Don’t think about Summerchild. About whether she’ll be alive when you return, or—
Don’t think about or.
Weariness settled on him like the big double baskets of earth that were yoked, before and behind, on the teyn who hauled them away from the digging crews. Think about what you’re going to say to Soth when he gets here. About what Raeshaldis will make of that poor fellow in the tent. Five or six others, who “look all right.”
He wondered how much scrub water Geb had managed to locate, and longed for a proper bath, a proper massage, sleep. He couldn’t recall when last he’d slept.
He’d even accept dreams about his father being eaten by lions, or about fleeing one himself, as an alternative to sleepless fear for Summerchild’s life, for Rainsong’s survival.
And the madman in his tent—and the one who’d thrown himself into the teyn gang—had first shown their madness with longing for excessive sleep. Was it the same with Raeshaldis’s grandfather?
There were men waiting for him outside his tent. With the sun-drenched dust that hung over the camp like lake fog in the north, he was quite close before he made out the brown and white robes of nomads.
They ran forward to him—surprising behavior for deep-desert dwellers, who mostly had little use for the king—and knelt before him, something no nomad would do save before their own tribal sheikh. Geb emerged briefly in the shadow of the tent doorway, arms folded and an expression of disapproval on his round features that would have done Jethan proud.
One of them, Oryn saw, was the tribal sheikh. So whatever was going on, it was serious. By the tattoos on their foreheads and chins they were an-Dhoki, a tribe that made its money mostly by hunting teyn in the hills and bringing them to the city for sale, though they engaged in small-time banditry when they thought they could get away with it.
“Lord King,” said the sheikh, “you who have the great mages at your calling, the great wizards. We, who are your disobedient children, we beg your help. I, Urah of the rai-an-Dhoki, beg it, and we promise our service for ten generations.” And though he remained standing, he folded his hands and inclined his head in the closest any nomad ever came to a gesture of supplication.
Oryn knew better than to be transported with joy at this news. They’d be back raiding the herds of the rangeland sheikhs before the moon was full. But he knew also what was expected of him, which was a grave frown and an expression of utterly uncaring haughtiness. “Geb,” he called out, “send water and bread to these, my children, and make them comfortable. I will see them when I have eaten and bathed, perhaps slept a little, for I am weary.” His father had never failed to impress upon him—and Oryn had found by experience that he was correct—that the longer one made a nomad wait, the greater one’s power in his eyes. For the nomads, power was everything. Power, and not showing them that they had a single thing that you wanted.
The waiting game, and afterward the endless ritual of refusing to get to the point of whatever they wanted of one, exasperated Oryn to frenzy, because sometimes things were important. As king he was expected to make everyone wait for days, sometimes months. But the nomads on the whole accepted this with patience and generally did seem to accord more respect to him the more he turned them from his door.
Thus he was astonished when the sheikh caught the sleeve of his robe and cried, “My lord, no! They are dead, my lord, they are all dead!”
Oryn looked down into the brown dusty face within its frame of veils and saw it streaked with tears. “Who is dead?”
The sheikh whispered, “My family—my children—my brothers and their wives. All of them. They all went mad and slew one another in the night.” He knelt and rested his cheek in the sand beside Oryn’s foot in a gesture, not of humility, but of a despair that lifted the hair on the king’s nape. “You are a king who commands wizards. You are a king who has put your life in the hands of the gods. Take this curse from off us lest these my nephews—all of us few that are left—go mad and die, too.”
Hoarse with shock, Oryn said, “Show me.”
Riding up to the construction camp that morning, Oryn had noticed the vultures, but his mind had been on the mad workman, and he’d accepted Ykem’s reply to his query, that it was probably a dead cow, wandered from the hills. The nomad camp lay in a shallow wadi three miles from the vast straggle of tents and teyn pens around the end of the aqueduct ditch. As their horses flung up their heads, snorting uneasily even before the camp came into view, Oryn guessed that Urah and the rai-an-Dhoki had come this close to the Dead Hills for purposes they guessed the king would disapprove. Ordinarily, nomads traveled with their herds of goats and sheep, animals whose straying would have announced their presence (he sincerely hoped) to the construction camp’s perimeter scouts.
