At night, cold pierced through our cloaks, so I rummaged through the saddlebags for spare blankets and wrapped them about Babak and me as we rode.
But come morning, the desert sun rose with a fiery blast, drenching us in rivulets of sweat, its long, slanting rays striking sparks of light off the pebbles and sand before us. Our eyes perpetually ached.
I had begun to hoard food, thinking to take it with us when we escaped. But now was not the time for escape. Each passing day, I knew, took us farther from the Euphrates and a reliable source of water.
Balthazaar’s potion must have tasted as bad as it smelled; I had to struggle to get Babak to drink it, sometimes pinning him to the ground and forcing open his lips. Afterward he would not talk to me. On occasion Pacorus held him for me, but Pacorus was often with Gaspar. He had taken to helping Gaspar pack and unpack, and they spent hours in conversation. Balthazaar came each day to trace his fingers across Babak’s face—more to ease my mind, I think, than from any hope he held. Though this did at first seem to give Babak some respite, his phases of alertness grew shorter and shorter, and increasingly he was plagued by waking dreams. He hummed and rocked and murmured. If I held a waterskin to his lips, he would drink. If I led him, he would walk. But in his eyes you could see that he was not here, but in some other place.
When the sun rose, the dreams often released him, and sometimes, if he had relented in his bitterness toward me, he would tell me about them—the same old tales of babies born, and shaggy beasts, and weddings, and salt trades, and stars, and a king with weeping sores. Then, Babak would slumber as if he had not done so for days, as if the dreaming did not replenish sleep, but sucked the vitality out of him.
“Look at him,” I said when Balthazaar came one day to visit, after Babak had collapsed in sleep before I could persuade him to eat. “I try to force food upon him, but the labor of chewing tires him out. I can feel his ribs beneath his tunic. The potion keeps him from wandering in his sleep, but not from this.”
Balthazaar swept Babak’s hair from his brow. Gently he traced his fingertips along Babak’s eyebrows, then bowed his own head, pinching the bridge of his nose, as I’d seen him do before. This time I noticed how knobbly and stiff his fingers were. How white his hair and beard. How thin and stooped his shoulders. At last, he looked up at me. “I know of nothing more. It’s possible it will run its course.”
“Then he’ll get well?”
“I do not know,” Balthazaar replied.
Then one morning, after Babak had gone to sleep and I had slipped out to relieve myself behind a tamarisk tree, I saw a spreading dark stain in my trousers.
Blood?
I stared at it dumbly. I had received no injury. So why …
All at once, I remembered my cousin Atoosa running to my aunt and my grandmother, crying. Had she said something about blood? The women’s laughter, and whispers. My aunt spiriting Atoosa away.
The monthly courses. Blood.
I recalled that Atoosa, who sometimes ran and climbed and rode with Suren and me, never did after that day. She stayed close to the house and courtyard, always with the women.
No longer a child.
Did this mean that I was no longer a child? That I was a woman?
With Atoosa it had been some great, joyous secret that the women would not share with me. When she had emerged with her mother, she had been flushed and proud. I had pestered my mother to tell me what had happened to Atoosa, but she said no, not yet; she said I’d know in time. I begged Atoosa to tell, but she wouldn’t either—just lorded it over me with a smug smile. If I had been older, I might have been able to pry the secret from her. I had been jealous of Atoosa, with all the women fussing over her.
But later, after my uncle sold her horse, I’d felt differently. If this secret meant an end to riding, perhaps I didn’t want to know about it after all.
Now I peered around the tree at the men. Striding about, tending to their affairs, without fear that their very bodies would betray them and bring them shame.
Unclean.
I was unclean in a way they never would be, unclean in a way they could not possibly understand. Unclean, and alone.
Something caved in at the center of me and my body folded in half, knees against chest, head held in hands. To have a woman near, just one … Even Zoya would have been a comfort!
