“You didn’t really walk,” soothed Melanie. “You stumbled, mostly, up and down dunes, through heavy sand. As the bird flies, we are not actually very far from Mahahm-qum.”
Though Genevieve had a dozen questions she wanted to ask, the air was so full of grit that talking was impossible. Instead, she followed Melanie’s example by lowering her hood over her eyes and turning her head to one side, resting it on the chin rest as on a pillow. Joncaster was the only one of them who had goggles, and even he soon wound a strip of fabric over his nose and mouth.
Close to the ground as they were, they seemed to go very fast, though not in any straight direction. Joncaster kept them low, zipping along the bases of the dunes rather than over their tops. The heat made Genevieve drowsy, and she let her body relax against the padding, aware of passing time but paying no attention to it, coming to alertness only when Joncaster murmured, “There,” as he pointed toward the top of the nearest dune where a red scrap fluttered in the ceaseless wind. “I found a cave nearby that we can watch from.”
“How far a cave?” asked Enid. “It’s almost noon. We don’t have much time.”
“Patience, madam. Patience.”
They veered widely around the base of the flag-topped dune, then went up another to encounter an outcropping of gray stone. Joncaster maneuvered the sled between two rough pillars and let it come to rest on an area of hard-packed sand beneath an overhang.
They rose, stiff from the motionless hours. When they stepped away, Joncaster pulled a pack of netting from under the padding and tossed it over the sled. Between the shadow of the rock and the effect of the netting, the sled disappeared.
“No one will see it unless they’re looking for it, and so far as we know, no one’s looking,” said Melanie in a dispirited voice.
Joncaster had moved away around the outcropping, and he returned, beckoning. “Keep it quiet. I hear harptas grunting, so they’re not far. They’ve covered more distance than I thought they would. They must have had fewer candidates than usual.”
They found Joncaster’s cave almost at the top of the outcropping, a shallow slit across the face of the rock, which Joncaster probed with a staff and a light, dislodging any of the desert’s stingers and biters. They slithered into the crevice backward until the shadow covered their faces. Melanie handed Genevieve a square of the same netting they had thrown over the sled, showing her how to drape it to hide her face.
“Now,” said Joncaster, when each of them had wriggled a belly hollow in the sand carpeting the space. “You don’t say a word, Genevieve. You don’t cry out or scream or run out of this place in some crazy effort to stop anything that’s happening, you understand? Nothing you can do will change what you see, and Madam Commander there says you have to see it, so stay quiet.”
She was immediately rebellious, and the feeling must have shown on her face, for Melanie took her hands and squeezed them, tightly.
“What he says is true, Genevieve. Only your silence keeps us safe. If you are not concerned over your own safety, remember Dovidi, and your husband, and even Joncaster and me. You must watch quietly.”
“Hush,” hissed Joncaster. “They’re here!”
Below them, within the scalloped rim of the lower dune, lay a broad blot of blood lichen, a few bristles of bone-bush, a few taller sentinels of thorn. The flag marked one of the dips in the rim at the far side. Beside it rose the head of a man, then the head of a horse, then the bodies of both as the horse climbed over the rim. Once atop it, the horse was reined out of the Une of march while four harpta lumbered past him, the first three accompanied by walking figures—half of them in black, half in white—and the fourth lizard burdened with basket panniers slung along its sides. From somewhere in the train, a baby cried, a single weak, querulous wail, and Genevieve’s head came up, too swiftly.
“Shh,” murmured Melanie. “Don’t move. Don’t attract attention. Just watch. The one on the horse is the Shah. The white-robed ones are the candidates. The black-robed ones are the aspirants or their proxies. They’re called ‘ritual masters.’”
The baby did not cry again. When all the persons and beasts were arrayed around the rim of the hollow, the Shah rode along their line, indicating this pair, that pair, this pair from among the black-and-white couples: six pair, all told, who knelt while the Shah raised his hands, mumbling something the observers could not hear.
“He’s giving them his blessing,” whispered Melanie.
