He accepted them almost mechanically. “Wait,” he said. “You need speed?”
“Yes,” Anghara said. “As much as I can muster.”
“And you really mean to go all the way back to Sa’alah to return to Sheriha’drin?”
Anghara blinked at him, startled. “There is a choice?”
He scuffed the sand with the toe of his sandal, looking down. “The mountains,” he said, almost inaudibly. “Shaymir.”
Even as Anghara opened her mouth to speak, ai’Jihaar was on her feet but Anghara’s hand on her shoulder silenced her. The old an’sen’thar waited, tense, as Anghara gazed thoughtfully at the young man before her.
“You know the way?”
“Paths can be found,” he said.
“There is death in those mountains,” said ai’Jihaar at last, unable to hold back. “That is the only thing that can be found there. And if you stray onto the Se’thara while the sun is still in the sky, you will find it swiftly; if you blunder in the mountains until you fall off a cliff or run out of supplies in some dead end, you will find it slowly, and agonizingly.”
“There have been those who have lived to tell the tale, ai’Jihaar.”
“He is right,” said Anghara. “I remember, the day of the Confirmation, ai’Farra telling me what became of those who crossed from Shaymir into Kheldrin.”
“And there have been those who went the other way,” said al’Tamar, “and returned.”
Anghara suddenly connected the Sa’id’s Shaymiraccented Roisinani with the road through the mountains; “al’Jezraal,” she said.
“He has been,” ai’Jihaar admitted. “Often. He trades with some of the far-flung outposts. Some of those who dwell in your desert…they are not so very different from us.”
“And I went with him, once,” said al’Tamar. “Nobody will be expecting you to return that way, the mountains will not be watched. And we are so much closer to Se’thara than to Sa’alah here.”
“Nobody is likely to be keeping an eye out for me anyway,” said Anghara with a laugh, forgetting for a moment the warning in the oracle’s words. “For most in Roisinan, I have been buried in the family vaults these many years. But the time I would save…”
“Do not tell ai’Farra I know the way,” said al’Tamar hastily. “She would flay me, and my uncle too would know the lash of her wrath, Sa’id or no Sa’id. She seems to have put aside her obsession with keeping Kheldrin from prying eyes where you are concerned, but that does not change her edicts—not every fram’man comes with the power to raise oracles for the Kheldrini, and everyone except you is still an intruder. She has never liked the idea of the mountain passes; the Sayyed patrol them, and they are not kind to anyone who falls into their clutches.”
“Then it is a dangerous gamble…”
“Of course it is a dangerous gamble,” said ai’Jihaar, latching on to the words gratefully. “Between the Sayyed and the mountains…”
But al’Tamar was smiling, and there was an echo of that smile in Anghara’s own eyes as she looked at him.
“We can leave before tomorrow morning,” al’Tamar said quietly.
“Anghara!”
Anghara closed both her hands over ai’Jihaar’s, lifting the other’s close against her breast and leaning over to plant a kiss on her brow. “I will be all right, ai’Jihaar. Remember, I will be home in the time it would take me just to reach Sa’alah…I will be home…” She drew a ragged breath. “Don’t tell them,” she said, pleading now. “I’m truly grateful for all al’Jezraal’s offers of help, but you know that while he would think it perfectly all right for himself to brave the mountain passes, I would be quite a different matter. And ai’Farra…well, she seems to be a law unto herself.”
“But to go alone like this into danger…”
“Hama dan ar’i’id,” Anghara reminded her. “You are never alone in the desert, or so everyone has been telling me ever since I got here. And I won’t be alone. There’s al’Tamar.”
“The whelp,” ai’Jihaar laughed sharply. “He’d better take care of you, else he will have me to answer to.”
Anghara’s smile widened. “So you’ll let us get away?”
“If you say you need to get home quickly…” said ai’Jihaar. “Still, I would have preferred you went properly escorted…”
“I have to go alone into Roisinan anyway,” said Anghara gently. “I can hardly march in at the head of a Kheldrini caravan.”
