by Donald Tyson
The desolation of the Empty Space stretched to the horizon in all directions. Heat rising from the sand made whirlwinds spring up and race with a dancing motion across the crests of the dunes, so that they almost appeared alive. For some reason they seemed to follow the road, as though watching the progress of the caravan. The road itself became invisible. It could be identified only because it was the sole way of progress between the dunes and the low rocky hills that thrust up among them. The horizon shimmered with silver, as though wet with the waves of some distant sea, but it was no more than a mirage. High above, vultures circled the caravan in the hope that one of the animals would sicken and die, but the tender care the Bedouins took of their beasts cheated them of their banquet.
One day when the sun was at its height, the chain was removed from my ankles and I was pulled from the cart. The caravan began to move forward. I stumbled after it, thinking that my captors wished me to walk for exercise, but one of them confronted me and pushed me backward so that I fell upon the sand.
“You stay here,” he said, the first words spoken to me since my removal from my cell.
I looked around in bewilderment. There was nothing in sight, not even an outcropping of rock. The great dunes rolled endlessly across the world. I scrambled to my knees and clasped my hands in front of my breast, tears springing to my eyes.
“Please, let me come with you. Do not leave me here to die.”
A trace of pity touched his harsh features.
“We do as we are commanded.”
I understood. To defy the order of the king of Yemen was death. He had given instructions that I be taken into the midst of the Empty Space and released. The Bedouins did not dare disobey.
Knowing it was fruitless, I wrapped my arms around his ankles and begged for my life. He tried to pull away, and then kicked me in the face with his sandal when I would not release him. Leaning down, he grasped the ivory hilt of his dagger and pulled the blade half out of its sheath. His meaning was clear. If I followed the caravan, I would be killed and the vultures would get their feast.
I sat naked upon the road, my arms and legs spread loosely, salt blood dripping from my cut lip where I had been kicked, watching the wagons and camels of the caravan dwindle between the distant hills and vanish from view behind the rising heat mirages. Then I was alone.
Chapter 3
During the time of my madness, I was not aware that I was mad. I ran off the caravan route through the hollows between the dunes, babbling in words that belonged to no human language. I fell a hundred times, each time climbing wearily to my feet, until I had no strength to stand, and then crawled with the sun blazing down on my bare back. Strangely, my skin was not burned, not even the soles of my feet. Rolling on the ground covered me with a layer of dust that shielded my pale body from its blistering rays.
No water had passed my lips since early morning. Awareness of my peril pierced my madness, and I knew in a wordless way that if I did not find shelter I would surely die. The vultures circled ever lower, taunting me with the cooling touch of their swift shadows. Sweat ceased to spring from my skin, and I began to pant in short hot breaths. At last I collapsed and lay still, too weak to raise my hand and shield my eyes from the glare of the dunes.
Something moved across my unfocused view. I blinked and saw that it was a lizard, no longer than my finger. It sat upon the hot sand, staring at me with open mouth as though recognizing me. With quick motions of its legs and tail, it began to dig itself into the sand. In moments the sand covered it.
For a time I lay staring at the place it had vanished, no thought in my mind. Then I began to rock my body, pushing the sand away with my arms and legs as I had seen the lizard push the sand with its feet. Action gave me a sense of purpose. I realized what I was doing and began to move the sand with more efficient strokes. Several inches beneath the surface of the desert, it was cool against my skin. I piled the sand high all around my body until I lay in a shallow trench on my back, then began to cover my legs and torso with the sand. When only my face remained exposed, I put my left arm across my mouth and nose, closed my eyes, and used my right hand to pull the sand over me.
The thought came that I was burying myself while still alive. In a moment it was lost amid the chaos of my mind. I forced myself to breathe slow and shallow breaths against the skin of my arm, and slept.
In my dream the faceless man beckoned, and I followed him across the dunes toward the angled crescent of the waxing moon that hung near the horizon, its lower horn pointing eastward. The droning beetles spoke to me through the darkness, whispering blasphemous secrets just beyond the boundary of my comprehension. I felt the power of their buzzing words, but each time I grasped for them with my mind they flew away in all directions. When I fell behind, the tall man waited patiently, his hands folded within the sleeves of his robe. Through the gap of his cloak I saw that it resembled the robes of the Christian monks who sometimes came from the west to convert the faithful to the strange teachings of the prophet Jesus. Years ago I had seen such a monk stoned to death in the marketplace at Sana’a, his emaciated body completely hidden beneath a pile of cobblestones and potsherds except for his cheek and staring, sightless eye. I remembered the blueness of his eye that was akin to the sky at its zenith.
The hooded figure stood upon the crest of a low dune and pointed beneath the horns of the moon at a cleft in a line of rocky hills. Through the gap ran a caravan road. It glowed with silver like a winding river against the darker ground of the desert.
Pain broke my mind from the dream. Something sharp cut the flesh of my palm, and for a moment I was again beneath the knives of the torturers. I clenched my fingers, and felt in their grasp a writhing, twisting serpent. With a cry I sat up from my bed of sand and shook the dust off my face. Twilight paled the sky. In my left fist I saw that I clutched the neck of a vulture. It squawked its fury and pecked with its hooked beak at my hand, pounding its wings against my arm. My fingers tightened, and I heard the bones of its neck crunch. The beating of its wings ceased.
