“We killed them.”

  “All?”

  “All,” said the tribemaster. “And if any man will practice sandmagic, today, we will kill him. For what happened to us we will let happen to no other people.”

  Cer saw the knife in the tribemaster’s hand.

  “I will have your vow,” said the tribemaster. “Swear before these stars and this sand and the ghosts of all who lived in this city that you will seek no sandmagic.”

  “I swear,” said Cer, and the tribemaster put his knife away.

  The next day Cer took his horse and a bow and arrows and all the food he could steal and in the heat of the day when everyone slept he went out into the desert. They followed him, but he slew two with arrows and the survivors lost his trail.

  Word spread through the tribes of the Abadapnur that a would-be sandmage was loose in the desert, and all were ready to kill him if he came. But he did not come.

  For he knew now how to serve the desert, and how to make the desert serve him. For the desert loved death, and hated grasses and trees and water and the things of life.

  So in service of the sand Cer went to the edge of the land of the Nefyrre, east of the desert. There he fouled wells with the bodies of diseased animals. He burned fields when the wind was blowing off the desert, a dry wind that pushed the flames into the cities. He cut down trees. He killed sheep and cattle. And when the Nefyrre patrols chased him he fled onto the desert where they could not follow.

  His destruction was annoying, and impoverished many a farmer, but alone it would have done little to hurt the Nefyrre. Except that Cer felt his power over the desert growing. For he was feeding the desert the only thing it hungered for: death and dryness.

  He began to speak to the sand again, not kindly, but of land to the east that the sand could cover. And the wind followed his words, whipping the sand, moving the dunes. Where he stood the wind did not touch him, but all around him the dunes moved like waves of the sea.

  Moving eastward.

  Moving onto the lands of the Nefyrre.

  And now the hungry desert could do in a night a hundred times more than Cer could do alone with a torch or a knife. It ate olive groves in an hour. The sand borne on the wind filled houses in a night, buried cities in a week, and in only three months had driven the Nefyrre across the Greebeck and the Nefyr River, where they thought the terrible sandstorms could not follow.

  But the storms followed. Cer taught the desert almost to fill the river, so that the water spread out a foot deep and miles wide, flooding some lands that had been dry, but also leaving more water surface for the sun to drink from; and before the river reached the sea it was dry, and the desert swept across into the heart of Nefyryd.

  The Nefyrre had always fought with the force of arms, and cruelty was their companion in war. But against the desert they were helpless. They could not fight the sand. If Cer could have known it, he would have gloried in the fact that, untaught, he was the most powerful sandmage who had ever lived. For hate was a greater teacher than any of the books of dark lore, and Cer lived on hate.

  And on hate alone, for now he ate and drank nothing, sustaining his body through the power of the wind and the heat of the sun. He was utterly dry, and the blood no longer coursed through his veins. He lived on the energy of the storms he unleashed. And the desert eagerly fed him, because he was feeding the desert.

  He followed his storms, and walked through the deserted towns of the Nefyrre. He saw the refugees rushing north and east to the high ground. He saw the corpses of those caught in the storm. And he sang at night the old songs of Greet, the war songs. He wrote his father’s name with chalk on the wall of every city he destroyed. He wrote his mother’s name in the sand, and where he had written her name the wind did not blow and the sand did not shift, but preserved the writing as if it had been incised on rock.

  Then one day, in a lull between his storms, Cer saw a man coming toward him from the east. Abadapnu, he wondered, or Nefyrre? Either way he drew his knife, and fit the nock of an arrow on his bowstring.

  But the man came with his hands extended, and he called out, “Cer Cemreet.”

  It had never occurred to Cer that anyone knew his name.

  “Sandmage Cer Cemreet,” said the man when he was close. “We have found who you are.”

  Cer said nothing, but only watched the man’s eyes.

  “I have come to tell you that your vengeance is full. Nefyryd is at its knees. We have signed a treaty with Greet and we no longer raid into Hetterwee. Driplin has seized our westernmost lands.”