But as the horses of the king and his squad of guards topped the rim of the stony crack in the earth, Oryn heard only the groaning and mumbling of camels and now and then the whicker of a thirsty horse. “Again, the animals survived,” he murmured, drawing rein and leaning to speak to Bax. The commander nodded.
“I thought that myself, sir.” The icy eyes scanned the broken ground, the clusters of dusty black birds rising and falling just where wind scour and an outcrop of harder stone offered concealment for the earth-colored goat-hair tents.
Oryn found himself thinking that vultures wouldn’t have clustered that way around the hidden campsite had live warriors been lying in wait to take prisoner the king. He thought Bax’s heavy shoulders relaxed a little as the commander raised his hand, signaled the guards to ride down into the wadi.
“It was thus we found them when we returned to camp this noon,” Urah whispered, urging his skinny, light-built desert pony close beside Oryn’s tall mount. “My nephews and I, we followed the wadi from the hills. We saw the vultures gathered, the shar-I-zhaffa, the servants of the gods of the dead, and we knew then what we would see. We did an evil thing, Lord King, and the curse fell upon these innocent ones.”
“What was the evil that you did?” asked Oryn.
The sheikh turned his face aside and drew his veils around him in an attitude of ritual shame. “All throughout the near desert it is said that the curses that once guarded the tombs of the dead hold power no more. It is said that men can enter the sealed houses where the old kings sleep and take back from them at last the gold they stole from the people of the desert and the gold they won from the mines with the blood of slaves.”
Most of the slaves who worked the gold mines in the Eanit and around the Lake of the Moon were in fact teyn, not nomads, but Oryn did not interrupt to point this out. No amount of this sort of logic had ever changed the nomads’ rationale that robbing the ranchers and farmers of the realm was merely getting back their own. He didn’t know if they even really believed it themselves. He said instead, “So you robbed a tomb?”
“We did, my lord.” Genuine distress cracked in the older man’s voice. “Had we known—had I known—of the doom it would bring . . .” He shook his head. “My lord, it was a few things only, for the tomb had been robbed before us, and most of the gold was already gone. Yet I see no other vultures; we have found no other camps like . . . like that of my family. I know not why the curse was visited on me and mine and not upon the thieves that came before.”
As the horses rounded the bare shoulder of sun-blasted rock that sheltered the camp, Oryn’s horse flung up its head again, fighting the bit, and at the same moment the stink of decay whiffed in the still, superheated air. Even in the afternoon’s heat it was no more than a whiff, and looking down, Oryn saw that what he had first taken to be a twisted black hunk of wood was in fact a mummy: withered, desiccated, and curled so tightly upon itself that it appeared to have been knotted like tarred rope.
Another one lay between where his horse stood and the half-dozen silent tents that clustered in the black shade of the overhanging lip of the wadi. A man—or what had been a man—lay next to that one, covered in vultures.
Oryn swung down from his hor
se.
“Watch it, sir,” cautioned Bax, but he dismounted, too. The other guards followed, leaving their horses with two men and advancing, swords drawn, into the hushed camp.
Beside Oryn, Urah said sadly, “I understand the caution of your men, great lord. There has been much misunderstanding between your people and mine. But I promise you, this is no trap. All here are dead.”
“I believe you,” said the king. “Zhenus!” he called out to the sergeant of the guards. “Please check the horse line and the camels and make sure that the sheikh here and his nephews are given all their beasts again—all of those which bear proper brands of sale.” He glanced sidelong at Sheikh Urah as he said it, and the sheikh bowed again.
“We have erred, Great King, and we have been punished. Please, please, lift the curse from us, from this camp, from our tents, and all that we possess lest it fall upon us tonight as we sleep. We have done great evil and beg only your aid.”
