by Andrew James
For ten days he marched the army west across sand and rock. Just when Darius thought the march would never end, he looked down from a high plateau and was amazed to see blue pools of water sparkling amidst fertile red earth and lush green fields, clusters of date palms, and the rectangular, earthy-brown huts of villages. Perched like an eagle’s nest on the very edge of the Great Sand Sea, the Place of Two Swords was a wild, remote spot, rich in fruit and grain, a paradise for the parched, hungry army. The night they arrived Darius feasted on fresh lamb and figs, bread, goat’s cheese and yoghurt, washed down with wine from the oasis vineyards, and eased his aching muscles with a long soak in one of the hot springs that gushed steaming and fragrant from the ground.
The novelty of fresh food, wine and constant bathing soon wore off; the endless waiting as supplies were sent ahead quickly wore at his nerves. The cavalry were camped half a day’s march away at the oasis capital, Mut, but even without them the infantry camp was bustling and noisy: men shouting, camels roaring, the clash of iron as soldiers practised with swords. Since the incident with the dates Darius had sensed hostility from Phanes’s closest circle, leaving him feeling increasingly isolated. Nothing was actually said. He wasn’t actively shunned. But he slept with his sword at his side and kept to himself, taking every opportunity to go off alone.
On a cold morning with clear light he left his tent, seeking peace and quiet, and climbed to a lonely spot high on a bluff. Looking west he was humbled by the sight of yellow dunes marching into the distance, like the ripples of sand on a shoreline. Chilly from the desert night he stood, head tilted up to the early sun to let its rays warm his face. On the oasis fringe, a hyena trotted into the cover of some boulders. Twenty paces away a sand-patterned snake with a zigzag on its back and a broad, heart-shaped head sunned itself on a rock. Darius froze as it slithered off the rock and sidewound silently towards him, and his fingertips brushed the hilt of his sword as it passed his feet to curl up beneath a thorn bush. Behind Darius came a sound like a foot scuffing gravel. He spun round, hand instinctively touching his sword again. Phanes was at the base of the bluff, his armour spotless despite the dust in the air, gold armbands gleaming. He lifted his head, saw Darius but didn’t speak, then clambered up the side of the bluff with the agility of a mountain goat. When he reached the top he stood staring unblinking into the wilderness. ‘We Greeks believe the Gorgon lives out there. A snake-haired woman so terrible, her face turns any living thing to stone. Zeus banished her there because it was the most remote place on earth. A place where nothing lives, so she can do no harm.’
‘It certainly looks desolate enough,’ Darius agreed, wondering what Phanes wanted. The two men had hardly spoken since the Place of Two Swords. And Darius had come up here to be alone.
‘Fortunately we only skirt the edge of it.’ Phanes pointed to the north-west, where a line of heavily laden camels was disappearing into the haze. ‘That is the way we go, to Ta-Ihet, the Land of the Cow, through a place they call the White Desert. There are rocks there as white as ice, or so the locals claim. We shall see. Little they say is true. I have four guides now, I’m paying them well, but they fill my ears with their babble, each swearing I must take a different route.’ He shook his head, like a man tired of dealing with people he had no patience for. ‘Sometimes I think what they really want is for us to wander around in circles until we perish.’
He turned away from the desert and fixed cold eyes on Darius. ‘Which is why I followed you up here. I speak to them in a mixture of Egyptian – which they claim to barely understand – and signs. I need someone who can pin them down to definite distances. Your friend Vinda tells me you speak many languages.’ Darius studied Phanes’s face carefully. His lips were drawn back, the vertical lines on either side of his nose almost, but not quite, forming a snarl. Puzzled for a moment, Darius realized he was smiling.
He didn’t return the smile. ‘Does he? Vinda is too kind. I speak Persian, Greek and Elamite, and I can get by in Egyptian, two dialects of Aramaic and, at a push, in Babylonian, and a smattering of one or two others. But these desert dwellers speak a tongue I do not recognize.’
‘Curse them!’ Phanes spat. ‘I can’t plan without knowing exactly how far it is to the Spring of the Shade. If we run short of supplies in there,’ he jerked a thumb at the Sand Sea, ‘we’ll lose half the army, or worse.’
