Parched by Melanie Crowder Page A

movement below reached his ears. Sarel was up, gathering their things, preparing to leave. He was out of time. Did he really think he could tunnel down through a whole hillside, weak as he was? Musa thrust the shovel into the wall of the pit he had dug and carved out a step. He climbed up and out. The fading sun was glaring, shining red across the flat plain.
    Suddenly, Nandi’s head shot up and swiveled to the east. She barked, loud, a throaty warning with a high-pitched edge of fear that lifted the hair on Musa’s arms. Outside the kennel, the dogs were circling Sarel, tails up, hackles up, all pointing south.
    Musa followed their gaze to where four men approached, the desert air blurring the outline of their bodies. Even from a distance, Musa could see their red bandannas and the rifles strapped to their backs as clearly as if they stood beside him.
    The Tandie were here. He was too late.
    The ground seemed to shift beneath him, and his fingers scrabbled against the gummed bark of the sweet thorn tree beside him.
    Musa sidled behind the trunk. Sivo hadn’t seen him yet. He could still slip down the other side of the hill and disappear into the desert.
    No one would ever find him.

34
Sarel
    She should run.
    But she was so tired.
    The men sauntered onto the homestead, guns slung over their shoulders, sweat-soaked red cloths cinched tight.
    It was just like before when Sarel had watched through a curtain of heat and dust and waving desert grasses, watched bullets throw the bodies of her father and then her mother to the ground. When the blades of the windmill slashed in lazy circles through billowing clouds. When the dogs in her father’s kennel clawed at the chainlink, barking, snarling, digging to get out.
    Sarel’s nostrils flared, and the wind shifted, washing the smoke of Dingane’s fire across her face. She blinked, clearing her eyes of the stinging, swimming tears. She blinked again, and the last wisps of memory fled from her vision.
    The dogs pressed in all around her, hackles raised and growls rumbling through their chests. Where was Nandi? Sarel sank her hands into the ruffs of the dogs on either side of her, holding them back from the men with the guns.
    â€œWhere is Musa?”
    Sivo. That’s what Musa called him.
    â€œWhere is my dowser?” Sivo slung the rifle over his head and waved it between Sarel and Dingane. Behind him, the other men leveled their rifles at the snarling dogs.
    Why didn’t the dogs just leave? They might make it. They might. Sarel tried to pull them back, but they were too strong. “Go!” she whispered. “Ubali, Bheka, Thando, get back—run!” Snarls pulled their lips up over their teeth. Where was Nandi? Why had any of them bothered to survive, if it was all going to end like this?
    Dingane stepped into the space between the Tandie and the bristling pack, his hands raised high in the air.

35
Musa
    Dingane stood in front of Sivo, his bare chest centered on the barrel of Sivo’s gun.
    â€œNo,” Musa whispered. He stepped around the tree. “Don’t shoot!” he yelled, pitching his voice to carry down the steep sides of the little hill and across the dry river.
    The Tandie turned toward the sound, squinting up at him. Sivo lowered his gun and held a hand up in warning.
    While everyone watched Musa pick his way through the trees, Dingane crept around behind Sivo. His eyes flicked up once, to his brother, and then he lunged for the rifle. Sivo threw him off as if he weighed nothing at all. He raised the rifle up to his eye.
    â€œDingane!” Musa cried.
    The
crack
of the gun ripped across the homestead. Dingane’s head whipped back and his body crumpled to the ground.
    Musa screamed. He ran, stumbling, tripping in the dirt pocked with holes, careening down the side of the little hill. His feet slipped on the scree and he smacked the dirt with a force that stole the air from his lungs.
    The ground beneath him