THE RICH MERCHANT MITRAI OF the city Bankala summoned one of his servants, a man named Kas, and said to him, “You are a loyal man who does his duty faithfully. I am rewarding you for this good service by giving you an important task.”
The servant bowed.
“You are to take a gift to the holy man Matua in the city Anun.”
The servant bowed. Then, as his master said nothing further, he said, “To go to Anun I must cross the desert of Ses-Hab.”
“Yes.”
“They say that bandits infest the trade road across the desert and robber tribes haunt the oases. May I take a few men with me, and horses?”
“You are to go alone, and on foot.”
Kas said, thoughtfully and respectfully, “It would seem rather a test than a reward.”
“It is what you make of it,” said Mitrai. “This is the gift you will give to the holy man.” He indicated a sealed jar of ordinary brown earthenware with hempen netting around it that stood on the table beside him. “As you see, there is nothing about it to attract the greed of a bandit or a nomad.”
“What is in the jar, sir?”
“Water,” said Mitrai. “Here is money for your journey. Hide it as best you can, and pray not to meet evil men. Leave tomorrow, and return with what gift or words for me the holy man may send. May your journey be blessed.”
Kas bowed once more, took up the jar by its netting, and withdrew.
There were no quarters for menservants in the great house; they lived in a barracks at the back of it. Most of them did rough work, sweeping, carrying water, taking manure from the stables to the gardener’s compost. Kas had done such work as a boy, but he had come to his master’s notice for his intelligence and diligence. Mitrai used him as a messenger, and he had proved so trustworthy that by now he carried all Mitrai’s letters or verbal questions and replies to and from the men of business and officers of government in Bankala; and he was so discreet that Mitrai did not hesitate to send him to deliver a bag of gold coins to a creditor or present a ruby, circumspectly, to a lady.
Because he had to go among rich people, Kas’s clothes were finer than his friends’ clothes, and he had to keep them much cleaner.
“Taba,” he said now as he came into the barracks, “let me wear what you’re wearing for a job I have to do, and you can have this shirt.”
“You want these?” the young man said, flapping his filthy shirt and the lamentable rag he called a kilt.
“I do.”
“And I can keep your shirt?”
“You can.”
Taba was naked in an instant, and Kas in the next. Taba took Kas’s shirt over to his corner, smoothing it out, stroking it, folding it carefully, and laid it on the shelf over his cot before he pulled on an even more disgusting kilt and pranced back out to work, shouting thanks to Kas. He turned around suddenly and called, “Why?”
“So I don’t look worth robbing.”
Kas was now wearing Taba’s shirt and kilt. Taba looked at him. “You don’t!” he shouted, and went off to the stable yard.
Kas went down into Bankala to inns where the leaders of caravans stayed. He often carried messages from his master to these men, and sometimes drank with them; they knew and trusted him. He told them his errand. They said, “Now? Nobody crosses the Ses-Hab now.”
“I must leave tomorrow.”
They shook their heads.
One of them said, “Old Habgalgat knows what you need to know. He’ll be in a pepper seller’s booth in the market.”
Kas found the old man behind his trays of peppercorns and said, “I must cross the desert to Anun.”
“No caravans or traders are going. Not for a month yet, not till the rains.”
“But I must go. My master sends a gift to a holy man in Anun.”
The old man wrinkled up his face, which looked like the face of a desert tortoise.
“Has he given you a horse? A mule is better.”
“I’m to go afoot, alone.”
The old man slowly shook his tortoise head.
“Unwise,” he said.
Kas turned up the palms of his hands a little, in a patient gesture that said: So it must be.
After a while the old man nodded. “I can tell you the old way. It goes far off the caravan road. Northward. From spring to spring at a walking pace. Fifteen days of walking. Is your memory good?”
Kas nodded.
“Then come into the booth here with me and listen.” When they sat together cross-legged, Habgalgat said, “Here is the way you must go.” He half closed his dark tortoise eyes, gazing straight ahead as if at a road before him, and began to speak the signs and landmarks, the turns and veerings, of the way across the desert he had walked in the old days before the caravans.
Kas listened and held the words in his mind. In this skill he had had much practice, carrying messages from and to his master word for word as they were spoken. When the old man was done Kas thanked him and asked how he could repay him.
“Who is the holy man you are sent to?”
“Matua.”
“Ah. There is no greater saint in all the cities,” Habgalgat said. “What is the gift your master sends him?”
“A flask of water.”
“It must be the very water of the River of Paradise. Now my throat is dry with speaking so long. I need five coppers for a flask of wine.”
