In the Labyrinth of Drakes (12 page)

I liked the sound of that very well indeed. “There is your answer, then. The Labyrinth is farther removed from Banu Safr territory. We shall go there, and be safe.”

“You'll go wherever the Aritat are.” Pensyth went back to his desk. “Even in winter, Dame Isabella, the desert can kill you very quickly. But once you find them—then yes, by all means ask them to take you as far from danger as you can.”

He had, clearly without realizing it, slipped into speaking as if I would be going along after all. I hid my urge to smile. This tactic can work very well with certain people: divert them with practical matters, logistics and such, and they will forget they meant to send you packing. By the time they recall, it is too late; backtracking will only make them appear foolish. “The sooner we depart, then, the better,” I said. “Our work depends heavily on the season, and I do not want to waste any of it.”

Pensyth jotted down a note. “I'll talk the sheikh around. We'll arrange kit for you, out of our own gear, though if we can get him to supply animals that would be ideal.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” I said—and then fled before he realized he had lost the argument.

*   *   *

Andrew was dispatched with us, ostensibly to provide a military presence in what was, after all, a military undertaking, but also—I suspected—as my chaperon. Although such measures would ordinarily have irritated me, in this instance I did not mind. In fact, our departure had something of the feel of a holiday: I was setting out with two of my favourite people in the world, away from the strictures of society, and I was going to see dragons.

I behaved myself, though, as we assembled at a caravanserai on the outskirts of Qurrat. Our traveling party was small, consisting only of myself, Tom, Andrew, and a quintet of Aritat men who would guard us and see to the animals. That latter was quite necessary, for the animals outnumbered the humans by more than two to one; the sheikh was taking advantage of our departure to send new breeding stock of both camels and horses to his people.

Tom, Andrew, and I were all on horseback, being wholly unfamiliar with the alternative discipline of camel-riding. “We should learn, though,” Tom said, eyeing the ungainly-looking camels with disfavour. “They're hardier than horses, out there.”

We did not trouble with this for the first two days, being more concerned with sorting out other logistical matters. But on the morning of the third day, Tom approached one of the Akhians, a fellow named Yusuf, and asked whether teaching us to ride camels would slow us down too much.

Yusuf looked us over with a dubious eye. “It can be hard on the back, if you aren't used to it.”

“The only way to become accustomed is to practice,” I said, in my most utterly sensible voice.

I was still dressed in skirts, but this was no obstacle to that day's grand experiment. The nomads of the desert go about in long robes all the time, often with nothing at all on underneath—as I found out during my time among them. One has the option of a number of postures in a camel saddle; the truly skilled can sit almost cross-legged, with each foot on the opposite side of the camel's neck. I opted for a more common posture in which one hooks a leg around the horn of the saddle, tucking that foot beneath the other leg.

The arrangement thus produced bears some resemblance to riding sidesaddle on a horse, which one might expect would mean I was good at it. In truth, however, I had not used a sidesaddle for years, preferring to dress myself in divided skirts and sit astride. Furthermore, a camel's gait differs from that of a horse in certain ways … not to mention that their greater height and humped back leaves one feeling perched atop a very unstable hill, sure to fall at any moment. In counterpoint to this, I must say that although camels have a reputation for evil dispositions, the one I rode was quite agreeable. I will not go so far as to call her sweet or affectionate; she was clearly a creature with a mind of her own, and a somewhat unpredictable mind at that. But I have ridden horses that are far more intractable, and I appreciated her inquisitive nature.

Camel-riding was indeed hard on the back, but we adapted and made acceptably good time. This far from the river, the terrain was scrubby farmland, agriculture being scratched out of soil so dry it is startling it will bear fruit at all. One early afternoon, halfway through our journey, we entered a narrow valley with suspiciously straight walls. Much later I learned this may have been a canal, during the height of Draconean civilization. Archaeologists have found signs that the area around it used to be rich farmland, which of course requires more water, and there is a place that may be where the canal was breached and destroyed.

