Heart of Flame

by Janine Ashbless

  “What? That’s hundreds of miles south.”

  “And deep desert. Yes, I know.” He looked at his hands. “No water, no shelter, no people. We don’t have to go. We can give up now.”

  She frowned. “You’ve changed.”

  “Taqla, we both nearly drowned yesterday.” His voice was suddenly hoarse. “I thought for a while that you had. It scared me half to death. I mean…I need you to say alive for this.” He gave a twisted grin. “I need me to stay alive too, of course. Having you alive will definitely help on that front.”

  “But you still want to keep going?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t hesitate over that one.

  Taqla felt a prickle of—what? Disappointment? Fear? Relief? “Then we go forward,” she said firmly. Then added, slightly shamefaced, “And can we go via Basra? I really need a hot bath.”

  Chapter Twelve

  In which a storm rises.

  Tarampara-rampara-ram.

  The sand was green. It wasn’t obvious if she picked up a handful, so pale was the color, but when it lay in a sweep at her feet, the delicate shade couldn’t be mistaken. The jade-hued crests of the dunes rose and fell in unending succession on every side, right to the horizon, like fossilised waves. That was presumably, Taqla thought, how the Abu Bahr—which meant Father of the Sea—had received its name, and how this area of dunes came to be remembered distinctly when so few people ever ventured even into the margins of the Empty Quarter. This was nothing like the familiar flat desert of home that was stippled with low thorny tussocks that provided sparse browsing for goats and camels. There were no pilgrim trails here, no caravan routes, no wells or villages, not the smallest tree or patch of thorns to break the monotony of a landscape wholly dead. Only the crippling heat of the sun during the day and the old stories of cities like Ad and Irem of the Golden Pillars, long since swallowed by the sands—places cursed by God for their wickedness.

  Green sand and ancient evil. The Temple of Yaghuth was not, they gathered, going to be an exception. The odd familiarity of that strange name had been solved by one of the old men back in the swamp village. It was written of in the holy Qur’an, he told them, as the name of an idol worshipped in the time of Noah.

  They travelled only in the mornings and the evenings. During the worst heat of the day, if no rock outcrop could be found, then they erected the windbreak and sat in its meagre shade. Taqla walked as much as she could because she felt better able to read the subtle strands of Fate when she was in contact with the earth and moving slowly. It was hard work striding over the soft sand. As she headed off in whatever direction took her fancy best, mesmerised by the puffs of grit thrown out before her sandals with each step, Rafiq would ride spiral sweeps centered around her plodding figure, urging the Horse to the top of dunes to get a look down the hidden slopes and investigating the crags of greenish bedrock that emerged through the skin of the sand like jagged bones. But none turned out to be the ruins of an ancient temple.

  At night the desert changed. They noticed it when first the moon rose. Rafiq stirred, staring out around them. “What on earth—?”

  Taqla, using the corners of her vision in the dim light, swung in a circle. The hair stood up on the nape of her neck as she saw that the landscape around them had altered, that the barren skyline of rolling dunes was now broken by strange shapes. Most were featureless mounds or clustered tiers of angles but one nearby had the branched silhouette of a lumpy tree. And among its branches something moved, shimmering. “Over there,” she whispered, pointing. “What’s that?”

  With a flick, the dim light shot behind a dark mass and vanished. Taqla was left staring at her own hand. As she’d pointed, her hand had left a greenish phosphorescent trail hanging in the air. She waved her fingers experimentally, and the glow outlined her rings.

  “I’m alight.”

  “So are they,” said Rafiq and she turned to look behind her. Globular, almost feathery glows of light hung above them, motionless except for the faintest pulsing. And a whole swarm of smaller glows was headed in their direction, flitting over the new contours of the ground. The swarm hovered over a mound momentarily, and Taqla glimpsed the pink blush of a domed surface as convoluted as an exposed brain.