Kas gave him ten coppers, and the old man grinned. “Why, you’re a rich man under your stinking rags, brother! So, walk at night. Sleep with your head in shade. If the well at Narrow Rocks is dry, as it may be this late in the year, dig in the sand of the streambed under the cliff. May your way be blessed.”
“May all your ways be blessed,” Kas said.
In the market he bought a new pair of sandals with strong soles and a supply of jerked meat and date-cakes and hard ewe’s-milk cheese, then returned home, where he lay down and slept for a couple of hours in the heat of the day. In the late afternoon he went to the women servants’ quarters to visit his dear friend Ini, a house servant. They went to a small room behind the storage room. The master did not know this nook existed, but all the servants thought of it as almost a sacred place. Though servants could not marry, they considered couples like Kas and Ini as having the rights of married people, even if those rights were limited to that one small room.
They made long and tender love on the mattress in the small, hot room. He told her of the errand and the journey he was to undertake. “To cross the desert alone?” she cried out. Then she said no more, since her anxiety could only make him anxious. Before he left, she brought two lengths of light, coarse cloth from her box and gave them to him to use as he needed against the desert sun. Then she hurried to the kitchen, took four oranges, and gave them to him. They held each other close and said farewell.
The sun was low in the west as Kas went back to the men’s quarters. He filled his pack with the food he had bought and the oranges and cloth Ini had given him, and hung his goatskin water bottle and the gift-flask from the pack. What money he had not given Habgalgat or spent on sandals and food he carried with his knife in the leather pouch at his waist, not trying to conceal it. He said to his friends, “I’ll see you in a month or so.”
They blessed his way, and he theirs, and he set off eastward across the city and out into the hills. By the light of the rising moon he saw the pale desert stretching before him from the shadowy feet of the hills to where the stars rose out of the earth.
By the first light of day the hills were far behind him and the caravan road a dark streak before him across the desert. The sun rose from the end of that road intolerably bright. The heat of it struck his face along with the light.
In daylight he could see evidence of the traffic of men and animals on the road, hoofprints in what had been the mud of spring now hard as a stone, scraps of canvas, dung, a broken harness strap. There was no other sign of life. The silence was absolute. He had walked some hours in that hot solitude when he came to a track leading away from the caravan road, northward.
Old Habgalgat had spoken of a pile of white stones where the old way met the caravan road. There were some whitish stones scattered about here and there on the sandy earth, but there was no pile of stones. The northward track was clear enough, but there were no signs of travel on it, no footprints or hoofprints.
If it was the old way, it would bring him to the well at Narrow Rocks by evening of this day. On the caravan road there was no water for twice that distance.
He drank one long swallow from his waterskin, which left not very much water in it. He took the road to the north. He walked doggedly in the silent, glaring heat. The sun had begun to descend from noon when he saw a mirage-hill quivering upside down a long way ahead of him. After a while he came among low hills, and saw cliffs to the north. The cliffs grew lower toward the track, and he came to the place old Habgalgat had called the Narrow Rocks.
It was a vast relief to know that he was indeed on the old way, the right way. But the heat in the valley between the cliffs was like an oven. The little stone well that made an oasis of the place was dry, the few palms that had shaded it were half dead. His waterskin held only a couple more mouthfuls.
He followed the narrowing cliffs to a dry watercourse. Where he saw a few scrubby plants and the tracks of small creatures on the gravelly sand of the streambed, he knelt down and began to dig with his hands. The sand felt cool, and as he dug farther, damp. A little water began to seep into the bottom of the hole he’d made. He dug, and waited, dug, and waited. The silent water crept into the hole and shone back the hot brightness of the sky. He waited till he could take up water in the small brass cup he carried in his pack, and drink. Again and again he filled the little cup and drank, slowly and with gratitude, and always the shining water welled slowly back into the hole. He used the cup to refill his waterskin, cupful by cupful. The sun was far down in the west when he went back to the small shade of the palms by the dry well to sleep.
He woke after sunset and went to the streambed to redig the hole, which had already half filled up with sand. He ate one of Ini’s oranges while he waited for the slow water. He drank again, and filled his waterskin. The anxiety that had been in his heart all night and day was gone; he was serene. He knew he was on the right road, that Habgalgat had given him good counsel, that all the wells and springs on the west from here were more reliable than the well at Narrow Rocks. All he had to do was walk fourteen days more across the desert under the sun and stars and bring the flask of water to the holy man. And then return as he had come.
