Desert God (20 page)

However, we dared not dally here; for every day we used up huge quantities of the precious sweet water.

The main convoy and the baggage train had left many days ahead of us. By this time they must have covered more than a hundred leagues. On the second day after our arrival in Arabia we mounted the horses and riding camels and set out after them.

A
s soon as we moved away from the moderating influence of the sea, the high sun soon became too fierce to allow us to travel during the middle of the day. From then onwards we began each march in the late afternoon when the sun had lost a little of its stinging malice. We travelled on through the night, stopping only for an hour around midnight to water the horses and the camels from the cache that the main caravan had left for us to find. Then we journeyed on after the sunrise. When the heat became unbearable we erected the tents and lay sweating in their shade, until the sun sank low enough to allow us to repeat the cycle.

After fifteen days and nights we finally caught up with the main column of the caravan. By this time the leather water bags were more than half empty, with merely a few gallons of slimy green and foul-tasting water sloshing about in the bottom of them. I was forced to cut the daily ration down to four mugs a day a man.

We had now entered the desert proper. The dunes rolled away before us in endless profusion. Our horses were showing signs of distress. When they were carrying even a lightweight rider the soft sand made the going extremely onerous for them. I turned them loose to join the herd of remounts at the head of the caravan, and I selected the finest racing camels as replacements for the girls and the rest of our party.

Al Namjoo assured me that the next water lay only a few days’ march ahead of us. So I took the girls, together with Zaras and his escort of picked men, and we rode ahead of the main column to find the promised waterhole.

Al Namjoo gave me Haroun, his eldest son, to guide us. We were able to travel much faster than the main body. We rode hard through the night, and in the first flush of dawn Haroun reined in on the top of another monstrous dune of brick-red-coloured sand and he pointed ahead.

Before us stretched a high cliff of striated rock. The horizontal layers were of contrasting but vivid colours, varying from honey gold and chalky white to shades of red and blue and black. Some of the softer layers had been wind eroded more deeply than those above and below them. These formed overhanging galleries and deep elongated caverns almost as though they had been designed by a demented architect.

‘This place is called the Miyah Keiv,’ Haroun told us. I was able to translate this from the Arabic as meaning ‘the Water Cave’.

Haroun led us up under the vertical rock wall, at the base of which opened a low-roofed lateral fissure. It was just high enough for a tall man to enter without bending, but it was more than a hundred paces wide and so deep and shaded that I could not see how far it undercut the cliff.

‘The water lies in the depths of this cave,’ Haroun told us. The princesses and Loxias urged their camels to kneel, and then they jumped down from the carved wooden saddles. I led the three of them into the opening, while Zaras held his men back to give us space to ourselves.

The stone floor dropped away gradually under our feet, and as we descended the daylight faded and the air grew cooler, until the contrast in temperature to that of the direct heat of the sun outside made us shiver.

By now I could smell the water, and hear it dripping somewhere ahead of us. My throat clenched with thirst. I tried to swallow but there was little saliva in my mouth. The girls tugged at my hands and dragged me down to the bottom of the incline.

A large pool lay before us, the surface gleaming with reflected light from the cave entrance. That same light created the illusion that the water itself was black as cuttlefish ink. None of us hesitated but with gleeful cries we plunged in to it, still wearing our tunics and sandals. I knelt until the water reached to my chin. I looked down at my own body and saw that the water, far from being black, was clear as the diamond I had given to Tehuti. I filled my mouth and sighed with pleasure.

I have drunk the finest wine from the cellars of Pharaoh’s palace in Thebes, but none of it could match this divine and arcane spring.

The girls were in the centre of the pool; splashing me and one another; gasping and squealing at the cold. Encouraged by the uproar Zaras and his men came charging down the sloping floor. They were shouting and laughing, as they too flung themselves into the dark water.

When we had drunk all that our bellies could hold, the men filled the water-skins we had brought with us and carried them out to the camels. Zaras could not allow them to take the draught animals down to the pool. The rock roof was too low for them to pass beneath it; and the risk of them fouling that sublime water with their droppings was too great.

