The Waters of Nayru
Chapter 8: Into the Desert
By, Frank Hunter
Rigo remained mentally detached in his own world of reflection for the first leg of the journey. He surfaced long enough to stare around himself at the nothingness, and the retreating glow of the pueblo behind them. Enough to ask Amili where they were going.
"Northeast, Rigo. To Hyrule. Are you okay?"
"No," he intoned. "No, no, no. You gotta turn away."
"No…" said Amili. "It's this way. Just trust me for now. I think you hit your head or…"
"No!" he protested more loudly. Amili stopped arguing, but didn't change course. Rigo tried to draw up his experiences from earlier in the night. He told her, in fractions of sentences and thought, about his encounter with Pureet and her advice to turn south for the first day. About their pursuers and the need to lie low for several days. He managed to get the idea across at least, it seemed, because after several minutes of babbling, Amili reluctantly agreed to turn to the south, though she still looked exceedingly puzzled. With their course corrected though, Rigo again fell silent.
He stared around him at the sand, felt the cool breeze of desert night sift through his hair, his cloak, and his tunic. The musky smell of the camel, the solid weight of Amili's waist as he held onto her. All of it seemed surreal. Where was this again? Where had his grandmother gone?
Grandmother had warned him against stirring up trouble in the pueblo. She had told him to be responsible. Rigo had attacked a Gerudo guard with his wooden shield. His shield, stolen from the pueblo armory along with a small arsenal, and was now riding out into forbidden territory on a stolen camel. And everything about Sooru. Civil tension, challenges to his kingship.
What had happened in the last few weeks?
This journey wasn't meant to be so serious. It was supposed to be an adventure, for gold and glory and the benefit of Gerudo, and even that last was just an afterthought. He had realized the treasure could be made altruistic, giving him of course good reason to go, but that wasn't the reason that motivated him. Rigo was young, just entering the first stages of manhood. He wanted excitement; he wanted to explore the things he'd never before seen. He wanted Amili to be with him, to be able to talk to her in the ways he always wished he could. But this all had spiraled out of his grasp and become more than he could hope to control.
Pureet's devotion in their final meeting was the defining factor of it all. She'd said that this gesture could help solidify Rigo's image in the eyes of the people. As though it weren't solid already. This all seemed to relate back to Grandmother's warning, that walking in Ganondorf's shadow could be dangerous. He hadn't realized it already was, hadn't realized there was probably a reason Sooru refused to personally instruct him in the arts of leadership. There was too much going on in the dark maze behind the walls. Things he couldn't see, and never would have guessed at if none of this had happened.
They rode on for that first night with little rest or reprieve. Amili was happy to hold the reins and kept the camel going as quickly as she dared push the creature. Hours later, the sun began its slow climb over the horizon to their left. Neither of the kids could keep their eyes off of it. They had both witnessed sunrises often enough in their young lives, but this was different somehow. There was nothing to contrast it against, and nothing but sand for the light to shine onto. The desert was a reflective ocean of light projecting a new dawn of life around them and across their path. It was a new beginning of something that they couldn't yet see clearly.
Rigo broke their exhaustive silence. "They're gonna be realizing we're gone right about now."
Amili nodded, though Rigo barely saw the gesture. Her hood was pulled over her head, protection against the night cold. He realized, for the first time, that he had been freezing. He barely felt his fingers. But he put it out of his mind. The sun was coming, and in the desert that meant that black turned to white, cold to scorching heat. They would be ready to kill for a cool breeze within the hour.
"We'll need to stop soon," Amili said.
"No," Rigo said. "Let's get as much distance as we can. When the sun gets high, we'll rest for a few hours, then keep going. Into the afternoon."
"Why the rush?" Amili asked.
"I told you last night."
"No you didn't. You wouldn't shut up last night, but I couldn't hear what you were saying. But you seemed serious about turning south, so I did. It looked like that made you happy."
"Yeah, it did," Rigo answered.
They continued on for several hours at Rigo's request, making regular short stops now that the sun was in the sky to take water and small bits of jerky and to see to their camel. They knew that the desert required great care and that they would all be worn down quickly if they didn't take it seriously.
As the sun rose toward its zenith, Rigo and Amili decided it was finally time to break. It was important to rest at the hottest parts of the day, so they could travel when the temperature was more manageable.
They brought the camel to a stop and hitched it to a lone cactus that stood tall in the sands. The camel immediately began to munch away happily at the dry desert foliage that dotted the ground beside the cactus. Once they were sure that the animal would be fine, Rigo and Amili got to work on their own accommodations.
