The Wheel of Osheim

‘This danger that you claim to have come to warn us of.’ Mahood pushed back his plate. ‘What is it?’ He rested both hands on his stomach. As lean as his father, he was taller, sharp featured, pockmarked, as quick to shift from friendly to sinister with just the slightest movement of his face.

‘Bad.’ I took the opportunity to push back my own plate. To be unable to clear your plate is a compliment to a Liban host’s largesse. Mine simply constituted a bigger compliment than usual, I hoped. ‘I don’t know what form it will take. I only pray that we are far enough away to be safe.’

‘And God sent an infidel to deliver this warning?’

‘A divine message is holy whatever it may be written upon.’ I had Bishop James to thank for that gem. He beat the words, if not the sentiment, into me after I decorated the privy wall with that bible passage about who was cleaving to whom. ‘And of course the messenger is never to be blamed! That one’s older than civilization.’ I breathed a sigh of relief as my plate was removed without comment.

‘And now dessert!’ The sheik clapped his hands. ‘A true desert dessert!’

I looked up expectantly as the servers returned with smaller square platters stacked along their arms, half expecting to be presented with a plate of sand. I would have preferred a plate of sand.

‘It’s a scorpion,’ I said.

‘A keen eye you have, Prince Jalan.’ Mahood favoured me with a dark stare over the top of his water goblet.

‘Crystallized scorpion, Prince Jalan! Can you have spent time in Liba and not yet tried one?’ The sheik looked confounded.

‘It’s a great delicacy.’ Tarelle’s knee bumped mine.

‘I’m sure I’ll love it.’ I forced the words past gritted teeth. Teeth that had no intention of parting to admit the thing. I stared at the scorpion, a monster fully nine inches long from the curve of the tail arching over its back to the oversized twin claws. The arachnid had a slightly translucent hue to it, its carapace orange and glistening with some kind of sugary glaze. Any larger and it could be mistaken for a lobster.

‘Eating the scorpion is a delicate art, Prince Jalan,’ the sheik said, demanding our attention. ‘First, do not be tempted to eat the sting. For the rest customs vary, but in my homeland we begin with the lower section of the pincer, like so.’ He took hold of the upper part and set his knife between the two halves. ‘A slight twist will crack—’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the scorpion on my plate jitter toward me on stiff legs, six glazed feet scrabbling for purchase on the silver. I slammed my goblet down on the thing crushing its back, legs shattering, pieces flying in all directions, cloudy syrup leaking from its broken body.

All nine al’Hameeds stared at me in open-mouthed astonishment.

‘Ah … that’s…’ I groped for some kind of explanation. ‘That’s how we do it where I come from!’

A silence stretched, rapidly extending through awkward into uncomfortable, until with a deep belly-laugh Sheik Malik slammed his goblet down on his own scorpion. ‘Unsubtle, but effective. I like it!’ Two of his daughters and one son followed suit. Mahood and Jahmeen watched me with narrowed eyes as they started to dismember their dessert piece by piece in strict accordance with tradition.

I looked down at the syrupy mess of fragments in my own plate. Only the claws and stinger had survived. I still didn’t want to eat any of it. Opposite me, Mina popped a sticky chunk of broken scorpion into her pretty mouth, smiling all the while.

I picked up a piece, sharp-edged and dripping with ichor, hoping for some distraction so that I could palm the thing away. It was a pity the heathens took against dogs so. A hound at a feast is always handy for disposing of unwanted food. With a sigh I moved the fragment toward my lips…

When the distraction came I was almost too distracted to use the opportunity. One moment we sat illuminated by the fluttering light of a dozen oil lamps, the next the world outside lit up brighter than a desert noon, dazzling even through the tent walls. I could see the shadows of guy ropes stark against the material, the outline of a passing servant. The intensity of it grew from unbelievable to impossible, and outside the screaming started. A wave of heat reached me as if I had passed from shadow to sun. I barely had time to stand before the glow departed, as quickly as it came. The tent seemed suddenly dim. I stumbled over Tarelle, unable to make out my surroundings.

We exited in disordered confusion, to stare at the vast column of fire rising in the distance. A column of fire so huge it rose into the heavens before flattening against the roof of the sky and turning down upon itself in a roiling mushroom-shaped cloud of flame.