The six black-robes moved to the pack-lizard, each taking a flat, woven basket from a pannier, each turning to guide one of the white-clad candidates down into the hollow. There each black-robe took a hooked blade from his belt and demonstrated to the candidate what was to be done: cut the lichen, so, near the ground; put the lichen, so, in the basket. The candidates knelt to the task, cutting the lichen close to the sand, placing the cut pieces into the baskets, dark scallops, winy under the sun. If they missed a single frond, the ritual masters pointed it out. The patch of lichen was a large one. The cutting took some time, and the white-clad figures slowed as they worked, until they were barely creeping by the time all was cut. The black-clad ritual masters carried the filled baskets up the slope and emptied them into the panniers, stowing the baskets there as well. The knives were sheathed at each black-belted waist, and the six black-clad ones returned to the hollow where each waited beside a candidate, head bowed, while the rest of the procession left the hollow as it had come.
One harpta remained behind. It put back its head and bellowed to its departing kindred. An answer came from multiple throats. The interchange went on for some time, until the retreating calls faded into silent distance and the single beast was reduced to a gravelly muttering. Until that moment, not one human voice had spoken, not one word had been said.
Melanie took hold of Genevieve’s hand and held it tightly.
One of the dark-clad figures uttered a command. The white-robed ones moved, uncertainly, and the command was repeated.
The white outer robes were dropped to reveal the forms of women, young women, standing uncertainly on the sand.
“Fold the robes,” said the dark-clad leader. “Place them here.”
Though the language was still strange to her, Genevieve understood the command. The robes were folded and piled neatly, leaving the women still voluminously clad, but with their heads and lower arms exposed. As one of the women turned, her veil pulled aside, showing her face. Genevieve started, only to be seized at once from both sides, Joncaster’s hand over her mouth, Melanie’s arm over her shoulders.
“You know her?” whispered Melanie.
Genevieve nodded. Joncaster took his hand away, slowly, watching her. “One of the Shah’s wives,” she whispered. The one who had spoken to her.
The women were led to the edges of the patch of lichen and evenly spaced about it.
“Kneel down,” said the black-robed leader. “Here, facing the lichen bed.”
“But,” murmured one of the women in a drugged voice. “We are supposed to go … to go … to Galul.”
Genevieve stirred again. She knew the voice. Not the Shah’s wife, but … someone she knew. Who could it be that she knew?
“You will go,” said the dark-robed one who had spoken. “This is your final task before going.”
They knelt down. Another of the dark-robed ones went to each of them in turn, offering a drink from a flask, which they gulped thirstily. Another black-robe wrapped a strip of dark cloth around each one’s eyes.
“We leave you now,” cried their leader. “You must not make a sound. Those who will take you to Galul are on the way. You must wait patiently. Do you understand?”
“My child,” said the familiar voice. “Please … my child.”
“Will go with you, woman. Now silence!”
The four nodded, barely. The men marched in place, making crunching noises with their feet. One of the women swayed and fell forward, her face in the sand. The dark-robes waited silently as the other women sway
ed, then fell. One of the black-robes went to the woman who had fallen first, straddled her, pulled her head back, and with one, sudden motion, cut her throat with the curved, seabone knife he had taken from his belt. He dropped her head into the sand and stood away. Blood ran in a crimson stream, down across the sand, soaking in.
By the time Genevieve lifted her horrified eyes to the others, they, too, were bleeding their life’s blood onto the sands. Somewhere among the slaughter, a baby cried.
“Shall I kill it?” asked one of the dark-robed ones, pushing his veils aside to wipe the sweat from his face on his sleeve. In that instant, Genevieve knew where she was. She was in Mrs. Blessingham’s office, seeing a vision. There was the body she had seen, the blood, the knife in the hand of a man, and that man was Willum. What was he doing here, slitting the throats of Mahahmbi women? It had had nothing to do with Carlotta and Glorieta? Why had she thought it did! She shuddered and buried her face in the sand, trying desperately not to be sick.
“Leave it for the birds,” said the leader, wiping his knife upon the woman’s clothing then standing back to observe the flow of blood. “She made a good candidate for your father, Havenite.”