For six more nights he walked across the low dunes and levels, the sands and crusted clay of the desert, sleeping through the heat of the day near the tiny well or spring of water to which the old way always brought him. His food was very scanty, but would last him. He saved the last orange as long as he could. He was eating it in the pleasant shade of the big oasis of Gebo, by the pool screened by tall reeds and palms, when he heard the snort of a horse or mule and the voices of men.
He cowered down among the reeds, but they had seen him before he saw them.
There were four of them, nomads, with two small horses and a train of mules. The men came around him and stood looking down at him. They were slight, wiry, wearing trousers, tunics, and white cowls. Their dark eyes burned in dark faces palely shadowed by the cowls. They carried long daggers or light swords and one had a longbow slung across his back. They said nothing.
Kas sat cross-legged among the reeds, naked. After he had drunk at the spring and slept through the worst heat, the big pool of Gebo had offered him the immense luxury of bathing. He had played in the water, rejoicing in its coolness. He had washed his shirt and kilt, even filthier than when Taba gave them to him, and spread them out across the reeds to dry.
He shivered, now, though the evening air was windless and hot. The men were motionless, staring down at him.
He set down the peel of the orange. His pack lay before him. He opened it slowly. Slowly and deliberately he took the pouch off his belt and laid it beside the pack. He looked up at the four men, from one to the next. He turned up the palms of his hands a little in a patient gesture that said: This is what I have.
“Why are you here?” said one of the men, whose sparse, short beard was white.
“I carry a gift from my master in Bankala to a holy man in Anun.”
“What gift?”
Kas touched the netted water flask that lay beside his pack.
“What is in it?”
“Water.”
One of them smiled. Another looked at Kas with sharp suspicious eyes. They were silent.
The old man squatted down, his thin sinewy arms across his knees, studying Kas and his belongings.
“What is the name of the holy man you seek?”
“Matua.”
“Ah,” said the old man, with a deep nod.
One by one the other three squatted down on their heels.
One of them pointed a long finger at Kas’s pouch.
“My knife,” Kas said. “Sixty coppers and a silver coin. Thread and needle.”
The man nodded.
Another, a young man, reached out and picked up the empty pack. He shook it, squeezed it, felt carefully along its inner seams, then dropped it. He took up the pouch, examined the contents, and dropped it with a scornful flick of his fingers.
“It is as he said.”
“In truth you go to Matua-dei,” the old man said, not quite a statement, not quite a question.
“In truth,” Kas said.
“Who sends you to him?” the young man asked.
“Mitrai the merchant.”
“Does he send out caravans?”
“He sends his goods in trade by the caravans.”
The old man asked: “What do you know of Matua-dei?”
“That he is the greatest saint in all the cities.”
“Although he was born a nomad,” said the old man dryly.
Kas bowed his head a little. “It is as you say.”
There was a long silence. The breeze of evening stirred once or twice feebly in the dry fronds of the palms and the long reeds all round them. A mule snorted, its harness clinked.
“Matua the son of my sister’s son is kin to you all,” the old man said to the nomads. “I wish to see him again before I die. Shall we give this giver of water escort to our kinsman Matua-dei in the city of Anun?”
“They are all liars in Bankala,” said the young man. “He is spying.”
“Who taught you this road?” asked one of the nomads, a man with a keen, hard face.
“Old Habgalgat.”
“Ah,” the man said.
“How will the guards at the Desert Gate of Anun welcome us, Uncle-dei?” the fourth man asked, smiling a little.
“The name of Matua will open the gate,” the old man said. “We can sell the gray mules at the market there. Come on.” He stood up, as lithe as a young man; the others stood. “Saddle the roan,” he said to the young man, and to the others, “Fill the skins,” and to Kas, “Put your clothes on, water-giver. You will ride to Anun with the nomads.”
And before nightfall he was mounted on a tall roan mule, his pack off his shoulders and in the saddlebag, his waterskin and the netted jar in the other saddlebag, riding with the nomads to Anun.
They left the way he knew from Habgalgat almost at once, striking off toward the southeast, on no road or track that he could see in the dusk or when the moon rose.
He had been very frightened when the nomads came on him there at the pool of Gebo. Fear leaves weariness in its tracks. He rode most of the night in a kind of half dream, the mule’s reins wrapped around his right wrist, clinging to the saddle horn with his left hand. He marveled at how high above the ground he seemed on the back of the tall, powerful, docile creature, how lordly a thing it was to ride not walk all night, across the moonlit hills.
