Written in the Ashes (45 page)

Tarek began to squirm. “What are you doing with that knife? Am I going to die? I am going to die, I know it!”

“Hold still, Tarek,” said Gideon as Alizar and Jemir came walking out from behind the rocky outcropping. “It is no use,” said Alizar, shaking his head. “We could not find it.”

Gideon nodded thoughtfully and said, “It was probably a wind scorpion.” Then he lifted his knife and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Now Tarek, I could kill you right now for the way you stare at my bride. You will die of a scorpion bite, and I will bury you myself, or you can swear you will never look at her or touch her for as long as you live, do you understand me?” Gideon pressed the blade against Tarek’s throat until there was a trickle of blood. Tarek whined and nodded. “Good,” Gideon snarled in his ear as he drew three small slits across Tarek’s neck with the knife to vent the poison.

Alizar scanned the horizon. “We best get moving. The day is already ahead of us. Tarek can ride one of the camels.” Alizar placed a hand on one knee to steady himself, then rose to his feet.

They continued through the heat of the day under a mostly vacant sky where the fibrous clouds receded upwards in the heat, traversing a desolate landscape of flat, parched ground where they occasionally encountered one of Cleopatra’s stone cairns, still standing after hundreds of years, marking the way to the oasis. The edges of the pale blue sky and the striated blond earth bled together at the horizon in a fine wash of color that made each of the travelers feel that they were trapped in a vast and unchanging landscape without nearing their destination at all.

Gideon covered Tarek’s welt every few hours with fresh clay, and for those first hours of the morning it seemed that Tarek had fought off the worst of the venom and would be fine, but by noon he had fallen into a feverish swoon and could no longer ride the camel that Jemir led along.

Alizar had brought extra provisions if they were to be set back a week in the desert, but not wanting to risk any delay, he was disinclined to stop the caravan till nightfall. They let Tarek rest on a litter they made with one of the camel blankets, giving him water often and asking him questions to keep him alert.

By nightfall they reached the edge of a small crater-shaped earthen pocket that backed up to another ocean of rolling dunes. It would be a suitable place to camp for the night, so the men unpacked the two camels and began to tend to Tarek as Hannah and Jemir prepared some food.

By that time Tarek, covered in sweat from the heat of the fever and drawing flies, slipped in and out of consciousness, complaining of numbness in his toes and fingers. Gideon had seen such severe symptoms only in the small children of the gypsies, but since Tarek had no body fat, there was nowhere for the venom to go except into his bloodstream.

“We have to bury him,” Gideon announced.

Alizar nodded in agreement. It might slow the symptoms. Praise Zeus, that morning he had hoped for the best and even ignored the severity of what had happened. Now Tarek was squirming on the ground, uttering nonsensical syllables, and even asking for his mother. What had he done? Alizar’s heart filled with an old sadness. He had clung to Tarek when his son died, for Tarek had been Theon’s best friend; to have Tarek near him was the closest thing to having his son alive. As Tarek lay on the cool ground, incoherent and weak, he realized that he had relied on the boy to be a bridge to someone already irretrievably lost.

The third death. Alizar had almost forgotten his own prediction. A bolt of fear flashed through him. He had to prevent it.

Alizar chose a place where the ground seemed less densely packed and began to dig with his bare hands. Without speaking, Gideon, Jemir and Hannah joined him with whatever tools they had. In less than an hour they created a deep trench in which to bury Tarek up to his neck.

“The desert has afflicted him, and so the desert must heal him,” said Gideon as they lay Tarek, limp as a sleeping cat, in the trench and covered him with the cool earth up to the dip in the base of his throat.

Alizar would not leave the boy’s side, to eat or to sleep. Every half hour or so he would tilt Tarek’s head back and pour water between his parted lips, most of which spilled down his chin onto the ground. The others awoke intermittently to relieve Alizar, but were always refused.

