She laughed at this, not in joy, but only in sadness. Then she said softly, 'I think you lie. But I love you for trying to make me believe it.'
She kissed my hand, and stood up to walk back to our line of tents. I had to help her work her way down through the darkness, lest she stumble upon the rocks. Although she said nothing of the future, I knew that before we won any great triumph, if ever we did, we would suffer through many sweltering days of terror and pain.
Chapter 25
Our sleep that night was as deep and cool as the air that fell down from the sky. We took comfort in the softness of the sand beneath our furs and the floors of our tents. Even Maram found ways to position his great body that did not unduly distress him. When it came time to journey again, his big voice boomed out into the darkness: 'There are five good things about this part of the desert. First, the sand makes a good bed. Second, there are no flies. And third, my nightly drink.'
'And the fourth and fifth good things?' I asked him.
If I expected him to extol the splendors of the heavens or the terrible beauty of the desert, then I would have been disappointed, for he said, 'The fourth and fifth good things are the same as the third.'
I smiled into the dark, glad that Maram had found at least a little good in this forsaken land. But he also suffered other things that were not good, as did we all. That day, as we pushed farther into the Tar Harath, it grew even hotter. The blazing sun reflected off the sand nearly burned out our eyes. Breathing itself became a torment, and we all coughed at the dust that the wind blew at our faces. This dust worked its way into the fibers of our clothing and the cracks in our skin. Movement, hour after hour sitting on horseback or walking through the sand, chafed our dirty, sweaty skin. Soon, as Master Juwain feared, the dust might work at us so that we all had sores in our flesh like Maram's.
So it went for the next four days. Our bodies grew thinner, for none of us wanted to eat very much in the unrelenting heat, not even at night when we fell exhausted into our beds. We sweated and drank from our waterskins, and drank and sweated some more We wished for a good bath and clean clothing almost as much as oranges and kammats and other succulent fruits. We watched our water disappear, cup by cup and skin by skin. Once, after a lone afternoon spent nearly dying on top of the burning sand, Maidro caught Maram washing the dust from his face and upbraided him.
'We've no water to spare for such extravagances,' he said to Maram in a raspy, dust-choked voice. 'Every drop of water you waste brings us all an inch closer to death.'
Maram bowed his head in shame, and he apologized for his thoughtlessness. But an hour later, I heard him mutter to himself: 'Every mile we cover brings me that much closer to my brandy. But what then, my friend? How many cups do you have left before our water runs out and brandy is all you have to drink? You can't bear the thirst, can you? No, no, you can't, and so I think that drowning yourself in brandy would be a better way to die.'
We made our way across the sun-seared Tar Harath mile by mile — but we did not cover as many miles each day as we hoped. The sand burned the horses' hooves and slowed them, as Maidro had said. We lost most of a day in circling around a miles-wide basin that Maidro feared contained quicksands. Maram objected to this detour, saying, 'This sand looks the same as any other — how do you know it's quicksand?'
And Maidro, who did not like to explain himself, told Maram, 'If you don't trust me, there is only one way to find out.'
He pointed his wrinkled old finger out toward the basin's sandy center. So despondent was Maram that he seemed to consider walking right out into it.
And then I heard him mutter: 'Ah, if there is no Maram, there is no purpose to the brandy that we've made our poor horses carry. And what will befall then? The brandy will be poured out into the sand. It would be a crime to waste it.'
He turned to Maidro and said more graciously, 'I'm sure you're right about the quicksand. Thank you for saving my miserable life.'
Just before dawn the next day, Arthayn killed the first of the packhorses by slicing his saber through its throat. The other horses had eaten all the grain that this unfortunate horse carried and had drunk its water, as well. For two days, the useless horse had plodded along relieved of its burden, but also denied food and drink. In truth, Arthayn should have killed the thirst-maddened beast the day before, but the Avari — and all of us — kept hoping that we might find water.
We never ceased scanning the rocks and sand and blue horizon for sign of this marvelous substance. We looked to Estrella in hope that she might lead us toward another hidden cave or perhaps some ancient, forgotten well. But she seemed to have no more sense of where we might find water than anyone else. Often she would gaze up at the sky with longing at the few small clouds, which here drifted toward the northwest.
