THE SILK TREE

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

The next day the river died. Flat and broad it had been their security with the glittering water path always with them. Now there was just the wadi, wind-blown dust and a spreading desolation. The only water was in their precious gourds and water skins. And if the dry bed disappeared entirely, where was their path?

They kept on. The dunes were now at a stupendous height – towering to over a thousand feet between valley and crest.

That night, as soon as the camels were seen to, Marius lined Nicander, Arif and the women up and, one by one, granted a single gulp of water, a ceremony he had performed at strict intervals during the day. ‘No boiling, no cooking in water, nothing.’

The wind got up. It droned and whistled, finding every hole and slit and filling the tents with a fine dust that settled a gritty coating over everything.

Nicander lay with his covering over his head, unable to sleep. Had they made the right decision to come to this hellish land, where humans had no right to trespass? The alternative was seven years’ imprisonment. That bastard Taw would make sure of it. But they at least would be safe, not in this demented wilderness.

The wind increased, shaking and flapping the tent – but then there was something else. Tremors through the ground, a deeper pitch to the wind and at the back of it all… the sound – of a great army on the move.

‘Did you hear that, Marius?’ he said breathlessly.

The noise wavered and strengthened, the concussion of thousands of feet, the rumble of wagons from out of the darkness.

‘They’re coming for us!’

‘I hear it,’ came Marius’s voice, sounding not as steady as usual.

Intertwining it was a distant calling, a sad keening, the words not quite understandable.

Nicander’s mind whirled – for he could make it out now. They were calling to him, pleading with him to go outside and come to them.

‘It’s the demons of the Flowing Sands!’ gasped Arif. ‘They after us!’

Nicander stared into the near impenetrable dimness where only the indistinct shapes of Marius and Arif could be made out.

Outside the wind blustered and moaned and the calls grew more desperate.

Then he sensed a presence – close outside. A scrabbling and movement.

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.