The Holy City was at the southern end of David’s Kingdom. Beyond the city, once we left behind the irrigated vineyards and olive trees, a land I had thought was already dry became even drier. The sky stretched for a thousand miles above us, cloudless and pale. The last remains of western civilization were left behind.
Ascelin had bought us all, including Maffi, densely-woven white robes to replace our badly worn pilgrimage cloaks. I examined mine critically and decided it was made of goat’s hair. I had been afraid the long robes would make us even hotter, but instead they reflected away the sunlight. The deep folds of the head dresses shaded our eyes, and as long as we moved no more than necessary and stopped to rest in whatever shade we could find in the middle of the day, the dryness was more of a problem than the heat.
I had expected the desert to be completely barren, but even here plants grew, scrubby gray-green bushes spaced far apart, though the soil between them was bare and stony. The low, steady wind kept up a continuous murmur in the bushes. It sounded like someone speaking, just too softly to hear, a commentary in the background that we could not understand and never quite ignore. In the early morning and late afternoon lizards scampered across the open spots, but in the middle of the day the only living creature we saw, other than ourselves, was the occasional snake or high, soaring bird.
Fortunately the road we followed led from oasis to oasis, spaced a day’s journey apart, so that we could drink deeply of the alkaline water and refill the containers for ourselves and our horses. Sometimes the water merely seeped into a shallow depression scraped out between the palm trees, but usually there was a round basin, surprisingly deep, in which the water looked black though it ran clear when we ladled it out. Ascelin warned us to be sure to shake out our boots every morning in case scorpions had crawled in during the night.
At the oases we exchanged a few words with other travelers, but there were not a lot of them, for the major trade routes between Xantium and the emir’s city toward which we were heading did not detour through the Holy City. A line of jagged mountains, like teeth two thousand feet high, lay to our right, separating us from the main north-south roads.
For the most part the other travelers kept to their tents and we kept to ours. But always when Dominic was rubbing down Whirlwind at least one man wandered over, as though casually, to look the stallion over and remark on his size and strength. Whirlwind snorted both at them and at their own horses.
As the long, dry days succeeded each other, I kept looking for Kaz-alrhun, with or without the ebony horse, to swoop down on us from the sky, but he did not appear. I found myself hoping that if he did attack us he would do so soon, before we spent any more days crawling through this enormous and rocky landscape.
In the cool of the long desert evenings I tried without success to find the secret of the spell of the onyx ring. Maffi sat next to me, silent while I concentrated, his bony knees drawn up.
All I could be sure of was what I had discovered immediately, that it was a school spell, which meant technical and complicated. If it had indeed been cast by Elerius, the best wizard the school had ever produced, I was afraid that meant it was too powerful for my resources. Maybe I would have done better my whole career if I’d tried learning eastern magic.
I teased at the edges of the spell and suddenly thought I had caught a loose, revealing thread of its magic construction, but when I tried to follow it up I only discovered a large black spot before my eyes, as though I were somehow looking into the center of the onyx.
I put the ring back on my finger without learning any more of its secrets and took out Melecherius on Eastern Magic. I still hoped that somewhere in its pages was something that I could use against an Ifrit, if we met one guarding the secret of the Wadi Harhammi.
Melecherius was no more helpful this evening than he had been the evening before. Ifriti, the book told me with what I was increasingly sure was not first-hand knowledge, were essentially immortal, as full of unchanneled magic as dragons, and as dangerous. “Have you ever seen an Ifrit?” I asked Maffi.
“No,” he said thoughtfully, “but I know how to deal with them!”
“You do?” I asked in surprise.
“Of course. The tales tell all about it. Ifriti are cunning, but they’re also stupid-a bad combination. If you accidentally let one out of a bottle where it’s been imprisoned by some great spell in the past, you can always get it to go back in by taunting it. Tell it you can’t believe it ever fit in a space so small, and when it crawls back in to show you quickly slap in the binding stopper!”
This didn’t sound as though it would work unless Ifriti were even stupider than he suggested.
“Do you think I could learn to be a mage?” Maffi asked.
I looked over at his smile and bright eyes. “You probably could. I’m sure you’re intelligent enough. But I don’t know where you’d go to learn magic here in the East. I assume you’ll have to apprentice yourself to someone-do you think you’ll ever dare face Kaz-alrhun again?”
He laughed at that. “How about teaching me some of your school magic?”
“Well,” I said slowly, “magic is really the same force throughout the world. What makes western magic distinctive is its organization and some of its technical discoveries-like telephones.”
“I’ve heard about telephones,” said Maffi, who never admitted not to have heard of something. “But when we in the East need to communicate long distances, we find a deep, dark pool, say certain secret words, and then we see the face we’ve been looking for!”
“Well, I don’t know any communications spells that involve deep pools, but I could try teaching you something else. How about an illusion?”