For the longest time we watched in silence, ignoring the screams of the servants clutching their faces, the panic of the animals, and the fried smell rising from the tents, which seemed to have been on the point of bursting into flame.

Even in the chaos I had time to reflect that things seemed to be turning out rather well. Not only had I escaped the deadlands and returned to life, I had now very clearly saved the life of a rich man and his beautiful daughters. Who knew how large my reward might be, or how pretty!

A distant rumbling underwrote the screams of men and animals.

‘Allah!’ Sheik Malik stood beside me, reaching only my shoulder. He had seemed taller on his camel.

That old Jalan luck was kicking in. Everything turning up roses.

‘It’s where we found him,’ Mahood said.

The rumbling became a roar. I had to raise my voice, nodding, and trying to look grim. ‘You were wise to listen to me, Sheik Mal—’

Jahmeen cut across me. ‘It can’t be. That was twenty miles back. No fire could be seen at such—’

The dunes before us exploded, the most distant first, then the next, the next, the next, quick as a man can beat a drum. Then the world rose around us and everything was flying tents and sand and darkness.

2

I could have lost consciousness only for a moment for I gained my senses in time to see a dozen or more camels charging right at me, maddened by terror, eyes rolling. I lurched to my feet, spitting sand, and dived to one side. If I’d had a split second to think about my move I would have gone the other way. As it was, almost immediately I slammed into someone still staggering about while the rumbles of the explosion died away. Both of us followed my planned arc but fell short of the point I would have reached unimpeded. I did my level best to haul my screaming companion out from underneath me to use as a shield but just ended up with two handfuls of gauze and a camel’s foot stamping on my arse as it thundered by.

Groaning and clutching my rear, I rolled to the side, discovering that I appeared to have stripped and possibly killed one of the sheik’s daughters. The moonlight hid few details but with her hair in disarray I couldn’t tell which of the four it was. Figures closed on me from both sides, the sand settling out of the night as they came. Somewhere someone kept shrieking but the sound came muffled as if the loudness of detonation had reduced all other noise to insignificance.

The sheik’s elder sons pulled me to my feet, keeping an iron grip on my arms even after I’d stood up. A grey-haired retainer, bleeding from the nose and with the left side of his face blistered, covered the dead daughter with his tunic, leaving himself naked from the waist up, hollow-chested and wattled with the hanging skin old men wear. The sons were shouting questions or accusations at me but none of them quite penetrated the ringing in my ears.

The sand cleared from the air within a minute or so and the moon washed across the ruin of our camp. I stood, half-dazed, with Jahmeen’s knife to my throat, while Mahood shouted accusations at me, mostly about his sister, as if the destruction of the camp were as nothing compared to the baring of two breasts. However fine. Oddly I didn’t feel scared. The blast had left me somehow separated, as if I floated outside myself, an unconcerned observer, watching the surroundings as much as I watched Mahood’s raging or Jahmeen’s hand around the hilt of the blade at my neck.

It looked as if a hurricane had blown through leaving no tent standing. Those of us who had been inside when the night lit up were largely unharmed. Those who had been outside showed burns on any exposed flesh facing the direction of the explosion. The Ha’tari on patrol had fared better, though one looked to be blind. But the tribesmen who had been sitting around their prayer pole, unveiled in the darkness, had been burned as badly as the servants.

The camels had taken off but many of the caravaneers had gathered around the base of the nearest dune where the wounded were being treated, leaving me with the two brothers and three retainers out on more exposed sands. It was damnable cold in the desert night and I found myself shivering. The brothers might have thought it from fear, and Jahmeen grinned nastily at me, but some cataclysms are so terrifying that my habitual terror just ups and runs, and right now my fear was still lost somewhere out there in the night.

It wasn’t until Sheik Malik approached from the dunes with two Ha’tari, leading half a dozen camels, that I suddenly settled back into myself and started to panic, recalling his light-hearted talk of gold-plating the balls of any man who laid hands on his daughters.

‘I never touched her! I swear it!’

‘Touched who?’ The sheik left the camels to the Ha’tari and strode into the middle of the small gathering around me.

Jahmeen lowered the knife and the two brothers hauled me around to face their father. Behind him the column of fire continued to boil up into the night, yellow, orange, mottled with darkness, spreading out across the sky, huge despite the fact it would take a whole day to walk back to where it stood.

