by Joan Aiken
The caravanserais offered more privacy at night, with their little cell-like chambers, but these were often verminous, with hundreds of fleas hopping among the dried thorns and reeds left by previous travelers. On the whole Scylla preferred to sleep in the open, though it was alarming, sometimes, to lie shivering in the chill of the desert night under blazing stars and hear the cough of a leopard near at hand among the rocks or concealing sand dunes; at the sound the camels would all begin to roar and gurgle, half rising to their feet; the drivers would curse them and fire a few shots to discourage the leopard; nights in the open tended to be restless and wakeful. And all the way Scylla dreamed, almost every night, about a great tree; and, when she asked him, she learned that Cal did too.
Cal found the desert journey frustrating because, although in Herat he had equipped himself with various notebooks and a slab of Chinese ink which he could moisten as required, there was hardly any opportunity for writing. Consequently his poem remained mostly pent up inside his head and he was in a continual ferment lest he forget any particularly choice line.
“Listen, Scylla!” he would call, urging his camel alongside hers. “Which of these do you prefer:
“Nine days of fire, nine piercing nights of hoar
The pierced god hung upon the weeping tree
Whose taproots plumb the still unfathomed core
Of black Ginnunga’s chasm, where the three
Dread shadows spin the skeins of destiny—
“Do you think it should be pierced god? Or the impaled god hung upon the weeping tree?”
“You have piercing nights—just before—perhaps it should be impaled, so as not to repeat the word?”
“But the repetition is intentional, Scylla, deuce take it! The question is, which word sounds better before god, pierced or impaled?”
Scylla gave it as her opinion that pierced sounded better. “I don’t care for the impaled god, Cal. Pray who is he, your pierced god? Odin?”
“Of course!” he said impatiently. “Odin hung himself upon Yggdrasil for nine days to learn wisdom. Now listen to this:
“Nine days he knew that anguish; through his heart
Gungnir the sacred shaft, which only he
Might wield, held with its deadly dart
Odin transfixed above the whispering sea,
Mimir’s dark waters, flowing to eternity.
“What do you think of that, Scylla?”
“Your last line has twelve syllables; all the rest have ten.”
“Of course it has, thickskull! It is a Spenserian stanza.”
Scylla pondered. “If it is a Spenserian stanza, should it not have nine lines? I believe you have ten.”
“Confound you, Scylla,” Cal said, laughing. “You are right!”
“What happens next?” Scylla wanted to know.
“Odin prays to the tree for wisdom, and then he creates man and woman out of two branches. Listen:
“At which the tree obeys, yields up its store
Of wisdom. Now the god, released, renewed,
Pacing with Loki on the ocean shore,
Perceives two blocks of timber, roughly hewed.
Ask, be thou man!’ The log of ash, imbued
With soul and sense, breathes, weeps, and kneels in praise;
‘Embla, be woman!’ Elmwood, rough and crude.
Trembles, and is transformed to woman’s grace.
The twain are given Midgard as their dwelling place.
“Oh, huzza, look—there’s a hare—I wonder if I can drop him with one shot before he takes fright? Why don’t you try for him, Scylla?”
But, since quitting the Bai’s castle, Scylla had quite lost interest in shooting. She watched in wonder as Cal, forgetting all about poetry for the time being, went off in happy pursuit of the hare. Sometimes she felt that, although she had been in close contact with him ever since they were born, there were parts of her brother that were a total mystery to her; witness his total unawareness of what had happened in the Pir’s cave; she knew him no more than the desert creature he was chasing; both were equally changeable, quicksilver, elusive. Where did he get these strange flashes of illumination?
“Your brother is writing a poem about an ash tree, I understand?”
She had not observed that Cameron, on his rangy gray camel, had fallen back alongside from his place ahead.
Surprised at this inquiry—on the whole Cameron showed minimal interest in Cal’s writing—she replied coolly:
“That is so, Colonel. He has had an idea for a poem about Yggdrasil, Odin’s ash. Why it should come to him here, in the desert, who knows?”
