But she would say no more on this.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow in the desert. We shall see.”
Having only softly stirring curtains between herself and the world was only the first new and strange thing Anghara would have to learn to accept, for Kheldrin seemed never to have heard of the concept of a door. She wondered for a moment, before she fell asleep on the banked cushions that served for a bed, how people indicated a desire to enter a room without having a door to knock on. But then sleep claimed her at last and the thought fled, only to be resurrected vividly as she woke to a soft voice beyond the curtains an hour before dawn.
“Sa’hari, an’sen’thar?”
She heard ai’Jihaar reply, and the man she had called al’Sayar entered, keeping his eyes decorously down and his hands, wrapped around a small flat package, folded neatly against his stomach. Anghara propped herself up on one elbow and watched ai’Jihaar and the serai keeper—for that was what he seemed to be—talking quietly between themselves. When their business was concluded, al’Sayar bowed again and turned to leave. Just before he slipped out into the corridor he looked up and stared at Anghara dispassionately for a long moment, returning her scrutiny, and then he was gone.
“That was not very polite,” said ai’Jihaar without turning round. She seemed to be paying out a few coins into her palm from a pouch at her waist.
Anghara could not restrain a light laugh. “It probably wasn’t. I’m sorry.”
“No matter. He was hardly the epitome of courtesy and decorum himself. And there will be others who will find you equally fascinating before we go much further. He brought you something. Come, let me show you.”
The “something” was a complicated head cloth which, once in place, could be worn either thrown back or tucked across nose and mouth in such a way that only the eyes showed through a narrow opening.
“There are few things in the desert,” ai’Jihaar said, lifting a hand to rub the sides of her narrow nose reflexively with slender fingers, “but what there is comes in many different guises. What you know as sand we might name soft sand, hard sand, dune sand, quicksand—and some are to be sought, some avoided. What you know as wind we may call iri’sah, or khai’san. And when you get caught in a soft sand desert with a khai’san blowing in your face, you die.” These were harsh words, but they were truth, and truth on which lives depended. Anghara listened with careful, concentrated attention.
“We of the desert have ways of breathing through storms of sand,” said ai’Jihaar, tapping her nose again. “It is something you will have to learn—if you are able. But for a little time, at least, wear this over your face; we do not want the desert to put an end too soon to something hardly even begun. Let me show you how to put it on. You must know this instinctively, you must be able to do it in seconds when someone wakes you from a deep sleep. We have an hour yet or so before we must leave to join the caravan at the Desert Gate. Practise.”
Anghara watched ai’Jihaar deftly wrap the burnoose about her head and tried to do it herself under ai’Jihaar’s critical hands. The older woman corrected one or two errors, supervised another practice run, then left her to it while she went to arrange their animals and supplies.
It seemed as if she had been gone for hours; Anghara, alone in a strange place where everything was new and a little frightening in the intensity with which it was approached, was on edge, shying at every rustle outside the doorless room. But she practiced, as instructed, the mechanics of donning the burnoose. It was as well; the first thing ai’Jihaar did when she returned was to approach and run swift exploring hands over Anghara’s head and face. She tugged at a slightly loose fold, then nodded.
“Good. Are you ready? The ki’thar’en are waiting for us.”
Anghara followed her without a word.
They had similar beasts in Shaymir, and Kieran, when he talked to her of his home, had described them to Anghara, long ago in Cascin. Their large, ugly snouts with disconcertingly long-lashed eyes, their faintly supercilious expression, their splayed feet adapted so well to sand and the huge hump on which a rider’s saddle was perched were not entirely unexpected. The way the animals were caparisoned, though, was—Kheldrin, it seemed, enjoyed its trappings, or else it was something ai’Jihaar drew to herself. Either way, the two animals on which they were to ride were decked out as if for a royal procession. Their tack was not new, but the bridles were soft, tooled red leather. Their saddles were laid upon rugs good enough to be set in pride of place in a noble house. Anghara knew ai’Jihaar sensed her surprise, and seemed to be enjoying it.