‘This was a Builders’ Sun.’ The sheik waved at the fire behind him.

My mind hadn’t even wandered into why or what yet but as the sheik said it I knew that he was right. The night had lit brighter than day. Had we been a few miles closer the tents would have burst into flame, the people outside turned into burning pillars. Who but the ancients had such power? I tried to imagine the Day of a Thousand Suns when the Builders scorched the world and broke death.

‘The infidel has despoiled Tarelle!’ Mahood shouted pointing at the figure sprawled beneath the robes.

‘And killed her!’ Jahmeen, waving his knife as if to make up for the fact that this was an afterthought.

The sheik’s face turned wooden. He dropped to the girl’s side and drew back the robe to expose her head. Tarelle chose that moment to sneeze and opened her eyes to fix her father with an unfocused stare.

‘My child!’ Sheik Malik drew his daughter to him, exposing enough neck and shoulder to give a Ha’tari apoplexy. He fixed me with cold eyes.

‘The camels!’ Tarelle pulled at her father’s arm. ‘They … he saved me, Father! Prince Jalan … he jumped into their path as they charged and carried me clear.’

‘It’s true!’ I lied. ‘I covered her with my body to save her from being crushed.’ I shook off the brothers’ hands with a snarl. ‘I got stepped on by the camel that would have trampled your daughter.’ In full bluster mode now I straightened out my robes, wishing they were a cavalry shirt and jacket. ‘And I don’t appreciate having a damned knife held to my throat by the brothers of the woman I protected at great personal risk. Brothers, it must be said, who would currently be on fire at the Oasis of Palms and Angels if I hadn’t been sent to save all your lives!’

‘Unhand him!’ The sheik shot dark looks at both sons, neither of which actually had hands on me any more, and waved them further back. ‘Go with Tahnoon and recover our animals! And you!’ He rounded on the three retainers, ignoring their injuries. ‘Get this camp back into order!’

Returning his attention to me, the sheik bowed at the waist. ‘A thousand pardons, Prince Jalan. If you would do me the honour of guarding my daughters while I salvage our trade goods I would stand in your debt!’

‘The honour is all mine, Sheik Malik.’ And I returned the bow, allowing my own to hide the grin I couldn’t keep from my face.

An hour later I found myself outside the sheik’s second best tent guarding all four of his daughters who huddled inside, wrapped once more in the ridiculous acreage of their thobes. The girls had three ageing maidservants to attend their needs and guard their virtue, but the trio hadn’t fared too well when the Builders’ Sun lit the night. Two had burns and the third looked to have broken a leg when the blast threw us all around. They were being tended a short distance off, outside the tent sheltering the injured men.

The important thing about the injured was that none of them looked mortally injured. The sands are staggeringly empty: the Dead King might have turned his eyes my way, but without corpses to work with he posed little threat.

I heard my name mentioned more than once as the sisters discussed the calamity in low voices behind me, Tarelle sharing the story of my bravery in the face of stampeding camels, and Lila reminding her sisters that my warning had saved them all. If I hadn’t been stuck outside in tribesman robes that stank of camel and itched my sunburn into a misery I might have felt quite pleased with myself.

The sheik, together with his sons and guards, had gone out amid the dunes to hunt down his precious cargo and the beasts it was tied onto. I couldn’t imagine how they could track the camels in the night, or how they hoped to find their way back to us either with or without them, but that seemed to be firmly the sheik’s problem and not mine.

I stood, leaning into the wind, eyes slitted against the fine grit it bore. During the whole day’s journey a light breeze had blown in across us from the west, but now the wind had turned toward the explosion, as if answering a summons, and strengthened into something that might easily become a sandstorm. The fire in the south had gone, leaving only darkness and questions.

After half an hour I gave up standing guard and started to sit guard instead, hollowing the sand to make it more comfortable for my bruised arse. I watched the sheik’s more able-bodied retainers salvaging additional tents and putting them back up as best they could. And I listened to the daughters, occasionally twirling a length of broken tent pole I’d picked up in lieu of a sword. I even started humming: it takes more than a Builders’ Sun exploding to take the gloss off a man’s first night in the living world after what seemed an eternity in Hell. I’d made it through the first two verses of The Charge of the Iron Lance when an unexplained stillness made me sit up straight and look around. Straining through the gloom I could make out the nearest of the men, standing motionless around a half-erected tent. I wondered why they’d stopped work. The real question struck me a few moments later. Why could I barely see them? It had become darker – much darker – and all within the space of a few minutes. I looked up. No stars. No moon. Which had to mean cloud. And that simply didn’t happen in the Sahar. Certainly not during the year I’d spent in Hamada.