There were surprisingly few people in Yurt interested in magic, beyond asking me to produce whatever effect they needed at the moment. Even the king’s brief interest in learning to fly was years in the past. I taught Maffi the elementary spell that would allow him to put an illusory spot of color on his arm or leg. He couldn’t get the words to work for the full range of colors, and the illusion faded of course after a few moments. But for most of the rest of our trip to the emir’s city he had a pink or purple spot on him somewhere.
“This land has been civilized for ten thousand years,” Joachim said to me. “There were cities and temples and emperors and trade here while the men and women of what are now the western kingdoms were all still dressed in skins and grubbing around in the woods after roots.”
“Then it must not have always been as dry as it is now,” I replied.
“The heat of summer may not be the best time to judge,” he said, “but I do think the climate must be drier now.” Among the broken stones that littered the side of the road were some that had clearly once been carved, as well as shards of pottery, the same tawny color as the stone but painted with dark concentric circles. Once I pulled up my mare to dismount and scoop up a silver coin from among the shards, its inscription so worn as to be illegible.
In the center of the day, when we sought out the narrow shadows of boulders and the heat beat on us like something solid, we sometimes saw mirages in the distance. A city, white-spired, lay just a few more miles down the road, flickering in welcome, though it always disappeared before we reached the place where it seemed to lie. It seemed as though the voice of that unreal city must be the voice in the wind talking to us.
“But it is a real city,” said Maffi. He had been experimenting with the spell I had taught him, and today had pink spots with purple centers on both hands. “Some people say that an Ifrit captured an entire city centuries ago, in the days of Solomon, and moves it around from place to place. But others say that cities are reflected from the desert sky as though from a mirror and appear and disappear before travelers. I think it’s all right to see a city. It’s when you start seeing lakes that you know you will soon die of thirst.”
I wasn’t sure whether to worry more about thirst, Ifriti, or bandits. The other travelers on the road, all of whom moved more swiftly than we did on their lithe, sure-footed horses, often gave us long looks from within the shadows of their headdresses, but none so far attempted to attack us, either by day or at night at the oases, under the dry and ominously rattling fronds of the palms. None of them seemed to be Kaz-alrhun or King Warin.
One morning Ascelin, whose watch it was, woke me shortly before dawn. “Could you watch for me, Wizard?” he asked quietly. “I’ll be back very soon.”
I crawled out under a sky brightening from gray to pink; he was gone before I could ask where. I relit our fire and started the water boiling for tea. As the sun’s orange rim slid up over the horizon, he reappeared, looking pleased.
“It was a desert fox,” he said, getting out the tin cups. “I saw her just at the edge of the oasis. I think she’d slipped down for a drink and had hoped to get away without being spotted. But I managed to track her-and it’s hard tracking, too, on this rocky soil! I’d show you, but I don’t want to frighten her. She’s got a den with three kits a half mile from here.”
The others were now stirring and coming to join us. “A desert fox has wonderful ears, very long,” Ascelin added. “She must need them to listen for mice-or for men trying to follow her!”
During the second week of our journey south I began to worry about the king. He dismissed my concerns with a smile, but during the day I kept a surreptitious eye on him. He really was an old man, though he worked to make us forget that, and he was certainly the most frail of us in this searing and unforgiving land. He was very quiet, not talking even when Ascelin called a halt to rest and to water our horses, sometimes forgetting to take a drink himself unless Dominic reminded him.
Hugo, on the other hand, became as active in the heat as a lizard. He began strolling over to the black tents of the other travelers during our evenings in the oases and striking up conversations about his father. A small group of aristocratic western pilgrims and a red-headed mage should have been fairly conspicuous, but no one would acknowledge ever having seen them.
“We may have to appeal to the emir,” Hugo said at last. “I can’t tell if no one’s really seen them, or if these people just distrust us. What they need is a command from an important political leader. I wonder if there’s the slightest chance the emir would even be willing to see a band of westerners.”
We came down out of the stony desert hills among which we had spent three weeks and saw before us a white-walled city, the city of the mirages. It was surrounded by irrigated fields colored a fresh green we had almost forgotten existed, and orchards where both fruit and flowers grew together. Palm trees rustled in the wind along the fringes of the fields. To our right we could see a broad road coiling away to the north-west, the main route to Xantium.
“This is the fabled emirate of Bahdroc,” said Ascelin, unrolling the map to show us. “We’re well out of the Holy Land here, into a place where few westerners ever go. The last of the caliphs had his capital here a millennium ago, and the current emir continues his rule, though on a much narrower scale.”
I shaded my eyes to look at the city. In the center rose a sharp outcropping crowned with more white towers. On the far side of the city stretched a glassy lake or arm of the ocean, disappearing into the distance, the color of weathered jade.
“This city faces east, not west,” Ascelin continued, “onto the land-locked Dark Sea, but if one crosses over the Sea one comes to the edges of the true outer ocean, and to the harbors where spices and tea come in from the far East.”
