The Parched Sea (3 page)

The ugly creature left, then a long line of baggage camels followed. Blackrobed men with turban-swathed heads led the caravan. At their belts hung long thin swords with curved blades. The weary procession seemed to continue forever, but the last camel finally passed out of the trough. A handful of humans scattered ten to twenty yards apart came next. This rearguard was composed of fatigued stragglers who could do little more than stare at their own feet as they shuffled through the dark labyrinth, and Ruha dared to hope she would survive the strange group’s passing.

Then, as one of the last men shuffled within a foot of Ruha’s hiding place, he stumbled. He reached out to catch himself against the steep slope, pressing his hand against Ruha’s sand-covered body. He gasped and jerked himself upright, then peered into the black shadows.

Ruha did not hesitate. She clamped her free hand over the straggler’s mouth, then thrust her jambiya into his stomach. He uttered an astonished and pained groan, but Ruha’s hand muffled the sound. The young widow drove the blade of her weapon toward his heart, simultaneously pulling him onto the slip-face beside her. She quickly dragged several armfuls of sand over his head and body. In an instant the man was dead and buried.

Her heart beating madly, Ruha turned her attention back to the trough, fearing that one of the dead man’s compatriots might have witnessed the struggle. The last stragglers were more than fifteen yards away, and they were all as lethargic as ever. Relieved at the carelessness of the strange procession, Ruha again leaned against the dune and covered herself with a thin layer of sand.

She stayed in hiding for what seemed an eternity, even after the last straggler had gone. She could hardly control her breathing, and found herself alternately struggling to stifle mournful sobs for Ajaman’s death and joyful chortles celebrating her own survival. At the same time, Ruha remained terrified that the dead straggler would be missed or that one last group of attackers would shuffle into view just as she left the shadows.

Finally Ruha conquered the indecision born by these fears and dared to leave her hiding place. In the same instant, she heard the patter of sand sloughing down the steep slip-face above her. The young women spun around, and looked toward the crest, jambiya poised to strike.

Fifty feet above her, kneeling atop the dume and silhouetted against the moon, was one last man. His face was turned toward the oasis, and he seemed oblivious to Ruha’s presence. Unlike the men who had passed ahead of him, he wore only a yellowish aba that matched the desert sand. Even in the pale moonlight, it was clear that his face was red, sun-blistered, and peeling. And though he presented only his profile to her, enough of his face was visible that Ruha could see his eyepatch and the pole, golden bar that protruded from beneath his keffiyeh. His features wet drawn and hagard, though there was still a certain boyish softness to them.

Ruha’s heart began to pound like the hooves of a camel, and her knees grew as weak as those of a calf. The man atop the dune was the one she had seen in her premonition.

Two

At’ar the Merciless hung in a deep blue sky, bathing the desert in the fiery radiance of her insufferable passion. Though At’ar’s orb had risen less than three hours ago, the heat already shimmered from the golden sands in skin-blistering waves. To Ruha, crouched atop a dune ninety yards from the oasis, it seemed nothing dared to stir beneath the yellow goddess’s gaze. The wind lay heavy and listless upon the barren ground, and the green fronds of the palm trees dangled motionless and lethargic: Even N’asr’s children, those great white-bearded vultures that ferried spirits to the camp of the dead, hovered overhead without so much as flapping a wing or twitching a tail-feather.

Ruha envied the vultures their patience, for her own thirst was making her grow desperate. Three hours beneath the morning sun had made her tongue so swollen it occasionally gagged her, her throat so dry she could not swallow, and her mind so muddled she could not keep the events of the previous night separated from what was happening at the moment.

Ruha recalled that her last drink had come from Ajaman’s waterskin, after she had left her hiding place last night and gone to him. She remembered the despair washing over her as she had taken her dead husband’s head in her lap and, in her mind, she returned to where she had sat in the sand at El Ma’ra’s base.

In Ajaman’s chest was a charred hole as big as her head, but his face betrayed no fear or sorrow. He held his dark brow furrowed in astonished fury, more angry at being ” soiled by magic than at being killed. The widow touched her mouth to her dead husband’s, then slipped his jambiya and its sheath off his belt and took the crushed amarat from beneath his body. These would be her only keepsakes.