‘Find new guides then.’
Phanes shook his head miserably. ‘No time for that now. We’re already running late. Besides, I doubt they’d be any better.’ He sucked in his lean cheeks, letting his normally firm jaw fall slack.
Darius had never seen the Greek hero so flustered. ‘We haven’t yet reached midwinter,’ he said. ‘There are nearly four months before the summer heat. What’s the problem?’
‘The problem is the Fifty Day Wind.’ Phanes scowled.
‘We came through some rough storms on the way, but we survived.’
Phanes’s laugh was hollow. ‘Not those sweet autumn breezes that tiptoed in from the north and east. These are hot, savage winds that scream in from the south-west. For fifty days they drive the desert before them. Dry as a devil’s furnace, they suck the moisture from your body and burn you up. If we don’t reach Siwa before they start they’ll catch us in the open. With the dunes tumbling around us and our lungs frying, no one will survive.’
Windblown hair straggled across the guide’s face, disturbing the flies swarming over his mouth and nose. The cross shook slightly as he tried to pull himself up to stop his lungs being constricted. Exhausted, he slumped down, straining against the bronze nails in his hands. His features screwed up in agony as the flesh in his palms tore, leaving raw bone to take his weight. Blood trickled down his wrist, dripping onto the sand. Unable to bear the pain he tried again to heave his ribcage up, legs thrashing vainly. With nothing to push against his muscles quickly tired, his chest slumped down again, his lungs barely able to expand, leaving him moaning in despair as he struggled for breath. The sound of his laboured breathing was interrupted by the second guide’s screams as nails were driven through his palms and he too was hoisted up. Phanes laughed. ‘It is necessary,’ he said, in answer to Darius’s questioning look. ‘It will encourage the other two.’
Midwinter’s day was warm and breezy. His gown flapping and face muffled against sun and windblown dust, Darius was conscious of an urgent buzz among the army as it headed north-west along the line of the dune fields. Rumour spreads quickly, and by now everyone knew they were racing against the weather.
The Great Sand Sea was an unreal world that struck Darius in the face with blinding white light. Standing on the crest of a dune, wind constantly pushing against him, he could see only two colours: the blue of the sky, and the interminable sunbaked gold of the sand, sculpted by desert storms into soft, constantly shifting dunes. The camels, with their broad flattening hooves, plodded by with just an occasional grumbling roar. But the heavy Nisaean war chargers floundered, panicking as they sank deep into the sand. Day after day, the dunes stretched into the distance. Crescent dunes like the horns of a bull. Towering dunes like defensive ramparts, some rising forty or fifty times the height of a man then plunging swiftly into steep valleys. Rounded dunes as smooth as polished bronze, dunes rippling with strange patterns like the wind on a lake, a constant spray of gold bursting over wind-sharpened crests. Darius picked up a fistful of sand and let it run through his fingers. The Sinai, the desert near Thebes, the deserts he remembered from Persia and Margiana, they all had some life. But here nothing lived, nothing grew. No spiky desert grasses to spear his hands, no grasshoppers, no sand-speckled lizards racing across the ground, not even the silver-backed ants that tunnelled into the sand. For the first time since entering Egypt there were no flies to torment him. Once Darius found the dried-up corpse of a windswept locust that had died a lonely death far from anything green. And bizarrely, he found the shell of a long dead sea snail that had turned into stone. He thought of Phanes’s Gorgon. Perhaps she rea
lly did roam here?
Miraculously, every five days Phanes found the caches he had arranged along the route. The twentieth day after setting off, men stopped and pointed in awe at the ice-white rocks that marked the borders of the Land of the Cow. Erupting from white-frosted limestone, they looked like man-high mushrooms growing from the ground. To Darius they seemed evil, further evidence that this desert, and everything in it, was cursed.
Stopping at the Land of the Cow only long enough to arrange fresh supply dumps, the army plunged back into the Great Sand Sea. Sick of the bloody, sand-abraded blisters all over his feet, Darius commandeered a camel from the supply train. If Phanes noticed, he said nothing. Darius expected he was too busy wondering why the guides had stopped leading the army over the dunes, instead letting it crawl lazily along the valleys between them. Darius tried to remember, when was the last dune they had actually climbed? Suddenly, out of nowhere, a coldness settled on his heart.