Drawing it close to my face, I bit through its neck and sucked the spurting fountain of its blood. It was foul with salt but so dry was my body it had the sweetness of well water on my cracked lips. When I could suck no more blood from its neck, I bit off one of its feet and used its talons to cut open its belly. I ate its heart and liver before discarding the carcass.
Stars brightened like windblown sparks in the darkening sky. The thin crescent of the waxing moon made me remember my dream. Strengthened by my sleep and by the blood of the bird, I walked toward it. Unseen night insects droned their approval. Somewhere in the distance a desert fox barked for its mate. The cooling air made walking less of an ordeal. At times I glanced up from the ground to glimpse the tall figure in black disappear over the crest of the dune before me. I ran to confront the fleeting shadow, but always the emptiness of the desert mocked me.
Panting to catch my breath, I paused on the crest of a dune and spied in the south beneath the horns of the moon the cleft between the hills of my dream. The caravan road was not illuminated with silver, but I knew it must run through the gap, since there was no other way to progress with wagons past the high dunes except between the hills. I stumbled and slid down the slope to the edge of the road. At my right hand, the road wound westward to the border of Yemen, from which I had come. To the left, it passed between the hills and bent itself eastward into the depths of the wasteland. I judged its direction from the star Mismar that is set like a nail in the heavens, around which turns the glittering canopy of the firmament.
Nothing awaited me in the land of my birth but death. I turned toward the left-hand path and followed the road between the hills. As I passed between them, I noticed a shadow on the ground. To my crazed imagination it looked first like a giant spider poised to jump, and then like the severed head of a man, but as I drew near I saw that it was a leather water skin.
Falling to my knees with a cry, I grasped it up in my hands. It was heavy to lift, and fat.
A Bedouin of the caravan, perhaps the man who had warned me against following, had felt a moment of compassion and had left the water behind on the road for me to discover. It was a treasure more precious than gold. I wept at this simple act of charity, cursing the weakness of my spirit that squandered the moisture of my tears in the dry dust. After my tears ceased to fall, I slung the strap of the water skin over my head and shoulder so that it hung at my right hip, and continued to walk eastward in the wheel ruts and camel tracks of the caravan.
When the paling of the stars alerted me to the coming of day, I sought shelter from the sun beneath a ledge of stone that would cast a shadow over the depression beneath its lip. As I lay down and prepared to make the water skin my pillow, a hiss betrayed the presence of a viper. It coiled its slender body like a necklace of shining black pearls, and reared its head with opened mouth. Again it expressed annoyance that its resting place had been violated. Some caprice of madness kept me from grabbing up a stone to kill it. I lay and watched it with sleepy eyes, my body motionless. When it felt no threat, it gradually undulated its way nearer, until it lay coiled against the skin of my thigh. We slept together, and I did not dream. When I awoke at dusk, the serpent had already departed to hunt for prey. I realized that I must do the same, or I would starve.
To the casual eye, the caravan road appeared barren, but this was an illusion. In comparison to the emptiness of the dunes, its path lay littered with useful items. I found a bright silk scarf striped with red and green, trodden into the sand, that was ragged on only one corner, and tied it about my neck. A dried melon rind retained some of its sweetness. In my extremity of hunger I ate all of it, even its tough outer skin. Hidden in the ashes of a campfire I discovered a bone that I judged to be from a goat, and cracked it between two rocks for its marrow. It was not enough, but for a short time it took away the gnawing emptiness. Nothing else remained between the stones of the hearth but bits of charcoal. Firewood, carried into the desert on wagons or the backs of camels, was too precious to leave behind.
As dawn approached, I searched for a natural shelter along the side of the road but found nothing. I was forced to waste the strength of my body building a cave with flat stones. It was barely large enough to lie in, but it shadowed me from the sun as I slept. The chinks in its sides allowed the breeze to pass freely through, making it more comfortable than expected. I rose after sunset refreshed, but my hunger was so great that it caused my belly to cramp in agony. Each time this happened, I was forced to crouch with my hands on my knees and wait for the pain to pass, panting as though giving birth.
The yelp of jackals through the darkness alerted me to a new prize, though what it might be I could not guess. The sounds drew me off the road and into the hollow of a small valley. In the moonlight I watched two jackals dance around a mound of rocks and scratch the ground with their paws. I approached carefully, hoping to kill one of the beasts with a thrown stone, but their ears were keen, and they fled with yips of frustration over the crest of a hill. Gazing down at the mound, which was marked with a large oblong rock at its head and another at its foot, I realized what had attracted them. Their noses had scented carrion. It was a grave. Someone had died upon the road and been buried here with scant ceremony.