“I will miss you,” said ai’Jihaar. “But I always said I would know when it was your time, and I think it is now. Go, child, with my blessing; and one day…one day, come back to us.” Anghara dropped onto one knee before her, suddenly overcome with emotion, and ai’Jihaar reached out with a gesture of blessing which quickly turned into a gentle caress of her bright hair. And then the old, practical ai’Jihaar emerged once again. “Do not come back to the house,” she said. “I will pack for you. When everything is ready I will leave your gear beneath one of the fishing boats.” She paused, and then, even as she was turning to go, held on to one of Anghara’s hands. “I will perform the ceremonies for you myself,” she said. “May the Gods watch over you both.”
With no further farewell, she was gone. Anghara stood up, gazing after her for a long moment, and then turned to al’Tamar. “When do you think we should start?”
“She will have things ready by the time it is dark,” he said. “I will prepare a few supplies, and bring out the ki’thar’en. We can leave as soon as we have everything.”
They rode out into the gathering twilight on two ki’thar’en and with a third pack-animal on lead rein—all three with burnooses tied around their muzzles to ensure silence at least until they were out of earshot of the village. There was no way of climbing the cliffs behind the village to reach the dunes of Kadun, and they had to retrace much of their original path, riding at a steady pace back along the same caravan trail beside the ocean. But al’Tamar cut into the red desert a lot sooner than al’Jezraal’s caravan had dropped down to the ocean, through a barely visible gap in the cliffs, and they were quickly plunged into one of Kadun Khajir’i’id’s more improbable landscapes, coral dunes streaked with yellow, gold, and occasional black stripes. Tall buttes of red rock reared around them every so often, and they had to pick a meandering path around their roots; al’Tamar bowed to the necessity of this, but kept them moving steadily east and south. They rode fast—there was no time on this trip to linger and follow silkseekers to jin’aaz lairs, or to pause to admire the scenery. This time they rode a race, yet al’Tamar managed to pass a nugget of information every now and again.
“This is silver country,” he said. “We will be passing quite close to my family’s mine. They will have good silver for your say’yin.”
“They would no doubt be astonished to see you,” said Anghara, unable to repress a quick grin.
“They would chew me out as an ignorant pup who cannot be trusted out of his elders’ sight, and probably send me straight back to Al’haria under guard,” he admitted without a trace of remorse at this unsanctioned adventure. “Perhaps it is best if I went back for the silver after you are safely through the passes.”
The weather held for them for almost a week, and then, without warning, everything changed. Anghara, shaken awake out of a dream where she was slowly suffocating, with two faceless men holding her down and another pouring sand down her throat with sadistic slowness as though it were wine, found that aside from the fancy of the three torturers, it had been no dream. Sitting up with a paroxysm of coughing, she reached instinctively for the burnoose which was always laid within arm’s reach by her bed. There was still grit between her teeth even after she fastened it, and she stared at al’Tamar, whose own desert veil was up, across the rim of her own with eyes which stung with the granular atmosphere. It was dark, but it was an oddly amorphous darkness—Anghara couldn’t tell if it was midnight, or simply mid-afternoon smothered in gales of flying sand.
“What in the name o
f all the Gods…” she managed to croak.
“Sandstorm,” he said. “Bad one. But it is too fierce to last long; I think it is best we wait it out.”
There was little time to talk. Anghara merely nodded. “The animals?” she asked.
“I took care of them.”
It was not a boast, simply a flat statement of fact, but he had accomplished a task which would have taxed two grown men. The walls of their tent flapped violently in the gusts of wind, and the scouring sand was merciless, even inside.
“Lie down,” he said, “it is best to move as little as possible.”
She nodded; he quickly followed his own advice, padding over to his own camp bed and dropping down full-length onto his stomach, drawing a fold of his blanket across his face for additional protection against the elements.
They survived, although the storm held them pinned to the camp for almost two days. They managed to gain a hai’r, and recuperated there for a whole precious day before they could go on again.