The first drop of rain hit me square between the eyes. The second hit me in the right eye. The third hit the back of my throat as I made to complain. Within the space of ten heartbeats three drops had grown into a deluge that had me backing into the tent awning for shelter. Slim hands reached out for my shoulders and drew me in through the flaps.

‘Rain!’ Tarelle, her face in shadow, the light of a single lamp hinting at the curve of her cheekbone, her brow, the line of her nose.

‘How can it be raining?’ Mina, fearful yet excited.

‘I…’ I didn’t know. ‘The Builders’ Sun must have done it.’ Could a fire make it rain? A fire that big might change the weather … certainly the flames reached high enough to lick the very roof of the sky.

‘I heard that after the Day of a Thousand Suns there was a hundred years of winter. The winter of the north where water turns to stone and falls from the sky in flakes,’ Danelle said, her face at my shoulder, voice rich and commanding thrills down my spine.

‘I’m scared.’ Lila pressed closer as the rain began to hammer on the tent roof above us. I doubted we’d be dry for long – tents in Liba are intended to keep out the sun and the wind: they rarely have to contend with the wet.

A crack of thunder broke ridiculously close and suddenly Prince Jal was the filling in a four-girl sandwich. The boom paralysed me with terror for a moment and left my ears ringing, so it took me a short while to appreciate my position. Not even thirty-six yards of thobe could entirely disguise the sisters’ charms at this proximity. Moments later, though, a new fear surfaced to chase off any thoughts of taking advantage.

‘Your father made some very specific threats, ladies, concerning your virtue and I really—’

‘Oh, you don’t want to worry about that.’ A husky voice close enough to my ear to make me shiver.

‘Father says all manner of things.’ Softly spoken by a girl with her head against my chest. ‘And nobody will move until the rain stops.’

‘I can’t remember a time when we weren’t being watched over by Father, or our brothers, or his men.’ Another pressed soft against my shoulder.

‘And we do so need protecting…’ Behind me. Mina? Danelle? Whoever it was her hands were moving over my hips in a most unvirtuous way.

‘But the sheik—’

‘Gold plating?’ A tinkling laugh as the fourth sister started to push me down. ‘Did you really believe that?’

At least two of the girls were busy unwinding their thobes with swift and practised hands. Amid the shadows thrown by so many bodies I could see very little, but what I could see I liked. A lot.

All four of them pushed me down now, a tangled mass of smooth limbs and long hair, hands roaming.

‘Gold’s so expensive.’ Tarelle, climbing atop me, still half-wrapped.

‘That would be silly.’ Danelle, pressed to my side, deliciously soft, her tongue doing wonderful things to my ear. ‘He always uses silver…’

I tried to get up at that point, but there were too many of them, and things had got out of hand – except for the things that were now in hands … and, dammit, I’d been in Hell long enough, it was time for a spot of paradise.

There’s a saying in Liba: The last yard of the thobe is the best.

…or if there isn’t, there should be!

‘Arrrrgh!’

I’ve found that there are few things more effective at making a man’s ardour grow softer than cold water. When the tent roof, weakened by earlier traumas, gave without warning and released several gallons of icy rainwater over my back I jumped up sharply, scattering al’Hameed women and no doubt teaching them a whole new set of foreign curse words.

One thing that became clear as the water dripped off me was that very little more was dripping in to replace it.

‘Sshhh!’ I raised my voice over the last of their shrieking – they’d enjoyed the soaking no more than I had. ‘It’s stopped raining!’

‘عشيقة، هل أنت خخير؟’ A man just outside the tent, jabbering away in the heathen tongue, others joining him. They must have heard the screams. How much longer the fear of what the sheik would do to them if they burst in on his daughters would outweigh the fear of what the sheik would do to them if they failed to protect his daughters, I couldn’t say.

‘Cover yourselves!’ I shouted, moving to defend the entrance.