When morning arrived, Alizar cupped his palm to Tarek’s forehead to find that it was cool. And the pulse of life was still in his neck.

When they pulled Tarek out of the ground he was weak but coherent, retaining no memory of what had happened to him. But his recovery brought with it a new problem, namely that they had used up Tarek’s ration of water for the trek in an effort to flush the poison from his body. Now they had to divide the remaining rations of water between them. There would be no more morning tea, no more stews. There was just enough to make it to Siwa if they were careful. If need be, they could always collect their own urine and drink it.

The five days that followed led them over the steep shoulders of the dunes. Hannah found the walking exhausting in the unabating heat as she was always sinking in the sand, climbing the faces of the dunes only to slide back. Gideon provided her with his arm for support whenever she needed it, and Hannah found that she allowed him to help her. The child was fatiguing her, she knew, and she dared not tell him of it, not yet, not until she could better gauge how he would respond.

Tarek was still weak. He walked when he could, and rode one of the camels the rest of the time. The sting left him unusually taciturn, wearing a far-off expression as though he had traveled to the edge of a precipice and some part of him had not returned from that distant place. He answered any questions laconically, his eyes fixed elsewhere when he spoke.

So.

When Gideon had three pebbles left in his pocket, they came to a wide valley where the ruddy ground was covered in small white stones as flat and round as rose petals. Alizar picked up a handful of them and thrust them in his pocket for his daughter back at home, who always loved such little treasures.

Then, as he was standing up, something else caught his eye beside his foot. A hint of blue buried in the ground. Alizar nudged the earth away from the object with his fingertips and freed it.

It was an image of Horus, imprinted on a faience pawn. Alizar presented it to Gideon.

“A wonderful omen,” said Gideon. “Let us hope the falcon god guides us.”

When the day came that Gideon had one stone left in his pocket, the wind began to push them back, blasting their cheeks with sand. By noon it was impossible to press ahead. The caravan made a tight circle as the windstorm flung sand in all directions. It was too wild to attempt to erect a tent, so they huddled between the camels and stacked the camel bags beside them, covering the little fort with blankets to keep the sand out.

The storm did not subside till that night when, half buried, they pulled themselves from the sand. The caravan had made almost no progress that day, but it was too early to concern themselves. They set up camp and Jemir made fresh bread using a Bedouin technique by digging a hole in the sand. Gideon and Alizar continued to pour over the maps as Tarek trudged to the top of a dune and pulled out a roll of Pergamon parchment so he could draw, but after an hour he angrily shredded the parchment in front of him that had been quite a good charcoal depiction of the landscape, and threw it cursing into the wind.

The next day, Gideon dropped the last stone from his pocket as they struck out over the rolling sand. By midday, they came to the end of the dunes and began to traverse a long salt flat hemmed in by hills of rounded rock that rose up from the eastern and southern horizons. There were no cairns, no signs of the oasis. Just the endless expanse of dry desert.

That night they camped on a plateau overlooking a wide, flat plain. “I think we are south of the oasis here.” Gideon indicated the position on the map. Alizar tipped his head and squinted. “It is possible,” he said.

They decided that it might still be too soon to see the oasis, given the time they had lost during the windstorm and Tarek’s sickness, so they walked for another day and that evening they came to a ledge of caves and set up camp, the men trying to conceal from Hannah their deep concern, though she sensed it. Tarek checked their gear as the others gathered around a fire Jemir had made from camel dung. As they stretched their aching legs and backs, they chatted about their quest, and the discussion again led to Cyril.

“Someone should just kill him before it is too late,” said Gideon with a comical smile on his face, a wineskin in one hand that he had been saving in his haversack till now. He passed the grape to Alizar, who chuckled and took a swig. While the men voiced their complaints about Cyril, Tarek crept up to the fire. He hung back behind a large boulder, listening.

“He just needs a woman to remind him of the flesh,” offered Jemir, taking the wineskin from Alizar.