In daylight they came to the caravan road, unmistakable by its breadth and straightness and the prints of hoofs and piles of stone-dry dung here and there from the last caravans of spring. They spent the middle of the day at an oasis.
The nomads did not give their names to Kas and used only kinship terms among themselves, so he thought of them as the uncle—Uncle-dei, they all called him, giving him the term of respect—the dark cousin, the smiling cousin, and the son. They spoke little to one another, and hardly a word to Kas; but the smiling cousin, seeing him bathing his inner thighs rubbed sore by the saddle, gave him a pair of loose trousers they wore. They shared their food with him. He set what he had out for them to share. The uncle and the cousins politely took tiny morsels of cheese or half a date and signified that they were completely satisfied and could not possibly eat any more. The son would not even look at Kas or his food, yet kept him always in view, as if suspecting him of plans to rob them, murder them, or ride off with the roan mule. He was a boy, constantly proving that he was a man. The men were patient with him.
They mounted again as soon as the sun began to lose its heat and rode on, their shadows growing longer and longer before them. The small tin ornaments on their bridles and saddlebags made a soft, pleasant tinkling, almost like running water.
The nomads’ horses were lean, unimpressive animals whose spirit he came gradually to appreciate. The mules were big, handsome, and intelligent. As he listened to the nomads talk during their midday rest-stops, he learned that they had been intending to sell four of the mules, his roan, a bay, and two splendid matched grays at a gathering of their people farther south. Meeting him had made the uncle decide to risk entering Anun, where they could sell the mules for twice the price, if they could get into the city and out again alive.
Springs of water on the caravan road were much farther apart than on the old way, but like the caravaners, the nomads carried water enough with them to get them and their animals across long dry gaps. They moved much faster than a man walking alone, and their halts were briefer. After his fourth night with them, Kas’s eleventh night of journeying, the sun before rising lit a spark of gold far ahead across the dead level of sand desert, the spire of the highest palace tower of Anun.
They thought at first that they might enter the walled city without any trouble, for the guards at the Desert Gate were not on the lookout, not expecting anyone to come out of the Ses-Hab in the hottest month of the year. But as they came through the deep gate on foot, leading their animals, an officious beggar lounging there shouted out, “Nomads!”—and the guard dozing in the gatehouse woke up and ran out also shouting, “Nomads!” Three more guards and a small crowd of onlookers soon stood facing them.
The uncle had dropped back, leaving Kas as the leader of the little procession. The nomads stood holding their mounts’ bridles, silent and with bowed heads. The first guard, a broad, burly man, came up, sword drawn, and demanded, “Who are you? What do you want here?”
The uncle had said nothing to Kas about his role at this dangerous moment, but he saw pretty clearly what it must be.
“I am the servant of the merchant Mitrai of Bankala, bearing a gift from him to the holy man Matua,” he said. He had long practice in speaking with confidence and without challenge, representing the dignity of his master. “These men have brought me and the gift I bear safe across the desert.”
He could see that the name Matua commanded respect; but the guard, after some hestitation, said harshly, “These others are nomads. They have no business in Anun.”
“They are kinsmen of Matua. They are horse traders taking their mules to sell at a gathering of their people. They kept me safe from the desert thieves. They come here in peace with me and the gift I bear.”
The nomads all stood patient and silent. Even their mules looked humble.
The guard conferred with the other guards; one ran off and came back presently with higher officers, and then officials arrived. Kas repeated his story to all of them. They listened to him. His mission to the holy man clearly gave him status, but they were suspicious. His manner was good, but his company bad. The officials shook their heads and muttered to one another.
One of them, a big man in fine robes with a gold tassel on his cap, was eyeing the gray mules. He turned to Kas and said in the smooth rather toneless voice of a person of power, “Your master Mitrai is a worthy trader, I know, and his errand is to a holy man. Will you vouch for these sand rats?”
“I will. They came here only in kindness to me and hope of seeing their holy kinsman.”
“And of selling some mules in our horse market, perhaps,” the man with the gold tassle said. Then, with a sudden assumption of authority that the other officials silently acknowledged, he said, “Let them into the city. Two of you guards, stay with them. They must stay with this man from Bankala. They can go to the house of Matua, may-he-be-blessed-who-brings-blessings. They can sell their stock at the market. They can sleep one night in the caravan inn. They must be gone out of the city, by this gate, by this time tomorrow. You can stay on,” he added to Kas, and turned and strode off down the street, his gold tassel flicking and winking in the morning light.
