Julian Stockwin - THE SILK TREE

He lay rigid with fear.

A dim shape passed across the laced-up entrance working at the loop.

Then into their tent burst first one then another giant demon. Nicander opened his mouth to shriek but one sobbed, ‘We couldn’t sleep, we were frightened.’ A cringing Ying Mei and Tai Yi crouched before them in the crowded tent.

The next day they set off in a still blustering wind with stinging particles that had them winding cloths around their heads and hands. It relented as the day’s heat began but the river bed was getting indistinct. They followed it around in a long sweeping curve and there ahead was a speck of green. This meant water – they were still on track!

The camels got the scent and increased their pace.

‘Thank God!’ croaked Nicander, as he made out a pool thirty feet across, with a few reeds and tamarisks growing at the edge.

Marius held up a warning hand. ‘I’ll try it first.’

He touched the water to his lips but quickly spat it out. He gave a grim smile. ‘We can’t have it but the camels will.’

Meng Hsiang and Ordut were soon showing their appreciation, throwing sprays of water over their bodies and giving hoarse roars of satisfaction as they drank.

Nicander and Arif sluiced water over themselves while Marius went to the other side of the pool and cast about. But there was no river bed to follow at all now, just dreary plain, ending against the slope of a massive dune.

He returned to the little group. ‘I won’t hide it from you. We’re in trouble. We can’t be sure this is the main river or if we’ve been following a branch off it to its end. Now we can turn round and go back, looking for signs in the river bed where the main went off in another direction – if ever it did.

‘Or we could go back on our tracks to reach the last place with good water. Either way we’ll run out of rations because we’ll be three times covering the same ground. The other side o’ the coin is to go on, see if the water comes back to the surface further on, hoping it’s the main stream. Which direction do we go to find it – the last way it was headed? Or do we give up looking and strike south and hope we pick it up again?’

‘It’s your decision, Marius,’ Nicander said almost in a whisper. ‘Which will it be?’

‘We stop here and set up for the night.’

‘Marius, it’s only the morning!’

‘Now why didn’t I notice that?’ the legionary said with a wintry grin. ‘No, you bastards are going to wait here in comfort while me and Meng Hsiang go up that dune and spy out the land.’

The crest was a thousand feet above them. The trip would take hours.

They stood watching as the lone camel angled up the dune, a tiny dot on the immensity of sand slowly ascending until it disappeared around the flank.

In the late afternoon Marius was spotted again and by evening he had returned.

‘No news,’ he said tersely. ‘Can’t see a thing that’s for sure a river. Only these fucking dunes like waves on a sea. They go on and on and you can’t see down between ’em to check if there’s a river there. I’m… I’m sorry.’

They were lost.

‘Thank you, Ah Wu. You did try – for all of us,’ Ying Mei said softly.

Nicander wondered how she could be so calm. Did she not know… But then he realised it was the strength of her character, the same self-discipline that had made her the Ice Queen as she had struggled to keep her appearance before the world in hideous times when others would have given up long before.

And now she was maintaining a normality that was calming their anxieties and preserving their humanity for the final trial.

His heart cried for them all.

Marius gave his decision. ‘We head south.’

They moved off quietly and soon came to the first dune. They began climbing at a shallow angle, their feet sinking into the soft sand at every step.

Marius positioned the women to the left and right of Meng Hsiang, Nicander and Arif either side of Ordut. The camels hardly noticed the soft going and were able to help pull them along bodily. He remained in front, stolidly pacing ahead.

They eventually reached the top – an infinity of dunes stretched in every direction. No mountain ranges, telltale oases, winding rivers or flat plains.

The hot wind was brisk on the crest, driving sand in curling spindrifts to the lee of each. But at least they would be spared the agony of constantly toiling uphill – the giant crescents were oriented in their favour, to the north and south.

‘Ma sheng ,’ Arif said diffidently.

‘Yes?’

‘The sand harder where the wind blow.’

Nicander was grateful: a little below the crest on the side from where the wind blew it was firmer going with the more compacted grains.

Unspoken was the realisation that their desolation was complete. Not a single living thing other than themselves and the camels, nothing but dunes and the cruel unblinking sun.

With every step he could feel the sloshing about in his precious gourd of water. How curious to realise that there was a simple equation that ruled everything: water in the gourd equalled life, none equalled death.

The odds were now very much against them pulling through.

He found himself thinking: what would Dao Pa have said? There was no way of knowing but he vowed to meditate that night and prepare his soul.

The resolution cheered him a little.

In a way the dull repetition of their slogging progress insulated him from despair. Each dune was different, all the dunes were the same. Sometimes it blew harder than other times, one time Ying Mei would be to the left of Ordut, then it would be the right.

She was muffled in flapping clothing but he knew and cherished the image of her valiant trudge.

At the end of the day the tents could not be put up as there was nothing firm to take the pegs so as darkness closed in they were reduced to curling up in the lee of the camels below the crest with every piece of clothing they could find against the bitter cold.

Nicander’s dreams were always the same: sparkling, refreshing water. But as he raised it to his lips he would jerk awake, parched.

Each morning they would take a gulp of water and refill the gourds at the water skins, trying to ignore the sight of their increasingly flaccid appearance.

Marius would then yet again go to the highest point and meticulously scan every quadrant. He would give a quick shake of the head and growl, ‘Move!’ and they would lurch into motion.

Finding the general direction of south was easy enough: at night the dazzling display of stars revealed it while in the day the centre of the arc of the sun was always south. But when would their agony end?

Thirst became a torment. The single-gulp discipline took inhuman control but under the eyes of all it was impossible to cheat. For a brief few minutes the mouth would be moist, the tongue free – then in the pitiless heat it would thicken and loll, the taste of dust always there.

Another day and night passed.

And in front, always, Marius striding on.

He would grimly administer the water ceremony at the stops, his voice hoarse but still hard, his skin wrinkled, his eyes sunken and feverish.

They were all suffering but none complained or criticised. Ying Mei was a slight, stooped figure with flushed face and hands that trembled as she took her water. A sun-ravaged Tai Yi kept close by all the time. Arif had taken to dropping his head in silent misery as he went about his duties.

Now the last water skin was empty – what they had in their gourds was all that remained.

Still there was no sign of deliverance. The nature of the dunes was becoming complex, the edge of the crests splitting and joining and making a straight course impossible even if they seemed to be becoming less massive.