“Where is this place?” he said hoarsely.
THIS IS NO PLACE, said Death .
. . . all alone . . .
“What is at the end of the desert?”
JUDGEMENT .
. . . with your beliefs . . .
Fri’it stared at the endless, featureless expanse.
“I have to walk it alone?” he whispered. “But . . . now, I’m not sure what I believe-”
YES?
AND NOW, IF YOU WILL EXCUSE ME-
Fri’it took a deep breath, purely out of habit. Perhaps he could find a couple of rocks out there. A small rock to hold and a big rock to hide behind, while he waited for Vorbis . . .
And that thought was habit, too. Revenge? Here?
He smiled.
Be sensible, man. You were a soldier. This is a desert. You crossed a few in your time.
And you survive by learning about them. There’s whole tribes that know how to live in the worst kinds of desert. Licking water off the shady sides of dunes, that sort of thing . . . They think it’s home. Put ’em in a vegetable garden and they’d think you were mad.
The memory stole over him: a desert is what you think it is. And now, you can think clearly . . .
There were no lies here. All fancies fled away. That’s what happened in all deserts. It was just you, and what you believed.
What have I always believed?
That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.
You couldn’t get that on a banner. But the desert looked better already.
Fri’it set out.
It was a small mule and Brutha had long legs; if he’d made the effort he could have remained standing and let the mule trot out from underneath.
The order of progression was not as some may have expected. Sergeant Simony and his soldiers rode ahead, on either side of the track.
They were trailed by the servants and clerks and lesser priests. Vorbis rode in the rear, where an exquisitor rode by right, like a shepherd watching over his flock.
Brutha rode with him. It was an honor he would have preferred to avoid. Brutha was one of those people who could raise a sweat on a frosty day, and the dust was settling on him like a gritty skin. But Vorbis seemed to derive some amusement from his company. Occasionally he would ask him questions:
“How many miles have we traveled, Brutha?”
“Four miles and seven estado, lord.”
“But how do you know?”
That was a question he couldn’t answer. How did he know the sky was blue? It was just something in his head. You couldn’t think about how you thought. It was like opening a box with the crowbar that was inside.
“And how long has our journey taken?”
“A little over seventy-nine minutes.”
Vorbis laughed. Brutha wondered why. The puzzle wasn’t why he remembered, it was why everyone else seemed to forget.
“Did your fathers have this remarkable faculty?”
There was a pause.
“Could they do it as well?” said Vorbis patiently.
“I don’t know. There was only my grandmother. She had-a good memory. For some things.” Transgressions, certainly. “And very good eyesight and hearing.” What she could apparently see or hear through two walls had, he remembered, seemed phenomenal.
Brutha turned gingerly in the saddle. There was a cloud of dust about a mile behind them on the road.
“Here come the rest of the soldiers,” he said conversationally.
This seemed to shock Vorbis. Perhaps it was the first time in years that anyone had innocently addressed a remark to him.
“The rest of the soldiers?” he said.
“Sergeant Aktar and his men, on ninety-eight camels with many water-bottles,” said Brutha. “I saw them before we left.”
“You did not see them,” said Vorbis. “They are not coming with us. You will forget about them.”
“Yes, lord.” The request to do magic again.
After a few minutes the distant cloud turned off the road and started up the long slope that led to the high desert. Brutha watched them surreptitiously, and raised his eyes to the dune mountains.
There was a speck circling up there.
He put his hand to his mouth.
Vorbis heard the gasp.
“What ails you, Brutha?” he said.
“I remembered about the God,” said Brutha, without thinking.
“We should always remember the God,” said Vorbis, “and trust that He is with us on this journey.”
“He is,” said Brutha, and the absolute conviction in his voice made Vorbis smile.
He strained to hear the nagging internal voice, but there was nothing. For one horrible moment Brutha wondered if the tortoise had fallen out of the box, but there was a reassuring weight on the strap.
“And we must bear with us the certainty that He will be with us in Ephebe, among the infidel,” said Vorbis.
“I am sure He will,” said Brutha.
“And prepare ourselves for the coming of the prophet,” said Vorbis.
The cloud had reached the top of the dunes now, and vanished in the silent wastes of the desert.
Brutha tried to put it out of his mind, which was like trying to empty a bucket underwater. No one survived in the high desert. It wasn’t just the dunes and the heat. There were terrors in the burning heart, where even the mad tribes never went. An ocean without water, voices without mouths . . .
Which wasn’t to say that the immediate future didn’t hold terrors enough . . .
He’d seen the sea before, but the Omnians didn’t encourage it. This may have been because deserts were so much harder to cross. They kept people in, though. But sometimes the desert barriers were a problem, and then you had to put up with the sea.
Il-drim was nothing more than a few shacks around a stone jetty, at one of which was a trireme flying the holy oriflamme. When the Church traveled, the travelers were very senior people indeed, so when the Church traveled it generally traveled in style.
The party paused on a hill and looked at it.
“Soft and corrupt,” said Vorbis. “That’s what we’ve become, Brutha.”
“Yes, Lord Vorbis.”
“And open to pernicious influence. The sea, Brutha. It washes unholy shores, and gives rise to dangerous ideas. Men should not travel, Brutha. At the center there is truth. As you travel, so error creeps in.”
“Yes, Lord Vorbis.”
Vorbis sighed.
“In Ossory’s day we sailed alone in boats made of hides, and went where the winds of the God took us. That’s how a holy man should travel.”
A tiny spark of defiance in Brutha declared that it, personally, would risk a little corruption for the sake of traveling with two decks between its feet and the waves.
“I heard that Ossory once sailed to the island of Erebos on a millstone,” he ventured by way of conversation.
“Nothing is impossible for the strong in faith,” said Vorbis.
“Try striking a match on jelly, mister.”
Brutha stiffened. It was impossible that Vorbis could have failed to hear the voice.
The Voice of the Turtle was heard in the land.
“Who’s this bugger?”
“Forward,” said Vorbis. “I can see that our friend Brutha is agog to get on board.”
The horse trotted on.
“Where are we? Who’s that? It’s as hot as hell in here and, believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”
“I can’t talk now!” hissed Brutha.
“This cabbage stinks like a swamp! Let there be lettuce! Let there be slices of melon!”
The horses edged along the jetty and were led one at a time up the gangplank. By this time the box was vibrating. Brutha kept looking around guiltily, but no one else was taking any notice. Despite his size, Brutha was easy not to notice. Practically everyone had better things to do with their time than notice someone like Brutha. Even Vorbis had switched him off, and was talking to the captain.
He found a place up near the pointed end, where one of the sticking-up bits with the sails on gave him a bit of privacy. Then, with some dread, he opened the box.
The tortoise spoke from deep within its shell.
“Any eagles about?”
Brutha scanned the sky.
“No.”
The head shot out.
“You-” it began.
“I couldn’t talk!” said Brutha. “People were with me all the time! Can’t you . . . read the words in my mind? Can’t you read my thoughts?”
“Mortal thoughts aren’t like that,” snapped Om. “You think it’s like watching words paint themselves across the sky? Hah! It’s like trying to make sense of a bundle of weeds. Intentions, yes. Emotions, yes. But not thoughts. Half the time you don’t know what you’re thinking, so why should I?”