The wind had fallen to a whisper that moved only the smallest grains of sand. He covered a goodly distance in increasing darkness before becoming aware of others abroad in the night: a shadow against the stars at the top of a dune, a slither of falling sand to his right, a line of footprints along a sandy cleft, made very recently and heading southwest, toward the coast. At first these presences were widely separated, but as he penetrated farther, he saw more frequent signs, and he heard voices, too: a pack animal being berated in murmured curses, vehement whispers telling a child to hush its crying, a muttered conversation between two men as to the landmarks of a trail that led southward among the mountains. Though he noted the landmarks in memory, he learned nothing as to who was going where, or why, except that there were a good many of them.
Since he did not known who the travelers were, or what had prompted their journey, he avoided them by going warily and stopping in this shadow or in that cleft while they passed him by, their numbers steadily diminishing. The sky had paled when he stumbled upon the first group of bodies strewn upon a cupped patch of blood lichen.
Warily, he backed off, scouted the area, then returned to the hollow with the tiny torch from his pack. He found six bodies, dried to sere leather, with their clothing torn to rags. Carrion creatures had been at them to the extent that it was hard to tell their sex. The first he uncovered was, he thought, a young woman because she had a dead baby bundled close to her. Though he would have preferred simply to walk on, the mystery of their presence here on the sands made him go on to each body in turn, all of them some days dead. Longer than that, there’d have been little left but bones. He saw no stains of blood, but necklaces of red lichen wound the mutilated throats and fronds emerged between leathern lips. The lichen had grown into them, or through them, which made him believe the site of the slaughter was no accident.
He thought they were all women. All women, at least one with a child. Almost as an echo, the Prince’s words came back to him: “We always take new mothers along, for luck.” And Genevieve’s conversation with the Shah’s wives. All young mothers. Going to Galul.
Was that a descriptive phrase that really meant something like “going to heaven?” Was it a religious ritual? Or just more of the Mahahmbi bloody-mindedness like cutting people into chunks to make a point?
Aufors hunkered down and considered. He had read of ancient societies that had revered certain trees or plants, societies that had made sacrifices when they cut a tree or used a plant. Did the Mahahmbi make some use of the bonebushes in the area? The Thorn trees? The blood lichen? Was this why it was called blood lichen? Was this ritual part of the quite impenetrable Mahahmbi religion? Or, since the Mahahmbi were known to be polygamous, had some one of them simply decided to rid himself of all wives at once?
Cursing under his breath, he used his dagger to cut a score of lichen fronds, fat ones, wrapping them in a square of the film that held his rations and storing the small bundle in his pack. If he ever got back to the airship, he’d use the analyzer to find what if anything made them valuable to the Mahahmbi. If, indeed, this bloody ritual had anything to do with plant life.
Continuing his line of march, he came upon other groups of bodies in the dawn hours. More broken bodies, more swaddled infants. Once might be an aberration, but twice said this was indeed calculated, habitual. When the sun rose, he went on, sticking to the bases of the dunes, winding a sinuous trail farther eastward. He heard the screaming voices of the prayer-callers and risked climbing the nearest dune, where he saw first the lashing black banners of Mahahm-qum and then the walls of the city. He lay just below the crest with only his eyes above it, staring with amazement at the troop emerging from the southern gates!