“Strange; very strange,” Cameron muttered.
She put up her brows. “Why so, Colonel Cameron?”
“Well—” he began, checked, and then impulsively, sounding younger, less sure of himself than she had ever heard him, “Och, I daresay you will think it all moonshine and havers, but when I was a child my mother had the second sight, she had forward-looking dreams—she was a Highlander, from Shieldaig.” He paused, then went on, “Well, it happened that on one of the first occasions when I was with your brother I heard a prophecy concerning him. It was connected with a tree.”
“A tree?”
In her astonishment, Scylla twitched her camel’s headrope and the subsequent struggle with the indignant beast made her voice come out unwontedly high and breathless; Cameron, evidently taking her reaction for scornful disbelief, shrugged and said in a cooler, more disengaged manner:
“Well, I do not expect you to believe that. Why should you? No doubt you think I am inventing old wives’ tales in order to impress you. It is not so, but no matter.”
“Why should I believe that you wish to impress me? You show no such wish in the normal way! I was only surprised because—but that is of no consequence. What was the prophecy that you heard concerning my brother, Colonel Cameron, where did you hear it? I am very curious, indeed!”
He told her the story of his visit to the seer in Ziatur. “Of course the man was probably paid to warn me off and to say what he did to Prince Mihal. But his remarks to Cal seemed to have no connection with the rest of his mumbo-jumbo; they appeared to be spontaneous.”
“A weeping tree; it is really very strange,” mused Scylla. “What can it possibly mean?”
* * *
That evening, seated under a scrawny tamarisk tree in the courtyard of the serai, Cal said:
“Have you ever heard of Shambala, Rob?”
“The kingdom of Shambala? As a legend, yes. Not as a real place.”
“It was of the legend that I was thinking.”
“Shambala?” Miss Musson stirred out of her silence and leaned forward; the firelight made triangular hollows of her deep eye sockets. “Is not that a kind of Eden legend?”
“It is the kingdom in the center of the world—somewhere up there—” Cal waved a hand northward, toward the river Oxus and the mountains of Bokhara. “The Holy Pir told me a little about it. It is the place from which all the holy truths and great sacred mysteries emanate. The god Dyans-Pita—the Zeus of the Greeks, or Jupiter—he came from there. Other names for it are Urgyan, Udyala—”
“You wanted to know if ash trees grow in Shambala?” Scylla guessed correctly. “Because it seems the same as the Scandinavian myth—Midgard? Why did you not ask the Holy Pir?”
“I wish I had. But at that time I had not begun having these dreams—”
He stopped because Scylla had let out a sudden low cry. Shifting her position, she had put her hand down on a flat rock and received two sharp jabs, one in the palm, one on the wrist. At her exclamation, Cameron sprang up and gave a kick to the camel’s thorn fire. It flared, showing a small snake flicking itself into a crack in the rock.
“Horned viper, damn it! Of all the cursed luck! Where did he get you?�
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“On my hand—”
“Here, quick—show me—”
While Cal went after the viper and battered it to death with a stone—“Look for its mate, too,” the colonel warned, “you generally find them in pairs”—Cameron hastily but carefully inspected Scylla’s hand, holding it close to the light of the fire; and then he sucked hard at the two puncture wounds, repeatedly spitting into the hissing embers. After he had done this half a dozen times Miss Musson said:
“That should suffice, Rob. The venom penetrates very fast. But you must have extracted what is near the surface. Now you had better incise the wounds while I prepare some of my snakebite specific.”
“I was going to,” said Cameron. Without more ado he pulled out his knife, held its blade a moment in the flames, then, saying to Scylla, “Shut your eyes if you don’t want to see,” quickly slashed the two small wounds crossways. “I wish I had some whiskey on me,” he muttered, “there is nothing like it for washing snakebite. Brandy must serve.” He splashed on a quantity from his silver flask. Scylla sucked in her breath at the sudden sting of the spirit.
“Brave girl.” Matter-of-factly he knocked the cork back into the neck of the flask.