My eager fingers pulled the stones aside and dug into the soft soil. The body was not far beneath the surface. Had it been buried deeper, the jackals might have failed to locate it, but who wasted strength digging in the desert for the benefit of the dead? It was wrapped in a shroud of white cotton sewn with coarse thread along its seams, and tied tight with lengths of cord. Trembling with eagerness, I untied the cords and opened the shroud. As I had hoped, it was the corpse of a man, and his relatives had dressed him for Paradise. I pulled his bloodless face toward mine and in the light of the moon recognized him as one of the Bedouins of the caravan that had abandoned me. I could not be far behind their wagons, since his flesh was quite fresh. The memory came that two days before my separation from the caravan this man suffered a sudden numbness in the left side of his body and had been unable to walk without help.
He was near my height, perhaps a trifle shorter and broader through the chest. I stripped off his cream-colored desert thawb and removed my water skin to put it on. Though frayed at the cuffs and hem, the cotton was clean and unpatched. His family had dressed him in his best attire for the grave. As expected, he wore no undergarments. It was not the custom of desert-faring men to cover their legs with the Persian surwal, which they considered a clothing fit only for women. I debated whether to place his ghutra over my head, then at last set the diagonally folded square of white cotton aside with its double-looped black agal. I have always preferred to leave my head uncovered, in defiance of fashion. The knots in the laces of his sandals came free with difficulty, and I discovered that they were slightly large for my feet. I drew the soft stockings of tan leather over my calves, and laced the sandals around my ankles. The touch of leather felt strange after so many days barefoot.
From a beaded and embroidered baldric of woven red wool that had been placed beside the corpse in the grave hung a dagger in its undyed leather sheath. The bone hilt of the old knife was cracked, and its blade well worn from years of use, but it bore a razor edge. It was an easy matter to cut with it several squares of cotton from the shroud. Such rags might be useful. I kissed its broad straight blade in my joy before returning it to its sheath, and slung its woolen strap over my head so that it dangled against my left hip. The water skin I hung on the opposite side, so that the baldric and the strap of the water skin crossed on my chest.
Coins jingled within a hidden pocket at the left breast of the thawb. It took me moments to locate its mouth, easily reached through the open neck of the garment that extended down almost to my navel. I drew them out and regarded them. Three silver Sassanian dirhams of the smallest of the three sizes, bearing the profile of the late shah Yazdegerd the Third. They were all good coins that showed scarcely any sign of clipping at their edges. What caprice had caused the family to bury silver with the corpse I could not imagine, but I reflected that I might use them on a future occasion to buy food or water. The same consideration made me decide to transfer the gold ring on the left hand of the corpse to my own hand.
The plain gold band would not come loose from its finger after much tugging, so I used the dagger. I stared at the red stump of the detached finger, turning it in my hands until the whiteness of the bone was visible at its center, and a terrible hunger rose within me. Still, I hesitated. No man could do what I contemplated. Yet I had already eaten human flesh, and therefore could no longer call myself a man. With a cry of surrender I fastened my teeth in the flesh and chewed it from the bone. After the finger was stripped clean, I cut a piece of meat from the inside of the thigh of the corpse and ate until my belly was full.
The night air felt strangely thick around my head as I feasted. I glanced up but could see nothing. It was as though a thousand moths pressed their soft wings against my face, in a futile attempt to stifle my breath. Petulantly, I waved my arm through the air above my head as though to drive away a fly, and the smothering sensation lessened. I sensed the presence of unseen creatures but gave them little thought. If they lacked the power to kill me, they were unimportant. Using a large stone from the grave, I cracked open the skull of the corpse and sampled its brain. As I had hoped, it was filled with wetness, almost like the juice of a ripe melon, but oily on the tongue rather than sweet. There was enough moisture in the skull to keep me alive for a day. It was a useful matter to know.
After cutting enough meat from the thighs to last me two days, and wrapping it in one of the cotton rags from the shroud, I left the remainder of the body for the jackals. It was unfortunate that I could not carry more, but in the heat of the desert the meat would have spoiled before I could have eaten it in any case. The knife wa
s a great prize, as was the thawb and leather sandals. The grave had proven to be a treasure trove of riches. My water skin was growing slack, and somehow I would have to find a way to replenish it before the passage of several days, but at least I would not starve before I died of thirst.
The road led ever deeper into the Empty Space. There must be wells along its length, or no caravan could survive the journey. The prospect of a well drew me eastward like a lodestone. There was also hope that water could be stolen from the caravan that followed the road ahead, were I able to overtake it. I traveled by night, the caravan by day, and the days were longer than the nights in the spring of the year. Still, the Bedouins moved slowly, unwilling to exhaust their beasts by pressing them forward under the heat of the sun, and they paused to eat and rest. They wasted part of the day making camp at evening, and another part breaking camp at dawn.
By the sky glow of early morning, while ranging along a ridge of hills that followed the road, I saw the black shadow of a cave entrance between two boulders, at the end of a narrow valley. A deep cave held the prospect of water and could not be overlooked, but whether deep or shallow it would provide shelter from the sun. Since other creatures might well have had the same intention, I drew my knife and held it in my hand as I forced my body forward between the boulders and into the darkness. The roof of the cave pressed low, but the cave extended far into the hill, sloping downward. The chance for water seemed good. The entrance to the cave was located at the low end of the valley, and any rain would flow toward it. Once collected in the depths of the cave in a pool, it would persist for months.