The mud flats of Arakho extend for many miles across the land. To outsiders they are seen as a smudge on the map containing nothing but savage people living in mud houses and enormous expanses of dirt and dust. The people that live there are the Arak. They are a peaceful people who have little in the way of resources or technologies. They simply live their lives in the mud flats, making do with what they have.

One of them is called Eya. She is a tall woman who wanders far into the plains and digs up salt to bring back for the tribe. The mud flats are rich in salt and much of their food is covered with it. To outsiders this food can be almost inedible and so few people trade with them for their food. Most people ignore them and leave them to their mud and salt. Most, but not all.

Far away a man sits in a room behind a desk covered with papers. Spread out across the room is a huge map which is titled in large letters, ‘The World’. The map is not very accurate, a fact the man is now discovering, but it is the most accurate map he has of the area he is interested in. And he is interested in every area. He has a book he writes in. A big black book whose blank pages he has slowly filled up with facts and information about every place on the map. He has now reached the mud flats of Arakho and he reads through his papers.

He sends out word to his king. A powerful man in control of many areas on the map. The king learns of this area and he learns of its salt. Salt is cheap and common in Arakho but it is rare and expensive elsewhere. The king is very interested in things rare and expensive. He has made it a habit to find them and take them from the people who used to own them. He does not usually trade.

Messages are sent out. Little information is known about Arakho and a party of soldiers and explorers is sent to gather more. They are led by a man named Leond, a warrior who has fought in many battles and is well prepared for the gruelling journey. They set out on a ship that can carry a hundred men, and sail to the city of Rasarath. The nearest coastal city to Arakho. From there they begin to ride.

Meanwhile Eya is out gathering salt. She has a long way to go and is often gone for days at a time. She brings her digging stick with her as well as bags to put the salt in. She has no horse, no dogs, nothing and no one but herself. Alone in the vast plains.

She is not truly alone though, experience has taught her that. While the mud flats seem empty there is much that lives there. Plants and trees that can survive in the salted ground grow in the harsh sunlight. These plants are dotted few and far between around oases in the plains. She usually stays away from the oases, in the shade of the plants live all sorts of biting bugs and stinging wasps. Then there are mud spiders to feed on the wasps and lizards to feed on the spiders, snakes to feed on the lizards. And there is always flies to feed on the dead. With all the life near the oases there is a lot of death for the flies. There are fewer plants or animals away from the oases. There are mud worms that slither their way through the ground sometimes, and mud lizards that eat them. There are old dead trees, leftover from dried up oases and in the trees there can be spiders and lizards, and sometimes even birds, travelling from far off places. Eya likes seeing the birds.

Then there is mighty Sambaya, the Salt Eater. He is all the protection Eya ever needs. She has only seen him a few times and each time she has hidden in fear and dread for he is huge. Bigger than the mud houses she lives in while she is not gathering salt. Bigger than the dead scraggly trees. Bigger than any creature she has ever seen or heard of before. She fears Sambaya, but she trusts him too. Her grandmother taught her that when she taught her the ways of the mud flats and the gathering of salt. She taught her that he is the monster who scares off all the other monsters. That he is the great protector of their tribe and while they appease him he will drive off all other evils.

So every time she finishes her digging and needs to go back, she leaves a bags worth of salt on a rock for the salt eater to have and every time she returns there it is gone with his great footprints leading up to it.

Sambaya finds the salt by himself as well. He is big enough and strong enough to tear up the ground for it without a digging stick and sometimes Eya can find the great furrows he has made and pick up the salt left behind. She prefers gathering it that way rather than having to dig it up herself in the hot sun.

She tips out a bag onto the rock and then turns to go home. She has never seen Sambaya up close. He has only ever been a lumbering shadow in the distance to her. He doesn’t come out during the day, she does not know where he goes, nor does she want to find out. He is her protector but he is still a monster.

She walks for hours and then days and finally returns to the tribe with her bags. It is noisy there. It is always quiet out in the mud flats. She likes the quiet, it is what she is used to. But she likes the noise as well, it is home.

She smiles at the other villagers as they greet her and wave. They talk to each other and yell at each other and little children run about the streets. She goes to the great storage house in the centre of the town. It is a tall round building with thick walls of mud to keep the food within cool. She crawls through into the cool dark interior and puts her salt bags with the others, then crawls out again.

Now she has finished her task and the tribe will welcome her back with a great fire and she can see all her friends again. But before then she needs to sleep. She goes back to the house she shares with her family and falls asleep on her bed, her sweaty clothes and empty food bags still on her.