“Odd thing, this storm,” the nomad chieftain whose base the hai’r was remarked to them, as he gravely accepted the water-price from al’Tamar and then stood watching while they watered the animals and filled their water-skins. “They are not common this time of year. This one, it came out of nowhere. Like you two. Where are you bound?”
It was discourteous to lie to those whose water one drank in the desert, but then, this was hardly a pleasure trip. “Home,” said al’Tamar after mulling over the possibilities for a moment. That wasn’t quite a lie. Anghara was indeed going home, and there was every possibility he would visit his own on his way back to Al’haria.
But it was useless—these were nomads, and already they knew everything before it happened, as usual. The chieftain chuckled.
“Your prudence does you credit, youngling,” he said. “This can only be she who raised the oracle at Gul Khaima; my people mean to make a pilgrimage there soon. And ‘home,’ then, means a great deal more than you would have cared to admit. But I will not pry,” he added, drawing his djellaba over his substantial stomach with a dignified gesture. “You are welcome to stay as long as you wish; and all our good wishes upon you when you choose to depart. Will you give us a blessing before you leave, an’sen’thar?”
Anghara pronounced the blessing, calling it down both on the nomad clan and on herself and al’Tamar. She had no way of knowing if the nomads reaped any benefits from it, but as far as the two of them were concerned it seemed as though the Gods had not been listening. On the second morning, al’Tamar led them out from the hai’r and they were only two days out when another storm hit, again from out of nowhere. It was as furious as the first, costing them another precious day and a half while it raged and an afternoon, afterward, to pull themselves together again.
“I should be able to see these coming,” muttered al’Tamar unhappily. “This is unnatural.”
“This stuff clings,” said Anghara, trying to shake off the soft sand, which seemed to have worked its way into every fold of her clothing.
The words seemed to surprise al’Tamar. He came over to peer at the residue on her robe, and chewed his lip thoughtfully. “That is omankhajir,” he said. “Soft sand. There is none around here for miles. Look.” He bent to rake a handful of the coarse, crystalline reddish sand at his feet into his palm and allowed it to trickle through his fingers. “Kharkhajir,” he said. “Rock sand. We are amongst the mesas that give birth to it. Omankhajir belongs much further south…and much further north, out beside the Se’thara. But not here.”
“So where,” asked Anghara, shaking still more clinging omankhajir from underneath a fold of her sleeve with some impatience, “did all this come from?”
“I do not know,” he said, and he sounded worried. Anghara looked up, startled. His golden eyes were dark with apprehension. “Sandstorms which carry soft sand can kill. Whole caravans unlucky enough to be caught in one have been found buried years after their journey; every man and beast perished.”
“But you said there is no soft sand here,” Anghara said, frowning.
“There ought to be none. But…” He stared at the powdery stuff she was still dusting off her person. His lips tightened. “We go on,” he said at last, after a pause. “Perhaps it was only chance, a few grains caught in the wind…”
But less than a day after this, storm number three blew up out of a clear sky. It was different from the others—duller, somehow, with less sound and fury but with a disturbing air of permanence—al’Tamar needed less than an hour to admit defeat.
“This is the kind that buries,” he said grimly. “We have no chance. Back, before we die in it; we had better hope we can outrun it.”
He turned his ki’thar, and the beast they had brought to carry supplies, tied to his own animal’s saddle, wheeled with him and followed him in retreat. But Anghara hesitated, staring into the teeth of the storm through narrowed eyes—and it seemed to her that somewhere in its midst stood a woman’s shape, motionless in the tumult of wind-tossed sand, so still that not a hair on her head moved. And through the whirling, blinding sand Anghara thought she could clearly see amber eyes that watched her with a sort of compassion. Your paths are still those of the Gods, and the paths that lead you this way lead nowhere but to futile endings.
The thought was so pure and sharp, so alien, that Anghara knew she could not have imagined it; but it was distant and faint, and seemed to reach her across a gulf of unimaginable dimensions. Forgive the suffering, but it is the only way I have to tell you that you must turn back.
