by Donald Tyson
“We have no time for entertainment. We must leave at once.”
In a few words I told her the warning given by the spirit in the bottle. Her eyes widened in alarm.
“We will go south into the hills, then bend our path westward. When I’m sure we are well in front of the wagons, we will rejoin the road. Have you all your possessions on your back?”
She nodded. As a precaution, we had agreed days before to keep ourselves in a state that allowed us to leave the wagon without a moment of warning. She had not allowed her vigilance to lapse. My water skin was slacker than I would have wished, but I reflected that I could fill it at the next well on the road.
Behind us, a great explosion rent the night, followed almost immediately by another, and then others. I turned and saw over the crest of the hill I had just climbed several strange shifting lights in the sky that were paler than the glow of a fire. Voices shouted in alarm. Then came screams. I recognized the terrified whinny of a horse, but the rest of the cries were from human throats. We stood listening to them in the darkness. It was many minutes before they diminished to silence, giving me occasion to reflect that I might not need to concern myself with pursuit from the wagons.
Chapter 53
It was tempting to return to the wagons for the treasure in the strong boxes, but I rejected the impulse. The travelers had scattered throughout the hills, either to get drunk or engage in indiscriminate mating. The seven angry spirits were unlikely to find them all in the darkness, even if they possessed the vitality to slay them. Hearing the cries, the men would gather their wits and stagger back to the wagons. Pula was safe, for I had seen no spirit glow fly in her direction, but her mother was almost certainly dead. The spirits would never rest until they sought out and killed the one who had imprisoned them.
We did not wait for daylight but moved between the hills by the light of the waning moon. Through long experience I found this no difficult task. The girl turned stones beneath her boots and cursed the darkness at regular intervals.
“How can you walk without a sound through this miserable country?” she exclaimed in vexation.
“It is a skill all ghouls possess,” I murmured. “Keep your voice low.”
“We are miles from the wagons. And you are not a ghoul, you are a man.”
“Once I was a man. My body still bears the shape of a man. But my soul is the soul of a ghoul.”
“Is that why you carry that skull at your belt?”
“It is a token of respect. You would not understand.”
She made a rude noise with her lips.
“We may be able to return to the caravan road more quickly than I anticipated,” I said, ignoring her criticism. “The travelers will believe we fled the spirits into the hills and were killed. I doubt they will waste time searching for our bodies, if many of their own lie dead. As long as we stay ahead of the wagons on the road, we will be undetected.”
Even as I spoke these words, a stone rolled somewhere in the darkness behind us. We stopped and held our breaths to listen. Only the insect sounds of the night reached my ears. I saw the gray patch of Martala’s face turn to me, and laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder. We moved off with greater care, listening at our back, but the noise was not repeated.
At dawn we stopped and ate a cold meal, then slept in a narrow fissure between two juts of rock until near midday. I did not dare stay longer for fear the wagons would somehow get ahead of us on the road, and we would find ourselves overtaking them from behind. They moved at less than a walking pace, and would not have left the enclave until dawn at the earliest, so it was unlikely they could pass us, despite the hindrance of the irregular ground over which we traveled.
We emerged from the hills in the early afternoon and continued on the road westward. The increase in traffic, coupled with the larger size of the villages, indicated that we were moving through a more populous region. I restored the glamour to my face as we approached a solitary Thugian wagon from behind, on the consideration that the travelers who had seen me at the gathering would look for a man badly disfigured. Belok and his family knew that I had two faces, but it was unlikely the others had been told. This precaution proved unnecessary. None of the scowling men who walked beside the wheels looked familiar. They made a display of ignoring us as we passed.
The road descended the gentle slope of a barren rock-strewn valley and ascended the opposite side. As we climbed the crest of the hill, I looked behind and saw on the far side of the valley a lone horseman. His head hung down, so that his turban concealed his face, but where his long cloak fluttered open, his breastplate caught the sun and glittered. The rider was too far behind on the road for me to distinguish any details of his appearance. His cloak was dark blue, his horse a pale gray. I judged him a mercenary by his posture in the saddle, which was erect but careless. The horse was large enough to be a horse of war.
It was not unusual to be passed by horsemen on the road, but they seldom traveled alone. Either they rode in pairs or groups for greater security, or if alone, they stayed near the edges of a caravan to profit from its armed guard. Martala turned and walked backwards, gazing behind, but did not speak. We shared the same thought, without need to voice it aloud. The rider might be Altrus. If so, it was probably too late to retreat into the hills. We would leave tracks easy to follow in the sand. We could not hope to outrun a horse in open country, or elude detection in daylight.
If the lone rider was Altrus, I expected him to overtake us swiftly. Yet minutes passed, and no sound of hooves came from behind. The road wound this way and that, denying us a clear view back along its length. It was not until late afternoon that we found ourselves on a long and straight section. To my amazement, I saw that the rider had not advanced, but was the same distance behind us.
“He is keeping pace with us,” Martala murmured, wiping sweat from her eyebrows with her fingers.