“Hold fast when they rise,” she warned, as they were mounting the animals which knelt awaiting them. “Keep a tight grip on the pommel.”
Anghara squealed in surprise as her ki’thar began lumbering to its feet with a bored-sounding grunt, and she thought for a moment she was about to make a thoroughly ungraceful head-over-heels descent down the animal’s curving neck. She dropped the reins, but held on, and the animal stood placidly in the gray pre-dawn light, waiting for further instructions. A handler, who had been standing by as they mounted, handed her the trailing rein, his face wearing an expression with equal parts of surprise and apprehension—it was as though the spectacle of Anghara seated upon his ki’thar stirred a deep feeling of unease. Anghara wasn’t entirely insensitive to this; she would have probably felt the same if he had been mounting her father’s stallion, about to gallop off into the moors of Roisinan.
Seemingly oblivious to the undercurrents, ai’Jihaar continued with her instructions. “You urge him forward with your heel, and you make him stop, just like riding a horse, simply by pulling on the reins. But these are trained to verbal commands as well. To make him advance you call akka; to halt him, sa’a. Gently, though; if you tell him to akka vigorously enough, he is liable to run away with you entirely.” The diminutive woman, who looked even smaller perched on top of the ki’thar’s hump, swung the heel of a delicate chamois leather riding boot against the monster’s side and said, softly, “Akka! Akka! Akka!”
The ki’thar began walking ponderously, with ai’Jihaar swaying in her saddle to the rhythm of his pace. “Try!” she called over her shoulder. “We have a little time. You will learn as we go, but we can take a few moments to make sure you can exercise at least a little control over your mount.”
Anghara kicked at her beast obligingly, calling akka in a soft voice. For a moment it looked like it would ignore her completely, wrapped in its own august thoughts. Then with a snort of what sounded suspiciously like exasperation with this idiotic rider, the animal shambled into a slow stroll, managing to give the impression its decision to move had nothing at all to do with the pesky parasite hanging onto its hump. Anghara laughed. So, after a moment, did ai’Jihaar, who nevertheless did not forget her duties as instructress.
“Now make him stop,” she called from where she had halted her own beast.
Anghara hauled at the reins, calling “Sa’a! Sa’a!” in a voice which, while authoritative enough, still managed to sound unconvinced that it would have any effect whatsoever. For a wonder, the animal cocked an ear and came to an obedient stop.
She would have rather died than admit it, but she had been thoroughly terrified at the prospect of having to battle wills with this animal out in the unforgiving desert. She still wasn’t sure she was equal to it, but at least she had told him what to do and he had done it without too much fuss. She might still be disgraced out amongst the desert nomads, but she would not be totally humiliated—and she would not be the utter liability she had feared she would be.
“Try it once or twice more, and then we should be on our way,” said ai’Jihaar.
It went smoothly enough, and after another few attempts at starting and stopping ai’Jihaar pronounced herself satisfied. They moved off, ai’Jihaar in the lead, toward the place she had called Desert Gate. The handler remained behind, staring after them with brooding eyes.
They were soon free of the city of Sa
’alah, and riding on the road which led toward the mountains ringing the coastal plains. Anghara could not have said when it had begun to rise, but there came a moment when she looked back and the city by the sea was already behind and beneath them, presenting once again a vista of golden roofs. Up ahead, the mountains were suddenly very close; on the green meadows, some of which now had perceptible slopes, she could see sporadic groups of sheep, and occasionally a shepherd watching over his flock, standing still as a statue. And then they had arrived. A loose knot of ten or fifteen people, some mounted on dun’en every bit as beautiful as Anghara’s father’s had been and others on ki’thar’en, stood waiting for them at the point where the road plunged into the mountain pass. Six heavily laden ki’thar’en waited patiently, carrying burdens which seemed hopelessly huge and heavy. The caravan leader urged his mount forward a pace or two and bowed to ai’Jihaar from the saddle. He wore his burnoose tucked up desert-fashion, leaving only a pair of golden eyes showing in his face, and touched his fingertips to his heart, his lips beneath the concealing desert veil, and his forehead, in the graceful salute of the desert. He murmured something in his own language; ai’Jihaar responded. The leader glanced at Anghara, and, from the set of his shoulders and the sharp glint in his eyes, he seemed far from happy; then he wheeled his ki’thar and urged it to the front of the cavalcade at a shambling trot. There, he raised his right hand and brought it down, very suddenly.