“He wants the grays,” the smiling cousin murmured to the dark cousin almost soundlessly, and the dark cousin nodded almost invisibly.
So, before the sun was at noon, Kas led his procession of white-cowled men and tin-bedecked animals through the streets of Anun, guided by two guards, followed by many little street boys and lean, light street dogs, much stared at and loudly and rudely commented on from sidewalks and doorways and shops and windows and balconies, to the house of Matua.
It was a small house of stone and clay. It had a good-sized courtyard with a well, a wide-spreading fig tree, and a big old orange tree. A man without hands or feet sat dozing in a wicker chair in the shade of the fig tree. Was this Matua? Kas wondered a moment. But then a little one-eyed boy came running out of the open house door to meet them and told them that his master was in meditation. They should return in the early evening.
“May we take water from the well?” Kas asked, for it had been a long way from the last oasis to the city gate, and no one yet had offered water to the travelers or their animals.
“As much as you want,” the child said. “The sacred well has water for all!” Proud to be able to be generous, he brought buckets for the animals to drink from. The nomad party watered their animals and filled their nose bags with oats; they drank deep themselves, and washed the dust off their faces and hands, and refilled their waterskins.
Kas would very willingly have spent all that day in the dusty, shady courtyard, waiting to see the holy man. He felt a great and immediate liking for the place, a sense of being at peace, at home. The cripple in the wicker chair did not speak, but watched them with a sleepy smile, as if he was happy they were there. Oranges shone in the shadow among the dark green, glossy leaves of the big tree. Spilt water smelt sweet in the dust. Nobody troubled them.
But the nomads wanted to get to the horse market, and they could not go without Kas, so they all set off again into the hot streets, now half-deserted. On the way they passed food stalls, where they bought bread and fruit and goat meat fried on sticks and broke their long fast with a feast. The nomads would not let Kas pay for his own food. When they got to the horse market and could buy feed for their hungry animals, they did so liberally, paying high for the best grain and oatcake, so that the feed merchants courted them in the hope of supplying their future needs.
The crowd that came round them there was not rude and hostile but intent, businesslike. Nomad horses and mules were highly prized in the cities for both their breeding and their training. The pair of gray mules went to a well-dressed dealer who imperturbably bid up every competing offer and finally paid ten broad pieces of gold and took the mules off to the stables of his master, undoubtedly the official with the gold tassel. They sold the bay and the roan for a good deal less than they’d hoped, Kas judged from what they said to one another, but two or three times what they would have got among their own people. When the roan mule stood waiting to be led off by his new owner, Kas went to him and scratched his forehead under the coarse, stiff up-brush of the mane. The mule grunted companionably.
“A good animal,” he said to the mule’s new owner. The man grunted less amiably than the mule and tugged at the leading rein.
The roan mule moved off with him, self-possessed, obedient.
As the day began to cool they returned to Matua’s house. The man with no hands or feet still sat in his wicker chair under the orange tree, smiling. He had more people to watch now. Ten or more men and women had gathered in the courtyard, waiting to speak to the holy man or to receive his blessing. Some were very poor, two were well-dressed. One man was very lame. A baby in its mother’s arms fretted weakly and endlessly. A woman wept, sobbing and moaning, clinging to her younger companion.
Kas and the nomads and the two guards joined these people, sitting or squatting in the dust, which the one-eyed child sprinkled now and then with water so that again it smelled cool and sweet.
Kas sat cross-legged. He was very tired, having not slept the last night and day, but he did not fall asleep. He sat in the deep peacefulness of heart and mind. When Matua came out of the house, Kas watched him with calm delight. He felt as if he were seeing the father he had never known, the mother who had died when he was five, as if he recognized a dear, known face. It was like a dream, but he was not dreaming.
He watched as Matua, a slight, dark man with graying hair, greeted the nomads, embracing them and calling them uncle, cousin, and nephew. They laughed and talked a long time.
Then the holy man came to him, not quite smiling but with a look of kind, alert expectation, and greeted him: “My son.”
Kas bowed his head down to Matua’s feet, then knelt before him, straight-backed. “Matua-dei, my master, Mitrai, the merchant of Bankala, bade me bring you this gift,” he said. He held up in both hands the earthenware jar in its netting of twine.
Matua took the jar and held it up before him. He looked down at Kas and smiled. Then with the jar on the palm of his left hand, he held his right hand over it for a moment.
He took it in both hands again and offered it to Kas. “You have brought me a great gift, my son. I ask you to bear it back to your master with my blessing and thanks.”