But at the time it was merely yet another bit of uninspiring terrain that stood between me and dragons. I chafed at the length of our journey, wishing with all the fervor of a young girl trapped in a carriage with a least favourite aunt that we might be at our destination already. Which is unfair to my companions—I liked all of them a good deal better than my least favourite aunt—but all the same, the days dragged by.

We might have made better time had we taken a barge upriver and proceeded from there. Doing that, however, would have taken us through the lands of the Taaruf, who are not on the best of terms with the Aritat. I began to appreciate that, although on paper Akhia is a single country, it is not unified to the degree that I had assumed. The current arrangement binding town and desert together has gone some way toward changing that, but the tribes still control their own territory, answering more to their sheikhs than to the caliph on his throne.

Instead we struck out overland, first through territory belonging to the Banu Zalit, then through the lands of the Isharid. As the days went by, farmland gave way to drier and drier terrain until, by imperceptible degrees, we arrived in what was unquestionably the desert.

It did not consist entirely of sand dunes. Indeed, though this is the common image of deserts, there are relatively few places in the world where it is true. Much of the landscape is stony and hard, supporting thorny plant life here and there, and lusher vegetation—if anything can be called lush away from the main rivers—in wadis and oases, in nooks and crannies of the barren ground. The trick of surviving in the desert is to know where these nooks and crannies might be, and to conserve water in between.

What amazed me the most was the realization that we were seeing the desert at its most verdant. The winter rains were drawing to a close, and everything was in full flower. But this greenery was still intermittent, with long stretches of hard soil in between where nothing at all would grow; and then we would come over a rise and find a carpet of wild lavender or red anemones had sprung up in the lower ground between two ridges. In a few months these would be gone as if they had never been, devoured by camels or burnt to crisp straw by the sun. For this brief span of time, however, the desert alternated between sterility and wonder.

The nights were bone-chilling, and all the more so because the days were still acceptably warm. The sun was also strong; I wore both hat and scarf so as to shield my face and neck, and we non-Akhians daubed our exposed skin with a paste intended to prevent burns. It did not work as well as Tom in particular might have hoped, but we fared better with it than without.

In retrospect, I feel as if I ought to have seen the smooth course of our journey out into the desert as a sign. It is not true that all great deeds must be attended by hardship and privation, and that any expedition which begins without trouble must inevitably go awry … but such has been my experience more often than not. Superstition therefore says that I should have known I would either accomplish little, or find myself in difficulty very soon upon arrival.

 

EIGHT

The Aritat—Desert mother, desert father—The Ghalb—A dead camel—Fire in the night

The tents of the Aritat spread out along the edge of a wadi, dark shapes above the green, with camels moving all around. I was astonished at their number, tents and camels both: I had envisioned the nomads as existing in small bands, perhaps as few as two dozen individuals. This is not at all the case, and the Aritat at that time claimed more than three thousand tents (the customary method of counting the population), with tens of thousands of camels to their name. What we came upon was not the entirety of the tribe—they almost never gather in a single location—but this particular group alone boasted in excess of fifty tents, each one home to several people.

We dismounted when we drew near, and the Akhians with us threw handfuls of sand up to form clouds in the air, which is how one signals peaceful approach. In response, two men mounted their camels and loped out to meet us.

As usual, my limited aptitude for linguistic matters hobbled me in this initial encounter. My command of Akhian had been improving, but people in rural corners always speak differently from their urban counterparts, and it was decidedly urban Akhian (not to say scholarly) that I had been mastering. Yusuf spoke that dialect better than his companions, which was why we communicated with him the most—but among the nomads, he lapsed into what almost seemed like another tongue entirely.