Leaving his horse with the others, Oryn waded forward through the deep sand to the tents, Bax and Urah following. Though his father had repeated over and over that one never admitted to a nomad that one was unable to do anything, he said, “You shall have my aid, my son”—the sheikh was at least a dozen years Oryn’s senior, ancient by desert standards—“so far as I am able to grant it. And you shall have all the assistance that my wizard, and the Crafty woman of my people, can grant. But some matters are too great and lie in the hands of the gods.”
Bax shot him a warning look, but Urah only folded his hands again and bowed.
“This I understand.”
The body of a woman lay in the doorway of the tent. Her throat had been cut, and the vultures had been at her. Blood clotted in her long black hair. With the sun’s descent all the tents lay under the shadow of the wadi’s wall, and the interior of the first, as Oryn stepped carefully past the dead woman, was for a moment so dark that all he could see was a stray gleam caught in a vessel of iridescent glass.
Behind him he heard Urah whisper, “Ah, Nisheddeh, beloved,” as he knelt beside the woman. “Forgive me, and do not pass along the evil to the one who brought it upon you.” And he gathered the dead woman’s hair into his hands to kiss.
Oryn turned back, blinking, to the dark of the tent. It seemed like any other nomad tent, and more sparsely furnished than most: a woman’s bow and quiver hanging from one tent pole, tasseled bags holding spare clothing like some sort of exotic fruit upon another, camel saddles to sit on, and blankets unrolled on the faded rugs that kept the inhabitants’ feet from the stones and sand. Sacks of dates and rice; a coffee pan of beaten copper and a bigger cooking pot; and two folding tables, one of which held a half-dozen intricately carved ivory spoons of varying sizes—Zali ware, they looked like, tomb loot almost certainly—and something that could have been a flute; as well as the round-bellied little vessel—a vase? a bottle?—of exquisitely tinted green glass. This vessel seemed to shine with glancing light for which Oryn could identify no source.
“Lord?” The sergeant Zhenus came in behind him, a burly, barrel-bellied man who retained the echoes of striking good looks. “I’ve had a look at the beasts. Should I . . .” His voice trailed off. Oryn barely heard him as he tried to figure out why that bottle—or vase or lamp or whatever it was—and that object alone should reflect light when the tent doorway lay in the shadow of the wadi’s edge. Only when Zhenus tried to step past him, hand reaching out toward the things on the table, did he come to himself.
“Here, don’t touch that.”
And, when the sergeant did not appear to hear him, Oryn stepped forward quickly and laid a hand on the man’s outstretched arm.
Zhenus startled, stepping back, and his eyes widened when he saw the king’s hand on him: “Lord, I—I’m sorry, I didn’t rightly hear you.”
“It’s all right,” said Oryn, though in fact to “not rightly hear” an order from the king was grounds for whipping at best and possibly hanging, or it would have been if the king had been Taras Greatsword, anyway. Oryn had seen a porter condemned to have all four limbs broken for having his attention elsewhere when Greatsword had given an order. He went on, “It’s just that it’s best if no one touches anything in the camp, at least until Soth and Raeshaldis have had a look at it.”
“But shouldn’t we—” The sergeant only just stopped himself from the unheard-of crime of contradicting the king. “That is, lord, might it not be a good idea to take the things back to the camp? His lordship might not arrive till after dark; and for myself, with these teyn turning wild as they’ve been and escapin’, I’d not like to think of anyone, even a mage or a Crafty, wanderin’ about outside the camp after dark falls.”
“That’s a reasonable suggestion, yes,” agreed Oryn. “Only there may be a curse, you see. So it’s probably best that they be left as they are.”
He emerged from the tent to find Bax already assigning four men to remain on guard around the camp: “Most of ’em killed each other, right enough, as you said, sheikh. Same as the village. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. You and your nephews best come back with us; we’ll see you put up someplace.”
“At least until the mage, and the lady Crafty, arrive,” added Oryn, seeing Urah’s frown at the commander’s suggestion. “I shall have the quartermaster set up tents for you, and your beasts will be given their own line separate from those of the camp and water and food. Bax, don’t leave a guard here tonight.”