'One cloud,' Maidro said, 'holds more water than a well. But the clouds go where they will, not where we wish. And they never shed their rain in the Tar Harath, not even, I think, at the command of an urda mazda.'
Later that day, at Maidro's command, Nuradayn killed the second packhorse. Maidro stood watching this slaughter and speaking with Sunji. Sunji then gathered everyone around him and announced, 'Our water has grown too little, and so we must forbear meat until new water is found.'
Here he looked at Estrella in utter confidence that she would somehow work another miracle. But Nuradayn, a young man given to wild surges of mood, looked out across the sun-baked dunes with doubt eating at his dark eyes.
The next morning, we came upon a single sandstone pinnacle so smooth and symmetrical that it might have been carved by the hand of man a million years ago. Here Estrella stopped her horse and looked up at the sky to watch a few puffy clouds drift past. Then she looked at me and pointed in the direction that the clouds were moving, toward the north.
'Estrella,' I said to Sunji and Maidro, 'wants us to turn that way.'
Estrella nodded her head at this and smiled. Arthayn nudged his horse forward and squinted at the brilliance of the unbroken sweep of dunes.
He said, 'There cannot be water there.'
Maidro's eyes filled with doubt, too, but he said, 'The girl is an udra mazda. She found water at the Dragon Rocks, in hills that were known to be dry.'
We held coundl then, and decided to turn toward the north, as Estrella had indicated. Maram, I thought, echoed all of our sentiments when he muttered: 'One direction in this damn desert seems as good as another. As they say, when you're going through Hell, keep on going.'
And so we set our course to the north, and slightly west. We journeyed for two more days without seeing any sign of water. During the day we relied on the sun and my sense of direction to hold a straight line across the sand; at night we navigated by the stars. With every mile farther into the heart of the Tar Harath, it seemed to grow only hotter and drier. The air in our faces burned us like the blast from a furnace. Our skin cracked, and the salt in our sweat worked its way into these raw wounds; it seared us as if we were being stabbed with fire-irons. Our noses grew so parched that they bled at the slightest touch. Things were simple in the deep desert, I thought, reduced to the most basic elements: sun and sky, sand and suffering.
Maram, upon grinding his teeth at the torture of his abrasive saddle, said to me, 'Don't you think it's strange that I, who have sought pleasures few men could bear, have instead found so much pain?'
I smiled beneath the cowl smothering me. I asked him, 'Do you still have the stone?'
Maram produced a roundish river stone with a hole burned through its middle. In the Vardaloon, he had used his gelstei to make this hole as a distraction against the mosquitoes. It was supposed to remind him that even the worst torments could be endured and would come to an end.
'I do have the stone,' Maram said to me. 'I only wish I were made of such substance — this damn sun is burning a hole in me.' Later that day the third of our packhorses died, not from the slash of a sword, but from heatstroke: it simply collapsed onto the sand and coughed out its last brea
th from its frothy mouth. Nuradayn blamed himself for not dispatching it sooner, but as he put it: 'Each time we cut down one of the horses, it's like cutting off our own limbs.'
Travelling as we did by early morning and early night, we lost count of the days: one evening in our tent, Master Juwain sat rubbing his bald head as he told us that he thought it was the fourth of Marud. We lost track of distances, too. We measured our progress not by the mile, but by the hoof and the foot: it took all our strength to keep the horses moving forward, step by step, and when they grew too tired, we had to force ourselves to walk up one dune and down the next. Finally we reached a place where neither days nor miles nor even suffering mattered. In the middle of an expanse of sand nearly as featureless as a sheet of parchment, Maidro suddenly called for a halt. He called for a council, too.
'If we turn back now,' he said to us when we had all gathered around him, 'I believe that we might be able to return to the Hadr Halona.'
'No!' I cried out to him. I looked all around us at the blazing sand. Other than some dunes in the distance and a few low rocks sucking out of the ground, there was nothing to see. 'If we turn back now, we'll lose!'