  Cer smiled. “I care nothing for your empire.”

  “Then for our people. The deaths of your father and mother have been avenged a hundred thousand times, for over two hundred thousand people have died at your hands.”

  Cer chuckled. “I care nothing for your people.”

  “Then for the soldiers who did the deed. Though they acted under orders, they have been arrested and killed, as have the men who gave them those orders, even our first general, all at the command of the King so that your vengeance will be complete. I have brought you their ears as proof of it,” said the man, and he took a pouch from his waist.

  “I care nothing for soldiers, nor for proof of vengeance,” said Cer.

  “Then what do you care for?” asked the man quietly.

  “Death,” said Cer.

  “Then I bring you that, too,” said the man, and a knife was in his hand, and he plunged the knife into Cer’s breast where his heart should have been. But when the man pulled the knife out no blood followed, and Cer only smiled.

  “Indeed you brought it to me,” said Cer, and he stabbed the man where his father had been stabbed, and drew the knife up as it had been drawn through his father’s body, except that he touched the man’s heart, and he died.

  As Cer watched the blood soaking into the sand, he heard in his ears his mother’s screams, which he had silenced for these years. He heard her screams and now, remembering his father and his mother and himself as a child he began to cry, and he held the body of the man he had killed and rocked back and forth on the sand as the blood clotted on his clothing and his skin. His tears mixed with the blood and poured into the sand and Cer realized that this was the first time since his father’s death that he had shed any tears at all.

  I am not dry, thought Cer. There is water under me still for the desert to drink.

  He looked at his dry hands, covered with the man’s blood, and tried to scrub off the clotted blood with sand. But the blood stayed, and the sand could not clean him.

  He wept again. And then he stood and faced the desert to the west, and he said, “Come.”

  A breeze began.

  “Come,” he said to the desert, “come and dry my eyes.”

  And the wind came up, and the sand came, and Cer Cemreet was buried in the sand, and his eyes became dry, and the last life passed from his body, and the last sandmage passed from the world.

  Then came the winter rains, and the refugees of Nefyryd returned to their land. The soldiers were called home, for the wars were over, and now their weapons were the shovel and the plow. They redug the trench of the Nefyr and the Greebeck, and the river soon flowed deep again to the sea. They scattered grass seed and cleaned their houses of sand. They carried water into the ruined fields with ditches and aqueducts.

  Slowly life returned to Nefyryd.

  And the desert, having lost its mage, retreated quietly to its old borders, never again to seek death where there was life. Plenty of death already where nothing lived, plenty of dryness to drink where there was no water.

  In a wood a little way from the crest of the Mitherkame, a treemage heard the news from a wandering tinker.

  The treemage went out into the forest and spoke softly to the Elm, to the Oak, to the Redwood, to the Sweet Aspen. And when all had heard the news, the forest wept for Cer Cemreet, and each tree gave a twig to be burned in his memory, and shed sap to sink into the ground in his name.

  1980

  Tin Men

  I saw an old loop at the museum,

  The flat kind they put on a screen.

  It was a dream,

  Or, if you will, a lie,

  Of men with boyish grins

  Bursting from impossibly bright spaceships

  To rescue naked women

  And stride unhindered on dusty planets

  And, yes, destroy evil, which always sneered

  And made stupid mistakes

  And clearly deserved to die.

  They believed in destiny, no doubt,

  And thought, because the worlds looked small,

  They could be harvested by reaching out;

  Because the road from proteins in the sea

  Looked infinite, they thought the road ahead

  Was also straight and infinitely long.

  They were wrong.

  Oh, there’s no sign the road will end—

  They just weren’t counting on our little bend.

  These tin men, star men, never lacked for heart.

  But in their dreams they ended voyages

  We have neither wit nor will to start.

  And when we set our hands

  To killing evil at its source,

  We traced it through its tortuous course:

  We found it shyly hiding in our glands,

  Where all our wishing could not have it dead;

  It rises hungry with us in the morning

  And returns in darkness with us to our bed.

