He’d been wandering for weeks, starving himself, hardly drinking. His strength had left him days ago, and he’d fallen into a desperate cycle of mad raving, followed by a bout of mad roaming. Then, his ability to move and rant spent, he’d lay wherever he fell. Drifting in odd, half-waking states, the backs of his eyelids showing, all day and night, marathons of strange alternate worlds. He saw himself in one, dressed in the garb of a 20th century catholic white-collar, preaching to an empty church and the pews went back as far as he could see. In another he saw the seas of the earth, all stirred and roiling with strange creatures turned up from the muck. They walked on earth and drank the firmament till there was nothing left but water. Then he was swimming down there. Lower than anybody had ever been, lower than the sea floor. He reached the bottom and then burrowed in. He broke through crust. He tunneled into solid rock. He came to fire.
Winter was coming to the desert and the nights, already freezing with sharp sustained winds, tested him. Finally, after many days without water, he found it. It was tough to see, running down the crack between two-thousand foot limestone walls and pooling a little bit in a crawlspace some thirty belly-crawling feet into a cave at the base, where the cliffs met the soil in a dry, open canyon. He saw the water glistening at the very top of the walls and knew that it must be gathering somewhere below. He dropped to his knees and then his belly and shimmied in.
He spent the night there, drinking every few minutes and soaking his hands. His feet were a problem. He couldn’t see them but he felt like he had deep, festering sores down there. He had ditched his sandals a week into the trek, long after the damage had been done and done again. A great slash across the top of both feet where the straps had been. A great gash and open bruises on the bottoms, he guessed. Walking with bare feet in the desert, it was a wonder he still had feet. For the first time in weeks he lay, reasonably safe and warm, and actually fell into a restful dreamless sleep.
Deep in the night he woke with a fright. He was sure he’d heard something out by the crawl space entrance. Voices? Was it thieves? Romans sent to kill him? He began to crawl for the outside desert. Halfway there the crawlspace and the whole of the desert outside lit up like daylight. It wasn’t lightning, because it lasted and lasted. A minute went by, Josh made the mouth of his cave, stood up outside. Saw the white, overpowering light. Greater than any bright day. Super-heating the dry air instantly. He knew suddenly, then crawled into his cave again. More determined now to have some semblance of rest. It seemed he’d be having a guest in the morning.
He had just begun his low crawling back to the oasis when he heard the footsteps. He yielded quickly under the rock and turned in time to see a man called Anwar running up the draw at the cave mouth, and then scurrying by. Moving fast, he could see.
In the morning he hydrated, rinsing his feet and hands and drinking a long drink. Then he picked a rock outside the cave and waited for his father to arrive unannounced.
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