Kas took the cool weight of the jar into his hands, a little bewildered, but too serenely contented in the presence of this man to have any question. “I will,” he said.
Matua looked at him steadily for a time, bent down, and kissed his forehead. “Walk in peace,” he said softly. He went on to the woman who could not stop weeping. She and the younger woman held out eager hands to him, whispering his name as he approached.
Kas yearned to spend the night there, sleeping in that courtyard where pain and tears and disfigurement and helplessness were made welcome and given ease, and there was no fear, no cruelty.
But he must stay with the nomads, and the guards were impatient to take them to the caravan inn and be done with them. So they went off through the crowded streets of evening where people stared at them with enmity and contempt. The tired horses were edgy and nervous among the crowds and shouting voices, the narrow walls and flaring torches and sudden shadows. The two pack mules and the two riding mules jogged along steadily on the leading rope. Kas walked close to them. Their resolute calm, their big, warm bodies, and the tinkle of their tin ornaments gave him comfort.
He felt exalted, yet bereft. He felt that he was walking down and down from a high peak to which he had been lifted as if by the wind. All the rest of his life he would walk down from that height.
The caravan inn was a huge place, desolate at this season. They ate together, served by a couple of boys who would have refused to serve the nomads at all if Kas had not taken the tone of a master to them. “Is this the hospitality of Anun?” he said. “The caravaners of Bankala will hear of it from me!” The dinner of cold lentils, boiled wheat, and greens was served with ill grace, but eaten with much pleasure. Kas bought a jug of red wine, and the five of them drank together. For the first time in their week of journeying together the nomads spoke to him openly. The young man, a little drunk on red wine and regretting his distrust of Kas, grew all but sentimental.
Kas could now ask a question that had puzzled him: “Uncle-dei, how is it that Matua, one of your people, lives here in the city?”
The old man told him the story. Over fifty years ago, his nephew had been captured as a little child in a raid of one nomad band on another and sold as a slave in Anun. Freed by his master, this nephew had married a poor woman of Anun. Matua was their child. “His name is spoken among the cities. But he remembers his people,” the old man said proudly, with tears in his eyes.
Before they slept, the smiling cousin spoke to Kas: “We go south now. The caravan road is no good to you afoot. Do you know the old way?”
“I know what Habgalgat told me.”
“Tell me,” said the nomad.
Bringing into his mind the series of places and springs and turns he had learned, Kas began to repeat them, but in reverse order. When he hesitated or drew a blank, the cousin told him what he needed to know. Kas repeated the words until they had gone through all the landmarks and names of the fourteen places of water and turns and forkings of the path to and from the Desert Gate of Anun to the East Gate of Bankala.
“Walk the way lightly,” said the smiling cousin.
In the morning when the guards came to escort the nomads out of the city, each one gravely bade farewell to Kas, and the uncle gave him a gift: a white cowl such as they wore. “This is the hottest half month of the year,” he said, “and I think it will be very hot this year. Cover your head always. In a sandstorm or duststorm, cover your face like this,” and he showed Kas how to tie the cowl to protect his face and eyes.
Then they went on their way with the impatient guards. Kas stood and watched the switching lion-tails of the two pack mules go off down the narrow street.
He went to the market and bought dates, hard cheese, dried meat, bean meal such as the nomads carried, and a few oranges. He added a second small waterskin to his pack. All that took his silver piece, but having still sixty pennies, he went to a jeweler’s booth and chose a copper pendant inlaid with a circle of blue enamel for Ini.
There was a longing in him to go again to Matua’s house and sit in the dusty courtyard in the shade of the orange tree. He hesitated, from a kind of shyness, and then went there.
The speechless cripple lay in his chair. He smiled at the sight of Kas. The one-eyed child greeted him and went on about his business. Kas sat in the dust in the deep shade and let his heart abide in calm.
As the afternoon wore on people began to come into the courtyard to wait for Matua to appear. Kas went to the well, filled his waterskins, drank deeply, shouldered his pack, and left.
He ate a bowl of boiled wheat and greens at a wayside stall and went on to the city gate. The guard in the booth nodded at him as he went through. He walked out onto the wide road, glaring in the dusty afternoon light.
He had eaten well, was well rested, and had within him now the peacefulness of Matua’s courtyard. He knew there was no water until the oasis where the old road, his way, came from the north to join the caravan road: he must walk all night and into the next night to get there. He set off at a steady pace, with the lightened mind of one who knows he is going home.