  Tinker

  Night came to the forest as suddenly as an owl stooping, and John Tinker barely had time to pile leaves together under the blue maple tree. He lay down and looked through the branches above him. Occasionally a star shone through the shifting pattern, and John Tinker wondered which of them might be the particular star he dreamed of.

  And as he slept that night the dream came again, and again he woke sweating and trembling in the cold of predawn light. Rushing through the night the star had come toward him, with the terrible roaring in his ears, until it was larger than the sun, then larger still, and he felt it swallow him up. It was hot, so that he could barely breathe, so that he sweated until he was too dry to sweat and his body was sandpaper. Then he woke shivering and panting, with the finches perched on a high root, watching him.

  He smiled at the finches and reached out his hand. Playfully they backed away, then came closer, toying with him as if he were part of their mating dance. Then at once they both leapt onto his hand, and he brought them close. Looking at the male, John Tinker cocked his head. The male finch cocked his head, too. John Tinker blinked. The finch blinked. Then with a soft laugh John Tinker threw his arm out straight and the finches were in flight, making tight, incredibly quick circles around the glade. And on their wings John Tinker rode their mad flight with them in the sickening drop of the organs of the birds diving, the exhilaration of rising quickly, looping, turning tighter and tighter until the wings are exhausted and straining. Then a few minutes of panting and rest, the finches on a branch, John Tinker on the ground, feeling the birds’ weariness and slight shoulder pain as if it were his own. Hard flight, and then sweet pain. He smiled, and removed himself from the birds.

  He got up and gathered his tinker’s tools, the wooden mallets and shapers, the melting pot, and most important the thin patches and scraps of tin that he would shape into Goodwife Wimbles new spoon handle, Goodwife Smith’s vegetable pan, or Sammy Barber’s strophook. The scraps were tied to his clothing and his staff, and as he walked they jangled and clanked so loudly that whenever he came to town the wives would be on their porches waiting long before he was in sight. “Tinker’s in town,” he’d hear them calling, and he knew business would be good. Had to be good. Not another tinker between Hux and Linkeree, not in all the broad Forest of Waters, and John Tinker was smart enough not to come to the same town twice in a twelve month.

  But it was near winter now, and John Tinker was coming home. To Worthing, the darkest, least-known little town in the forest, where no one came to him asking for tin. What they wanted in Worthing was a winter’s worth of magic. What he would give them he would call a winter’s worth of pain.

  After only an hour John Tinker struck the road, knowing the spot to be about a quarter-mile out of town. He rarely used the roads, for in these days robbers murdered passersby to take their wealthy And though he knew many of them and had often tinkered for them and spent the night, he knew that if they saw him on the road he’d be dead before they had time to notice it was John Tinker, the forest man, or John Bird, the magician with the finches.

  And there were places in the forest where his name wasn’t known at all, but where he had come once, covered with tin, to a cabin with no smoke from the chimney because the people inside were too sick to cut wood. He appeared in the doorway, and feebly a dying old woman lifted a knife, or a six-year-old boy struggled to lift an axe to protect his delirious parents. John Tinker whispered a soft word then, and smiled, and the finches would fly from his shoulders and alight on the bed of the sick. When he left the folk slept peacefully and there was wood in the hearth.

  They awoke healthy and whole, and soon forgot John Tinker, whose name they never knew, except that every now and then as a mother covered her sleeping son in the night she remembered the hands of the healer, and as a man regarded his wife early in the morning while sleep still covered her eyes he thought of the large man with birds for friends who touched her and let her sleep.

  Sammy Barber looked out the window of his shop on the main square, and saw the flashes of light from John Tinker’s tin. He hurried back to the chair where Martin Keeper was covered with soap, waiting for a shave.

  “Tinker’s in town.”

  Martin Keeper sat bolt upright. “Dammit and the boy’s the only one at the inn.”