Joncaster put his arms across Genevieve’s back and held her firmly. The men climbed from the hollow, each picking up one of the abandoned robes before taking a position beneath the fins of the harpta and moving away, out of the hollow, back along the track they had made earlier.
Genevieve struggled against their arms, but they held her fast.
The men and the great lizard retreated, the lizard coughing in a dull, repeated complaint.
“Wait,” whispered Joncaster. “Sound travels on the wind, and they are downwind of us.”
Solemnly, slowly, the lizard moved away, grumbling, the silent men keeping pace beneath the shade of its fins until they vanished along the line of flags around a far dune.
“Now,” said Melanie, with distaste. “Come!” She rose to her feet and started down the slope of the dune.
“I don’t want to go down there,” cried Genevieve in a child’s voice. “I don’t …”
“You will,” said Melanie. “For your mother who could have died here; for all the women of Haven who have died here.”
“Of Haven!” she cried. “Women of Haven? These are Mahahmbi women.”
“You are of Haven,” Joncaster said in an angry voice. “And you were supposed to be here, among these. You were warned, you escaped, otherwise you would have been here to drink their potion and kneel before their knives. And I am told there was to have been at least one other on your ship, one who did not come …”
“Lyndafal.” She shuddered in disbelief. “The wife of the Earl of Ruckward.”
Joncaster’s iron hand pulled her erect and half carried her down the slope after him, she stumbling along in a mood of frantic denial. They went over the lip of the dune, into the cupped center, and stopped by the first body, white as a cloud, all its blood pumped away into the sand.
“Look,” said Melanie, pointing. “This is what you have to see.”
Where the blood had run, the sand had come alive! Questing scarlet tendrils writhed into the sunlight, tiny-toothed granules along their stems opening into flat, scalloped fronds that overlaid one another like feathers on a bird, rapidly covering the ground with winy scales. A high-pitched sound came from the sand, like the avid screaming of minuscule voices. Already, the patch of blood lichen that had been cut off at the ground had erupted into frantic regrowth wherever blood had flowed.
Joncaster knelt and turned the first body over. The face was peaceful, unafraid. “They give them a drug,” he said. “At least the bastards don’t terrorize them.”
“Only because fear changes the blood chemistry,” said Melanie. “If adrenaline helped the process, they’d terrorize them, believe me.”
Joncaster pulled Genevieve after him as he went on to the second body, and the third, turning up their faces and feeling among the voluminous veils they wore. He came up with a bundle, which he unwrapped carefully. A baby. “Dead,” he called to Melanie, “from the heat and dehydration.” He rewrapped the tiny bundle and replaced it by the mother’s body. “A boy. They raise almost all the girl babies for their blood, but if the donor of the candidate already has an heir or two, they leave the boys for the carrion birds.”
Genevieve cried, “I should think they’d grow them bigger, too. They’d have more blood, wouldn’t they?”
“They say only women’s blood makes the lichen grow like this,” said Melanie. “Women of reproductive age, preferably nursing mothers. It has to do with the hormones.”
“To make this stuff grow? What is it?”
“P’naki,” said Joncaster, watching her narrowly.
She turned aside, retching, “They gave me P’naki, once. When I was a child. To protect me from the fever.”
Melanie shook her head. “No, Genevieve. They gave you powdered bonebush, probably. It’s evil-tasting stuff, and they told you it was P’naki, a protection against the fever. They told you that it came from Mahahm. You grew up thinking that only P’naki from Mahahm could protect you from the fever, and that explained why Mahahm was important, why the Lord Paramount traded with Mahahm instead of conquering it.”
“I don’t understand,” she cried, as Joncaster dragged her to the fourth body. He rolled it over and removed the veil. Red hair tumbled across the sand, green eyes stared emptily at the sun, a soft mouth curved toward Genevieve, the lips slightly open, as though in a moment she would wake and laugh!
Genevieve wailed, the high, hopeless cry of a child, man or creature, lonely and lost. “Oh, oh, no … no.”