The party sent by the king ride toward Arakho. They are growing hot and tired and irritable. There are a lot of them and travelling is much slower than Leond would like. There are explorers who must see everything there is to see and talk to everyone there is to talk to. There are rich men, obsessed with investigating and cataloguing every type of plant or rock or animal they find. There are mapmakers who must take measurements of the stars every night and scribble all over their maps. And there is him, who does not care about the sights and the people and the plants and the animals and the stars. He cares about Arakho and how far away it is. But it is getting closer every day.

Night falls and Eya is awoken by her family who bring her to the great fire pit in the centre of their village where a roaring fire is burning and many of the tribe have already gathered. They cook food and sing songs and Eya tells them of all she has seen out in the mud flats. They tell her all of what has happened at home. Of those who have fallen in love. Of the children who have accomplished new skills. Of the simmering feuds with rival tribes and the relations with the few who trade with them. She listens to it all and stays up all night dancing and singing with her tribe.

The next day she sleeps most of the day and then spends the next few days helping her family around the house. She meets up with her friends and talks to them of what has been happening. Of all that has changed in the weeks she has been gone. There is always a lot that has changed.

Eventually after many days pass she gathers up her bags of food and her empty bags to fill with salt. She takes her digging stick and many waterskins and she sets off back into the mud flats. Back into her lonely world of silence and peace.

The party sent by the king reaches Arkharath, the last city before the mud flats of Arakho. They stay there the night and meet the people there. They see all the salt moving throughout the streets in great bags and the low price charged for it. They see it covering the food and covering it well. They talk to the people through a translator they brought from Rasarath and learn of the great wealth of salt in the mud flats. The next day Leond and his soldiers set out to investigate ahead of the others. They are moving into unknown territory now and it is considered safest to send the soldiers first. Leond approves of this idea because with only his soldiers he can travel much much faster. They ride off from Arkharath and vanish into the distance.

Eya has been gone for a few days. She has gathered very little salt and has not travelled very far. She sleeps alone under the stars as she always does and in the morning she watches the sun rise and thinks she sees a column of smoke off in the distance from her village. She has never seen smoke like that before. She assumes it is because of a great fire in the fire pit, maybe to celebrate the return of some other salt collector. She decides to ignore it and continues on into the mud flats.

At the village, things are not going well. The soldiers rode in fully armed and so the locals threw spears at them. The spears killed two of the soldiers but the rest made it into the town where they attacked. Killing and raping until they’d gathered up most of the villagers by the fire pit. Leond then walked through each of the houses, bloodlust and rage still rising in him. And tore apart the furnishings with his sword looking for salt. And he found it. In almost every house there was bowls or bags of it. He dragged them all out and tossed them into a sack. Then he found the storage house. He sent in one of his soldiers to crawl through the entrance and take out everything that was in there. The storage house had the village’s entire supply of food for the rest of the year. Some things, like the salt, they could collect year round. But most were seasonal and could not be easily replaced until next year. Then he burned them.

He kept the salt and burned everything else, sending an ugly black pillar of smoke into the sky. Then he sent back a messenger to tell the others that it was all safe and settled down to wait for them to arrive. Bullying the villagers into obeying him and his men. Serving them and giving them what little food they had left. Some tried to resist and were cut down. Others ran away but with no food they wouldn’t survive long in the mud flats.

The villagers mourned their dead and carried on. They didn’t speak the language of the soldiers and knew little of what was going on. But they had lived in the harsh mud flats for their entire lives. They were used to hardship and they would bear this one as well. They only hoped they wouldn’t have to bear it for long.

The elder ones among them discussed it out of hearing of both the soldiers and the other villagers. They had all heard tales from other tribes of soldiers from a different country with a different language and different weapons showing up and taking control. Taking things they did not own and making the locals slave away for them forever. These elder villagers knew that where some of these men came, more would follow, and they began to believe there was nothing they could do about it. They watched the younger villagers huddled up together trying to hide from the soldiers, whispering about what was going on, still hopeful it would get better. The elders weren’t worried for themselves, they knew they would soon die anyway. But they felt terrible sadness that the younger part of their tribe might never grow up happy as they had. They needed to come up with a plan. But they had no food, no weapons and few warriors. A plan was not forthcoming.

Eya looked back at the village. The smoke had stopped the same day it started. It was strange that there had been smoke during the day. The fires were always lit at night and that one would have had to have burnt during the day to produce the smoke. She shrugged, she would likely learn what had happened when she returned. She had a job to do.

She dug away at the mud, slowly filling her salt bags with salt and emptying her food bags of food. The sun beat down on her and all around was peaceful silence. Except it wasn’t.