'If we don't turn back and we don't find water,' Sunji said to me, 'we'll lose, too: our lives.'
'We'll find water,' I said. 'I know we will.'
I looked at Estrella, and so did the rest of us. This slender girl, sitting on top of her spent horse, looked up at the pretty clouds in the sky.
'She follows the clouds,' Sunji said, 'as she has for days. It will not avail us, but who can blame her?'
Estrella, he said, having been acclaimed as an udra mazda, must feel too keenly the desire to satisfy our expectations.
'But surely she must be stymied, as we are,' Sunji said. 'Surely she leads us on in false hope.'
Nuradayn, whose doubt had turned into despair, sucked in air through the bloody shawl wrapped over his nose and said, 'It may have been false for us to have named the girl an udra mazda. What if she found that cave by chance?'
For a while, beneath the day's dying sun, the four Avari debated the signs by which an udra mazda might be recognized. Maidro held that only the grace of the One could lead such a young girl to water, and that chance could have played no part in this miracle. Estrella, he told Nuradayn, was surely who they believed her to be. But then he added, 'Even an udra mazda, however, cannot find water where there is no water.'
We all gazed out at the burning sands where Estrella wanted us to go; almost none of us wanted to go there. The desert itself seemed to drive us back with a hellishly hot wind that seared our eyes. Nuradayn told of a sick heat that fell upon his brain whenever he contemplated taking another step along our course; he said that it must be the will of the One that we would surely die if we went on. We all, I thought, felt something like that. Even Kane regarded the barren terrain before us with a dread that was as powerful and deep as it was strange.
'It is a terrible chance you're asking us to take,' Sunji said to me.
I drew my sword and watched as the sun touched' it with an impossible brightness. I shielded my eyes against its shimmering glorre, and I told him, 'We're well beyond chance now, as you have said. I believe our fate lies out there.'
I looked at Estrella and bowed my head to her. Either one had faith in people, or one did not.
'Fate,' Sunji said, looking out to the northwest. 'Fate,' Maidro repealed, shaking his head.
I saw in his old eyes what he saw: all of us lying dead on the sand without even the ants or the vultures to relieve us of our rotting flesh.
He gazed at Estrella, and then at me. I opened my heart to him then, I found within myself a fierce, fiery will to keep on going. For a moment, it burnt away my fear, and Maidro's as well. 'If we turned back now,' he said, 'we might still reach the Hadr Halona. But then, we might not.'
'One place,' Sunji said to him, 'is as good to die as another.' Arthayn agreed with them, and so, reluctantly, did Ruradayn. I sat there beneath the merciless sun marveling at the courage of these warriors who did not have to make this journey nor fight this battle,
'One thing we must do, however,' Maidro said, 'if we are to go on.'
He told us that we must lighten the horses' burdens, and this meant jettisoning everything not vital to our survival. He was a harder man and more exacting than even Yago. And so we cast away many things that were dear to us. Liljana nearly wept at having to abandon the last of her galte cookware, as did Master Juwain when he removed his steel instruments and medicines from his polished wooden box and left the box to be buried by the sifting sands. Only with great difficulty could I bring myself to part with the chess set that Jonathay had given me at the outset of our first quest — and with Mandru's sharpening stone and Yarashan's copy of the Valkariad. Maram made a great show of surrendering up the heavy wool sweater that Behira had knitted for him. But this sacrifice proved insufficient to satisfy the implacable Maidro. When Maidro discovered that one of our horses carried seven bottles of brandy, he insisted that they, too, be left to the sand.
'But that is our whole reserve!' Maram cried out. 'It is madness to give up good medicine!'
'It is madness to make the horses carry it another mile!' Maidro snapped at him. 'Madness to bring it along in the first place, when this horse could have carried extra waterskins!"
They argued then, with a vehemence and heat like unto that of the desert all around us. For a moment, I thought Maram was ready to strike Maidro. But in the end, all of Maram's bluster could not prevail against this tough, old warrior. Maidro had his way, and we all watched as Nuradayn dropped the brandy bottles onto the sand.
