Now he dreamed them every night, snatches and flashes of other lives, other places. He dreamed a beautiful city fallen into decay. Terrible winged creatures with eyes that used to be human. A young woman and an older man, their long hair sunlight golden, their eyes startling blue as they pulled fire from thin air. He wept when he dreamed them, for the love and the loss.

His belly rumbled, complaining. He ignored it. What kind of father filled his own belly and left his child’s empty? Tilda was a growing girl. They’d buried three babes before she was born. He and Bene were agreed. No matter what they suffered, their daughter would survive the grinding hard times that had Lur beaten to its knees and whimpering.

She has to survive. For she’s like me, my Tilly, and Lur needs her to live.

He couldn’t say why he was so certain of that. He only knew he was, that the feeling was a lot more than a father’s love for his child… and that if he ignored his quiet, insistent, inner voice he might as well pitch himself off the cliff.

The waning night was so silent. Lur’s drought had killed a lot of birds. It was slowly killing everything. He didn’t need his dreams to know that. He was an Olken, born hearing the earth’s song… and the earth had stopped singing. It was weeping now. Wailing. And not even Lur’s best earth-singers knew a lullaby to soothe it.

Why can’t I dream a lullaby, instead of these strangers?

As he sat on his sandstone rock, waiting for the future to become the present, he watched the stars fade and the sun rise. Looked down into the parched creeklet, counting skeleton fish and dry rocks. Last of all he looked north, to the smudge of mountains on the distant horizon. He’d dreamed them, too. Dreamed them shimmering and golden, filled with a power that stole his breath. They didn’t have a name. They were simply the mountains. No-one knew what lay beyond their high jagged peaks. No-one cared to find out. The Olken weren’t an adventurous people. They lived small and peaceful lives.

At least we used to. But that’s about to change.

He might not know exactly how, but he was certain it would be soon. The crawling sensation between his shoulder blades never lied. The leaping pulse of his blood, that was a truth-teller, too. Lur was about to get itself tipped topsy-turvy. As fervently as ever he wished for rain, he wished he was wrong, but he wasn’t. The things he saw came true. Always. That was his curse.

Tilly laughed when he walked into the mud brick cottage’s kitchen, and waved her little spoon at him. The old whittled wood was yellow with egg.

“Pa! Pa! There you are, Pa!”