Chapter 19

Then Aga was blotted out by the dense cloud of dust that billowed out over her and filled the whole room. With it came an intense heat. Green opened his mouth to cry out to Amra and Paxi to cover their faces and especially their noses. Before he could do so his own open mouth was packed with dust and his nostrils were full. He began sneezing and coughing explosively, while his eyes ran tears in their efforts to wash out the dirt that caked and burned them. Clods of dirt struck him, hurled by the blast. They didn’t hurt because they were so small and so fluffy. But they fell so swiftly and in such numbers that he was half-buried under them. Even in the midst of his shock he couldn’t help being thankful that he’d been breathing out when the heat struck him. Otherwise he’d have sucked in air that would have seared his lungs, and he’d have dropped dead. As it was, wherever his skin had not been covered by cloth he felt as if he were suffering a bad case of sunburn.

Painfully, he rose on all fours and began crawling toward the other room, where he thought the dust would not be so thick. At the same time he tugged at Amra’s arm--at least he supposed it was her arm, since she’d been so close to him when the explosion took place. His gesture was intended to tell her that she should follow him. She rose and followed him, touching him from time to time. Once she stopped, and he turned to find out what was bothering her, even if he felt that he couldn’t stand much more of the almost solid dust in his lungs and had to get out to open air or strangle. Then he knew that the woman was Amra, for she was carrying a child in her arms. The child had a scarf around her head and, as he remembered, Paxi was the only infant so dressed.

Coughing violently, he rose to his feet, pulling Amra to hers, and swiftly walked toward where he hoped the exit was. He knew he’d fallen on his face in the general direction of the doorway; if he kept in a straight line he might make it without wandering off to one side.

He found soon enough that he was going just opposite, for he fell headlong over a body on the floor. When he got up again, he ran his hands over the body. The skin was crusty, scaly. Aga’s burned corpse. The cutlass was lying by her side, assuring him of her identity.

Re-oriented, he turned back, still pulling Amra by the hand. This time he ran into a wall, but he had his free hand stretched out in front of him for just such an event. Frantically, he groped to his left until he came to the corner of the room. Then, knowing that the doorway lay back to his right, he turned and felt along the metal until he came to the opening. He plunged through it, almost fell into the other room, which was as dark and dusty as the one he’d just left. He trotted on ahead, bumped into another wall, groped to his right, found the next exit and ran through that. Here the air was much more free of dust. He could actually make out outlines of his companions as the light was penetrating the fainter haze.

Nevertheless he and the others were coughing and weeping as if they were trying to eject lungs and eyeballs alike. Spasm after spasm shook them.

Green decided that this room wasn’t really much better than the others, so he led Amra and Paxi around the right-angled corner and into the dark tunnel. Here his violent rackings began to quiet down and by rapid blinking, which forced tears, he cleaned his eyes of much of the dust. Anxiously, he peered down the passageway toward its end, where the cave mouth formed a dim arch in the moonlight outside.

It was as he’d feared. Somebody stood there, outlined in the beams, bent forward, peering in.

He thought that it must be the priestess, for the figure was slight and the hair was pulled up on top of the head in a great Psyche knot with a feather stuck through it. Moreover, around her feet were four or five cats.

His coughing betrayed him, for the priestess suddenly whirled and trotted off on her sticklike legs. Green dropped Amra’s hand and ran, at the same time drawing his stiletto from his belt, as he’d lost his cutlass during the explosion. He had to stop the priestess, though he didn’t know what good it would do. The savages sooner or later would come to the sanctuary to ask if she’d seen any of the refugees. And if they couldn’t find her they would at once suspect what had happened. The chances were that they already knew. Surely, the noise of the blast must have penetrated even to their ears.

Or had it? The air waves had to round several perpendicular turns before reaching the cave mouth, and it might be that the noise had seemed much greater to Green than it actually was because he’d been so close to it. Perhaps there was some hope.

He ran into the clearing before the cave mouth. The sun was just coming over the horizon, so he could see things clearly. The old woman was nowhere in sight. The only live things were several drunken cats. One of these began to rub its back against Green’s leg and purred loudly. Automatically, he stooped down and caressed it, though his gaze flickered everywhere for a sign of the priestess. The door of her hut was open and since it was so small he could be certain that she had no room in there to hide from him. She must have run off down the path.