“Maybe it’s the overall experience that’s important,” I offered, “not the details of the individual pilgrimage churches.”
He turned to look toward me, a long, intense stare that suddenly turned into a smile. “Thank you, Daimbert,” he said, stretching out again. “You’re absolutely right.”
“Right about what?” I said, startled.
“I should have realized this from the beginning,” he said with surprisingly good humor. “Now I know why I’ve been having to fight against spiritual dissatisfaction this entire journey. I’d assumed it was only the temptings of the devil, and of course in part it was, but I now realize it also came from my own misdirected attentions.”
It was no use asking him to explain what he meant. I wouldn’t understand even if he did.
“I had thought that to come on pilgrimage to the Holy Land would be the culminating experience of my life, the opportunity for my soul to rise above mundane concerns at last and reach toward God. In part it certainly has been, but I was constantly irritated in finding myself still on and of the earth, worried by earthly things.
“Now you’ve made it evident, with your clear insight, that I’d been missing the point all along. ‘The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.’ It is not my body that needed to go where Jesus lived nearly two millennia ago, but my spirit that needed to rise to meet the living Christ.” He gave me a quick glance. “God can use even a wizard for His purposes.”
“Glad to be of service,” I mumbled.
Ascelin and Dominic found the Wadi Harhammi on an old, yellowed map they came across in the bottom of the map drawer of a dark bookstore in the oldest part of the city. None of the newer maps, even the most detailed, included it.
It seemed from the rather confused symbols the mapmaker had used to be up in the stony hills a few days’ journey south of the emirate of Bahdroc. But the map showed no road leading to the Wadi.
“Do you still want to go there?” asked Ascelin. We all sat on the floor, crowded into the king’s room in the pilgrims’ hospice. “That mage certainly knew about the Wadi. I’m afraid we don’t have much hope of being the first there-even if no one else had reached there already in the last fifty years.”
“We may have to face the mage wherever we go,” said Dominic. “I’m beginning to wonder if he’s been toying with us, to let us travel all the way unmolested from Xantium to the Holy City.”
“And don’t forget King Warin,” said Hugo. “He stole Arnulf’s onyx ring from us on purpose to buy the flying horse, which by now has certainly taken him to the Wadi if that’s where he was going.”
“That is,” I put in, “unless Arnulf’s agents somehow managed to get the horse away from Kaz-alrhun first-after all, when I last saw them they seemed to think the horse was now legally Arnulf’s.”
“We should go south in any event,” said the king, “because that is the direction Sir Hugo’s party took. As the mage mentioned the Wadi Harhammi to us, he may also have mentioned it to them. We can ask after them in the oases along the way, and if we reach the emir’s city without word perhaps we can enlist his aid.”
Maffi sat in the corner, following the discussion with bright eyes but saying nothing. I wondered uneasily if he was acting as Kaz-alrhun’s agent. If so, I couldn’t see how even a mage could get information from him while he stayed as close to us as Ascelin made sure he did.
Dominic looked at his hands, where the ruby of his ring shone in the candle light. “I shall travel to the Wadi, whether the rest of you wish to accompany me past the emir’s city or not. My father died with it in his thoughts. We were too foolish for fifty years to realize there was a message hidden in this ring, but even if I’m far too late I must get there at last.”
Dominic glanced toward the king for confirmation as he finished, but the rest of us were already slowly nodding. This had been King Haimeric’s pilgrimage, but we had now completed that aspect of the journey. Somewhere between Dominic’s father’s grave and the Holy City, his quest and the search for Sir Hugo had become fused.
“I agree with you, Dominic,” said King Haimeric. “We should carry out my brother’s last wishes and at least try to find whatever he and his wizard thought was hidden in there. Tomorrow morning we can send a message to the queen, by those pilgrims who said they were heading straight back to the City, so that she’ll know we’ve been delayed.”
“Whether we find anything in the Wadi or not,” said Hugo, “the emir’s city will be the best place to look for my father’s tracks.”
“It should also be the best place to find the blue rose,” commented the king, brightening.
Ascelin rose to his feet and stretched, his hands brushing the ceiling. “Then tomorrow we’d better buy provisions,” he said, “including more waterskins. It’s going to be a dry journey.”
II
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.