Though Ruha had come to like Ajaman during the two days of their marriage, she could not say that she loved him. It was a surprise to her, then, that tears were streaming down her cheeks. It was proper for a widow to grieve her dead husband, but for Ruha to claim that she wept on Ajaman’s account seemed out of place and insincere. The tears, she realized, were for herself. With Ajaman gone, she was likely to spend the rest of her life as Qoha’dar had spent hers-a shunned woman.

In similar circumstances, any other woman might have returned to her own khowwan, assured that her tribe would have received her with open arms. For Ruha, that possibility did not exist. Even if she returned to the Mtair Dhafir, the old women would blame her for the Qahtan’s disaster and, with a grim air of reluctance, the elder warriors would persuade her father to banish her.

With her magic, Ruha knew she could survive alone in the desert, but the thought of being forced into hermitage made her stomach queasy, and it horrified her. The young woman had not asked for her premonitions, and she had never done anything to deserve banishment. Still, she did not blame her father or the Mtair Dhafir for ostracizing her. To them, her presence seemed dangerous, and they were just doing what they thought necessary to survive. Given similar circumstances, any Bedine would have done the same.

“You do what you must to survive, and I will do the same;’ Ruha said, speaking to the distant tribe of her birth. “I’ll ride with any khowwan that will take me, though it be the blood enemy of the Mtair Dhafir.”

As she spoke, Ruha found her throat so dry that the words came out in a series of croaking gasps. Realizing that she was desperately thirsty, the widow reached for Ajaman’s waterskin. The fall had burst the neck open, leaving only a few last swallows in the corners. Ruha placed her lips over the neck to prevent the loss of even a drop, then tilted her head back to drain the precious water into her parched throat.

Nothing.

Ruha tried to swallow again. Still nothing.

With a start, Ruha snapped back to the present, and she realized that she was a half-mile from her dead husband. He was still at El Ma’ra, buried in the cool, shallow grave she had dug for him earlier. Now, she was sitting atop a dune, exposed to Mar’s full glory and so sun-sick that she was hallucinating.

The young widow angrily pulled Ajaman’s crushed amarat horn from around her neck, then threw it down the dune’s slip-face. It slid clear to the desert’s rocky floor.

“Why did you fall on your waterskin, husband?” she croaked, looking toward El Ma’ra’s tawny pinnacle. “An honorable man would not leave his wife without water!”

Of course, Ajaman did not answer, but Ruha did not doubt that he heard her.

“Ajaman, if you do not send me some water, there will be nobody to wash your body before the journey west;’ Ruha threatened, still staring in the direction of her husband’s body. “Tonight, when the vultures come to take you to N’ asr’s tent, the odor of life will cling to you like blood on a newborn calf. Surely, the Pitiless One will give you to his djinns, and it won’t be my fault:’

Bartering with the dead was dangerous, the widow realized dimly. Even those who had been friends often repaid their debts with plague and pestilence, but Ruha thought she had done everything she could to find water on her own. She remembered checking the canteen of the straggler she had killed last night. It had been empty. She had even found the milk skin she had been carrying when the attack started, but it had been trampled into the sand by the caravan. Ruha was desperate.

At the oasis there was plenty of water, but she did not dare approach it. In the entire khowwan, not a Qahtani remained alive. The men had fallen in contorted, inert poses at the camp perimeter. In the oasis itself, dog and camel corpses lay scattered among the tents and trees. The women and children were gathered beneath shredded and charred khreimas, their locations marked by lumps and dark stains in the cloth.

But it was not corpses that prevented Ruha from going to the oasis pool and drinking the water she needed so badly. The pale-skinned stranger who had appeared last night in the caravan’s wake was searching the entire camp tent by tent. He had been since dawn. Methodically he furled back each khreima, then kneeled amongst the corpses. After a few moments, he covered the bodies again and went to the next tent. Never, as far as Ruha could tell, did he take anything from the dead or their households.

His behavior was a stark contrast to that of his companions, two creatures who stood about four feet tall. Ruha could tell little about the pair, for they were swaddled head to foot in white burnooses. The short bipeds were robbing the “tan, warriors, pulling rings off dead fingers and prying jewels from scimitar scabbards.