He looked up at the sun. In winter it tilts hard into the southern sky. It should have been a quarter turn to his left, but it was almost directly behind him. He realized they were heading too far north, not enough west. Of course, sometimes they had to head due north to avoid a soft patch of sand, but thinking back Darius couldn’t remember the last time they hadn’t been heading that way. Was it this morning? Or yesterday? He closed his eyes, desperately trying to recall, but after two months in the desert all the days were blurring together. He called out to the guides, looked up at the spot where they normally marched, and saw that they were gone.
Dunes rose like storm waves on either side of Darius. In the valley between them Phanes heard his shout, looked over his shoulder to the spot where the guides should have been, realized they were missing, pulled on the reins of his horse, raised his fist and bellowed. ‘Halt! Find those guides.’
Hooves beat the sand as his guards galloped off to search. With a flurry of shouting, the order for an unscheduled stop was relayed back down the line. Angry curses split the air as daydreaming soldiers, surprised by the sudden stop, marched mechanically into the back of the men ahead. At last the vanguard of the vast army began to grind slowly to a halt.
Darius’s tongue was thick and dry as he sat cross-legged on his camel’s back, surveying the four empty waterskins hanging from its harness. He picked up the fifth and last, unstoppered the spout and swirled it around. It was barely a quarter full. He dribbled a few drops into his mouth. The water was hot. He swooshed it about, catching the sand crunching between his teeth, then let it trickle down his throat.
While the search went on for the guides, Phanes slid off his horse and stretched his back and leg muscles, rolling his shoulders and wrists. Leaning wearily on his spear, he looked up at the sky and shook his head at what he saw. Darius also looked up. Dirty, rainless clouds were blowing in front of the sun. He could feel the air growing heavy and oppressive, and in the flat grey light that had suddenly fallen he found it impossible to tell where the sand ended and the cloud began.
Phanes returned to his horse, pulled the linen map from his pack and studied it. At the sound of feet swishing through sand he looked up, eyes focused intently on the approaching men. Darius noticed those eyes had lost their vital spark, and a sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead.
‘Where were you?’ Phanes demanded of the guides.
Standing between two guards the guides stayed silent. ‘They were falling back through the column, sir,’ one of the guards answered grimly. ‘Making ready to leave, if you ask me.’
Phanes looked accusingly at the oldest guide, who turned his waterskin upside down and unstoppered it. It was empty. ‘We went to find water, lord. That was all.’
Phanes scowled. ‘Are you sure it is ahead? You are not mistaken? Or lost?’
As ever, the guide’s face was veiled against drifting dust. Just his eyes showed, very dark, rimmed slightly red. He narrowed them and shook his head. ‘It is forward, lord. A great rock that points at the sky.’ He shook his right hand free of its robes, stuck a wrinkled brown finger in the air to imitate its shape. ‘There is none other like it in the Sea of Sand. That is where we bury your supplies.’
‘Then why is it taking so long to find? You said we would reach it in under five days. Today is day six.’
The guide turned his palms upwards. ‘Army walks slow.’
Instinct told Darius the guide was lying, and Phanes must have thought the same. He sucked through his teeth and turned away, then shook open the map and looked at the Persian quartermaster. ‘Well?’
The quartermaster was a stalwart, middle-aged officer, wearing a blue felt hood with the cheek flaps hanging open beneath his chin. He tugged at them nervously as he looked at the map. ‘The rock is as he described it, sir. They call it Pillar Rock. But where it is …’ He threw up his hands helplessly.
‘The point of you going with them was to find it if they disappeared,’ Phanes said harshly.
The quartermaster looked flustered. ‘I know we rode for five days before we reached it, but we started from a different spot, and out here …’ He shook his head. ‘Every bloody place looks the same, sir.’
Phanes glanced up at the hazy sun, then back at the quartermaster. ‘Don’t they teach boys to read the sky in Persia? When I was twelve my father took me two days from home, gave me a knife and a flint, and told me to find my way back or starve.’
