Tim Powers - Declare

“‘Nothing extraordinary,’” echoed bin Jalawi in a thoughtful tone, and the other two Bedu muttered to each other as they spread their robes and sat down. “Perhaps to the Franks the end of the world is nothing extraordinary.”

Hale found a place to sit on the windward side of the fire, and he accepted a plate of rice ladled from the pan that would recently have served as the camels’ drinking trough. He dug in hungrily with his right hand, licking his fingers, for he had brought only bread and cheese to sustain him during the day’s jolting drive.

“A few million bugs don’t make the end of the world,” he said to bin Jalawi around a mouthful of rice.

“It is metaphorical,” said bin Jalawi, using the English word.

In the twilight Hale could see several of the ruined forts of ancient Jabrin silhouetted against the purple sky. He knew that Jabrin had been a prosperous city long ago and that at some point the citizens had been driven out into the desert by a killing fever; the illness had abided at the place like a curse, and struck all the Arabs who had periodically made the attempt to live here since then. Oddly, travelers who stopped at the oasis never contracted the malady, and now the Bedu visited Jabrin only to use the wells and gather dates from the hundreds of date palms, which no one ever tended anymore.

Butterflies fluttered around Hale’s face as he ate-little orange and black painted ladies-and bin Jalawi nodded somberly when he saw Hale brushing them away.

“You know better than to inhale one of them, bin Sikkah,” he said, using Hale’s Bedu name now that they were in the sands, rather than the city name Tommo Burks. “But don’t crush them, or needlessly knock them into the fire.”

“Poor ghosts,” agreed one of the ’Al-Murra tribesmen. His gaunt face was sculpted into chiaroscuro gullies and prominences by the firelight as he too glanced around at the horizon notches that were the old forts. He wrung his hands for a moment as if washing them, then spread them to the sides, palm down. “At least they’re the ghosts of men. South of here will be ghosts of other things.”

Hale had read in the Hezar Efsan about ghosts of the A’adites. “The walking stones,” he said.

“Uskut!” the man exclaimed; the Arabic word meant shut up! “Name them not!”

One of the butterflies had landed on bin Jalawi’s palm, and he breathed softly on it, ruffling its wings but not dislodging it. “If you can hear,” he said to it, “and think, remember us in your morning prayers; even the Nazrani .”

Hale smiled sourly, but he was sure that if the butterflies were indeed ghosts, they were fragments of identity too minimal to be capable of thought. He sniffed the stone-scented wind and thought that there was no sentience at all in the miles of dark desert surrounding them; far away to the north and south might be hidden isolated clusters of warm Bedu tents, with perhaps overhead in the dark sky the astronomical distortions that indicated the passage of djinn through the Heaviside Layer, but the Jabrin region felt empty.

He knew that the desert south of them would not be empty; and he tried to pray, but in spite of his best efforts he found that his mental Pater Nosters quickly degenerated into a sterile recitation of the London Underground stations. Once again he envied Elena her faith.

“Bug,” he said in useless English to the fluttering nullity on bin Jalawi’s palm, “in your orisons, be all my sins remembered.”

When he had finished the rice and scoured the plate with a couple of handfuls of sand, he wiped his hands on his dishdasha robe and then unzipped the longer of the two leather cases he had carried from the jeep; he lifted out of it a slim Mannlicher 9.5-millimeter carbine and a canvas bag of loaded stripper-clips, and another canvas bag that contained four custom-machined iron ankhs, wrapped in linen cloths to prevent clinking. Doubtless his Bedu companions imagined that the second bag contained spare cartridges on clips like the first-they would be scandalized by the sight of the devilish ankhs-and Hale decided not to trouble them with an explanation of the Egyptian looped crosses until the party had reached the regions where their protection would be necessary.

Hale didn’t have to goad his Bedu companions to ride hard during the cool January days; his only worry was that one or even all three of them might be missing at prayer time one dawn.

The wind was steadily at their backs from the north. When the sun was bright and there were high dunes to be crested-with the wind casting long dazzling streamers of sand from the topmost ridges, and the camels plunging single-file down the lee slopes to expose streaks of lighter-colored sand under the dark tan top layer-Hale dizzily felt that somehow they had climbed up into the sky and were plodding across the top surfaces of clouds. And when they crossed the desert’s gypsum stone floor between dunes in thrashing rain, with the camels’ hooves clattering among primordial seashells, he imagined he was in the vanguard of the Pharaoh’s army, pursuing Moses across the floor of the Red Sea in the moments before the unnaturally sustained walls of water would break and crash back in.

And he came to appreciate the expertise of his guides; most of the covered wells were mounds identifiable by the camel tracks that led to them and the camel dung and date-stones that paved their surroundings, but several times he saw one of his guides ride directly to an anonymous sand hummock in a trackless landscape and confidently dismount and kick away drifted sand to expose the hides and timbers that covered a hidden well. Some of the wells they found had deliberately been left uncovered, either by raiding parties or by home tribes wanting to keep invaders from getting the water, and these wells had been filled in and covered by the drifting dunes. He was told that clearing the sand out of the shafts was not an impossible task for a tribe, and that in fact all the well shafts in the desert had simply been found, and cleared by the Bedu, rather than actually bored; the wells, cut straight down through red sandstone and white limestone, were reputedly the work of a very old civilization that had flourished in the days when great rivers had flowed across the Rub’ al-Khali.

On the sixth day out from Jabrin they watered the camels and refilled the water-skins at the wells of Tuwairifah-and then they had left the last known wells behind, and they took extra care to strap the water-skins high up on the camels, secured against accidental bursting or puncture.

Under emptied blue skies the party of eight camels zigzagged onward southeast through the parallel dunes of the vast Bani Mukassar, keeping to the gravelly desert floor and crossing the dunes at shallow gaps that notched the mountains of sand like passes. All four of the travelers preferred to ride during the day, when the sun blotted out the malign stars, but twice when they had had to march for a long distance along a dune to find a crossing place, they made up for the lost time by riding at night-and though on one of these long, plodding nights there was no moon, the planet Jupiter glowed brightly enough in the sky to cast shadows on the dimly glowing sand, and Hale could see a faint luminosity around his companions and the camels. His party was now very far away from any outposts of men, and when he looked up at the stars of the Southern Cross in the infinite vault overhead, or gauged his course by the position of Antares in Scorpio on the southern horizon, it seemed that the postwar world of London and Paris and Berlin was astronomically distant and that he and his companions were the only human beings seeing these stars.

Riding or camping, they always spoke quietly at night; and even in the noon sun the oppression of the region kept his guides from indulging in the falsetto singing with which Bedu generally filled the time on long marches. They took turns standing guard while they were camped, and Hale saw that in the mornings one of his guides always paced out across the sands looking for the tracks of any stones that might have crept up out of the darkness to investigate the heat of their fire.