Using their hands and Rigo's shield, they dug a wide, shallow hole in the ground, erecting something of a windscreen and exposing the cooler sand below the surface, sand which had not yet been sun-exposed. Using the arrows as poles, they strapped their cloaks above the hole, blocking out the sun and giving them dearly needed shade. The shelter did not have to be outstanding, merely functional for the few hours that they would be using it, and it seemed it would serve that purpose. Confident in their work, Rigo took Amili's hand and helped lower her into place under the cloaks and into the hole, before climbing in himself.
It was as comfortable as could be expected, although a little tight for the two of them together. Rigo kept his arms crossed over his chest so as to take up less space, and Amili piled some sand behind her head in an attempt at a makeshift pillow. Sleep, however, was not going to come for either of them.
"Can we talk now?" Amili asked after she'd had enough time of lying uncomfortably awake.
Rigo considered for a moment before saying, "Yeah, we should. Though, I'm not really sure where to start."
"Well, how about why you made me turn south?" Amili asked him.
Rigo told her again, more coherently now, about his last encounter with Pureet in the armory. This caught her off guard.
"Wait, you'd told me they wouldn't mind you borrowing the weapons!" Amili said. Whoops.
"I may have stretched the truth a little bit," Rigo confessed. Amili punched him in the shoulder, but Rigo ignored it. He probably deserved it. He just continued his story.
He told Amili what Pureet had said about Sooru, and that they would likely have the guards after them. Maybe even Sooru herself. That they would probably guess what direction he was headed, and that going south would make them about as difficult to find as a needle in a hay crate.
"But they won't go all the way to Hyrule?" Amili asked.
Rigo shook his head. "No. Pureet thinks they'll want to stay within a few days of the pueblo. Won't want to stretch out too thin. More likely that Sooru will take advantage of my being gone and just hope I stay lost."
Silence fell as Amili laid back. "What?" Rigo asked her.
"What you're saying, about Sooru wanting to stay in power. It…it makes sense."
Rigo was taken back. "It does?"
Amili nodded. "My mother is always talking highly about Sooru, says she's the best thing the tribe could have hoped for after our exodus. And she's always telling me, quietly you know, that the 'Stewardship is dead.' I never really got what she meant, it was a confusing thing to say, but I think you're right. I think she'd be happy to see Sooru as queen."
"Queen?" Rigo scoffed. "There's no queen."
"Not yet, but they may be trying to make it happen before you're old enough to fight it, Rigo."
Rigo wanted to counter her. It sounded like so much nonsense, but in light of everything he'd learned, he knew that it was possible. And, of course, he couldn't fault Amili as the message bearer, or even her mother. It was all part of something bigger.
"I shouldn't have left," Rigo muttered.
"No," Amili said. "No, Rigo, what you're doing…it might be the only thing you can do to make yourself more respected, to even challenge Sooru. You've gotta give the people something they can believe in."
"But she'll have time to set them all against me while I'm gone," he said.
"And you'll have the means to draw them to you when you get back," she answered. Amili rolled up onto her side and drew her face close to his so she could look at him. He felt her warm breath on his neck and quickly broke out into gooseflesh.
"I don't know how you possibly came up with the idea for this," she said, "but it was a good one, and it might be exactly what you need. I'm…proud of you," she said. And she smiled, and it was contagious.
Rigo didn't know what to say. He decided just to stick with the truth. It had served him well so far.
"I'm glad you came with me," he said.
"Me too," she said.
Amili lay back down on her sand pillow and closed her eyes. No longer just trying not to take up space, she draped her arm across Rigo's chest, and Rigo, unsure of how to handle the gesture, cradled her forearm in his. As the only man and potential king of a nation of women, his promise of power came only with the isolation of having no real role model, and no peers to help him understand how to properly grow up. He was left to simply be baffled and alone.
Amili got some sleep but Rigo just lay there, awake and sweating in the desert heat, alone with his thoughts. After a few hours had gone by and he could tell by the shadows outside that the sun had started to drop in the other direction, he roused Amili and the two got to work dismantling their little shelter and re-equipping theirs cloaks and supplies. Once outside, they found that their trusty steed had actually chewed through the cactus that they had used as a hitching post and was roaming the desert free about fifty meters away.
"We're damn lucky he didn't run off," Rigo said as he led the animal back to their campsite.
"Yeah," Amili agreed. "But look on the bright side. If he can eat cactus, at least he won't go hungry out here."
The two finished packing up and remounted the camel, this time with Rigo at the reins. They continued due south, away from the pueblo and the prying eyes of the Stewardess, who, Rigo hoped, was now dispatching her search parties in the wrong direction. He wondered, with some trepidation, what would happen if she caught him now, but he finally decided to disregard the pessimism. What happened would happen, and he needed to keep a clear head, not just for himself, but for Amili's safety as well. He'd do what he could to keep them both out of danger, and deal with whatever else came up. That was the best he could hope for.