The men seemed to be directing us to a tent some distance away. We dismounted and led our camels there, while all around us men, women, and children emerged from their tents to watch us go by. We were not the first Scirlings they had seen—a detachment of soldiers had come out here at the beginning of this enterprise, to scout out the situation—but I was the first Scirling woman to visit them, and very exotic in my khaki dress.

Our destination stood out from all the others by virtue of its size: whereas many of the tents had only a single central pole to support them, creating one “room” within, and few had as many as three, this tent had five. The man who waited outside it was more finely dressed than the others, in white robes as snowy as the environment would allow. This was the sheikh of the local clan, Hajj Nawl ibn Dawwas—a man who, in different times, might not have been beholden to any superior authority. Since the imposition of unified governance between the towns and the desert, however, he answered in some matters to Husam ibn Ramiz. Between that and our status as guests, he showed great deference in greeting us.

We were soon seated upon fine cushions and plied with coffee and dates, while a man sat cross-legged in the corner playing upon the stringed instrument called a
rebab.
Outside, men slaughtered a camel for our supper—and not one of the camels used to bear burdens on the march, either. The meat was therefore very tender, and a sign of great esteem. (This accrued to us not on our own merits, of course, but those of Husam ibn Ramiz. To feed us a tough old camel—or worse, to feed us no camel at all—would have been an unforgivable insult to him.) Certain notables of the clan joined us, while others listened at the flap, hanging on every word of our conversation.

For once we did not meet with the polite (or not so polite) disbelief that so frequently greets our work. People often have difficulty understanding why Tom and I would risk ourselves in pursuit of mere understanding … but tell them your purpose is war, and no one questions your sanity at all. Nawl ibn Dawwas was not a particularly warlike man, the Aritat having lived more peaceable lives since the ascendance of the current caliphate; but it was still a thing he had been brought up to value above almost anything else. He knew this business with dragons had a military purpose, and he approved.

Encounters with powerful people have always made me uneasy, and so I was grateful that I took my own supper with the sheikh's wives and other female relations rather than the men. I was even more grateful when at last we escaped the sheikh's tent. By then it was full dark, with scarcely a sliver of moon to light our way, and I could only follow blindly in Yusuf's wake as we crossed the encampment to another tent. This one was not exceptional in any way, being woven of dark goat hair, with one side open to catch the wind, and light spilling out across the ground.

A guard dog began barking as we approached, but fell silent when someone came out and touched the top of its head. Even in the dark, with nothing but a silhouette to go by, I recognized Suhail.

It was my turn to halt in my tracks, as he had halted when he found us in the courtyard of his brother's house. I knew, of course, that he was out with the Aritat—but that tribe consisted of many clans, scattered across many camps. No one had told me he was with this one.

Likely because no one here had reason to think I would care. It seemed the rumours concerning my conduct had not reached this far.

Tom greeted him with surprise, and received an apology in return. “I only just returned to camp,” Suhail said, “or I would have come to find you in the sheikh's tent. We did not expect you to arrive so soon. Please, come in.”

This was directed at all four of us: Tom, myself, Andrew, and Yusuf. I took a moment to straighten my dress and the scarf over my hair, then followed the men into the tent.

It seemed Suhail had been out hunting. A splendid falcon sat on a perch in one corner of the tent, and a woman near the fire was plucking the feathers from one of several small birds, which I presumed were the fruits of Suhail's labours (or rather his falcon's). She cleaned her hands off and rose to greet us, along with another man.

Both were older and much weathered by the sun. Suhail, making introductions, said, “These are Umm Azali and Abu Azali—my desert mother and desert father.”

This he said in Scirling, so there was no chance of misunderstanding him. “Desert mother?” I repeated, my gaze slipping to the woman. She did not look much like Suhail, nor did the father—even allowing for the way desert life had thinned their flesh. Suhail was not a fat man, but we all looked plump next to the nomads, who seemed universally made of rawhide.

“They raised me during my fosterage,” he said. “It is custom, for many of us in the city. A way of making certain we do not forget where we came from.”