When he reached the oasis he was very tired and had scarcely a swallow of water left, but there he could drink his fill from a good spring, pour cool water over his head and body, eat an orange and a handful of bean meal, and sleep. The next day he rested, eating a little and drinking often, in the rustling shade of the old, squat palm trees. He studied the faint maze of animal tracks—beetles, sand rats, birds, a fox, and the sharp hoofprints of two tiny antelope he had seen in the dawn light coming to drink at the spring.
In the evening he ate and drank again, filled up his waterskins, and set off on the faint track leading northwest. From then on each night’s walk would bring him to water. But though at night the dry air cooled quickly, the rocks and sand held the sun’s heat in them like bricks in a kiln. And all the days of his journey were fearfully hot. Every day was hotter, he thought, than the one before.
On the ninth morning he came to Gebo, where the nomads had found him. It had been a long stage from the last small oasis; it was nearly noon when he saw the reeds and palms dancing far ahead on quivering levels of heated air. Low hills to the north stood upside down in the sky. His head was drumming; waves of dizziness frightened him. The weight of the jar of water in its netting, jouncing as he walked, dragged at him as it never had before. He finally came into the shade, threw off his pack and clothes, and plunged into the miraculous soft murky coolness of the pool.
He slept there that afternoon and the next day, not traveling that night. His food was holding out pretty well, he knew the way from here on, and he needed rest. He hoped the terrible heat might break or at least moderate before long. Though this oasis was where he had met up with hostile strangers, he had no fear. The vast solitude in which he walked and slept had come into him and included him, as the peace of Matua’s household had come into him and included him. He dozed, lay in the water of the pool, slept again. He watched the creatures of the oasis come to the water: a slender green snake; a dragonfly among the reeds; several sand rats. They too seemed to have no fear. In the afternoon in the shade of the palms he cut and split reeds and wove a tiny basket with them, as he had learned to do as a child. He put Ini’s amulet into it, and it was in his pack when he left Gebo in the fiery, breathless evening.
That night as he drank from the waterskin he had bought in Anun it broke open on the seam. He drank all he could of the water, but much was lost. He could not mend the waterskin and buried it in the sand at the Red Hills well. He was sorry to lose that reassuring supply, but after all, he had gone from Bankala to Gebo with only one waterskin; he could go back with only one.
The heat of the days could not grow any greater, but it did not grow any less. There was very little shade even in the oases and no coolness. No wind ever stirred, so that breathing was like breathing heat but not air. Only for a few hours before dawn did the night air grow cool, sometimes enough to make him shiver and wrap himself in Ini’s clothes.
The water at the Clay Bank spring was not good, much worse than he remembered it from the journey east. It had a metallic taste that took away his appetite. He forced himself, the day he spent there, to drink it, and to eat. He held each morsel of pressed date in his mouth for a long time before he swallowed it.
He was a little afraid for himself now, but in a detached way. He knew he could not go on walking through the furnace very much longer. But there was not so very much farther to go. The next night would bring him to Narrow Rocks. There was not much shade there, but he would rest in what there was. And from there it was only a night and a day, a long day, to the Dry Hills and the Eastern Gate.
He filled his remaining waterskin with the vile Clay Bank water and set off in the silent heat of the evening. The low sun was so fierce in his face he had to tie the cowl almost shut to keep his eyes from dazzling.
Once in the night he waked from a kind of walking sleep and thought he had lost the track. Everything around him was strange in the starlight. He stilled his panic and told himself that this was the way, he was on it. He trudged on through the strangeness. As the first light came, he began to recognize the hills, but thirst plagued him worse than it ever had, making him feel sick and dizzy. Certain of his way now, he finished the water in his waterskin. The terrible sun came up behind him. In midmorning he came to the streambed and the well at Narrow Rocks.
The well was as dry as ever. He went to where he had dug in the streambed, found the traces of the water hole he had made, and began to dig in the same place.
The sand grew a little cooler as he dug down, but it did not grow damp. He dug far deeper than where the water had begun to seep in before. The sand was dry.
He gave up and tried another place, higher up the streambed, where it might be nearer the buried spring. He came on no sign of water.
He dug once more, at the deepest part of the gully, and then gave up. He went back into the thin shade of the palms and considered the long afternoon ahead, the long night, and the yet longer day that lay between him and Bankala. There was nothing for it. He would rest here, set off in the evening, and walk without water.
He covered his head with the cowl and Ini’s cloth and tried to sleep, though thirst made it hard. His head swam even as he lay still, and that troubled him.
