Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey [278]
And I told them how the tongueless priest had spoken it, and what had befallen me.
They listened, the both of them, and Imriel was wide-eyed as any child hearing a tale of wonder, no longer fearful. What Joscelin thought, I could not say.
"Do I really look like I did with the Mahrkagir?" I asked him later that night, lying against him in the tent with our cots pushed together.
"Mm-hmm." He was half-asleep, his arms around me. "And like you did at the bathing-pool, after I caught that fish."
"Where we made love?" I propped myself up on one elbow to look at him.
"Yes." His eyes opened in the dim light, amused. "And when thatarrow grazed you and Imri put snakeroot on the wound, and in Nineveh, when you informed me we had to go into Drujan. Phèdre, I'm used to it. Daršanga was different, but this . . . your wandering around with the Name of God in your head is just one more damned thing to get used to."
"Am I that hard to live with?" I asked.
"Yes." His arms tightened around me. "But it's worth it."
Matters might have fallen out differently that night if Imriel had not been asleep in the tent with us; as it was, it merely made me think— and suggest to Imri with no especial tact that he might enjoy bunking with Bizan or Nkuku the following night, which he did with a good will, for any display of affection between Joscelin and I gladdened him. I may say that we made good use of the time, and I was well content with it. And whether it was the purgative effect of laughter, relating the story or our lovemaking, I cannot say, but the insistent presence of the Sacred Name grew easier to bear in the days that followed.
Like as not, though, it was the rains.
They began two days after our conversation.
After our travels in Khebbel-im-Akkad, I thought I knew somewhat of rain. I was mistaken. The rains that fall in Jebe-Barkal are like naught else, and no one travels in them. We did, though. If I had not seen that landscape once already, I would be hard pressed to describe it, for more often than not, it was a solid veil of rain through which we journeyed. We rode where we could, and walked where we could not, leading our horses through treacherous gullies and over rain-loosened scree. In the plains, we plodded along the banks of a rain-swollen Tabara River, our heads lowered, water running off us in sheets.
In the early part of the day, the rains would cease for a time.
That was when the flies came.
Blood-flies, Kaneka had called them; I remembered that, now. They were black and vicious and their sting hurt like fury. Our animals were half-maddened by them, and we humans were scarce immune. It got so one welcomed the rains. In the evenings, the rain and smoke kept them at bay, when we could muster a fire. Betimes the firewood was so sodden, not even Bizan could coax a flame. We all took to carrying tinder wrapped in oilcloth.
"We can make camp, lady, and wait out the rains," Tifari Amu said to me after five days of misery. "In the highlands, it is not so bad. We can build shelters that will last, and there is easy game."
"How long?" I asked him.
He shrugged. "Three months, perhaps."
It would be winter by the time we reached Menekhet, and too late for any ships. I gazed at Imriel, shrouded in a burnoose; Joscelin, his shoulders hunched against the downpour. Our bearers cursed and pleaded with the donkeys, whose short legs sunk deep in the mire. "What do you say, Tifari?"
"That only madmen travel in the rainy season." He regarded the straggling line of our company. "Madmen, and us. You ask me? I want to go home, lady. If you have the heart for it, I say we press onward."
"Onward it is," I said, thinking, home.
EIGHTY
IT WAS a miserable journey.
There are no words to describe it. We took to travelling in the morning hours, when