.

The village was full of terran animals, mostly for their usefulness.  There were goats and sheep and bakons from Milar, horses from Nadumar, chickens and other fowl from Rumon and cats and dogs too, though the cats and dogs were mostly for vermin killing.

The lights pinned up all over the place were raw sala’r skins, their luminescence fading slowly as they dried out.  It was pretty dim light but better than trying to light torches underground.  It was almost quiet here on the edge of what was a noisy, hot, overwhelming space with everyone jammed into the main cavern because of the storm.  The creak of the wheel as they walked, the rumbling splash of water as it was dumped into the filters at the top. The thump of their heels together on the wood.

People had been less upset when it became clear that their water source could be cleaned fairly quickly and that the seep was apparently a spring.  A trickle, but still a source of fresh water, from somewhere underground.

“You know...” Werfas said into the quiet thud of their footfalls, hollow in the cavern.  “I think that your da and stepda think I’m sweet on you.”

Kyrus was so startled he stopped his walk, got carried around the wheel but only until he clonked his head on the hub, stumbled sideways and fell on his rump in the sand, staring, as Werfas plodded on, more slowly, grinning at him.

“B...b... bu...no um you’re my friend bb bbb.bbbut.”  He sputtered as if he were trying to spit out a mouthful of sand.

“I don’t think they know we’re wing-brothers,” his friend continued thoughtfully.  “And they’re pretty happy that you and Hara are getting on well.”

“WERFAS!  You’re being an idiot.  You know how I feel about boys... um... men... um...”

“You don’t need to shout.”  Werfas nodded.  “They just have these weird ideas.”

Ky nodded, picked himself up off the sand, brushed the seat of his trousers with one hand. “You said that just to see me fall over, didn’t you?”  He stepped carefully back into the wheel and took up rhythm again, watching his feet to make sure he didn’t trip on the traction strips.

“Yeah, of course I did.  You need the occasional clunk on the head.” Werfas said, laughing a little, but Ky had his head down and didn’t see the wistful expression on his friend’s face before it disappeared.