Hearts in Zenith (Four Husbands and a Lover)

52. Nowhere Good (1 of 2)

Taffiz sped up our march, for there was no point sparing the beasts only to get caught out by the sandstorm. After we left countless dunes behind, I spotted the shelter he was making for. I thought he was heading for one of those rocky sentinels rising from the depth of the sand, offering natural hideouts, but what I saw were colossal buildings with columns and steepled roofs pushing toward the sky. Palaces, in the middle of the desert!

Their pink and white flesh rose from the golden sand, backdropped by the still blue sky. The shadows and the fine dust of the gathering storm thickened all colors to an unreal vibrancy. The gold of the sand baked to a richer color without a name; lilac tinted the blue of the sky; the pink of the stone shone with the intensity of the orchards in the misty jungles.

"Could this be real? Or is this a trick of Fata Morgana?" I asked Taffiz, struggling for breath as desiccating air plugged my throat.

"I wish it was an illusion of the desert sun. But it isn't. Instead, it's our salvation."

He finished the sentence, but his thought trailed off. Incompleteness unnerved me. Perhaps it was the storm on the horizon coloring the world in portentous gloom. Or maybe I wanted to listen to his voice. Hoarseness from the heat and grit imparted a whole new cadence to it. It was seductive.

We would have time to talk once we would outrun the storm--I forbade myself to think of it in if terms. We would outrun the storm. We would save Parneres. This tale would have a happy ending. I was too close to catching the intractable man of magic beauty to stop, even if it was to die. I had to ask him why he stayed in Peleth' thrall. Had to!

The darkness overtook the sky, pouring more ink into its lilac shadows. Every wrinkle on the orange dunes stood out. The buildings turned into a grandiose ruin clustered next to a black pyramid. It wasn't not large as far as the pyramids went, but in the emptiness of the desert it felt enormous. And useless. Hopefully, we could find shelter among the fallen walls, caved in roofs and gaping windows of the other structures. More than the colonnades, pyramids and obelisks we needed a simple room that the blowing sand couldn't penetrate.

A few hundred paces away from the nearest cut stone, the gusts pounded us. Then grit imbued the wind, shaving every inch of unprotected skin.

I huddled to my dromedary, pressing my face into its stinking fur for protection. Another minute—and I wanted this stench, because it meant air not sand inside my nostrils. The heat and the howling strived to break the limits of human endurance, bending me lower and lower, stealing my consciousness. It grew so dark that my eyes couldn't tell me if I had swooned.

But I felt movement.

Step by step, the dromedary trudged on. Hopefully in the right direction. The last animal on the Known World that I would have called a symbol of trustworthiness now held my life in its smirking mouth. My cotton hands dropped the beast's reins. My fingers squeezed into fists, clutching clumps of its brown hide.

′We must not die.′ I sent this message to my dromedary subconsciously, because I couldn't even think of opening my mouth.

How far the beast got us before Taffiz's voice swam up from the abrasive void of the sand, I didn't know.

The singing sand...what a joke! This was howling sand. Over the noise I couldn't make out what Taffiz was saying, but he must have given my dromedary a nudge in the right direction, because the punishing blows of wind eased, then stopped altogether.

I unwrapped my face and opened my eyes.

The room was grand if windowless. The mosaic in its middle used to be a floor of a cascade pool. I imagined crystalline water gurgling over these happy naiads water lilies and long-nosed fish. Perhaps, the fish was a mythical allegory or a dolphin created from a written description by an artist who had never seen a dolphin... Some bits of the mosaic went missing, but on the whole, the waterless pools fared better than the walls. Here and there, the initial crimson of the background and the gowns of white, gold and azure on the ebony figures clung to the drywall. The rest of the frescoes fell into dust, were stained over or faded away. I could pick out the merrymaking in the preserved fragments, food and drink, and, in one corner--two sinuous forms in a lovers' embrace. The celebrants weren't the Divines, they were humans. I liked that.