“Shall I die?” she asked calmly.
“No, my poor child. You would have if it had been a cobra. But you may wish that you were dead; I am afraid that you will be very sick for some days.”
“Here—drink this—it helps to combat the poison—”
Miss Musson had heated water in a metal pot and infused into it one of her herbal powders. Scylla obediently swallowed down the bitter stuff.
“I daresay it will be nothing, after all,” she said hopefully as they settled down for the night.
* * *
Her optimism was unfounded. During the night her arm swelled to three times its normal dimensions and became so painful that the least touch felt as if red-hot nails were being hammered into her skin. Nevertheless she made light of it next morning and said that she was perfectly able to travel, if somebody would kindly help her onto her camel.
That day, and many subsequent ones, became like a hellish dream for Scylla. She knew that it would be highly dangerous—out of the question, indeed—for Cameron’s party to drop out of the caravan. They had not food for more than the time it would take to cross to Yezd, which was the first town of any magnitude along the way. Moreover if they remained alone at one of the caravanserais they would be in danger of attack from Turkoman brigands or wandering savage tribes from Baluchistan. It was essential to keep up with the rest of the cafila. But the effort required to get on her camel and stay on it throughout the interminable days of travel was something that made any other pains or difficulties in her life seem mere trifles in comparison. Her head swam, she was deathly sick, often half delirious, and her whole body felt hot as fire; she longed all the time for drink but any food tasted repugnant to her. Hour after hour she struggled against an insane urge to throw herself off the saddle onto the desert sand; the camel’s gait, consisting of sway—jerk—pause, and then, on the other side, sway—jerk—pause, became an excruciating torture, a recurrent jolting pain on her already pain-racked body so hard to bear that it was all she could do not to groan aloud each time her mount shifted its weight from one pair of legs to the other. At the end of the day, all she could do was roll from the saddle when her camel knelt down, and then lie where she had fallen, with the blood pounding in her head like cannon fire. Her companions tended her kindly and tenderly; she was aware in the evening rest periods of how one or another of them was always with her, coaxing her to drink, washing and cleaning her horribly swollen and inflamed arm.
“Will it have to come off?” she once asked Cameron with difficulty. “Has gangrene set in?” Her tongue felt enormous, like a flap of Arab bread. “No, matters have not come to that yet,” he replied coolly.
Toward the end of the journey Scylla became aware of nothing but pain. Night and day were blurred together in her consciousness; she hardly discriminated between the days of travel and the nights of delirium. She could not speak enough to ask questions; occasionally she struggled to mutter, “Sorry—trouble—sorry!” but was washed away on waves of fever before there was time to hear the reply. She dreamed, endlessly: of mountains, rivers, the girl Dizane galloping away on her wiry black horse, turning a mocking face to call, “Catch me if you can!”; of the Rani Sada offering a dish of fruits and sweetmeats which on closer examination proved to be a mass of writhing snakes; of Prince Mihal with a glittering spear about to stab Cal to the heart; of the Bai, shouting angrily, “Where is my wife, where is she? You have hidden her!”; of the Holy Pir, seated on a stone horse, with Miss Musson on the pillion behind him, riding sidesaddle, her unseeing eyes staring past Scylla, who cried helplessly, “Come back, come back!” And, over and above and in among these tangled images, again and again, she felt rather than saw the great twisted tree, which grew up through them, towered over them, dripped its leaves, and cast its shadow upon them.
The later stages of her sickness impinged on her in disconnected images: a huge dim room with smoke, from incense perhaps, drifting sluggishly in blue wreaths and coils; a white-bearded turbaned man, touching her arm, she thought with a feather, though she felt the stabbing pain of a knife; the coolness of ice, laid on her tongue; and then the numbing but healthful bitterness of some opiate which plunged her fathoms deep in oblivion; then, some long time after that, the taste of coffee, suddenly and wonderfully recognizable and stimulating after what seemed weeks of leaden-tongued, fur-mouthed fever, when even fruit had been a slimy horror to the palate. “I am getting better! I must be!” she was able to whisper, and heard Miss Musson’s voice, tired but cheerful: “Yes, child! You are indeed!” She could feel now the delicious comfort of down-filled cushions instead of the lumpy, swaying saddle; but was soon swept again into darkness.