Watching the strangers continue their desecrations, Ruha wondered who they could be and what they were doing at El Ma’ra’s oasis. Her muddled mind could not even guess at an answer, any more than she could imagme the origin of last night’s murderous caravan. She had never seen anything like either group in the desert, and her ignorance of the lands beyond Anauroch was complete. Both the caravan and the three strangers remained an utter mystery to her.

For the next hour, the widow pondered her ignorance and waited for the strangers to leave. A gray haze appeared on the southern horizon, and Ruha knew that a sandstorm was ravaging some distant part of the desert. She paid it no further attention, for it would not arrive soon enough for her to sneak to the oasis pond beneath its cover.

As At’ar grew brighter and hotter, Ruha’s skin became pale and clammy. She felt sick to her stomach. Her head ached. Spots appeared in her vision, and she could not make them go away.

Ruha turned her gaze toward the vultures, barely able to distinguish the birds from the dots before her eyes. “Surely, N’asr will punish these defilers of the dead. Ask him to do it now, so that I may live and prepare my husband for the journey to your father’s camp:’

If the vultures heard her plea, they gave no sign. The bulky birds continued hanging in the sky, steady as clouds. The widow waited. She did not exert herself by searching for non-existent shade. In the summer, Mar rode proud in the sky, and it would have been futile to attempt escaping her heat. Only a tent or a palm tree’s gaunt fronds could offer shelter from the sun, and the only sign Ruha saw of either was in the oasis. Everywhere else, on the gentle slopes and steep slip-faces of the dunes, and in the rocky valleys between them, Mar blazed down on the parched sands in all her fiery radiance. The yellow goddess could not be avoided.

Ruha could feel herself growing perilously weak, but she resisted the dry voice whispering to her to sneak back to the oasis. Whoever the strangers were, their desecrations made it clear that-they were no friend of the Bedine, and from what she had seen last night, the instincts of the oneeyed stranger were too sharp to challenge.

As she thought about the stranger, Ruha’s mind wandered and she once again found herself standing in last night’s shadows, the dead straggler lying in the sand beside her. The stranger was crouched atop the dune, where he had appeared so suddenly in the wake of the caravan. As the screams of dying Qahtanis began to drift over the sands, he continued to watch the battle, his attention fixed impassively on the oasis.

Ruha wondered if he was the man who killed Ajaman. Confident of the magic that kept her hidden and unheard, she gripped her jamblya and prepared to take vengeance.

As she picked up the handful of sand she needed to create her magical lion, the oneeyed man whirled about and drew a straight-bladed dagger. He stared into the quiet darkness protecting the young woman, seeming to sense her presence in spite of the spells hiding her. The stranger shook his head once, then sheathed his dagger.

Was he warning Ruha not to attack, or did he doubt the instincts that had alerted him to her presence? Before Ruha could decide, the stranger slipped down the other side of the dune and disappeared. The widow’s knees were ready to buckle and her stomach felt as though her heart had dropped into it. She did not follow.

With a start; Ruha realized that the ache in her stomach was more than fear, and that her confused mind had again lost track of reality. Heat cramps were causing the Pain she felt, and the reason it seemed like night was because her eyes were closed. She had lost track of reality again, drifting into a dream of last night.

Ruha held her head with both hands, vainly trying to stop the fierce pounding inside. The young widow realized she had to risk going to the pond, even without any spells to conceal her. With his acute instincts, the stranger would probably see her as she drank, but to wait was to die.

Ruha slid a few feet down from the dune crest, then turned toward the rocky labyrinth behind her.

To her surprise, a string of ten white camels stood two hundred feet away. Believing that her mind was playing tricks on her, she dosed her eyes and whispered, “Husband, by the last drop of water in my mouth, if this is a mirage, I will be slave to N’asr himself before I wash your filthy corpse:’

When she opened her eyes again, the beasts were still there. Though clearly mature riding camels, they had no halters or saddles. Instead, their driver had looped long ropes around their lanky necks and run lines from one beast to the next. The sight puzzled Ruha, for any man who owned ten matched camels could certainly saddle them properly.