H
aroun confirmed my own estimate that the main caravan was at least three days behind us at this stage. This did not worry me unduly, for the girls were tired out by the journey and this would give them a chance to rest and fully regain their strength.

What really concerned me was our vulnerability in this place. The location of the waterhole would be well known to all the Bedouin tribes for hundreds of leagues around. We were a small party, but our animals, weapons and armour were highly valued by the tribes and would be attractive to the lawless elements amongst them. If they learned of our presence at the waterhole and knew how few there were in our party we would be in grave danger. We must keep alert and make certain that we were not taken off guard.

As soon as Zaras and his men had refreshed themselves, I brought them out of the cavern and I posted our sentries and organized our defences to secure the area.

Then I took Zaras and Haroun with me to explore our immediate surroundings and search for any signs that other human beings might have been here recently.

All three of us were fully armed. I carried my longbow slung over one shoulder and a quiver of thirty arrows over the other. In addition my bronze sword hung in its scabbard on my right hip.

When we reached the top of the nearest dune we separated. But before we parted we agreed to meet back at the Miyah Keiv before the sun reached its zenith, which would happen in about an hour. I sent Zaras to make a circle out in a northerly direction, and Haroun to investigate what appeared to be a caravan trail in the valley below us. I followed the high dune towards the south.

It was difficult to remain unobserved for there was almost no cover in this terrain, but I took pains to keep off the skyline where an enemy could spot me from a great distance.

I soon found myself enchanted by this landscape that was barren and bleak, but at the same time was hauntingly beautiful. It was an infinity of dunes that were as mutable as the swells of a tranquil sea; smooth and pliant as the body of a beautiful woman, devoid of hard edges, malleable and sculptured. The peaks of these waves of sand were being gnawed at by the wind, changing shape before my eyes. Footprints and hoof prints would become indistinguishable from each very quickly, and would disappear completely soon after that.

As I moved through it I found nothing in this other world to indicate to me that man or beast had ever existed here; until suddenly I noticed a small piece of sun-bleached bone protruding from the sand at my feet. I knelt to dig it loose, and was surprised to find that it was the skull and short gaping beak of a nightjar. The bird must have been blown so far from its usual haunts by unseasonable winds.

I turned back and slid down the face of the dune. When I reached the bottom I headed towards the entrance of the subterranean pool. As I approached it I heard the shrieks of feminine laughter and the splashing of water from within.

Zaras had returned before me. He and his men had unsaddled the camels and moved them in under the overhang of the entrance to the cavern, to kneel where they were shaded from the direct sunlight. The men were grooming them and feeding them their rations of corn in leather nosebags. I called to Zaras.

‘Did you find anything?’

‘No, my lord. Nothing.’

‘Where is Haroun? Has he returned yet?’

‘Not yet, but he will be back shortly,’ he answered. I hesitated at the mouth of the cavern. Everything seemed perfectly normal and commonplace. I could not understand the reason for the sense of anxiety that was nagging at me; but I knew enough not to dismiss it.

Instead of entering the cavern I turned aside and followed the wall of rock in the opposite direction. I was out of sight of the cavern entrance when I reached a point where a narrow fissure cleft the vertical face of the rock. I had not noticed this fault before, and I studied it for a moment and decided that I might be able to climb up to the top of the cliff and see what lay beyond. I reached out and tentatively placed my hand on the exposed rock.

The sun had heated the surface so that it burned me like a live coal. I jerked my hand away so sharply that I dropped the bird skull I was still carrying. I sucked my scalded finger until the pain eased, and then I stooped to retrieve the skull. I paused before my fingers touched it.

Close up against the rock wall where the wind had not yet eroded it was a single human footprint in the packed sand. As I stared at it one side of the footprint collapsed in a soft slither of sand, demonstrating how recently it had been made.

It had certainly not been made by one of my girls. This was the print of a large masculine foot wearing a sandal with a smooth leather sole. I could still hear faintly the voices and occasional laughter of Zaras and his men behind me. I returned quickly to a point from where I could see the cavern entrance and the group of men standing in front of it. One quick glance was enough for me to make absolutely certain of what I knew already. All the men were wearing regulation military sandals with brass-studded soles.