Her next sensation was one of motion; but a very different motion, this, from camel travel; it was brisk, regular, yet soporific rocking: “Roti, makan, chini, chota baba nini,” she murmured, remembering Miss Musson’s Urdu lullaby, and heard Cameron laugh somewhere nearby.
“Come, that is capital. She will be better even before the sea breezes have a chance to revive her,” somebody said.
Sea breezes?
And then, not suddenly, but in a slow pleasant languor, true consciousness began to come back. By degrees she found herself reclined on a straw-filled couch, covered by a cotton coverlet, in a small clay-walled room full of sunset light. Miss Musson was washing little Chet in one corner by a stone basin of water; the shrill, clear keening of some unfamiliar bird came through the unglazed window.
“I was dreaming about a tree,” Scylla murmured.
Miss Musson gave an exclamation and, laying the baby down upon a wadded quilt, crossed the room with hasty steps to peer at Scylla.
“My dear child! There you are at last!”
“Yes, ma’am. Here I am.” Scylla smiled faintly.
“One moment, and I will bring you some lime juice.”
The juice, wonderfully cold and tart, in a large earthenware mug, was like nectar; Scylla thought she had never tasted anything better. While she drank it, Miss Musson propped her on a pile of cushions against the wall.
“Do you wish to lie down again?” she asked when the mug was empty.
“No, let me stay up a little, ma’am. I fear I have given you all a deal of trouble.”
“We were worried about you, child; but you did not choose to be bitten.”
“It was wretchedly careless.” Looking now at her guardian with compunction, Scylla saw that Miss Musson’s hair was decidedly whiter and scantier, her keen brown face thinner and more lined; there were unfamiliar furrows between the brows, around the eyes, chiseled deeply from mouth to nostril.
“I shall get better very quickly from now on,” Scylla resolved. “How long have I been ill, ma’
am?”
“Why,” Miss Musson was beginning, “to tell truth, I have rather lost count of time—” when there were voices and steps outside—evidently running up stone stairs—and Cal burst into the room.
“Ma’am! Miss Musson! Only imagine! There is an American ship in the bay!”
“What?” demanded Miss Musson, but her exclamation was drowned by Cal’s shout of joy at the sight of his sister sitting up.
“Scylla! By all that’s famous! Sitting up and drinking lime juice like a Christian!”
“Like a Muslim, you should say!” Scylla found that words still came slowly on her tongue. Then something extraordinary struck her. What had Cal said before?
“Are we in Baghdad?” she asked. “Where is this place?”
Cal was squatting down by her couch, scanning her eagerly, and exclaiming, “Your eyes are clear, your look is sensible—you are really better!”
Then her question penetrated, and he answered:
“Baghdad? No, indeed, we left there two weeks ago! Do you not remember the carriage ride? Rob would hire the most amazing coach you ever saw; I swear the Shah of Persia himself must have had it built. Springs like pigs’ tails—”
Cameron’s quick step was heard, and he strode into the room.
“I thought it best to come to you directly, Miss Amanda. It is true, there is an American merchantman anchored out there—the Lucy Allerton, from New Bedford—”
“New Bedford!” Miss Musson echoed faintly. Her hands were trembling. “Where is it? Which one? Point her out to me!”
“Right in the middle—there.” Unceremoniously, Cameron laid an arm around her shoulders and led her to the window; with the other hand he pointed.
“No; it is no use; I cannot see it,” said Miss Musson after a moment. “But is she really sailing to New Bedford?”
“Yes, ma’am; in two days’ time.”
“Two days? Oh, but how can I possibly—”
“Cal!” said Scylla urgently. “What lies outside the window? Where are we?”
“Come—I will show you.” He glanced around, snatched up a woven shawl that lay over the foot of the couch, and wrapped it around her. “Up, now!”