  “Coral?” said Rafiq disbelievingly. Then the swarm was upon them and Taqla saw that it was about a dozen cuttlefish each as long as her hand, moving through the air as if it were water. They clustered about the two travellers, colors chasing across their transparent skins. Apart from the blushes of color, she realized, the animals were see-through, beings made of dim light. One jetted close to her face and she put up a hand to intercept it, causing the cephalopod to flit away and swim in a circle before returning. It swam straight through her hand then, and though she felt nothing, she jumped.

  “Ghosts,” she whispered, anxiety giving way to wonder. The whole swarm of cuttlefish was gathering about her now, entranced by the phosphorescent swirls she left in water only they could feel. They followed each move of her arm and she found she could conduct them in a strange dance. “They’re like ghosts.”

  “The ghost of a whole sea,” Rafiq said, stepping to the leafless tree of coral and scything his arm through the branches without meeting any resistance. “All around us.”

  Taqla had never seen the sea. She laughed, turning on her toes as the cuttlefish danced around and through her. The sand she stirred puffed up and hung in the moonlit air before falling slowly back. The undersea color show was muted but lovely, an unearthly glimmering that barely illuminated more than a fleeting glimpse of feathery or rugose corals. “It’s beautiful.”

  The moonlight picked out Rafiq’s grin.

  “What are they, do you think?” she asked, pointing at the eerie blobs of light.

  “Well, those look like jellyfish.”

  “And those?” She waved at a cluster of three round spiralform objects, as big as millstones, that defied gravity just like the jellyfish. Each seemed to sport a cluster of tentacles.

  “No idea. I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  They stood and goggled at the lantern-festival display, which strengthened as the moon rose. Everything was sketched in delicate glimmers, everything as insubstantial as mist. But when a beast bigger than all the others came soaring over a crest and angled in their direction, Taqla couldn’t help her heart jumping into her mouth.

  “Whoa! Don’t move!” Rafiq snapped, but neither of them took his advice when it became clear how big the thing was—as long as an ocean-going dhow, with a heavy neck and a mouth longer than a grown man, filled with jutting, snaggled teeth. Four huge paddle limbs propelled the monster. Taqla and Rafiq both took an involuntary step back and together, leaving a green glow to outline their retreat. The creature twitched its head and bore down in their direction, its crocodilian maw easing open. “Oh no,” Rafiq groaned, reaching for his sword.

  Taqla grabbed her fear in both hands, lifted it high over her head and spoke the words that would ignite it. White light, painfully bright, shot from between her fingers, illuminating for a long moment the sands around them—empty, barren and leached of color, their own shadows thrown down like ink upon the pallor.

  When the light went out, they were both blind. It took a long time for their eyes to readjust to the moonlight.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” said Rafiq a little unsteadily. “It couldn’t actually eat us.”

  “It couldn’t eat our bodies,” she replied dubiously. The Ghost Sea had gone, even when she was able to make out the outlines of the dunes once more. “You know what that was?” she said, flushing with relief and pride. “That was the Behemoth. We saw the ghost of the Behemoth!”

  After that they slept. In the morning when Taqla awoke, she found a fragment of coral in a fold of her clothes, like a tiny flower of stone.

  “Be patient,” Taqla said as they waited out another afternoon’s scorching sun. “Did you think God was going to hand you a map?”

  “Do you really believe we
will find it?” Rafiq was carving a piece of sun-bleached goat bone with his knife. It was a round knob broken from a femur and this time he was picking out the shape of a human head from it.

  “Yes.” She shut her eyes. “I feel…something. It’s near. It tastes bad.”

  “This is sorcery, is it?”

  “Part of it.”

  “Hm.”

  From under her lashes, she watched the tiny face taking form beneath his clever hands. It was a woman’s face. Ahleme, the Flower of Dimashq, she thought. He had seen the girl once and been engulfed in the flames of love. Now every moment apart from her was a burning torment. Taqla wasn’t unsympathetic. She understood how love was. The pain, and the need to quench that fire, took over the lover’s life. She’d heard it said and sung a thousand times, and now knew for herself how it felt because she too burned.

