Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [258]
When it was over they were exhausted, and had lost two days’ travel. And all about them, the slopes, the valleys, the outcrops of fine sculptured sand had radically altered. They were where they had been, but the desert had reformed about them. Then the takshif, silent throughout, stirred and rose to his feet. ‘Katib?’
‘Yes?’ said Umar.
‘I will guide you by the shift of the sun, and the wind. In a little, the sand will speak louder. But it is speaking already. Tell your men not to fear, and be strong.’
The men were strong, and also experienced. Nicholas thought that, given the choice, they preferred the natural perils of the desert to the black camps, the sudden attacks of the winter. Now, they were unlikely to be troubled by brigands, and were beyond Akil’s power.
Success depended on how long it would take to reach Bir al Ksaib, and on their strength, and that of the camels. All the desert was strewn with the bones of long-dead camels, and often those of the men who accompanied them. The sands round Timbuktu were threaded with ivory rib-cages, and it had been the same at the oasis and Arawan. Their owners had died within sight of water, as if joy itself had stopped their tired hearts.
They walked and rode for three days before the next storm, and after that, walked more than they rode, to save the camels, for whom there was little food left. They killed a camel the day after the storm, and cut up and dried its flesh in the sun, seething some of it in the liquid wrung from its own stomach and bladder. The rest they poured into their empty water-skins. One of the drovers fell sick and had to be carried. The desert contained, in tidy piles, the discarded loads from both camels.
Umar had counted the days, as well as Nicholas. The second night after the storm, Umar said, ‘If we had gone to Taodeni instead, we should be there.’
It was not really the case. The sandstorms would have held them up just the same. But it was true that their food was nearly finished and their water so reduced that they were perpetually parched. Umar said, ‘Do you wish me to bring out the goro?’
He was speaking of kola nuts. Nicholas had seen them. The size of a chestnut and expensive, the most efficacious were white. Chewed, they dispelled in time all sense of hunger and weariness. They were the means Nicholas had used to bring Godscalc back from Ethiopia. They took their own toll. Nicholas said, ‘Soon, perhaps. But not yet.’
Soon, Nicholas began to dream of the pools in the Ma’ Dughu, and of the river that ran past his gardens in Kouklia. When Umar shook him awake, he laughed creakily, and told him that he was thinking of the water-wheel at Bruges, and what he had done to it.
That was the day the sick man went crazy, and Nicholas thought perhaps he himself was affected as well, because there on the dancing, quivering sand was a lake, with palm trees about it, and animals drinking.
‘They tell you it is the sport of demons,’ Umar said. ‘But it is a trick of the light. There is such a place. But it is not there, on the sand.’ Umar had become thin and sunken of eye, as they all were, but he had shown no emotion except when the thread broke. At home, Nicholas knew, Zuhra was already carrying their third child. It would be born before Umar returned. Nicholas didn’t need to be told what Umar was doing for him.
Then the blind man came again, as they rested at noon, and said, ‘Katib, I smell a storm. There is one camel I see you have favoured. Give it to me, and I will take it to Bir al Ksaib and bring you back water. I can outrun the wind.’
‘Tell it to everyone,’ Umar said. ‘We shall all decide.’
They let him go, for the trust they felt in him. Under clear skies, he explained, the strongest might just reach the well in two days. Travelling hampered by storms, none could do it. By waiting for him, man and beast would harbour