“His horse may be weary, or lame,” I speculated.
Everything I knew about Altrus told me he would fall upon us like a whirlwind and slay us before we could draw our blades, yet if this was Altrus, he declined to approach. I could conceive no reason for hesitation. In another man I might suspect fear, but that was an emotion unknown to this mercenary. I told myself it must be some weary traveler whose horse had gone lame, but in my heart I did not believe. My heart told me that Altrus was toying with me as a cat plays with a bird. Yet above all other qualities, the mercenary was a practical man, and to inflict torment for its own sake seemed beneath his dignity.
I waited until dusk fell before leaving the road to find a place to rest for the night. Not even Altrus could track footprints in the dark. We continued over the rough ground through the fading twilight, then hid ourselves on the top of a ridge that was a sheer cliff in the back and impossible to climb blind from that side. If the mercenary did locate us by some magic, I wanted him to have only one approach, and that as difficult as I could make it. The steep slope in front was littered with loose stones. We lay behind a boulder and I told the girl to sleep.
“Wake me at midnight, and I will listen until dawn,” she whispered.
It was near midnight before I heard her deepened breaths. I let her sleep until morning. There seemed little point in both of us being exhausted from a sleepless night. With Altrus out there, wandering the darkness, there had been no prospect of sleep for me. I would sleep on the road, while I walked, a trick I had learned from Gor. I stroked his skull, and the smooth bone comforted me.
The dust and flies were more tormenting on the road the following day than they had been since leaving the river Euphrates. It was easy to account for the dust. The increased traffic stirred up the bed of the road and ground it to a find powder that drifted upward in the slightest breeze. For a time the flies puzzled me, until I noticed them rising in clouds from the piles of dung dropped by the passing camels and horses. An increased numb
er of travelers meant more food cast to the side of the road to rot, more animal excrement, more breeding places for maggots, and hence more numerous flies to vex me, and me alone. As usual, Martala walked through the swarms almost untouched. Now and then a fly would land on her head scarf or shoulder, but it did no harm and soon flew away.
I took the striped yellow and white scarf that I had kept from the wagon and wound it around my head and face so that only my eyes were visible through its slit. This helped keep the dust from my throat and the flies from the pit of my severed nose, where they liked to burrow. I fell into a rolling pace, letting my mind drift in the way I had been taught by the ghouls, so that I dreamed while walking, and saw visions pass on either side from the corners of my eyes. I kept only enough attention on the road to avoid the piles of dung that came into my narrowed field of view at irregular intervals.
It was late afternoon when the girl tugged my sleeve, waking me from my moving dream.
“Alhazred, look,” she said with excitement, pointing ahead.
The wall of a great city floated on the horizon, and beyond it, the gleam of gold-covered minarets. It could only be Damascus, the navel of the world, whose gates it was said all pilgrims were destined to pass through at least once in their lives. As I gazed upon it, shimmering in the rising heat like some mirage of the desert, tears welled into my eyes. I had not realized how road-weary I had grown. I was sickened with walking. The prospect of a warm bath and a night spent in a bed seemed like some vision of paradise.
We reached the open gates just before twilight. Above the shadowed battlements of the wall, the western sky shone with fire and gold from the setting sun. The guards standing on either side of the road eyed us as we passed between them and entered the city but gave no challenge. The double gate was less impressive and smaller in size than I expected, yet sturdy enough in its construction to withstand a siege. All the fables about Damascus read in my youth had caused me to imagine it the wonder of the world, yet after all I found it was only a city. Filth lay in pools along the gullies in the middle of the cobblestone street. Some of the buildings needed to be washed with lime, or were missing glazed tiles from their facades. The smells were those of any city, excrement and rotting cabbage and smoke.
A black dog danced around our heels for a time, barking itself hoarse, then wandered off along the crowded street in search of more interesting amusement. We passed a harlot in a dirty red dress, hands on her broad hips, bawling out words to another woman who leaned from a second-level window across the street. She felt my eyes upon her and gave me a yellow-toothed smile. I shook my head and dropped the scarf from across my englamoured face to smile politely. She sneered a response and went back to her conversation.
“So this is Damascus,” Martala said. “It looks no greater than Fustat to me.”
“This is the home of the Caliph Yazid,” I reminded her. “Damascus rules Fustat.”
“Egypt ruled the world before Damascus had a name,” she said with a tartness in her tone that surprised me.
“Perhaps,” I conceded. “But that was centuries ago, and we must live today.”
Beggars were as numerous as flies along the narrow and winding streets, and never ceased to try to make us stumble over their feet or legs, so that they could stop us long enough to beg for alms. Beneath my brown cloak, I kept one hand on my purse and the other on the hilt of my dagger. We made our way to the marketplace by following our nose and our ears. It was a mad mill of human bodies garbed in every imaginable kind of clothing, and the babble of commerce made it difficult to talk, or even to think.
