The Hidden Queen (36 page)

Anghara pronounced the blessing, calling it down both on the nomad clan and on herself and al’Tamar. She had no way of knowing if the nomads reaped any benefits from it, but as far as the two of them were concerned it seemed as though the Gods had not been listening. On the second morning, al’Tamar led them out from the hai’r and they were only two days out when another storm hit, again from out of nowhere. It was as furious as the first, costing them another precious day and a half while it raged and an afternoon, afterward, to pull themselves together again.

“I should be able to see these coming,” muttered al’Tamar unhappily. “This is unnatural.”

“This stuff clings,” said Anghara, trying to shake off the soft sand, which seemed to have worked its way into every fold of her clothing.

The words seemed to surprise al’Tamar. He came over to peer at the residue on her robe, and chewed his lip thoughtfully. “That is
omankhajir,
” he said. “Soft sand. There is none around here for miles. Look.” He bent to rake a handful of the coarse, crystalline reddish sand at his feet into his palm and allowed it to trickle through his fingers.
“Kharkhajir,”
he said. “Rock sand. We are amongst the mesas that give birth to it.
Omankhajir
belongs much further south…and much further north, out beside the Se’thara. But not here.”

“So where,” asked Anghara, shaking still more clinging
omankhajir
from underneath a fold of her sleeve with some impatience, “did all this come from?”

“I do not know,” he said, and he sounded worried. Anghara looked up, startled. His golden eyes were dark with apprehension. “Sandstorms which carry soft sand can kill. Whole caravans unlucky enough to be caught in one have been found buried years after their journey; every man and beast perished.”

“But you said there is no soft sand here,” Anghara said, frowning.

“There ought to be none. But…” He stared at the powdery stuff she was still dusting off her person. His lips tightened. “We go on,” he said at last, after a pause. “Perhaps it was only chance, a few grains caught in the wind…”

But less than a day after this, storm number three blew up out of a clear sky. It was different from the others—duller, somehow, with less sound and fury but with a disturbing air of permanence—al’Tamar needed less than an hour to admit defeat.

“This is the kind that buries,” he said grimly. “We have no chance. Back, before we die in it; we had better hope we can outrun it.”

He turned his ki’thar, and the beast they had brought to carry supplies, tied to his own animal’s saddle, wheeled with him and followed him in retreat. But Anghara hesitated, staring into the teeth of the storm through narrowed eyes—and it seemed to her that somewhere in its midst stood a woman’s shape, motionless in the tumult of wind-tossed sand, so still that not a hair on her head moved. And through the whirling, blinding sand Anghara thought she could clearly see amber eyes that watched her with a sort of compassion.
Your paths are still those of the Gods, and the paths that lead you this way lead nowhere but to futile endings.

The thought was so pure and sharp, so alien, that Anghara knew she could not have imagined it; but it was distant and faint, and seemed to reach her across a gulf of unimaginable dimensions.
Forgive the suffering, but it is the only way I have to tell you that you must turn back.

It was ai’Dhya, ai’Dhya of the Winds…

“Anghara! Hurry!” al’Tamar’s voice broke the spell, and when Anghara looked again there was nothing where the Goddess had stood except a tornado of twisting sand. She bowed, nonetheless, to where the presence had been, and turned her back onto the storm, to where al’Tamar stood waiting for her, eyes screwed into slits against the grit. He lifted his head as she approached, as though he were sniffing the air.

“It seems to be abating,” he said. “Perhaps, if we did wait it out…”

“No, al’Tamar. It was a gallant idea, but it is not to be,” Anghara said, her voice firm but gentle. “I should really ride back to Al’haria and ask al’Jezraal for all the help he promised,” she mused, “but I cannot face ai’Farra, not after sneaking out on her like that. If I do, I won’t be able to leave the city until she’s told me exactly what she thinks of me and of what I have done, and I don’t have the time to listen to it all, not now. And already I have lost over two weeks…Will you come with me to Sa’alah?”