I heard smirking behind me, but they moved, presumably not expecting to emerge unscathed if reports of ‘frolicking’ reached their father.

Outside someone took hold of the tent flap. I’d not even laced it! With a yelp I flung myself down to grab the bottom of it. ‘Hurry for Christ’s sake! And blow out the lamp!’

That set them giggling again. I grabbed the lamp and pre-empted any attempt at entry by bursting out, setting the foremost of the sheik’s retainers on his backside in the wet sand.

‘They’re all fine!’ I straightened up and waved an arm back toward the tent. ‘The roof gave way under the rain … water everywhere.’ I did my best to mime the last part in case none of them had the Empire tongue. I don’t think the idiots got it because they stood there staring at me as if I’d asked a riddle. I strode purposefully away from the tent, beckoning the three men with me. ‘Look! It’ll all be clearer over here.’ I sincerely hoped those thobes went back on as quickly as they came off. Two of the sheik’s men were bringing over one of the sisters’ maids, urging her on despite her injuries.

‘What’s that over there?’ I said it mainly to distract everyone. As I looked in the direction I was pointing though … there was something. ‘Over there!’ I gesticulated more fiercely. Moonlight had started to pierce the shredding clouds overhead and something seemed to be emerging from the dune that I’d selected at random. Not cresting it, or stepping from its shadow, but struggling through the damp crust of sand.

Others started to see it now, their voices rising in confusion. From the broken sand something rose, a figure, impossibly slim, bone-pale.

‘Damn it all…’ I’d escaped from Hell and now Hell seemed to be following me. The dune had disgorged a skeleton, the bones connected by nothing but memory of their previous association. Another skeleton seemed to be fighting its way from the damp sand beside the first, constructing itself from assorted pieces as it came.

All around me people started to cry out in alarm, cursing, calling on Allah, or just plain screaming. They began to fall back. I retreated with them. Not long ago the sight would have had me sprinting in the direction that best carried me away from the two horrors before us, but I’d seen my share of dead, both in and out of Hell, and I kept the panic to just below boiling point.

‘Where did they come from? What are the odds we camped right where a couple of travellers died?’ It hardly seemed fair.

‘More than a couple.’ A timid voice behind me. I spun around to see four bethobed figures outside the women’s tent. ‘Over there!’ The speaker, the shortest so probably Mina, the youngest, pointed to my left. The sand in the lee of the dune had begun to heave and bony hands had emerged like a nightmare crop of weeds.

‘There was a city here once.’ The tallest … Danelle? ‘The desert ate it two hundred years ago. The desert has covered many such.’ She sounded calm: probably in shock.

The sheik’s retainers began to back in a new direction, retreating from both threats. The original two skeletons now seemed to sight us with their empty sockets and came on at a flat run, silent, their pace deadly, slowed only by the softness of the sand. That brought my panic to the boil. Before I could take to my heels though, a lone Ha’tari sprinted past me, having come through the camp. The sheik must have left one to patrol out among the dunes.

‘No sword!’ I held my empty hands up in excuse and let my retreat bring me among the four daughters. We stood together and watched the Ha’tari intercept the first of the skeletons. He hacked at its neck with his curved blade. Hearteningly, bone shattered beneath the blow, the skull flew clear and the rest of the skeleton collided with him, bouncing off to fall in a disarticulated heap on the sand.

The second skeleton rushed the warrior and he ran it through.

‘Idiot!’ I shouted, perhaps unreasonably because he’d acted on instinct and his reflexes were well honed.

Unfortunately sticking your blade through the chest of a skeleton is less of an inconvenience to the thing than it would have been back in the days when its bones were covered in flesh and guarded a lung. The skeleton ran into the thrust and clawed at the warrior’s face with bone fingers. The man fell back yelling, leaving his sword trapped between its ribs.

I saw now, as the last tatters of cloud departed and the moon washed across the scene, that the skeleton was not as unconnected as I had thought. The silver light illuminated a grey misty substance that wrapped each bone and linked it, albeit insubstantially, to the next, as if the phantom of their previous owner still hung about the bones and sought to keep them united. Where the first attacker had collapsed and scattered, the mist, or smoke, had stained the ground, and as the stain sank away the desert floor writhed, nightmare faces appearing in the sand, mouths opening in silent screams before they lost form and collapsed in turn.