“Akka! Akka! Akka!” came softly from the riders around Anghara, and the ki’thar’en, not without a few grunting comments of their own, all began moving slowly toward the pass.
Anghara urged her ki’thar into a slow trot. She had not developed the right rhythms yet, and felt like nothing so much as a sack of loose bones, all of which were protesting furiously and unanimously at being shaken about. Except for the riders leading the beasts of burden, Anghara was last in the caravan until ai’Jihaar quietly assumed a position behind her. They plunged into a narrow, winding canyon, deep in shadow, riding silently in single file. The ki’thar’en were the only ones who grumbled loudly—at the hard stone beneath their feet, at their riders, at the acrid smell that emanated from each beast to the delicate nose of the one that followed.
But very soon the floor of the canyon began to change. First there was just an occasional flurry of pale sand disturbed by the infrequent breath of a breeze which came and went intermittently as they threaded their way through Ar’i’id Sam’mara, the Desert Gate. Then, gradually, the bare stone began to disappear beneath soft sand drifts. The sounds of the caravan’s passage grew softer and softer, even the endless litany of complaints from the ki’thar’en ceasing slowly as their feet began to find the sand for which they had been wrought. The breeze grew warmer, steadier, the breath of the desert blowing into their faces.
They began approaching the massive rib of a mountain buttress, so huge it almost spanned the width of the canyon and very nearly closed it altogether—only a narrow corridor remained, where a passing ki’thar almost scraped the towering stone on either side of him. Except for its prodigious size, it was no different from many they had already passed, but even as the leader of the caravan vanished behind the barrier of stone Anghara’s heart seemed to stop for a breathless instant. She felt poised on the brink of something extraordinary, standing at a crossroads with myriad paths unravelling from her feet. It was a moment in which she could feel her life change, become something quite different from what she had imagined it would be.
And then she was out of time, all choices cast in stone, and her own mount was edging past the last obstacle and over the threshold. Ar’i’id Sam’mara opened up with a startling suddenness, and the mountains fell away to the sides.
Ahead of them, as far as the eye could see to the flat and shimmering horizon, stretched an expanse of yellow desert, blown into smooth ridges at their feet by the ever-swirling winds of the Desert Gate.
Anghara had known it would be a flat and largely featureless ocean of sand, drifting and deadly. She had known it would be overwhelming in its silence and its immensity. But she had not known it could wring a heart, that it was beautiful.
Arad Khajir’i’id, said the voice of ai’Jihaar in her mind. The sen’thar had never done this before, but somehow it was not surprising that this should be so, not in this hour, not in this place. The Southern Desert. This is Kheldrin, Land of Twilight, not seen by alien eyes for a thousand years.
16
If that first sight of Arad Khajir’i’id had been wine which had gone to Anghara’s head, her first day in the desert sobered her up very quickly. It was still beautiful, and had lost none of its power to touch her soul—but the surface beauty was delicate skin stretched over fine bones, and if the bones themselves were beautiful it was the razor-sharp beauty of the purity of death.
It was not yet mid morning when they set out across the sands, but the heat was already overwhelming, the sun a living fire overhead. They had travelled for only a few hours before the caravan leader signalled a stop; a semicircle of black tents was up almost before Anghara could scramble down from her ki’thar. One had been raised for herself and for ai’Jihaar, the first sign Anghara could see that anyone in the caravan acknowledged their presence. She noticed the ki’thar’en had been tethered in the meager shadow of the tents, and she led her own behind her tent, hammering in a clumsy peg to hold his hobble. The sen’thar’s was already there, and ai’Jihaar was standing by the entrance to the tent; when Anghara rose and looked in her direction, ai’Jihaar simply nodded her approval in that uncanny way she had of knowing when she was being watched and ducked inside. Anghara followed. The tent was small, the air inside it close, but somehow less torrid than out in the merciless sun.
