Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey [231]
I remembered ruefully the counsel I'd given Pharaoh's wife, poor, simple Clytemne. Would that I'd had a salve of wool-fat on this journey!
And then we were off again, boarding our lumbering, swaying camels, emerging from the baking shadows of the valley into the blazing wasteland. My lips parched and cracked, and I wet them sparingly with small sips from my water-skin. Only the heaps of dried camel dung at our resting-points gave evidence that anyone else in the world had passed this way—that, and the occasional corpse, the desiccated mounds of fallen camels.
"You are sure," I said to Kaneka at one point, my voice thin and cracking, "that this is the wisest route to Meroë?"
"The wisest?" From under the shadow of her hood she looked at me, eyes dark and amused. "I never said it was the wisest, little one. But it is the shortest."
Yellow sand and basalt hills gave way to granite, grey plains and rugged hills laced with a vein of blue slate, an unexpected gift of color. It fed the imagination until one's mind conjured lakes, vast lakes, blue and shimmering in the distance. The first such vision excited me and Iurged my camel onward over the desert floor, imagining the cool depths, plunging my whole head into the waters and drinking my fill, until my parched throat was slaked at last and my belly filled with water, as much water as it could hold.
"No, lady." Mek Timmur held me back, grasping my camel's reins and shaking his head, looking sorrowful. "It is illusion. Only illusion."
I didn't believe him, not at first. After another hour's march, when the shimmering lake remained at the self-same distance, I began to believe. And then he adjusted our course, moving slightly to the east, and the "lake" faded, giving way to barren rock. Then, I believed.
Onward and onward. Our water-skins ran dry, and we had to breach one of the casks, huddling around to share it out among us, lest a drop be spilled. At night, my mouth was so dry I could hardly chew the strips of dried meat. Our camels plodded through deep sand and scree, staggering on the loose pebbles. How long had it been? A week, Kaneka had estimated. It felt like far longer. Despite the best care of the guides—and they were good, if the stories I've heard were any indication—one of the camels foundered, wallowing on the desert floor. Imriel, angry and bitter, would have wept if he'd had the moisture for tears.
And slowly, slowly, the signs of life reemerged.
First were a few stunted mimosa trees, ragged shrubs struggling for life. We hailed them with shouts of joy. On the next to last day, we saw a pair of gazelles, startling and unlikely, bounding southward at our approach.
On the last day, I could smell the river.
One would not suppose, being odorless, that the scent of water could travel so far. In an arid land, believe me, it does. My lord Delaunay trained me to use my nose no less than any other sense, and it was I who scented it first, the sweet, life-giving presence of moisture carried on the air.
We had regained the Nahar.
It was different, far different, from the broad, gracious expanse on which we had sailed upon our feluccas. Here it was younger and swifter, nearer to its source, and there were fewer settlements upon its banks, which were not nearly so lush.
Still, it was water, and life.
We had crossed the desert.
SIXTY-SEVEN
FROM THE banks of the Nahar, it was another several days' journey to Meroë, which lay at the juncture of two Great Rivers—the Nahar, which we had travelled, and the Tabara, which led further south. After the forced march across the desert, this leg of the journey was nearly leisurely. Day in and day out, we drank our fill of water. I never thought it would seem such a luxury.
There were villages along the way, albeit small and struggling. Here we traded for flat-bread and milk, augmenting our diet. And there was game, at last. Mek Timmur and the others hunted, bringing in gazelle, which we ate half-cooked and bloody.
'Twas not