A camel groaned; I snapped upright, wiped myself quickly with tamarisk leaves, scoured my hands with sand. I yanked up my trousers, checked the back of my tunic. No blood had leaked there. I peered around the tree again, looking for the Magi or for Giv. Since they knew I was a girl, they might easily become suspicious. But the Magi had disappeared within their tents, and Giv was deep in convocation with the guides. I strode back to Ziba, trying to appear as if I hadn’t a care in the world. Then I took calabash and blanket from the saddlebags, catching the eye of a man Giv had set to watch over Babak and me. He nodded. I had often gone off to wash alone. It was good that we were all Persians, save for the Bedouin guides, who never paid me any mind. Greeks—now they had no modesty, or so I had heard. They thought nothing of bathing and even urinating together. But we Persians were discreet.
I walked downstream from the oasis. When I was out of sight, I drew off water from the brook. I cleaned the stain from my trousers and laid them on a rock to dry. Ripping strips of blanket and tying them together, I devised a sort of swaddling for myself, something to catch the blood. I poured cool water over my hands and scrubbed them raw.
I sat back on my heels, swatted at the cloud of flies that buzzed round me. What now?
Giv had said I must tell him if this happened. But what would become of me if I did? I could see the horror on their faces—Giv, Melchior, Balthazaar. And Pacorus! With his love of the Wise God and his teachings, Pacorus would recoil from me.
Unclean.
Would they leave me here in the desert alone?
No. Balthazaar would not permit that. And Giv—no, he would not.
But perhaps they would leave me here with only a servant to shove food and water through a tent flap until the bleeding stopped.
Or perhaps they would let me ride far behind them and eat and sleep apart. Like a leper. Lower than a foreign slave.
I dressed again, tugging at my tunic to cover the wet place in my trousers, then walked back to our tent, unremarked by Giv.
I crouched beside Babak, watched his chest rise and fall in sleep, watched the flickerings beneath his eyelids.
I would not be separated from him now. I would not.
They called it sin for me to walk among men during the monthly bleeding. An offense against the Wise God. And it must be so, for everyone said it. Even in Susa women were confined. But now, looking down at Babak, at his old-man face, at the bruised flesh beneath his eyes, it seemed that it could not be so great a sin as this: that I—his very sister—had agreed to sell his dreams, despite the peril to him. I should not have listened to Zoya. I should have stopped the dream selling when I could. I should have run away in Ecbatana. I should have … I should have …
So many shoulds!
It was for his own good, I had told myself over and again. But was it, truly?
Or was it only to fulfill my dreams?
CHAPTER 44
MIRAGE
On the fourth night after my blood began to flow, when it had dwindled to a rusty trickle, our waterskin grew slack. We had not come across an oasis, nor even a well, since the first day of the bleeding. I heard mutterings against the guides, questionings as to whether we had passed this bluff or wadi days ago, wonderings whether they truly knew where water lay. Time and again, Gaspar peeled off from the caravan to gaze up at the heavens. Often Pacorus followed and wrote down on parchment figures that Gaspar seemed to be reading from his star-taker. It seemed that some new arrangement must have been made, for Pacorus now rode mostly with Gaspar, and Melchior didn’t protest. But Melchior and the chief guide often exchanged harsh words. And whenever the guide rode past, the men
nearby stilled their tongues in an uneasy silence.
Had the Wise God turned against us because I was unclean? Giv’s words rang in my memory: You would offend the Wise God and likely bring down his wrath upon our journey.
Still, when I saw how the men eyed the guide, I was glad no one knew about me.
At last, as the sun rose one day, a shout went up from the front of the caravan: “Water!”
Water. Water. Water. The word hummed through the ranks.
I took a swig from our nearly flat waterskin as Ziba picked up her pace and jogged eagerly forward. The world set to jiggling—the sand-and-scrub hill before us and the humps of camels all around. Bells jingled. Saddles creaked. Metal pots and implements clanked. Babak shook his head and blinked, and I was about to tell him about the water when I heard angry shouts ahead. As we crested the rise, we saw men and camels trailing long, early-morning shadows and milling about in disarray. The men were grayish white all over, crusted with the accumulated grime and dust of travel. Several of the guide’s party stood near a well, pulling on ropes. Something heavy was rising up out of it.
