He remembered his mother, who had died before he was two years old. He remembered warm flesh, soft and dusky, smelling sweetly of milk. In the darkness, Dani smiled. Mother’s milk, the odor of love. She had loved him very much. He remembered his father telling him so, and afterward, after his father was gone, Warabi and old Ngurra, who had raised him, the scent of mother’s milk and warmed flesh, the sharp tang of a wad of well-chewed gamal.

Truly, the blackness was not so terrible.

“Do you smell that, lad?” Uncle Thulu said dreamily. “It’s like the scent of baari-wood, newly peeled, slick with morning dew. Nothing like it, is there?” He laughed softly. “I must have been about your age when I cut my first digging-stick. ‘Learn to follow the veins of the earth,’ old Ngurra told me. ‘The Bearer will have need of your skills.’” Another soft laugh. “Even the wise are wrong sometimes.”

A faint sense of alarm stirred in Dani. “Baari-wood?”

“Peeled clean as a whistle, sweet as dawn.” Uncle Thulu squirmed into place and slumped back against the wall beside him, their shoulders brushing companionably in the darkness. “You’ll see, we’ll go to the grove together, and you’ll see.” He inhaled deeply, then yawned. “You can almost see it now, if you try.”

It was wrong, all wrong. There was no scent of baari-wood in the tunnels, only mother’s milk and desert-warm flesh, and that was wrong, too, because his mother was long dead and his father, too, and there was nothing here save stone and darkness.

“Uncle.” Dani shook Thulu’s unresponsive shoulder. “Something’s not right. We’ve got to keep moving. Please, Uncle!”

“To where, lad?” Thulu asked, peaceable and sleepy. “Back where the Fjel are waiting? That path is gone. Onward to starve in darkness? There’s no way out of here. Better to rest, and dream.”

“No.” Gritting his teeth, Dani wiped the blood from his sticky hands and fumbled for the clay flask, trying to work the cork loose. It was tight; he had made sure of it after his fall had jarred it loose on the plains. His palms burned, his fingers felt thick and clumsy, and it was hard to get a grip on the cork. For a moment he thought, why not rest? Uncle is right, we are lost forever, it’s better to rest and dream.

Then the cork gave way and the scent of the Water of Life arose, and it was clear and clean and potent, heavy with minerals, almost a weight on the tongue, shredding the veils that clouded his mind. With his head heavy and low, Dani took a deep breath, tasting life, verdant and alive, and understood anew how precious and precarious it was, and how tenuous their grasp upon it here in the bowels of the earth.