One young man in the market showed uncommon persistence. He leaned on a stick due to a clubbed foot that twisted inward, and looked as thin as any desiccated linen-wrapped corpse of the Nile. Strings of ragged greasy hair hung over his unwashed face, which betrayed on its chin the beginnings of an unimpressive beard.
“Anything your heart desires, noble lord, I can procure for you. I am called Ani, the resourceful one. Remember my name. If you want food, Ani will bring it. If you seek wine, Ani can find the best in the city. If you need a room to rest the night, you need only ask, and for a trifle I will have your bed filled with the most beautiful girl you have ever looked upon.”
Martala listened with a frown and growing impatience, until at last she had heard enough. She bent and picked up a handful of pebbles, then began to throw them at the smiling and nodding youth, one by one, with unerring accuracy. He backed up, a pained expression on his thin face, struggling to maintain his happy countenance as the little stones bounced from his forehead and cheeks.
“Be gone, rogue. We need nothing from you. Do you think we are fools? Take your lies away.”
I put a hand upon her arm.
“Wait, Ani, let me talk with you.”
He returned with the swiftness of a stooping hawk that falls upon its prey, ignoring the presence of the girl as if she had ceased to exist.
“Yes, great lord, anything you need, I will find for you. To name it is to have it in your possession.”
“For tonight we will need a room at a good inn that has a tub for bathing the body, and hot food.”
“That is the easiest thing, lord. I know just the inn, only a few streets from the market. Other inns have bugs that bite in the beds, but this inn is as clean as the palace of the Caliph himself. The rooms are large, so large you would never believe their size—”
I raised a hand to cut off the flow of words, which showed no sign of stopping.
“Then I would like to rent a house in a street called the Lane of Scholars.”
The expression on his face became fixed, and a paleness came under his skin that made his cheeks gray in the failing light.
Before he could respond, he was distracted by a crush of bodies that pressed against us. Other procurers of the market, most of them young men, saw that Ani had gained my interest and surrounded us with clamoring voices, eager to turn some of our silver into their upraised palms. Ani flew into a flailing whirlwind of curses, using his stick to beat the rival procurers savagely away, his face a snarl of rage. With reluctance, they withdrew before his onslaught. He turned back to me and regained his toothy smile with the ease of long practice.
“That is possible, my lord. It can be done without difficulty, only the houses in the Lane of Scholars are large and of no small price.”
“Find the best house that is available and make inquiries on my behalf,” I told him, taking out my purse and giving him a dinar. “When you know which houses are for rent, make arrangements with the owners to show them to us tomorrow.”
He almost kissed my hand when he took the gold coin, so great was his delight. I noticed the hollows in his cheeks and wondered when last he had eaten. The gold would buy many loaves of bread, and probably a few skins of wine and a harlot as well.
“What am I to call you, noble master? The agents for the owners will wish to know your name.”
“I am called Alhazred. This is my servant, Martala.”
He led us out of the market and through the streets of Damascus as though protecting two fragile babes, his eyes darting ceaselessly around, ready to beat off the approach of any other procurer. Above the front door of the inn hung a sign painted with the image of a white bird standing on one leg in a pool of blue water. As I expected, the Inn of the Stork was ordinary, but it did boast a copper tub in an unused room beside the kitchen that the mistress of the house would fill with warm water for a nominal fee. After being shown our bed, I sent Ani off to inquire about houses, and ordered the matron to put her kettle on the fire for the tub.
Martala was inclined to sulk in the bath chamber.
“You gave that smelly wretch too much money,” she said with a pout. “He would have done what you asked for bronze, and you gave him gold.”
“I wanted to ensure his loyalty and his enthusiasm
. I may have need of him in future.”
Slipping off my dust-encrusted undershirt, I threw it into a chair on top of my mustard-colored thawb and stepped naked into the hot steaming water, which came up to the level of my knees. The tub was not large around, but delightfully deep. As I sank down, the water rose to my shoulders and almost covered the domes of my bent knees.
“Ask the innkeeper’s wife if we can get our clothes washed before the morning, and if she has something we can wear in the meantime.”
“Why bother?” she said. “You throw gold around like bits of chaff. Why not just buy new tunics in the market tomorrow?”
“Because I do not wish to put those filthy things on my back after my bath. And because we need no new clothes.”
She snorted, shaking my garments as she folded them, so that the road dust floated over the bath, making me sneeze.
“Empty the pockets and put the things into my wallet.”
She began to do so, but not without much banging and grumbled words.
“A good servant does not complain. What are you saying?”
“You will probably stay in that tub until the water is cold, and then what pleasure will there be left for me?”
“Come into the tub with me, then.”
This caused her to smile in spite of her wish to maintain her ill-temper.
“So I would, if the tub were larger. We would force out all the water onto the floor.”
Her exclamation of surprise caused me to open my eyes. She held up Narisa’s sapphire and diamond pendant by its fine gold chain, admiring it in the light from the window screens.
“Where did you get this?”
“I don’t remember. Do you like it?”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Accept it as my gift.”
To drown her squeals of joy, I managed to slide down in the tub until the water rose above my ear-holes.