“It’s not a real trading center like Xantium,” said Maffi somewhat smugly. “It’s not much more than a way-station. Here pilgrims every year start the last stage of their journey to the most holy sites of the Prophet, and here the spices of the East are transferred from ships to land transport.”
“Do they also import silk?” I asked.
Ascelin shook his head. “Silk come overland from the northern part of the East, and spices by water from the far southern parts. I don’t know of anyone who’s actually been there, but the true East must be larger than all the western kingdoms put together.”
“I know someone who’d been to the East,” put in Maffi. “He said that the men there can grow no beards, even if they try their entire lives.”
“That seems unlikely,” Hugo began, as though feeling the boy was interfering with his monopoly on specious travelers’ tales.
But he did not get a chance to finish. The king startled us all by speaking for the first time that day. “Rose bushes!”
He had his face turned up, testing the wind. We all sniffed as well and caught it, a scent completely unlike the sharp smell of desert sage that had accompanied us the last three weeks: it was the smell of roses.
King Haimeric kicked his mare forward, and the rest of us scrambled to catch up. We followed the steep stony track down to where it abruptly became a broad, smoothly-paved road, between fields where swarthy men worked. The king galloped another quarter mile, then pulled up abruptly by a low fence. Beyond was a tangle of rose bushes.
Ascelin grabbed the mare’s reins as the king leaped off. Haimeric vaulted the fence in a show of energy I had not seen in him in years and plunged between the bushes. “They may have the blue ones here!” he called back over his shoulder. “I see maroon, and lavender, even a red darker than anything I’ve ever been able to grow, and-” He broke off as a man rose slowly from the middle of the bushes.
The man had Kaz-alrhun’s bulk but was not as dark. It was not Kaz-alrhun himself, I told my wildly beating heart. He scowled down at the king, whose headdress had fallen back in his excitement. “Are you a westerner?”
“And a fellow rose-grower,” said the king with enthusiasm. “I’ve never seen colors like some of yours. We’ve heard, in the west, that someone here has been able to breed a blue rose. Might it be you?”
The chaplain and I exchanged glances and both shook our heads. King Haimeric was as excited to see an eastern rose garden as Joachim had been to see the churches of the Holy City. The king’s age and frailty had all dropped away, and his naked interest in roses was a much more powerful protection here against harm than any spell I could have cast.
The huge rose-grower’s scowl turned into a wide smile. “Come, and I shall show you what I have. I work for the emir, of course. He has roses of his own inside the palace, but there are several of us outside the city who also cultivate cuttings and do crosses for him. For two years now, he has announced to rose-growers throughout the East that he has a blue rose. And the rose he has is mine!”
Maffi tugged at my arm. “If this man really is a grower for the emir of Bahdroc,” he said in a low voice, “then he is a powerful man indeed.”
The rest of us tied our horses to the fence and made our way cautiously amidst the roses’ spiny branches. The king and the grower chattered away on topics ranging from soil acidity to aphids to crosses that just wouldn’t breed true as they slipped between the bushes, far more easily than we did.
“Now this section is what I call my blues,” the man continued from the far end of the garden. He and the king had pushed past glorious reds and yellows without slowing down. The bushes at this end seemed rather spindly to me, and the blossoms drooped in spite of a soil watered so heavily it was spongy under foot. “This was my first attempt.”
The flowers in question were more green than anything, a rather sickly shade and with an unpleasant odor.
“But then I decided to try to try to approach blue from the direction of the deep reds instead,” the man continued. He showed us several maroon blooms of the same color as ones the king had already spotted. “But we come now to the best of all.”
I don’t know what I expected, something enormous and showy probably, a sapphire blue that would take our breaths away. What we were shown instead was a rose with few and rather tattered petals, of a violet that could only be called blue if one overlooked the rather pinkish cast.
“I see,” said King Haimeric, fighting disappointment with what I considered remarkably good grace. “And this is the blue which is exciting rose growers throughout the East?”
The huge man’s smile split his face. “It is of a certainty! But I remain unsatisfied, as does the emir. We may have the first blue rose ever grown, but we want to make it better yet! You may notice it has but little scent …”
That was the least of its problems, I thought, but said nothing.
“I wonder if it would be possible to meet the emir,” said the king, his enthusiasm back as if it had never gone. “Did I mention I’m a king myself, back in the western kingdoms?” I froze, but he did not mention Yurt directly. “It would be a great honor to meet such a renowned leader and grower.”
“You are a king, are you?” said the grower with an incredulous chuckle. “Well, they do have some odd customs, I hear, out in the west. You might interest the emir at that; he says that he likes to hear or see at least one new thing each day, but it is sometimes hard for him now that he is too old to travel. This time of day he generally holds open court for plaintiffs, so I am sure he would be happy to hear you, and, I assume, your party.” He looked Ascelin up and down, gave the rest of us a glance, shrugged, paused to lock the little gate in his low wall, then led us along the palm-lined road toward the city.