“No, sir?” The commander’s white eyebrows flared up at the ends, like inquiring wings.
Oryn looked uneasily at the length of the shadows that had now completely crossed the wadi, at the fading gold of the sky. “No. Whatever is going on here, I’d rather risk losing track of it through not setting a guard than lose four more men as we did at Three Wells. Soth should be here by morning, and, please the gods, Shaldis. And one or the other of them will, I hope, be able to find some answers about whatever is going on here. And elsewhere.”
As he walked back toward the horses, Oryn felt his eyes drawn, as if in spite of himself, to the dark of the tent doorway. Beyond the body of Urah’s wife, nearly hidden in the shadows, the glass vessel gleamed like a watching eye.
“I thought there wasn’t curses anymore, sir,” he heard Zhenus argue to Bax. “That’s what they say is going on with the rains, isn’t it? That magic don’t work no more, not for good nor for ill. So that means nothing that was cursed is still cursed.”
“That’s what it means,” replied the commander imperturbably. “But that’s only the curses that work by magic. Not going along with what the king says is one of those curses that doesn’t work by magic. You step out of line, and magic or no magic, you’re for it. Understand?”
“Yes sir. I understand.”
By the horses Elpiduyek was muttering as he readjusted the ingenious gyroscopic arrangement that changed the angle of the royal parasol’s canopy, cursing the sand that fouled the mechanism. Two of Urah’s nephews brought the horses and camels from the lines behind the tents, the horses stumbling and wild with thirst. Oryn stopped and turned back to look at the dark tents again, and the sheikh paused beside him, his face filled with unbearable grief.
“How can it be,” the older man asked quietly, “that the curse would pass by my horses and my camels and yet take my beautiful Nisheddeh, the honey of my days, the stars of my nights? Is this what the curse is: that I who sinned should not die but should live on in sorrow?”
“I do not think any man, not even the great sages of old, has ever found an answer to that,” replied Oryn, thinking of the still, wasted body on the linen pillows, the voices of his Raven girls raised in spells that did not seem to touch the shadow that lay on Summerchild’s face. “If I ever learn the answer I shall tell you.”
And the sheikh glanced sidelong at him and managed a little smile under his grizzled mustache. “Thank you, Lord King. And I shall do the same for you, should I learn the answer first.”
“I appreciate it.” Oryn turned toward the h
orses again and paused once more, looking down at the black, writhed form of the naked mummy in the dust. “Is that common?” he asked. “I’m a scholar, and I’ve never encountered mention of it: of Zali mummies being deformed in that fashion. It’s only recently that we’ve seen any that survived. But, if you will forgive my frank speech, lord sheikh, you’re a tomb robber and have more experience in this matter than I. Is that something the Zali did to their dead that made them convolute that way?”
“Mummies?” Urah’s eyes filled with shock and with pain as he looked down at the blackened, leathery thing at their feet. “Lord King, that is not a mummy! Look at the face—can you not see the tattoos still upon the forehead and the chin? I know those tattoos, my lord, and by them I know this man: he is my brother, Warha. It is the curse that has left him so.”
FORTY
Someone was seeking her.
Shaldis put the thought aside.
Darkness lay upon the desert. The moon had set; the evening wind was long stilled. Around here even the plants were failing, the eerie sentinels of cactus and the clumped sleeping sagebrushes growing farther and farther apart. Very soon, Shaldis knew, they would end altogether. Underfoot the floor of the world was colorless stone and sand.
The air smelled of heat and sand, and nothing more.
And far, far off, like the ghost of smoke, the faintest trace of indigo.
Look in a mirror!
But she knew now that if she took her attention from that far-off scent, she would never find it again. Not in this world that seemed to grow wider and wider, this silence that deepened with every forward step she took.
Behind her she had the dim consciousness of Jethan riding, leading the camels. Many yards behind, but what did it matter? In this world there was no longer any concealing brush, and even the cracks and wadis that came down out of the Dead Hills had shallowed to nothing.
Anything that would come at them could be seen for miles.
Circle of the Moon Page 33