P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

“Byrne?” the latter called, cradling her, craning to look over the mob. “Come help with your mother. Curse it, where is that boy?”

Jame’s ten-command took their assigned position a quarter of the way down the line of march, near Ean’s wagon. Evensong greeted her with near hysteria, reaching up to clutch her hand.

“You’ll take care of my beloved, won’t you? Promise!”

“There now.” Gaudaric patted her back. “I’m sure the lass has enough to manage already.” But his eyes pleaded, for the sake of his daughter.

“I promise,” said Jame, adding prudently, “to the extent that I can.”

“True, you’ve a challenging trek ahead. I went once, when I was young. Now it’s Ean’s turn. Don’t let the monotony of the desert seduce you into carelessness. It holds unexpected threats.”

Now he tells me?

He read her expression and slapped her raw-boned bay on the shoulder, making the excited gelding hop sideways, nearly stepping on Jorin. The ounce crouched, sprang up onto the wagon, and burrowed under its tarpaulin, leaving only the white tip of his tail atwitch in the open. Something there caught his attention, but Jame was too busy to notice.

“Truly,” Gaudaric was saying, “I would have told you more if I could, but everything that happens in the Wastes lies under King Krothen’s oath of secrecy. I haven’t even been able to tell my own son-in-law as much as I would have liked, although I’ve given him hints. Your seniors will have shared with you what they know. Note, though, that they are only allowed to travel with the caravan so far. If anything happens beyond that point, it’s no longer under your control, and precious little will be before that.”

The assistant wagon masters were shouting through trumpets, down the line. It was a big caravan—one hundred and fifty wagons carrying trade goods, water, food, fodder, and fuel. Each trader was expected to provide the latter four items for his own team and crew. The first lurched off down the southern road. Standing in her stirrups, Jame saw that it carried the middle-aged, blond seeker whom she had last seen during the raid on the small caravan during the summer. An old woman sat next to her on the high seat, rail-thin and white-haired. The other wagons followed one by one, like pulling out a skein of knobby yarn. Now Ean was maneuvering into position with many shouts at his team interspersed with farewells called to his wife.

Evensong collapsed against her father’s chest.

“Byrne!” he shouted, holding her, still scanning the turbulent crowd, now in motion. “ Byrne !”

“Good-bye! Good-bye!” people cried, drowning him out.

The travelers passed through the South Gate, out between the fields, dust roiling up under thousands of hooves and wheels. Ahead rose the dusky mountains, and beyond that, as yet unseen, the open desert.

That first night, they camped halfway up the Apollynes, the terraced slopes stretching down behind them to the dark valley floor. Level with them were the distant lights of Kothifir, sparkling as if in imitation of the stars above. Some gazed longingly back. Most thought only of what lay ahead.

The next day they reached Icon Pass, with much scrambling up the steep road. This time the lights shone above them among the peaks where the fortress known as Mountain Station overlooked both flanks of the range. Snow crowned the heights and the air was frosty. Campfires blossomed beside the wagons. Jame and Timmon played a game of Gen in her tent before she turned him out, protesting, into the night.

On the third day the travelers crossed the pass. Horses leaned back on their hocks against the downward slope and the weight pressing close behind them. Stones rattled down the steep incline. Switchbacks helped for a while, then were left behind. Streams plunged past, fed by the beginning of the rainy season, and the sloping meadows were green. Goatherders watched them pass while edging their flocks out of reach, but the travelers still had plentiful supplies of their own and only laughed at such caution.

On the fourth day they continued to descend through the mountains’ southern foothills, then through date palm groves fed by the Apollynes’ largesse of streams. The desert itself enfolded them almost by stealth. The land flattened into a rock-studded plain with diminishing vegetation and waterways disappearing underground. The monotony Gaudaric had warned about lay on all sides, broken only by silently dancing dust devils and the occasional bush. It was much hotter by day, but when the sun set, the temperature dropped sharply. Jorin hunted by night, usually returning before daybreak with cold paws which he kneaded against Jame’s stomach, claws retracted, under their shared blanket. So it went for several days as the caravan followed the ancient, subterranean stream with its occasional, increasingly gritty wells and stands of dusty palm trees.

Riding behind Ean’s wagon, Jame noticed that it was dribbling water. When she called this to his attention, he untied the tarpaulin, threw it back, and discovered Byrne curled up in a snug hollow that he had made by partaking freely of their supplies. The water came from the wagon’s reserve tank which the boy had tapped and insufficiently closed, with the result that a quarter of it had drained away.

Ean clutched at his curly hair. “What am I going to do with you?” he demanded, distraught, of his young son. “Your mother must be frantic, and your grandfather too!”

“I’m here, Papa,” said the boy with implacable logic and a dimpled, self-satisfied smile. “Now you have to take me with you.”

Indeed, Ean had no choice. He couldn’t turn back himself, given what his father-in-law had staked on this expedition, and no one else would, however much he offered to pay them.

On the tenth day, they came to the last oasis, set in the dusty trading town of Sashwar on the edge of rolling sand dunes.

“How long do we stay here?” Jame asked.

“Long enough to prepare for the deep desert,” said Ean.

He extracted a pot from his load, broke the seal and began to smear its contents on the sloping front of his wagon.

“What’s that stuff?” asked Dar as the trader worked his way to the boards underneath. Byrne crawled after him, as usual getting in the way. Other veterans were performing similar work on their rigs, watched with amusement by the less-experienced drivers.

Ean held up a glistening glob. “I don’t know exactly. Gaudaric brought it back from the heart of the Wastes years ago on his one trip there, but it feels, smells, and tastes—ugh—like congealed fish oil.”

While he worked, Jame took Byrne to explore the town, such as it was. Her ten-command came too. A clutch of drivers whistled after pretty Mint, who made a flirtatious show of ignoring them.

Damson snorted.

“One of these days,” Jame said, “you’re going to get into trouble.”

“I like trouble,” said Mint, pouting, “the right sort, at least.”

At a primitive inn they ate fried locust on toast and goat cheese curds, washed down with bitter tea. Jame noted the women’s veils, reminiscent of the Kencyr Women’s World, and the men’s cheches , out of which tufts of hair poked like a furry fringe around their faces. She wondered if the latter were the ends of braids. Under her own head covering, her hair was also tightly woven Merikit style, those strands on the left side for men she had killed, those on the right for children she had supposedly sired as the Earth Wife’s male Favorite. Did the desert tribes follow a similar code? Whom did they worship anyway? The Four or their desert equivalents? Urakarn’s Dark Prophet or the Witch King of Nekrien? There were even rumors of a tribe sworn to the Three-Faced God, rather to the embarrassment of his Kencyr followers who would hardly have wished him (or her, or it) on anyone else.