  No, she corrected herself. If she had been foolish enough to give way to her feelings, then she’d have been love’s victim too, but she’d been smart enough to recognize the trap and strong enough to resist it. She wasn’t helpless. She did not love.

  Rafiq suddenly seemed to become aware of what it was he was carving, and covered the little face in his hand. “How did you become a sorceress then?” he asked, snagging the waterskin from between them and lifting it to his lips. “Did you…make a pact?”

  “With Iblis himself, you mean?” she said, smiling. “No. You have to be born to it. I was seven years old when it first became clear I had the Art. And it runs in my family. My father and my grandfather and his father were sorcerers.”

  “Your mother too?”

  She stopped smiling and brushed some sand carefully off her knee. “No. In our family it wasn’t considered wise to make marriage-links with outsiders. Too many questions might have been asked by strangers, you see. So the mothers of my line were all slaves bought at the market, not free women. But they had to be maidens—it’s almost always the firstborn child that has the Art.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “No one knows. Magic seems to root better in a virgin womb.” She ran her tongue across her lips, but they stayed dry, and out of somewhere very deep inside her, words came and pressed up against them, struggling out into the air like wasps crawling from their hidden nest. “That was how they found out I was my father’s heir. When I was seven, I told my father that the baby my mother was carrying in her belly wasn’t his. I thought it was obvious. I thought he knew.” She blinked. “I was just a little girl. I didn’t know what it meant.”

  Rafiq frowned. “What happened?”

  “He sold her. I don’t know who to.”

  “Oh.”

  Taqla shrugged. “It’s the lot of slaves and wives to be disposable.”

  Rafiq looked pained. “Not all of them.”

  She didn’t reply, only ran her fingers through the sand between her feet, wondering why she had told him her story. She hadn’t spoken a word about it to anyone, even Lelia, since leaving childhood behind.

  “He broke the law, you know,” said Rafiq cautiously. “She’d already borne his child, so she should have been safe from being sold on.”

  “Yes, well.” Her throat felt like it were coated in ash. “Legally he could have had her executed. I suppose he might have been being merciful, just selling her.” She remembered her father’s stern face. “I doubt it though. He was always very…proper. Very disciplined.”

  Rafiq rubbed at his jaw. “Is your father still alive?”

  “No.” Perhaps once this point had been raw, but by now it was covered by layers of scar tissue. “He went out into the desert one day with a mule load of aloes and sandalwood. He meant, I assume, to lure and trap a djinni. His servants found him with his skull and his belly burst and every bone in his body broken, as if he’d been dropped from a great height.”

  “My condolences.” Rafiq’s tone was completely flat.

  Needled, Taqla drew herself up a little straighter and thrust out her lip. “He was always good to me.” She recalled long hours of study, his dedication to her excellence in the Art, and her fierce determination to win his approval. He could have disowned her or ignored her, but he’d chosen to school his daughter in his own path. She did not underestimate the value of that care. “He made me his heir and he taught me…so much.”

  “I can see that,” Rafiq answered a little grimly.

  She shot him a hard glance and then wished she hadn’t. His eyes seemed to look right inside her. “We can move on,” she muttered, looking around for her belongings. “It’s not so hot now.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Pardon?”

  “What went wrong when he tried to capture the djinni?”

  “Oh. I don’t know.” Without thinking, she began to rotate the little bronze ring about her finger. “Maybe he took too long getting the words of binding out. Maybe he encountered one who couldn’t hear him. They have to hear to obey, you know. Some of them, the Ifrit especially, took awls to their ears and made themselves deaf so that they couldn’t ever be enslaved. They’d rather spend their lives in silence than submit to us.” Rafiq looked shocked, so she went on. “They fear and resent us, you know. We are inferior to them in almost every way, and yet God has favoured Mankind and made us their masters.”

  “That’s…good to know,” he said. “Let’s hope the one we’re chasing isn’t deaf. Or fast. Or, God willing, awake.”