He woke suddenly from a heavy sleep. The sun had set and the faintest breeze stirred the fronds of the dying palms by the dead well. An orange haze was dying out of the upper air and a very faint mottling of high clouds, the first clouds he had seen for weeks, caught the last of the afternoon glow. He went back to the streambed, which held the illusion or memory of water, to eat. As he tried to munch on a dried fig, like plaster in his dry mouth, he saw a little movement near the pile of sand where he had dug the last hole. He sat still and watched.
A sand rat came around the pile of sand and nosed at the rim of the hole. They were familiars of all the oases, pretty little animals, tan above and white below, with narrow white feet and large ears so delicate that light shone through them. They were shy, moving quickly and softly, sometimes with a kind of skip.
He watched this one. It went down into the hole he had dug and nosed at the bottom. Then it began to dig. Its little narrow paws were not good at moving the sand. It dug and dug, and the sand slipped back down where it dug.
It was thirsty. It was dying of thirst, he thought. It lived here, this place was its world, and there was no water in it.
He looked up. Only the larger stars were coming out. The cloud layer was thickening. There might be rain in a day or two. The first rain, the crazy rain. This dry streambed might foam with water for an hour before the cloudburst sank away into the sand.
The rat scrabbled weakly at the bottom of the hole. Kas leaned closer to it. It went immobile, a little statue of a rat.
“It’s all right,” he said. His voice, which had not spoken for fourteen days, was barely a whisper. He unhitched the earthenware jar from his pack and took it out of its netting. He broke the seal of the wooden plug with a twist of his hand and filled his small brass cup with the water. He set the cup in the sand beside the hole, pushing it down to keep it steady. Then he moved some distance away and sat down again.
After a while the rat crawled up out of the hole, moving slowly in fear or in weakness, its long delicate whiskers very busy. It went straight to the brass cup. It put its muzzle in the water and drank, sucking or lapping silently. The water was gone in no time.
Kas involuntarily moved a little. The rat gave a high skip and vanished behind the sand-mounds in the shadows of twilight.
“It’s all right,” Kas told the shadows.
He put his brass cup in his pack. He replaced the plug in the flask carefully and made sure the flask hung securely from the pack so that it could not leak or spill. The high overcast was slowly hiding even the larger stars. Maybe the crazy rain would come. “Get out of the streambed, little rat,” he thought. He set off on the faint track westward.
WHEN KAS CAME TO THE East Gate of Bankala he could not speak. Idlers at the gate had watched the figure shamble along toward them on the road in the late yellow light shaken by distant thunder. When they saw his strained face and blackened mouth they brought him water, and people came crowding around him giving instructions as to how much or how little he should drink at first, saying he was a nomad, saying he was not a nomad, asking him who he was and where he lived and was he mad to walk alone across the desert in the great heat of the year. He heard little of this. Somebody recognized him, and somebody sent to Mitrai’s house, and he got home somehow.
His friends in the men’s quarters laid him onto his cot and tried to clean him up. Ini came hurrying from the house and did a better job of it. The master sent for him if he was able to appear. He insisted on going. He appeared, shaky but decent, in his master’s counting room. He offered Mitrai the earthenware jar in its worn, dirty netting.
“The holy man bade me bring you this. His blessing is on it,” he said in his desert-hoarsened voice.
Mitrai took the jar. His face showed no expression.
“His words?”
“Matua said: ‘You have brought me a great gift, my son. I ask you to bear it back to your master with my blessing and thanks.’ ”
Mitrai examined the jar closely and tested the plug.
“The seal is broken,” he said.
Kas nodded briefly.
“You drank from it.”
Kas glanced up, surprised. His face went still and became stern. He said nothing.
Mitrai watched him.
“You opened it.” It was and was not a question.
“I did. At a dry well. I gave water to a rat.”
Mitrai studied him a while more, then looked back at the jar. He shook it gently. There was no sound of gurgling. He pulled out the wooden plug and peered inside.
“It’s full,” he said.
He looked at Kas.
“It is full to the brim,” the merchant repeated.
Kas’s burnt, cracked lips could scarcely smile. He opened his hands, palm up, in a patient gesture that said: I do not understand, but that is how it is, and it is all right.
Mitrai was silent a while. At last he said, quietly, “Go on, then, Kas. You did well, as always.”
Kas bowed and left the counting room. He was not steady on his feet. Ini was waiting for him at the end of the corridor. She wore the copper and enamel pendant on a string round her neck. She put her arm around his shoulders. “Kas,” she said, “come outside. It’s raining.”