“Try to get some sleep,” advised ai’Jihaar. “We leave again late this afternoon, and we travel during the cool hours of evening. It will be midnight before we stop for rest again.”
It was indeed a pleasure to close eyes which hurt from the brightness of sun reflected from yellow-white sand, but sleep eluded Anghara—it was too hot, and there was a thin film of sweat on her skin which seemed to make her clothes slide and chafe uncomfortably. All the same, it seemed all too soon when a quiet voice called from the tent’s entrance: “Sa’hari? Sa’hari, an’sen’thar?”
When ai’Jihaar murmured a response the summoner departed, his chamois riding boots rasping softly over sand as he walked away.
Anghara remembered the serai keeper outside the curtained doorway of their room had used the same soft word to rouse them on the morning they had left Sa’alah. Only now, here in the desert, was she beginning to understand the lack of doors in Kheldrin.
“Sa’hari…. what does that mean?” she asked ai’Jihaaras they made ready to emerge from the tent.
“You would knock on a door in your land,” said ai’Jihaar. “There are no doors in the desert. The sense of sa’hari could be translated as are you there? It is your answer to this which either invites the one who asked into the place where he seeks admittance, or bids him wait outside while you come to him. Come, they will wish to strike the tent.”
Theirs was one of the last, the rest having vanished as though they had never been. For a moment Anghara gazed back the way they had come, to where the mountains shimmered like an illusion behind a wall of heat. It was already difficult to believe anything existed beyond them. When she finally turned away to claim her ki’thar, it was with a start that she found herself face to face with a Kheldrini man, his eyes gleaming from his desert-veiled face, who stood holding the reins of her ki’thar in his left hand. He hissed a word of command at the ki’thar, waited until it had knelt on the sand, and then offered the reins to Anghara in silence. Another word came back to her, one she had heard ai’Jihaar use in the serai.
“Saliha,” she said. Thank you.
He bowed—heart, lips, brow—and after a slight hesitation she did the same. Leaving her in possession of her mount, he withdrew. Anghara stood looking after him for a moment, not s
ure what just happened but aware it had been deeply significant in some obscure way. She climbed into her saddle in silence and made her mount get to its feet, which the ki’thar did with the same rebellious commentary he’d already expounded once in the yard of the Sa’alah serai. Another ki’thar approached her, and the smile on ai’Jihaar’s unveiled face was unmistakable.
“That was well done,” she said. “Your instincts serve you well.”
Beneath the burnoose Anghara flushed with the pleasure of a just praised child who had solved a difficult problem, and the pride of a queen who proved that royalty lay in her more than just skin-deep or conferred by the touch of a jewelled circlet on her brow. She even caught herself wondering, with what was almost venom, whether Sif would have done as well, for all he claimed he was Kir Hama, and royal-born. And then she veered away from that road. Sif’s name, and what he had done with his crown, was still too raw a wound.
They rode for the rest of the afternoon and, it seemed to Anghara, most of the night. She was bone-weary when the leader finally called a halt, and it was almost more than she could manage to do her duty by her ki’thar, settling it with ai’Jihaar’s for the night with a portion of coarse grain. Then she returned to the center of the tent semicircle, where a blaze had been kindled and several of her co-travelers were busy over a steaming kettle.
The air was cool, even chilly, on Anghara’s first night in the desert. Too tired to even attempt to sleep, every muscle shrieking in agony, she came and sat close by the campfire, wrapped in the woollen djellaba ai’Jihaar had given her, holding out her hands to the cheerful blaze. She had removed her burnoose, after a momentary hesitation, and the thick braid in which she had confined her hair fell over her shoulder to pool in her lap, with the usual wayward curls framing her pale face. Others who moved in the circle of the firelight had also removed their burnooses in the quiet, windless night. Bronze skin and bright copper hair caught glints from the fire and gleamed in the desert darkness beneath a translucent sky wreathed with bright, cold stars. Anghara could not see ai’Jihaar anywhere.
The Hidden Queen Page 24