“Willingly,” he said instantly, without a trace of hesitation. He glanced once again at where the storm seemed to be settling down into nothing more than a slightly high wind behind their backs. “What was it you met back there,
an’sen’thar?
”

“Only a God,” said Anghara, smiling. She dug her heel into the ki’thar’s flank. “Come, we must make up for lost time.
Akka! Akka! Akka!
”

The ki’thar broke into a shambling, loping run; after a moment of shaken silence, al’Tamar followed, dragging the volubly protesting pack ki’thar behind him.

The moment they decided to forego the mountain road, everything settled down, and it seemed as if the blessing Anghara had called down on the nomads finally brought good fortune. They skirted carefully around al’Tamar’s home, passing so close he was able to point out the mesa it lay within. Other than the occasional hai’r, they tried to avoid most places which might be inhabited, and moved swiftly and freely across the face of Kadun Khajir’i’id. This time there would be no ordeal of the Khari’i’d between Anghara and the coast—they were too far east for the Empty Quarter, and, anyway, there was nothing there for her to seek any more. This time Anghara would take the High Road ai’Jihaar had wanted to take before her own Gods had told her otherwise—she would cut across Sayyed land, the plateau of Kharg’in’dun’an, the place of horses. There was only a narrow belt of the Stone Desert, less than a few hours’ worth, between the red desert of the north and the winding road which led to the high country.

The horse clans could hardly have been expecting them, but Anghara was not surprised to find a welcoming committee waiting for them on the edge of the plateau, forewarned by their scouts and the inevitable desert grapevine. Anghara and al’Tamar had ridden hard, and it showed both on themselves and on their ki’thar’en; Anghara was bone-tired, too tired to favor the dun’en on which the clansmen were mounted, which she would have gasped to see under ordinary circumstances, with more than a cursory glance. Khari’i’d had done it to her, again; she could have endured a week in the Kadun easier than she coped with an hour in the Stone Desert.

They could not help but know who Anghara was—by this time there were few in Kheldrin who had not heard of her. These were ai’Farra’s kinsmen, and most of them shared her aversion to strangers—but they were also imbued with the pragmatism of the desert folk. They might not have wanted Anghara in the first place, but she was here, and, after all, she had earned the right. So they did their best to ignore the alien gray eyes and the foreign lines of the face revealed when Anghara dropped her burnoose, and tried to see only the gold robe of a Kheldrini
an’sen’thar,
a holy woman filled with power who was said to have the ear of the Gods.

“Our home is yours,” said one of the delegation, bowing deeply from the saddle, without smiling.

“We are honored,” Anghara said, returning the courtesy as best she could.

“The honor is ours,” said another, a younger man with the yellow eyes of a Roisinani wildcat. He did smile; alone of the committee, he looked as though he might truly welcome Anghara’s presence. She thought she could vaguely sense a flicker of an aura around him, but she was so tired…

“We will not impose on your hospitality for long,” she said, “I have need of speed, and would be on my way as soon as we have sufficiently rested.”

“An’sen’thar,”
said a Sayyed elder, his hair almost white with age, with grave and unexpected sympathy, “you are welcome to stay as long as you need. A day’s rest now will speed your journey all the more. Stay and gather your strength, and we will give you fast dun’en for the last lap to Sa’alah. You will reach your destination as though you had never tarried. But leave now, and the weariness will cling to you, and slow you down. My daughter said you might pass this way, and bade us give you our assistance should you do so; it is no more than we can do to offer you a place of comfort and safety to rest in.”

So they had been expected, in a way.

“Your daughter…” asked Anghara fuzzily.

“That is ai’Farra ma’Sayyed’s father; he is
Sa’id
Say’ar’dun,” said al’Tamar in a low voice close to her ear.

Say’ar’dun turned out to be a small city, less striking than spired Al’haria but far more focused in its existence. The reason for its being was dun’en, and everything in Say’ar’dun revolved around the beasts. Anghara, whose idea of the animals was shaped by their rarity and preciousness in her own land, could not get over seeing herds of them in one place. There were dun’en being groomed, or exercised, or doctored, or if the physical beasts were absent, then the residents of Say’ar’dun surrounded themselves with records of their breeding, with distinguished pedigrees stretching back generations. When Anghara, whose weariness seemed to have abated after a good meal and a short nap, requested to be shown the city, it was the yellow-eyed Sayyed youth who acceded.

