The Desert Witch
Our village sits at the edge of the desert. The days burn hot and long, and in winter the nights sit cold and lonely. There is a fever which comes to our people, a sickness that rides upon the night air and enters the lungs of the sleeping. Like a beast on the hunt, it usually finds the weakest for its victims. Some say evil spirits bring the fever.
Tana, my father's cousin, is our village leader. I have lived with him since my parents died. Sometimes he lets me sit with him at the village council. Tana says we must accept the risks of living here, and let the fever take who it will. That is how the fittest survive, he says. That is how the village survives.
One morning, Tana awoke with a burning fever. Take me to the desert witch, he said to me. The desert witch is the only one who can cure me.
There are stories of the desert witch told in our village. She is an old but ageless creature, half-demon they say. She can go years without eating, but when she does eat, she devours an entire person.
I put Tana on a camel and we rode into the heart of the desert. That is where she lives, they say. At the heart of the desert. At the driest place. In the middle of the earth.
She was a terrible sight. Her skin was dry as the wind, and her eyes were sunken and dark. She sat on a skin under a makeshift tent. She smelled of death.
I carried Tana to her. She nodded. She knew him.
She drew a circle in the sand and divided it in half. Then she rent his shirt and drew the same symbol on his chest. Where her finger passed, a red line appeared like a cut. Then she looked up at me. I came towards her and held out my wrist, somehow knowing what she wanted.
The blood from my wrist dripped into the circle of sand. Her teeth were sharpened into fangs.
Tana awoke, his eyes rolling in his head and then focusing. He sat up, looking at the witch. Finally he looked at me, and then back to her.
He was deciding whether to leave me. That is the decision you must make when you have a village to think of.