“What hag would touch him?” Gideon jested.

“Agreed,” said Alizar.

All this they spoke while Hannah slept with her head on Gideon’s lap as he stroked her hair. Sweet woman. He invested as much faith in her as in any man he might have traveled beside.

“He will never change,” said Alizar. “We just have to find a way to endure his stupidity, I fear.”

“He is a child,” said Gideon.

Jemir shook his head and downed a swig. “I agree with Alizar. He will never change. He is a coward at any age.”

As the men tossed out their sardonic opinions, Tarek skulked away, anger churning his blood. This proved his suspicions that the men were against him. Even Alizar had agreed with them. It made him furious. Had they been closer to Alexandria, he might have turned straight around.

“Hey, what has been keeping you?” Gideon left the fire to empty his bladder and found Tarek leaning against one of the boulders.

“I have been checking the camels,” said Tarek, his eyes steely and dark.

“Everything all right?” Gideon asked as he turned his back to piss off the ledge.

“Fine,” Tarek snapped, and he turned and walked away. In that moment, he decided he would make them pay. All of them. They would never call him a coward again.

Gideon shrugged and went on with his business.

As the days stacked together, they became even more careful of their water rations, but Hannah had not been accounted for in the initial packing, and Tarek’s trial had so diminished their supplies, the inevitable finally occurred.

A little over two weeks into their journey, and still no sign of Siwa, the caravan ran out of water, passing the last sheep bladder between them for an entire morning as they walked. By afternoon, they subsisted on the remainder of Gideon’s liquor, which only brought on dehydration from the alcohol. By evening, they were forced to capture and drink their own urine.

Alizar knew they had three days left at best. If they did not find Siwa soon, they would have to kill one of the camels.

Hannah watched as the men debated their options. Gideon and Alizar fell to arguing over the direction they were heading. Jemir just dabbed his forehead with a dusty white cloth and stared off to the horizon while Tarek looked at the ground, waiting. Hannah had no energy left to even consider breaking up the argument, so she sat down on her heels and closed her eyes, listening to the rush of blood in her ears.

As she sat, an old melody floated into her mind, one she had written as a child playing beside some stones in a stream. The lyrics always returned to the same refrain, which Hannah began to remember in threads that all wove back into one line, something about the sun and the sea and the silverfish, but the words did not matter.

As if in a trance, Hannah stood up and began to walk diagonally away from the rest of the caravan, her eyes closed, humming the melody.

Gideon stopped mid-sentence and thrust the map into Alizar’s hands, walking past him toward where Hannah was wandering off. “Hannah?” he called out, but she did not respond. She was sauntering like a dancer, eyes closed, humming a melody, and he felt certain she was becoming delirious.

Gideon moved to step in front of her to stop her, and Alizar’s hand fell on his shoulder. “No,” he said. “I think we should follow her.”

“Follow her?” said Gideon, befuddled. “First you say we are to move south, now west after a delirious woman?”

Alizar nodded and called out. “Jemir, you and Tarek stay here. We will be back in less than an hour.”

Hannah went on as if she did not hear, the melody filling her as she moved, singing what lyrics she could remember.

Alizar fell into step behind her with Gideon. “Let us see where she goes. She seems not delirious, but in a trance.”

Gideon shook his head and licked the blisters on his lips. “We are all going mad,” he said, but he too, followed Hannah.

Deep within Hannah’s rucksack, swaddled in a simple linen cloth, the broken half of the Emerald Tablet pulsed with light as it neared the place of its origin. A glint against Hannah’s chest caught her eye, and she looked down to see the shard of the tablet around her neck, glowing in the sunlight. She lifted it up to the afternoon sky and looked through it to behold a world awash with green. But the shard was so clear that as she walked, Hannah thought she saw a little demarcation in the green landscape. When she removed the shard from before her eyes, however, it was no longer there. Abruptly, she stopped, and turned to Alizar.