A mule. A dead, decomposing mule.
I slumped in the saddle, ran my tongue across my dry, cracked lips. Someone had poisoned the well.
The Magi, Giv, and the guides gathered in a circle about the mule. Melchior, I saw as we grew near, was frowning, stabbing a plump finger at the chief guide. He bellowed something back, and then they were all shouting, it seemed—all but Balthazaar, who made calming gestures as the voices subsided to a low growl.
I drew up beside Pacorus. “What’s happened?” I asked.
“One feuding tribe has poisoned the well of another. Melchior demands to know why our guide didn’t know this or anticipate it.”
“How far to the next water?”
Pacorus shrugged. “The guide and his party wish to ride two days north, but the Magi say that their way is west, and they may be late already. They ask what if the northern well is likewise poisoned. The guide says it will not be poisoned. Melchior says he doesn’t think the guide knows, that he did not know about this one and so he cannot be certain, and that it’s common knowledge that there is water to the west. The guide says the western water is too far, and we’re not carrying enough water to get us there alive.”
The sun was a molten ball in the east. Already it had banished the nighttime chill so completely that I could no longer remember how it felt to be cold. A bead of sweat trickled down my brow; I captured it with a dusty finger and brought it to my tongue. Babak looked up at me, anxiety etched on his face. Fear was crowding in on me; I tried to push it away so that it would not infect him.
Voices swelled, the guide intoning that it was his responsibility alone to decide where to go for water, and Melchior flinging back that it was folly to entrust this mission to the judgment of a stubborn donkey. The guide went quiet, gathering his dignity about him. “I cannot lead if you will not follow,” he said. Then he spun round on his camel, summoned his companions with a wave, and headed north across the desert.
We watched in silence as they shrank in the wavering distance. One man spoke agitatedly to Giv and pointed at the departing guides, clearly asking if he might fetch them and bring them back. But Giv lifted his chin, signaling no.
The desert stretched out parched and bleak on all sides, with no pockets of green grasses or trees to suggest where it kept its water hidden. Far away, the guides dwindled to flickering puffs of dust.
There was a convocation then among the leaders—the Magi, Giv, and a few others. Babak and I dismounted and let Ziba loose for a while to crop the brittle scrub.
Had I truly cursed this journey? Should I tell someone about the bleeding?
But what would befall me if I did? What would befall Babak? In any case, there was no water to spare for purification. And the bleeding had all but ceased. What was done was done.
Soon Giv came round inspecting waterskins and confiscating some. Water would be distributed so that no man received more than any other, he said. Then he surreptitiously tucked a full skin into one of our saddlebags. “Make sure he drinks,” he said, jerking his head toward Babak.
We mounted our camels and set off again, west.
All the long day the sun beat down like a hammer on copper, denting me, making me tender and soft. Heat rose in shimmering waves from the ground, wicking all the moisture from my mouth, from my throat, from the whole of the insides of me, leaving me dry as a shriveled husk.
We did not erect tents when we stopped, as we would not rest long enough to justify the effort. I found a hollow in the ground of the right size for Babak and me, and set up a makeshift shelter from a doubled length of blanket hung over a thorn-bush bough. When I fed him the potion, Babak was too weary to object. I held him in my lap, poured it slowly into a corner of his mouth, watched his throat contract with swallowing. When I was done, he turned away from me and slept. We were forced to shift after the moving shade the whole while we rested, scraping our bodies across the humpy, pebbled ground—damp with sweat, and beset by fleas and biting flies.
All too soon the call came to rise and set off again, straight into the glare of the setting sun.
Afterward there was an easier time, when the heat of the day eased and the night had not yet turned frigid. We stopped for a while as the Magi gazed up into the sky, and Pacorus took down figures for Gaspar. Later, Pacorus came by with water and inquired after Babak. “They’re navigating,” he told me. “Gaspar can find from the stars where we are; he can tell which way to go.”
“But do the stars tell where water lies?” I asked.
Pacorus did not reply.