'Damn you!' Maram shouted at Maidro. 'You'll kill me yet!'
He sat down near the bottles, and would not be moved. He shouted out to Sunji, 'You're right, Avari: One place is as good as another to die!'
Again, I worried that we would have to tie ropes around Maram and drag him across the desert. And then Master Juwain came over, and bent down to whisper in Maram's ear.
'Ah, all right — all right, then!' Maram pulled himself proudly back up. He stood glaring at Maidro. 'Let it not be said that Sar Maram Marshayk of the Five Horns abandoned his friends!'
As we made ready to resume our journey, I took Master Juwain aside and asked him, 'What did you say to him? Did you remind him how much we love him and couldn't go on without him?'
'No,' Master Juwain said with a smile. 'I reminded him that I'm still the keeper of the last bottle of brandy, and that he had better get back on his horse if he wants his ration tonight.'
We did not ride much farther that day. Just past dusk, we came upon some low rocks, and Maidro insisted that we should make camp in their lee. He did not say why. Apparently, his argument with Maram had driven him into a disagreeable silence.
We were all grateful for a chance to take a little extra sleep. Even Kane lay down inside the tent with us. I was not sure if he ever allowed himself to slip down into unconsciousness, but it seemed that he dwelt for hours in a realm of deep meditation and dreams.
Just after midnight, with a cold wind blowing against our tent, I felt his hand on my shoulder shaking me awake. I called out into the darkness: 'What is it?'
'Maram,' Kane said to me, 'has not returned.'
I rolled over to pat the empty sleeping fur where Maram should have been. I said to Kane, 'Return? Where did he go?'
'He said that he couldn't sleep. He said that he was going outside to look at the stars.'
Now I sat bolt upright; Maram, I thought, would no more give up his rest to look at the stars than he would to take a walk on the moon.
'How long ago, then?' I asked Kane.
'I'm not sure. An hour — maybe two.'
I grabbed for my sword, then worked my way out of our tent. Kane followed me. The brilliant starlight and half moon illumined our encampment and the desert beyond. The Avari's tent and that of the women stood black and square in a line with ours, behind a rock formation twenty feet high. The horse
s stood there, too, as if frozen in the eerie stillness with which horses sleep. Maram's horse, I saw, remained with the others. I circled around the mound of rock, hoping to find Maram sitting on top of it or on one of its steps. I looked out into the desert, hoping to see his great shape looming above the starlit sands.
'Maram!' I whispered to the wind whipping out of the northwest. I turned to look off to the south and east, then shouted out, 'Maram! Maaa-ram! Where are you?'
My cries awakened everyone, who came out of their tents rubbing their eyes. I told them what had happened. It was Maidro, with his sharp old eyes, who discovered an additional set of tracks paralleling a mass of hoofprints pressed down into the sand in a long, churned-up groove leading from the direction by which we had come here, from the south. The tracks, Maidro told us, were surely Maram's, for they were deep and pointed back along our route.
'He has given up!' Nuradayn said, without thinking. 'But why didn't he take his horse?'
Nuradyan counted our waterskins, and determined that Maram had taken none of these either.
'He has not given up,' I said to him, and everyone else. 'And he did not take his horse because he wished to steal out of here unheard.'
'But why?' Nuradayn asked.
I looked at Master Juwain, who looked back at me through the weak light. I said, 'Because he knew we would stop him from going back for the brandy.'
I moved to go saddle my horse, and Maram's, but then Maidro stopped me, laying his leathery old hand on my arm. 'No, Valaysu, do not go, not now. I fear that soon there will be a storm.'
I looked up at the glittering sky. Except for some clouds drifting toward the northwest, and strangely, up from the southwest, the sky was perfectly clear.
'Do you mean a sandstorm?' I said to him.
'I have seen signs of it all day,' he told me. 'It is why I wanted to make camp early, behind these rocks.'
'Then all the more reason that I must ride after Maram, before the storm comes.'
Maidro looked past the mound of rocks toward the northwest. The wind from the darkened desert in that direction blew stronger and stronger even as we spoke.
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