There was a stranger amongst us.

My next thought was for the safety of my girls. I cocked my head to listen to the voices that were still issuing from deep in the cavern. I recognized two of them immediately, but I was unable to distinguish the third. Trying to conceal my perturbation from the men I strode back past them and entered the cavern. I went quickly down the sloping stone floor to the edge of the pool. I paused for a moment to allow my eyes to adapt to the gloom, and I stared at the pale and nubile bodies that were tumbling and swirling in the dark waters like frolicking otters. But there were only two of them.

‘Bekatha!’ I yelled at her, my voice rising with the onset of panic. ‘Where is Tehuti?’ Her head bobbed up with the red-gold hair smeared wetly over her face.

‘She went outside to make an offering to Seth, Tata!’ This was their girlish euphemism for the culmination of the human digestive process.

‘Which way did she go?’

‘I didn’t watch her. She just said she was going out to do it.’

Tehuti was a fastidious child. I knew she would have hidden herself away before she performed any intimate bodily functions. She would not have stayed in the cavern. She would have gone out into the desert. I ran back to the entrance of the cave. Zaras and his men were still where I had last seen them grouped at the left-hand side of the entrance. Once more I shouted at Zaras.

‘Did you see Princess Tehuti leave the cave?’

‘No, my lord.’

‘What about the rest of you men? Did any of you see her?’ They shook their heads dumbly.

Tehuti would have avoided them. Perhaps she had found another exit from the cavern, I told myself. I turned and ran back past the cleft in the rock face where I had seen the alien print.

‘Horus, hear me!’ I entreated my god, praying with the full force of my psyche, unleashing the strange power within me that I have learned to call upon in times of deep and desperate need. ‘Open my eyes, O Horus. Let me see. O my sweet God, let me see!’

I closed my eyes tightly for ten beats of my heart, and when I opened them again my vision had taken on a lucent lustre. The great god Horus had heard me. I was seeing with my inner eye. Around me colours were more vivid, shapes were starker and with sharper edges to them.

I looked along the bottom of the rock wall, and I saw her. It was not Tehuti but it was the memory of where she had recently been, like an echo or a shadow of herself. It was a smudge against the brightness, a tiny intangible cloud. It was not even human in shape or outline but I knew it was her. She was dancing away from me, keeping parallel to the striated wall of rock.

I knew instinctively that she was being pursued, and that she was trying to escape from danger. I could feel her fear resonating in my own heart and tasted the terror of it on the back of my tongue.

‘To arms, Zaras!’ I roared. I did not realize that my voice was capable of such power. ‘Leave five men to guard Bekatha and Loxias. The rest of you mount up and follow me!’

Knowing that Zaras had heard me, I ran on without looking back, concentrating my everything on the evanescent cloud that was not Tehuti, but that was her very essence.

Suddenly I had wings under my feet. I ran faster and still faster, but the little cloud matched my speed sucking me along as though I was caught in its wake. Then abruptly it dissolved into nothingness at the point ahead of me where the striated rock wall turned back upon itself.

The lucent glow faded from my eyes, and my vision returned to normal. My feet slowed and became heavier, bereft of their god-given grace. I forced myself onwards until I reached the spot where she had faded away. I stopped with my breath sawing hoarsely in my lungs.

I looked around me wildly, but there was nothing. She had gone.

Then I looked down at the earth beneath me and I saw that although my vision of her had faded away, she had left the veritable prints of her bare feet in the sand where they were protected from the wind. I raised my eyes to follow them and I saw that only a short distance ahead they had been obliterated once again, but this time not by the wind. Rather, the sand had been churned by the feet of men wearing smooth-soled sandals. I could not tell how many there were of them but I guessed that there were a dozen or more. It was clear to me that Tehuti had been pursued by these men. When they had overtaken and seized her, she had put up a fight. I saw where and how she had struggled. Tehuti possessed the strength of a wildcat when she was aroused, but in the end they had overwhelmed her.