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hours. What’s wrong?”
He sighed. “I’m just going to pay my respects. I’m going back to the place where I burned the body of the man who was like a father to me. My first real friend. He made me what I am.”
He stood silent for a while, seemingly unaware that he still held her hand. “Back in Port T. people put flowers on the graves. Ol’ Marou wouldn’t want flowers. I’m taking him a piece of goanna and a bottle of beer. To remember.”
She said nothing, just squeezed his hand. “Come,” he said roughly. “Come and see the last resting place of the lord of the desert.”
In the stark moonlight he led her up between the shadowed buttes and then into a narrow ravine, dark and cruel-edged in the sharp moonlight, and then out onto the naked sheetrock at the top. In the moonlight the tangled weave of sharp-edged valleys lay like some gargantuan mauled tapestry below them. “In the early morning, after a storm, you can