Dogging Anghara’s footsteps as always, al’Tamar commented whimsically in the Records House, “Some of these dun’en know more about their ancestry than I do.”

“The records go back hundreds of years, in some cases,” their guide said, unrolling one long scroll. “Here, for example, is one where twenty-five generations have been tallied.”

Anghara peered at it. “But how long does a dun live?”

“Twenty years, sometimes thirty,” said the guide. “A lifetime companion for a man.”

“Twenty years?” she repeated. “But that means this scroll is…over five hundred years old!”

The young man bowed lightly, allowing the scroll to roll up again under his fingers. “A copy,” he said diffidently. “But yes, that is correct.”

“I have not seen many dun’en in my land,” Anghara said thoughtfully, “but I do remember my father had at least two separate sets from Kheldrin in my own lifetime. I do not recall ever hearing of any surviving for longer than ten years.”

“Taken away from their country,” said the Sayyed guide gravely, “it is possible they do not live as long. Perhaps there is something we do not understand—a tie which, severed, means they cannot exist beyond a certain number of years. I know of this; my own dun’en, and my family’s, are like children to me, and I grieve for their lost years as I would sorrow for those lost to any child of mine.”

“And yet they are still taken,” murmured Anghara softly.

“Those that go,” said the youth, “help those that stay behind, both dun’en and their masters, to survive the dry seasons. The wealth they bring in provides food for those who might otherwise go hungry. And it is never the best who go.” The smile that crept onto his face as he tapped the ancient pedigree in his hand with one long tapered forefinger was almost sly. “None of his line will ever be sold beyond these shores…and these are the real dun’en, the jewels of the desert. They are companions, not servants—they are ridden for the joy of it, not for need or necessity. They are kings here, and what is a king when you send him away from his country? He is diminished when torn from the place he was born to rule.”

“Perhaps there are other callings,” said Anghara.

The youth bowed in a graceful apology. “Forgive me. I forget myself sometimes when I speak of these animals; I do not often speak of these kings to one who is queen in her own right, and in whose presence it might be more prudent to hold my tongue. But you will see; we will give you one for your journey. And afterward, nothing you ever ride will be the same again.”

He was right, of course—in everything. It would have been all too easy to stay there, resting in the high cold breezes that swept the plateau, watching the proud herds of dun’en graze on the banks of the small lake which made their life in that place possible. But it was this young man’s words, inadvertent or not, that made Anghara look with fresh passion on her journey. Yes, there were other callings, as she had told him—and she would never regret her Kheldrin years and the gifts the Twilight Country had chosen to bestow upon her. But she was a queen, and yes, she was diminished by her distance from the land that was her own. Her home. It was time to go back.

The Sayyed were true to the young man’s promise when Anghara prepared to depart; Anghara’s mount, a rare gray in a breed that was usually sleek and dark, was truly a prince amongst dun’en. The yellow-eyed youth himself held her reins as she came to mount up, and his eyes gleamed.

“This is one of my own,” he said, with not a little pride. “One whose ancestry lies revealed on the scroll I showed you. A king, who has never been away from his kingdom.”

“You do me great honor,” said Anghara.

He tilted his head in respect, accepting her thanks with his usual grace. “What greater honor,” he said, “than for him to bear an
an’sen’thar
on a journey…and a queen back to her realm?”

Here, she was
an’sen’thar
first, queen second. It was a different world; but hers, also, just like Miranei. She reached to pat the horse’s arched neck. “I will see he is well cared for, and returned to you to reign in his kingdom again,” she said.

“Sen’en Dayr,”
he said, stepping back. “God speed,
an’sen’thar.
”

The gray dun’s paces were silken, but it could fly like the winds of ai’Dhya herself, and Anghara sped across most of Kharg’in’dun’an at a flat-out gallop, for once not because she wished to hurry but for the sheer joy of it. But that meant they were upon the southern desert almost before they knew it, and the first glimpse of Arad Khajir’i’id from the edge of the high country, her first after many months in red Kadun, smote Anghara with an almost physical pain. She seemed transfixed by it, so much so that al’Tamar, himself mounted on a princely chocolate-colored dun, had to all but lead her down into the yellow sand together with the pack beast he still dragged behind him.