Perhaps I had sunstroke already.
Mahood returned with a camel for me. I can’t say I’m fond of the beasts but riding is perhaps my only real talent and I’d spent enough time lurching about on camelback to have mastered the basics. I stepped up into the saddle easy enough and nudged the creature after Sheik Malik as he led off. I took the words he muttered to his boys to be approval.
‘We’ll make camp.’ The sheik lifted up his arm as we joined the head of the column. He drew breath to shout the order.
‘Christ no!’ Panic made the words come out louder than intended. I pressed on, hoping the ‘Christ’ would slip past unnoticed. The key to changing a man’s mind is to do it before he’s announced his plan. ‘My lord al’Hameed, we need to ride hard. Something terrible is going to happen here, very soon!’ If the veils hadn’t thinned because of some ongoing slaughter it could only mean one thing. Something far worse was going to happen and the walls that divide life from death were coming down in anticipation…
The sheik swivelled toward me, eyes stone once more, his sons tensing as if I’d offered grave insult by interrupting.
‘My lord, your man Tahnoon had his story half right. I’m no demon, but I did fall from the sky. Something terrible will happen here very soon and we need to get as far away as we can. I swear by my honour this is true. Perhaps I was sent here to save you and you were sent here to save me. Certainly without each other neither of us would have survived.’
Sheik Malik narrowed his eyes at me, deep crows’ feet appearing, the sun leaving no place for age to hide. ‘The Ha’tari are a simple people, Prince Jalan, superstitious. My kingdom lies north and reaches the coast. I have studied at the Mathema and owe allegiance to no one in all of Liba save the caliph. Do not take me for a fool.’
The fear that had me by the balls tightened its grip. I’d seen death in all its horrific shades and escaped at great cost to get here. I didn’t want to find myself back in the deadlands within the hour, this time just another soul detached from its flesh and defenceless against the terrors that dwelt there. ‘Look at me, Lord al’Hameed.’ I spread my hands and glanced down across my reddening stomach. ‘We’re in the deep desert. I’ve spent less than a quarter of an hour here and my skin is burning. In another hour it will be blistered and peeling off. I have no robes, no camel, no water. How could I have got here? I swear to you, my lord, on the honour of my house, if we do not leave, right now, as fast as is possible, we will all die.’
The sheik looked at me as if taking me in for the first time. A long minute of silence passed, broken only by the faint hiss of sand and the snorting of camels. The men around us watched on, tensed for action. ‘Get the prince some robes, Mahood.’ He raised his arm again and barked an order. ‘We ride!’
The promised fleeing proved far more leisurely than I would have liked. The sheik discussed matters with the Ha’tari headman and we ambled up the slope of a dune, apparently on a course at right angles to their original one. The highlight of the first hour was my drink of water. An indescribable pleasure. Water is life and in the drylands of the dead I had started to feel more than half dead myself. Pouring that wonderful, wet, life into my mouth was a rebirth, probably as noisy and as much of a struggle as the first one given how many men it took to get the water-urn back off me.
Another hour passed. It took all the self-restraint I could muster not to dig my heels in and charge off into the distance. I had taken part in camel races during my time in Hamada. I wasn’t the best rider but I got good odds, being a foreigner. Being on a galloping camel bears several resemblances to energetic sex with an enormously strong and very ugly woman. Right now it was pretty much all I wanted, but the desert is about the marathon not the sprint. The heavily laden camels would be exhausted in half a mile, less if they had to carry the walkers, and whilst the sheik had been prodded into action by my story he clearly thought the chance I was a madman outweighed any advantage to be gained by leaving his goods behind for the dunes to claim.
‘Where are you heading, Lord al’Hameed?’ I rode beside him near the front of the column, preceded by his elder two sons. Three more of his heirs rode further back.
‘We were bound for Hamada and we will still get there, though this is not the direct path. I had intended to spend this evening at the Oasis of Palms and Angels. The tribes are gathering there, a meeting of sheiks before our delegations present themselves to the caliph. We reach agreement in the desert before entering the city. Ibn Fayed receives his vassals once a year and it is better to speak to the throne with one voice so that our requests may be heard more clearly.’
‘And are we still aiming for the oasis?’
The sheik snorted phlegm, a custom the locals seem to have learned from the camels. ‘Sometimes Allah sends us messages. Sometimes they’re written in the sand and you have to be quick to read them. Sometimes it’s in the flight of birds or the scatter of a lamb’s blood and you have to be clever to understand them. Sometimes an infidel drops on you in the desert and you’d have to be a fool not to listen to them.’ He glanced my way, lips pressed into a bitter line. ‘The oasis lies three miles west of the spot we found you. Hamada lies two days south.’
Many men would have chosen to take my warning to the oasis. I felt a moment of great relief that Malik al’Hameed was not one of them, or right now instead of riding directly away from whatever was coming I would be three miles from it, trying to convince a dozen sheiks to abandon their oasis.
‘And if they all die?’
‘Ibn Fayed will still hear a single voice.’ The sheik nudged his camel on. ‘Mine.’
A mile further on it occurred to me that although Hamada lay two days south, we were in fact heading east. I pulled up alongside the sheik again, displacing a son.
‘We’re no longer going to Hamada?’
‘Tahnoon tells me there is a river to the east that will carry us to safety.’
I turned in my saddle and gave the sheik a hard stare. ‘A river?’
He shrugged. ‘A place where time flows differently. The world is cracked, my friend.’ He held a hand up toward the sun. ‘Men fall from the sky. The dead are unquiet. And in the desert there are fractures where time runs away from you, or with you.’ A shrug. ‘The gap between us and whatever this danger of yours is will grow more quickly if we crawl this way than if we run in any other direction.’
I had heard of such things before, though never seen them. On the Bremmer Slopes in the Ost Reich there are bubbles of slo-time that can trap a man, releasing him after a week, a year, or a century, to a world grown older while he merely blinked. Elsewhere there are places where a man might grow ancient and find that in the rest of Christendom just a day has passed.
We rode on and perhaps we found this so-called river of time, but there was little to show for it. Our feet did not race, our strides didn’t devour seven yards at a time. All I can say is that evening arrived much more swiftly than expected and night fell like a stone.
I must have turned in my saddle a hundred times. If I had been Lot’s wife the pillar of salt would have stood on Sodom’s doorstep. I didn’t know what I was looking for, demons boiling black across the dunes, a plague of flesh-scarabs … I remembered the Red Vikings chasing us into Osheim what seemed a lifetime ago and half-expected them to crest a dune, axes raised. But, whatever fear painted there, the horizon remained stubbornly empty of threat. All I saw was the Ha’tari rear-guard, strengthened at the sheik’s request.
The sheik kept us moving deep into the night until at last
