Tim Powers - Declare

Hale saw a couple of larks and noted that the birds did not fly, but hopped along over the sand; bin Jalawi told him that this was to evade birds of prey, which would notice the moving shadow of a bird in flight. “They know better than to draw attention,” bin Jalawi said ponderously.

Several times his companions shot hares, and though the Bedu only squeezed out the contents of the intestines before adding the carcasses to the rice pot, leaving the stomachs filled with whatever desert grasses the hares had grazed on, Hale found that his hunger outweighed his fastidiousness. Several times they saw foxes bounding across the gravel plains, and Hale dreaded the thought of eating one; but though desert foxes were considered lawful to eat, bin Jalawi told him that it would be madness to kill one in the region around Wabar. “Here they might be the old citizens,” bin Jalawi said. “‘Honor him who has been great and is fallen, and him who has been rich and is now poor.’”

Hale’s party reached the three wells of Um al-Hadid at sunset on January 27. The wells were in the bottom of a sand basin, and though they were recognizable by their characteristic mounds of stratified camel dung, the desert sands had filled them in long ago, and Hale saw no litter of date seeds around the mounds.

“The wells are long dead,” said the elder of the ’Al-Murra guides, “but we camp here. Wabar is only half a day’s ride farther.”

They were not able to find any bushes or roots at all for a fire, and so their dinner consisted of dates and brackish Tuwairifah water. In the fruitless digging for roots Hale did find a broken ostrich egg; he pointed it out to his companions, for ostriches had been extinct in Arabia for fifty or sixty years.

“I’ll bet it was laid and hatched right here,” Hale said, turning over a piece of shell as he squatted over the find.

“Probably it was broken by fire-worshippers,” said one of the guides grimly. “Bird eggs are anathema to djinn, and the fire-worshippers curry favor.”

Hale was reminded of the story “Aleiddin and the Enchanted Lamp,” a late and enigmatic addition to the text of the Thousand Nights and One Night. In the story, Aleiddin was at one point tricked into asking an obligated djinn for a roc’s egg to serve as a dome for his palace; and in reply the djinn angrily refused to kill the Queen of the Djinn. Hale had never understood why the fetching of the roc egg should involve the death of a powerful djinn, and he sensed that he had found a clue to the explanation here, in this Bedu’s remark-but the Bedu refused to say more, and Hale was too exhausted to press him. He thought of distributing the ankhs, but decided that it might now seem too much like the fire-worshippers currying favor, and he decided to hand them out tomorrow, before approaching Wabar.

The wind that had buffeted their backs for twelve days died to stillness during the night. Hale awoke when it stopped, and he lay there in his blankets on the sand for several seconds, staring up at the crescent of the new moon, wondering what sound had awakened him, before he concluded that the change had been the total cessation of the wind.

Only when he next awoke, shortly before dawn, did he notice that the ’Al-Murra guides had stolen away with four of the camels during the night.

Choking back a curse, he threw off his warm blankets and got to his feet to assess the supplies they had left; and they seemed to have divided the food and water evenly.

At least they had not taken the sand sled.

Salim bin Jalawi was at his dawn prayers, kneeling at a half-circle he had scored in the sand, bowing toward the west and Mecca. Hale looked around and did not see another line in the sand; the ’Al-Murrah must have left before prayer time, and were probably kneeling at a traced half-circle in the Tara’iz sands right now. Certainly they would not neglect it.

At last bin Jalawi stood up from the line in the sand and stared impassively at Hale. The sky in the east was pale blue and pink, though the sun had not yet appeared over the rim of the basin, and the still air was cold enough to make steam of both men’s breath.

“If we ride hard,” said bin Jalawi, “we could catch up with them.”

“No,” said Hale in a hoarse, tired voice. He scratched his bristly beard and yawned. “No, we will go on and get the egg-I mean, the big piece of iron. I hope four camels will be enough to haul it on the sled.”

“The devil take your sled,” said bin Jalawi mildly. He looked around at the sand basin they had camped in, clearly replaying in his mind the previous evening’s search for fuel; and he must have concluded that it had been thorough, for he shrugged and said, “Allah gives and Allah is pleased to take away. Coffee must wait until we find wood at Wabar.” He cocked his head then, listening, and he said, “They…return…?”

Soon Hale could hear it too, the almost liquid sound of camel hooves in sand. He crouched by his saddle and pulled the Mannlicher carbine out of the oiled-wool scabbard, then scrambled on all fours up the northwest sand slope; he slid the rifle barrel up to the crest of the slope, and then with his hand on the stock near the trigger guard he slowly raised his head to peer over the basin edge.

The four returning camels in head-on view were the only figures out in the lunar dawn landscape-and though saddlebags flopped at their sides as they plodded this way, there was no rider on any of the saddles.

“Fida’ at al Allah!” whispered bin Jalawi, who was now prone beside him. The phrase was one of farewell, meaning In the custody of God.

Clutching the carbine, Hale got to his feet and stepped slowly out across the still, icy sand to meet the camels. The beasts were walking normally, bobbing their big heads, and the saddlebags and water-skins didn’t appear to have been touched.

The guides might have been shot by bandits or a hostile tribe-but he and bin Jalawi would have heard shots in this stilled air, and the assailants would have taken the camels; and Hale couldn’t think of any other explanation…besides djinn. He was bleakly sure that he should have distributed the ankhs to the men last night.

The cold sky was a weight on his shoulders as he clucked his tongue at the camels and caught the reins of the leader. The beast lowered its head, and Hale slung the leather rifle strap over his shoulder and put his wool-booted foot on the camel’s neck and let it lift him up off the sand toward the saddle. The sun was a red point on the eastern horizon, and Hale imagined that it was peeking at him as he had peeked over the basin rim.

There was no blood on the flat board of the saddle; only, caught in the folds of the blanket and on the saddlebag flap buckles, a scatter of jewelry. Hale stepped across from the camel’s neck onto the small Oman saddle, and he knelt swayingly up there as he scraped and picked up a handful of the jewelry.

It was tiny sticks, some curved and some straight, made of glass and bone and bright gold; and not until he found a knobby round piece of gold as big as a marble and held it up to the light, and saw that it was a tiny scale model of a human skull, did he realize that the sticks were probably miniature sculptures of human bones.

He had heard Salim bin Jalawi’s footsteps approaching, and now bin Jalawi was up on the saddle of another of the returned camels, and Hale glanced over to see that he too was gathering up scattered jewelry.

“La-ila-il-l’ Allah!” bin Jalawi exclaimed abruptly, flinging the handful of gold and glass and bone slivers away from him in the dawn sunlight. “Drop them, bin Sikkah!”

The man’s response had startled Hale so badly that he not only scattered the miniature bones but jumped right off of the saddle too. He landed unbalanced on his feet and sat down hard in the cold sand, the slung carbine barrel cracking him painfully over the ear. “What the hell?” he said irritably in English, getting quickly to his feet to dispel any impression of panic.