Melanie grasped her by the shoulders and shook her, not gently. “Genevieve, stop it! Who is it!”
She sobbed, “Barbara. My schoolmate, Barbara. She married … she married Viscount Willum, of Halfmore. Oh, for the love of heaven, why? Why?”
“You haven’t been listening to what we’ve been telling you!” snarled Melanie, shaking her. “Stop this!”
Genevieve shuddered herself silent while Joncaster felt along the body, coming away with a bundle that moved slightly. “Another boy child.”
Melanie took it from him, a baby larger and older than the other had been. She took a nippled water bottle from the scrip at her side and thrust the teat into the little mouth.
“This is what you come for?” Genevieve said, wiping her face on her sleeve. “To save the babies?”
Melante nodded. “The ones we can. There are other teams out covering the other locations. We have many among us now who were once children of the candidates.”
Genevieve, kneeling to replace the veil over Barbara’s white face, scarcely heard. “Will we bury her?” she cried, wiping her eyes as she stared about at the quiet bodies. “Bury them?”
“No,” said Joncaster, roiling Barbara’s body back onto her face, as he had already done the others. “We will do nothing except take this one living child back to the refuge. When he is strong enough to travel, he will go to Galul.”
“Just leave her? Like this?” she cried.
Joncaster pulled her to her feet. “We will leave her with the others, so when the flagman’s crew comes at the next holy season, they will see nothing except what the desert itself has done: perhaps a scattering of bones that the bonebushes have not eaten, which he will tidy away so the candidates won’t be frightened by them. There are many carrion-eaters on the sands.”
Melanie said, “Besides, if we buried them, the Mahahmbi might catch on to us.”
“But surely the people from Mahahm-qum already know you’re here,” Genevieve said. “The refuge isn’t hidden.”
“Of course they know we’re here,” said Melanie. “But they don’t know who ‘we’ are. Just as they hide P’naki in plain sight by defining it as something else, so we hide ourselves in plain sight by calling ourselves malghaste. So far as they’re concerned, we’re malghaste, therefore unimportant. They don’t concern themselves with unim
portance!”
“And the lichen isn’t P’naki?”
“It isn’t P’naki if you mean a preventive of a purely fictional fever,” said Joncaster. “It is P’naki if you mean the stuff that Mahahm lives by, the stuff that is taken from here to a well-guarded storehouse just outside the south gates of Mahahm-qum, from which it is traded with the Lord Paramount for food and fabric and machines, that is then traded by the Lord Paramount with other worlds for all manner of things. It is P’naki if you mean that which the Lord Paramount uses to reward his faithful followers, just as the Shah uses it here in Mahahm. This stuff can extend men’s lives indefinitely. Both the Lord Paramount and the Shah Effulgent have grown centuries old upon P’naki, and they grow craftier and greedier with age, while those of Haven who want to grow older grow more numerous, and they, too, become more and more greedy. Those on far worlds, the powerful old men who trade off-world luxuries for P’naki, also grow greedy, always wanting more, and more and more.”
Melanie said, “First the old men take it every twenty years. Then, when they are about one hundred, they need it every ten years, or five, and when they get to be a hundred fifty, they need it every year, every season, just to go on living. And for every dose, more or less, a woman dies.”
Genevieve stared, her eyes glazed, lost in contemplation of the caverns beneath Havenor, piled high with useless treasures, paid for in blood. “How old can they get?” she cried. “Can they live forever?
Joncaster shook his head. “When it gets to the point they need it every day or so, usually something happens to them. They are said to die in hunting accidents, or they drown, or they fall down the stairs.”
Melanie looked closely at Genevieve, noting her pallor, her trembling hands. “Come. Let’s get out of this charnel house. Over the edge of the dune, at least.”
“Go up to the flag,” directed Joncaster. “No sense all of us climbing back to the sled in this heat. I’ll get it.”
Just over the edge of the dune, the two women sat on the sloping surface, Genevieve wiping her face with the hem of her robe while Melanie made a shade with her outer robe and laid the baby within it, still holding the bottle to his mouth. The baby sucked, then sighed, then sucked again.