  “Too late, anyway, he’s already turned in.” Sammy fingered his razor. “Might as well go home with a shave as go home with stubble, now, don’t you think, Master Martin?”

  Martin grunted and sat back in the chair. “Make it quick then, Sammy boy, or it’ll cost you more than the tuppence you hope to gain.”

  Sammy set to work scraping at Martin’s face. “I don’t see why you don’t like him, Martin. Sure, he’s a cold man—”

  “If he’s a man—”

  “He is your cousin, Master Martin.”

  “Which is a lie.” Martin was turning red under the remnants of shaving soap. “His father and my father were cousins, but after that I swear no relationship except that he gets free lodging in my inn.”

  Sammy shook his head as he stropped his razor. “Then why,” Master Martin, does your little boy Amos have his eyes?

  Martin Keeper jumped from the chair and turned on the little barber savagely. “My boy Amos has my eyes, Sammy boy, blue like mine, blue like his mother’s. Give me the towel.” He wiped his face quickly, missing a few places, including a spot of soap on the end of his nose which made his face look ludicrous. Sammy restrained his smile as the big innkeeper strode out of the shop. When the door slammed shut he went ahead and laughed, a giggle high in his head that shook his whole fat body.

  “Blue like mine, he says. Blue like my wife.” He sank into the chair still warm from Martin Keeper’s body and giggled and sweated until he fell asleep.

  Amos, Martin’s son, sat on the tall stool in the common room, where he was to tend the desk—which meant an hour or two of looking through his father’s counting book and wishing he could go outside. It was another thing to keep desk in winter, when the fire roared and everyone was inside drinking and singing and dancing to keep warm. Now it was the last few days of warm weather before the cold rains came, and then it would be winter and deep snow, and he wouldn’t be able to swim until the thaw. His fingers itched to take off all his clothes and dive into West River. Instead he turned pages in the counting book.

  A jangling noise distracted him and he looked up to see a tall man standing in the door, shutting out the light; It was John Tinker, the winter tenant of the south tower, the man that no one spoke of and everyone knew. Amos was afraid, of course, just as everyone else in Worthing was afraid. And he was even more afraid because for the first time in his life he had to see the Tinker all by himself, without his father’s hand on his shoulder to calm him and make him safe.

  John Tinker walked up to the wide-eyed boy at the counter. Amos only stared at him. John Tinker looked into his eyes and saw blue. Not common blue. Not the eyes of every blond forest dweller. Deep, uninterrupted, unfathomable blue, surrounded by a clear, veinless white. Eyes that could never twinkle or look merry or speak of friendship, but eyes that could see. The same blue eyes that John Tinker had, and it made him sad somehow to know that this boy, his cousin Amos, had those same true eyes. Amos had a gift. Not John Tinker’s gifts, perhaps, but a gift, and John Tinker shook his head and reached out his hand and said, “Key.”

  The boy fumbled with the key on the rack and handed it to the tinker, who said, “Get my things from the cupboard,” and walked away toward the stairs to the south tower. Amos got off his stool slowly and made his way to the cupboard where the tinker’s bags were kept. They were covered with dust after a summer’s storage, but they were not heavy, and Amos carried them easily to the tinker’s room.

  It was up a high flight of stairs, past two floors of tenants’ rooms, all full, and a floor of rooms that were not full this year, and at last up a winding stair and then a short ladder through a trap in the ceiling; and he was in the tinker’s room.

  The south tower was the tallest place in the town, with shuttered windows that had no glass on them so that when they were opened the wind rushed through from all around and you could look and see forest in every direction. Amos had never been up here before with the windows opened— he had only snuck up a few times to play here, had been caught once and thrashed. He looked out west and saw Mount Waters rising high and clear and snowcapped from the deepest part of the Forest of Waters. He could see the West River flashing and shining away north and west, and he could see, way to the north, the purple horizon of the Heaven Mountains. From this tower you could see all the world that Amos had ever heard of, except for Heaven city itself, where the Heaven King lived, and that was not part of the world anyway.