It was ai’Dhya, ai’Dhya of the Winds…
“Anghara! Hurry!” al’Tamar’s voice broke the spell, and when Anghara looked again there was nothing where the Goddess had stood except a tornado of twisting sand. She bowed, nonetheless, to where the presence had been, and turned her back onto the storm, to where al’Tamar stood waiting for her, eyes screwed into slits against the grit. He lifted his head as she approached, as though he were sniffing the air.
“It seems to be abating,” he said. “Perhaps, if we did wait it out…”
“No, al’Tamar. It was a gallant idea, but it is not to be,” Anghara said, her voice firm but gentle. “I should really ride back to Al’haria and ask al’Jezraal for all the help he promised,” she mused, “but I cannot face ai’Farra, not after sneaking out on her like that. If I do, I won’t be able to leave the city until she’s told me exactly what she thinks of me and of what I have done, and I don’t have the time to listen to it all, not now. And already I have lost over two weeks…Will you come with me to Sa’alah?”
“Willingly,” he said instantly, without a trace of hesitation. He glanced once again at where the storm seemed to be settling down into nothing more than a slightly high wind behind their backs. “What was it you met back there, an’sen’thar?”
“Only a God,” said Anghara, smiling. She dug her heel into the ki’thar’s flank. “Come, we must make up for lost time. Akka! Akka! Akka!”
The ki’thar broke into a shambling, loping run; after a moment of shaken silence, al’Tamar followed, dragging the volubly protesting pack ki’thar behind him.
The moment they decided to forego the mountain road, everything settled down, and it seemed as if the blessing Anghara had called down on the nomads finally brought good fortune. They skirted carefully around al’Tamar’s home, passing so close he was able to point out the mesa it lay within. Other than the occasional hai’r, they tried to avoid most places which might be inhabited, and moved swiftly and freely across the face of Kadun Khajir’i’id. This time there would be no ordeal of the Khari’i’d between Anghara and the coast—they were too far east for the Empty Quarter, and, anyway, there was nothing there for her to seek any more. This time Anghara would take the High Road ai’Jihaar had wanted to take before her own Gods had told her otherwise—she would cut across Sayyed land, the plateau of Kharg’in’dun’an, the place of horses. There was only a narrow belt of the Stone Desert, less than a few hours�
� worth, between the red desert of the north and the winding road which led to the high country.
The horse clans could hardly have been expecting them, but Anghara was not surprised to find a welcoming committee waiting for them on the edge of the plateau, forewarned by their scouts and the inevitable desert grapevine. Anghara and al’Tamar had ridden hard, and it showed both on themselves and on their ki’thar’en; Anghara was bone-tired, too tired to favor the dun’en on which the clansmen were mounted, which she would have gasped to see under ordinary circumstances, with more than a cursory glance. Khari’i’d had done it to her, again; she could have endured a week in the Kadun easier than she coped with an hour in the Stone Desert.
They could not help but know who Anghara was—by this time there were few in Kheldrin who had not heard of her. These were ai’Farra’s kinsmen, and most of them shared her aversion to strangers—but they were also imbued with the pragmatism of the desert folk. They might not have wanted Anghara in the first place, but she was here, and, after all, she had earned the right. So they did their best to ignore the alien gray eyes and the foreign lines of the face revealed when Anghara dropped her burnoose, and tried to see only the gold robe of a Kheldrini an’sen’thar, a holy woman filled with power who was said to have the ear of the Gods.
“Our home is yours,” said one of the delegation, bowing deeply from the saddle, without smiling.
“We are honored,” Anghara said, returning the courtesy as best she could.
“The honor is ours,” said another, a younger man with the yellow eyes of a Roisinani wildcat. He did smile; alone of the committee, he looked as though he might truly welcome Anghara’s presence. She thought she could vaguely sense a flicker of an aura around him, but she was so tired…
“We will not impose on your hospitality for long,” she said, “I have need of speed, and would be on my way as soon as we have sufficiently rested.”
The Hidden Queen Page 38