She heard something. Footsteps, and breathing, heavy breathing. She stopped digging and listened. It was always so quiet on the mud flats, any noise was loud. She listened and there were definitely footsteps and heavy breathing. She climbed up onto a rise and looked out across the empty plains. Except they weren’t empty. Not this time.

There were footprints. Human ones. There were never human footprints out here apart from her own and these weren’t hers. There were other salt collectors like her but they all had different parts of the mud flats to explore. Never before had anyone got so lost as to come to her part. She followed the footprints. She didn’t have much experience with human footprints. They were smaller than hers though. Did that mean they weren’t dangerous? She hoped that it did.

She caught up to them quickly. They weren’t moving fast. It was Kaythi, a younger girl of her tribe, staggering her way through the mud flats with no food or water.

“Kaythi!” Eya said in surprise, starting at the sound of her own voice, she never talked out here.

Kaythi turned toward her with dull eyes. “Eya?” she asked in confusion.

Eya rushed forward and handed her a waterskin. “What’s happened? Why are you here?”

Kaythi drank the waterskin. Eya was somewhat alarmed to see her drink all of it. “Men came to the village. Strange men with strange weapons.”

“What did they do?”

Kaythi breathed heavily some more, her eyes were more focused now. “They killed people, and raped people, and took over and burned all our food except the salt. They made us do things for them. I don’t think they’re going to leave.”

Eya narrowed her eyes and clenched her fist around her digging stick. “They didn’t burn the salt you said?”

“No,” Kaythi shrugged. “I don’t know why.”

Eya nodded. “Strange men do strange things.”

Back at the village Leond relaxed on one of the beds. They weren’t very comfortable beds. Not like the ones he was used to back home. But as a soldier he’d slept on worse. He was waiting for one of his men to bring him a new girl. He’d liked the first one but she’d run away. He’d considered sending men out to look for her so he could drag her back and have her executed so the next one wouldn’t run away. But he needed all his men here. The rest of his party would probably not arrive for a long time at the speed they travelled even though his messenger had told them to come as fast as possible. So he had to make do with what he had and he knew with fewer men the locals could grow bolder. They had no weapons and little discipline but he’d rather not be killed by some mud covered primitives.

A soldier walked into the room. He hadn’t brought a girl with him.

“What do you want?” Leond asked, annoyed.

“I went out to explore the mud flats,” the soldier said.

“Didn’t I tell everyone to stay here?”

“I didn’t go far.”

Leond rolled his eyes. “What did you find?”

“Well there were two girls running around out there but they ran off and I didn’t want to go very far.”

Leond cursed. “Was one of them that bitch I had before? It’d be perfect if we could catch her.”

“No,” the soldier stammered. “Well, I don’t think so. Maybe... Um...”

“What? Is there something else?”

The soldier looked out into the dark night fearfully. Leond rolled his eyes again. “Well... I did see something else.”

“What did you see?”

“Well it was pretty far away, and it was dark, so I’m not really sure...”

“What was it?”

“A monster. A big monster heading for the village.”

Leond rolled his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. “If there was a monster here we would have heard of it. The only thing here is salt.” He gestured at all the salt they’d piled up in the corner. “And mud. So much mud.” He waved dismissively at the soldier. “Go and do something useful. There’s no monster.”

The soldier left and Leond waited on the bed. Eventually he heard a scream, then felt a rumble.

From outside the village Eya watched Sambaya tear through the streets. The soldiers didn’t try to attack him, they just ran. He went straight for the biggest house and now she saw he wasn’t actually as big as she’d thought. He was much faster though. With all the shouting and screaming he seemed to grow enraged and with his huge tusks he tore through the mud house, spraying mud and salt everywhere. Then he glared at what few people hadn’t fled yet until they did and started to lick up the salt with his long tongue.

One of the strange men staggered out of the ruins of the house and flew at him with a sword. The salt eater turned and with his huge tusks flung the man into a building. Then he charged. The man didn’t survive.

The next day the village put itself back together. Even the great salt eater couldn’t eat that much salt and they still had plenty after he’d left. Eya and Kaythi got a great fire with what little food they could spare to celebrate their victory over the strange men and they told them their whole story of leading Sambaya to the village with a trail of salt.

The soldiers who escaped fled back to the rest of the party where they told of great Sambaya, the terrible monster under control of the village and the party decided to proceed cautiously. They found a translator and this time instead of approaching with force they approached in peace, offering food and what other treasures they had for the salt. The tribe needed food and were only too happy to trade. The party returned home with more than enough salt and the village lived on. A few days later Eya walked off into the mud flats again. To be in her silence and peace with only the salt eater for company.