The following nights and days passed in a haze of milky blue starlit landscapes, then stretches of glittering sand that blazed like lakes of fire, shooting pain up through my eyes and crashing in dark waves against the back of my head. Sometimes I saw shimmering mirages, in which I could pick out the shapes of palm trees and cool, running streams. Am I dreaming? I wondered. At last?
As time went on, Pacorus came by less and less often to give us drink. My tongue swelled up, dry and foreign in my mouth; my shrunken lips cracked open and bled. Sometimes Giv slipped us a half-empty skin, but the water did not suffice for long. There was not enough for Babak’s potion, but I knew he would not sleepwalk, because he no longer had the strength to walk. He moved in and out of his dreamings, at times calling out one thing or another, which I had not the wit nor will to decipher. Once, Giv led us to a trickle of muddy water in a hollow; we knelt down and greedily sucked moisture from it through the cloth of our sleeves. In a while, we had eaten up all the stores I had saved for escape.
Escape! I couldn’t even contemplate it now. It was all I could do to endure.
One day, the wind picked up. I heard it first, a rattling in the stiff thornbush, a low, dry rustling of sand on limestone, sand on sand. It beat a faint tintinnabulation against the camel bells and hissed against our robes, which bellied out behind us like sails. The horizon disappeared, engulfed by a rising tide of darkness. The air filled with sand and dust, dulling the sun to a dark gold disc. It smelled of hot metal. I drew my headcloth tightly across my nose and pulled the brow folds forward, leaving only a slit to see by, then helped Babak do the same. Nonetheless, sand began to burrow beneath my eyelids, to scratch my shriveled eyes. It crept into my nose, my ears; it crunched between my teeth. The edges of the caravan blurred until I could scarcely make out the shape of the camel in front of ours.
Ziba lurched, stumbled, recovered, slowed to a faltering walk. At last, with a plaintive bellow, she dragged wearily to a halt. Where were the other camels? I looked all about for them, but the land and sky had dissolved, and now there was only sand.
We were alone. We had escaped at last—just when I least desired it. The caravan had vanished; the sun had vanished; there was nothing to see or hear or feel but sand. I slumped in the saddle, turning my face out of the wind. I closed my eyes and slipped softly back in memory to an
other time of sand, when Suren and I had gone riding in Susa. A gale had come up suddenly, and the world had shrunk down to a tight cone of swirling dust and grit. I had been terrified—but not Suren. He had taken me up behind him, tethered my pony to his. He had enveloped me in his cloak and let his pony find the way home.
Now I squinted open my eyes, forced my hands to move. I swept my cloak over Babak’s head and shoulders. I urged Ziba forward, and when at last she began to walk, I let her choose the way. After a space of time that could have been a moment, could have been an hour, could have been a day, I saw a figure in the blowing sand beside us. Suren! I thought. But no. It was Giv, tethering Ziba to his camel. I pulled my headcloth down over my eyes and let him lead us to the others.
*
And then, on a different day, the phantasm of trees and water that shimmered in the air before the caravan did not erode back into dust. Our camels hastened to an eager, jiggling trot as bit by bit the oasis took on substance: an oleander thicket; a convincing deep green thatch of palms; a clear, still pool in the midst of a running stream. When we were nearly there, Babak and I slid down from Ziba. Staggering, I carried him to the stream, found a spot among the men clustered round there. We scooped up water, gulped it down, let it drip in wasteful runnels down our chins.
“Look!” Pacorus pointed west, to where a ridge thrust up against the horizon. “The hills just this side of Judea. And not far beyond them … Jerusalem!”
CHAPTER 45
KINGS
The next day we reached Jerusalem, high atop two hills, its great, crenellated walls gleaming gold in the late-afternoon sun. We put in at a caravansary outside the gates; the Magi retreated to their quarters, and soon I heard the chanted drone of prayers. As I led Ziba to water, I silently lofted two prayers to the Wise God. One, a prayer of gratitude, for delivering us from the desert. The other, a plea for Babak.
Susan Fletcher - Alphabet of Dreams Page 20