  She found a stone. At first it simply caught her eye as she walked up, a shiny piece of flint in the coarse sand and pebbles at her feet. She took one pace past, stopped and turned. It lay there, gray and sharp-edged against the green blur of the sand. It nagged at her mind’s eye. Stopping, she examined the flake, turning it over in her palm. It was an arrowhead, she decided after a moment, though the tip had been broken off. It felt warm and smooth—and somehow a little unclean. She had an unaccountable urge to wipe her hands on her clothes.

  Instead she looked around, but only the featureless dunes rolled about her, wave after wave, and even Rafiq wasn’t in sight. There were no similar shards in view—this was a desert of sand, not flint. So she sat down, and with the arrowhead resting before her, loosened her headscarf to bare the nape of her neck so that she could unbind her hair from the clumsy braid there. Once loose, it felt uncomfortably warm on her skin. She plucked nine long individual hairs, then braided them together to make a short string that she looped about the stone arrowhead. The small weight hung from its tether, swaying back and forth. She stood carefully and watched to see which way it would twist, pivoting on the balls of her feet and humming a particular little tune under her breath. Only then did she notice that Rafiq had reappeared, and was sitting on the motionless Horse under a nearby dune crest, watching her.

  Rather clumsily she looped her jabbayah one-handed over her head once more, loose strands of hair blowing in her eyes and sticking unpleasantly to her throat, but she didn’t stop humming. The arrowhead swung and she concentrated on which direction the tug felt the strongest. When she was sure, she indicated to him with her hand in which direction they were to go, and set off again.

  Two hours later, Rafiq rode up and told her she was going in circles.

  “What?”

  “We’re circling back on our own footprints.”

  She looked around her, blinking. The light reflecting off the sand was so hard she could hardly focus. “Then it’s here somewhere,” she said, peering in vain across the sand for some sign of an ancient temple.

  “Are you sure?”

  She was too hot to give him more than an exasperated look.

  “That’s a pity—because we’re going to have to leave.”

  “What for?”

  He nodded to the horizon over her shoulder. “See that? I don’t like the look of it at all.”

  She stared. A greenish haze like the oldest of bruises was building low in the sky.

  “Sandstorm,” said Rafiq, leaning forward in the saddle and looking grim. “We can almost certainly outrun it o
n the Horse, but we need to get going.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “We found this place. We’re meant to be here.”

  “We’ve found nothing much,” he answered dubiously. “And I’d rather not be caught in a sandstorm.”

  “We’re here.” She set her jaw. “At the right time. Storm or not.”

  “I’ve seen men killed by these storms,” he said quietly. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded, wishing she felt more confident. Sorcery was such a tenuous, fragile link to the world. She trusted her instinct, but had never put it to such a test before.

  “All right then.”

  They prepared a camp and what little shelter they could. Rafiq was anxious, far more so than he would ever have admitted to Taqla or to anyone. He’d survived a two-day sandstorm some years back and had seen flesh stripped down to bone and eye sockets scoured blind. He’d seen men who’d been buried by sand, only their hands or feet protruding from its waves. The worst threat though, he knew, was from suffocation. Fine dust could work its way everywhere, including down throats and into lungs. Not normally preoccupied with his own mortality, the one death Rafiq did recoil from was suffocation. He wanted an enemy he could react to, and though he’d learned like every traveller that there were some things—heat, thirst, pain—that could only be endured, it was a terribly hard thing for him to prepare to lie passively before the assault of the storm when it would have been so easy for them to flee.

  Trust her, he told himself, she knows what she’s doing. The thought made him smile to himself because he’d spent most of his adult life refusing to respect any judgment but his own, and here he was entrusting his life to a sorceress. Choosing a spot near the top of a slope—he thought it too easy for the dune to march over their heads if they sheltered at its base—he pushed the Horse Most Swift over on its side and they set up their goathair shelter against its metal belly.

  As the air began to taste sour and grow heavy, djinn could be seen stalking the dunes—or at any rate the whirls of dust that betrayed their invisible presence. The light grew greenish yellow as the shadow of the storm blocked out the sun.