‘Yes, sir …’ the quartermaster spluttered. ‘But … there’s no landmarks here … And he said we were veering north again to avoid some bad land, and I believed him …’
‘Go,’ Phanes said curtly. Looking relieved to escape the stratekos’s anger, the quartermaster bowed and walked briskly away. Phanes drew a long breath. The confident general marching cockily at the head of his army had been replaced by an ill-tempered man, frustration boiling inside him. The weather was turning. Every day lost brought the sandstorm season closer. Having to rely on men weaker and less able than himself was delaying him; above all else, Darius knew, Phanes hated being delayed. ‘We’ll camp here and give the men an early dinner while we wait for the morning’s scouts to return,’ he told his guards. ‘Have my tent set up.’ He jabbed his finger at the guides. ‘And keep them in sight.’
Protesting loudly, the two guides were dragged away.
Phanes posted men on top of the dunes while he, Vinda, his six guards, three other officers and Darius went to his tent. Inside, twelve simple stools stood around a folding campaign table. His parade armour stood on a wooden stand next to a bedroll stuffed with Indian cotton. A bronze jug stood on another stand with a bowl of water, and several large bronze-bound wooden chests lay in a corner. Darius guessed they were where Phanes kept Cambyses’ gold. Phanes ordered the guides to be brought. Everyone sat on the stools, but he made the guides sit on the ground. They looked terrified.
There was shouting outside and the soft sound of camels trotting over sand. Through the open tent flap Darius saw a squadron of camel riders cresting the dune, their outlines silhouetted against an almost grey sky. Their satapatish was a young Armenian noble Darius knew as Dadarshi. Dressed in a green gown and short corselet of bronze armour, he trotted down the dune, dismounted, gave his camel to a driver and headed towards the tent. A big, well-built man, he was running slightly to fat and walked slowly with a heavy tread as though worn out from riding. Ducking his tall frame through the flap he saluted Phanes and bowed from the neck. Up close, his eyes were haggard and where it showed beneath his armour his gown was stained with dark patches of sweat. He wore a small round cap with a broad flap of cloth hanging down over the back of his neck. He removed the cap, shook out the sand, brushed more sand from the fashionably curled black hair, and pulled back his lips as though in pain, in an expression Darius soon came to recognize as characteristic whenever he had something difficult to say. It was neither a smile nor a grimace, though it showed his white teeth. ‘Nothing, Stratekos. We rode at sun-up and searched three hours in each direction. All we saw was sand. No rock, no hoof m
arks, nothing to show men have ever passed here.’ Dadarshi’s big round face was morose and his voice had a touch of despair, as though staring at endless sand had driven him half mad.
Phanes handed him a skin of water. ‘Drink. You look as though you need it.’
Dadarshi drank. When he had gone Phanes looked grimly around the tent. ‘Someone is lying to me,’ he said softly, baring his teeth. His fist shot out and grabbed the nearest guide’s throat. The desert dweller’s skin was sun-darkened and his eyes almost black in the shade of the tent. But when Phanes ripped the headcloth from him Darius saw his forehead was higher and more domed than the nomads, and his greasy hair was closer to brown than black. Phanes grabbed the man’s scalp, jerking the screaming head back and pressing his dagger to the bearded throat. The guide swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as the iron blade pressed into his skin. Phanes pushed his face closer. ‘My supply caches are spaced five days apart. Today my men will go thirsty and tomorrow they will start dropping from the ranks. But you will not see it because I am going to unravel your guts and string them across the sand while you yet live! Do you hear me?’
Shaking with terror the guide tried to nod.
Triumph lit Phanes’s eyes. With a sudden shock, Darius realized Phanes had been speaking in Greek. Far from the Greek colonies in Egypt’s delta, no common desert dweller would understand that language, unless …
‘He is an Ammonian!’ Darius shouted, bursting to his feet as he suddenly understood.
‘Very good, Darius. Yes, he’s an Ammonian spy, as all these guides must have been, sent to lead us to our deaths. Half the Ammonian nobles have Greek blood. They take wives from the Greek colonists on the Libyan coast and take in the language with their mother’s milk.’ Phanes nicked the guide’s throat and blood trickled down his neck. ‘How did you manage it?’ he growled. ‘I chose four guides from different places yet they were all Ammonians.’
