Balkis stared. “How beautiful—and how terrible! What is this place, Panyat?”
“It is called the Sea of Sand, Balkis—and it is a sea indeed, though one without water.”
“A dry sea?” asked Anthony, who had never seen a body of water larger than a pond. “How can that be?”
“It seems still now,” Panyat said, “but look at it again tomorrow from this same place and you will see a completely different picture. Each dune will have moved a dozen feet or so; some will have changed their shapes, and others will have disappeared completely. The sand is always moving, though far slower than water. It swells into waves like the sea and is never still, always slipping, remounding, and being blown about like salt spray—or as the traders tell me seawater is blown.” He smiled sheepishly.
“It is beautiful.” Anthony stared, dazed. “But it is terrible, too. So vast, and without moisture! How are we to cross it? Even our feet will sink in with every step!”
“That much we can cure with the aid of yonder tree.” Panyat pointed to one of the dead pines. “We must cut wood, split it into planks, and tie them to our feet.”
“Of course!” Anthony cried. “If it is like the water of a sea, it is even more like snow! We must make sand skis!”
“If that is your name for them, of course.” But Panyat frowned. “What is 'snow'?”
Anthony and Balkis took turns explaining about the magical white powder that fell from the sky, mounded up into drifts, and pressed itself into ice by its own weight. Then they had to explain what ice was, and finished by telling Panyat that when spring came, the ice turned to water.
“Truly your mountains are lands of wonder!” the Pytanian responded.
Anthony laughed. “Your valley of apple trees seems just as magical to me, friend Panyat, as do your people. How wonderful would it be to survive on the aroma of our food alone in the dead of winter!”
When they had fashioned their skis, Anthony and Balkis made a meal of hardtack and dried pork, with Pytanian apples for dessert—they had each packed a considerably greater number than Panyat brought. He managed quite well by sniffing one of his own.
“It is amazing how long our stores have lasted,” Anthony said.
Balkis nodded. “We have been lucky to find game, and nuts and berries, so often.”
“And the hospitality of those we have met,” Anthony agreed. “Still, long though they have lasted, our supplies are very low.”
Balkis shrugged. “Scarcely surprising, since we have been on the road two months now. They should last until we have crossed this desert, though.”
They slept through the rest of the day in the shade of a boulder, then set out across the sand-sea at night. Very quickly, Anthony and Balkis lost their bearings. Balkis halted and asked, “How are we to know the way? Every dune looks like every other, when we are down here among them!”
Panyat pointed at the sky. “In the desert, you can always see the stars—and though they move through the night, they turn like a wheel, and its hub is one star that moves very little. It lies in the north; therefore, as long as we keep it before us, we march toward the land of Prester John.”
“So that is what the caravan drivers mean when they say they follow the North Star!” Anthony exclaimed.
“You have seen it before?” Panyat asked.
Anthony nodded. “There is little else to see, in a mountain winter—but the cold makes the sky clear and the stars bright. We can tell the hour by their positions.”
Panyat grinned. “Then there is little chance of your becoming lost, so long as you remember where to find the center of your clock.”
They shuffled on through the night, and the sand-skiing was hard enough work that there was little breath to spare for conversation. They halted to rest at midnight, though, and Balkis asked, “Where shall we spend the day?”
“At an oasis I know,” Panyat told them. “During my wander-year, I traveled with the traders all the way across this desert. They knew how to follow a line of oases so that they never had to go more than three nights without fresh water.”
“That,” said Anthony, “has the sound of an underground river that comes to the surface now and again.”
“Perhaps it is,” Panyat replied, “but legend says the first caravan master told a djinni where to seek the most lovely djinniyah in the world, and in return the djinni dug him a string of wells from here to the northern edge of the desert. The oases sprang from those wells.”
“As well the one explanation as the other.” Balkis rose, dusting her hands and taking up her curving pine ski-poles. “But dawn will come and find us nowhere near your oasis, Panyat. Let us walk.”
They shuffled rather than walking, but made surprisingly good time for so slow a mode of travel, reaching the first oasis when the east had begun to brighten with dawn. There, they washed their faces and hands, refilled their waterskins, and made a breakfast of hardtack and jerky. Panyat watched with amusement, sniffing his apple. They took turns telling stories as they ate, and Balkis was fascinated to discover how easily and naturally Anthony's speech fell into meter and rhyme. They fell asleep in the shadow of palm trees before the sun rose, and slept through the day.
They rose as the sun was setting, ate again, and set out on their night's journey. Thus they traveled from one oasis to another. Anthony and Balkis could see the fear in one another's faces when they had camped for two nights in a row and their water was growing low, but Panyat always led them to another oasis before that third dawn.
Still, he noticed their anxiety, and as they pitched camp at the fourth oasis he told them, “Sleep a little longer today, and when the sun has set I shall show you how to find food, even in this desert.”
“Where?” Anthony looked about at the waste around them, totally confounded.
“You shall see,” Panyat promised, “and there is no point in my telling you, for you would never believe me without seeing it.”
He was right—they never would have believed him. They had trouble enough taking him seriously when he showed them how to weave nets of palm fronds and bury them in the sand sideways, with one handle sticking up. When the handle trembled, Panyat said, “Now! Pull it up!”
Anthony yanked as hard as he could, Balkis caught the rim of the basket as it surfaced and threw her weight against it, and the basket sailed clear of the sand. In it was a flat, foot-long fleshy slab, about an inch deep and four wide, and pointed on each end. It thrashed and leaped.
“Hold it up by its tail!” Panyat directed.
“Which end is that?” Anthony cried in dismay.
“The end without the eyes!” Balkis answered, and caught it as Panyat meant. She had to use both hands to hold it up, head pointing downward, while Anthony hovered, ready to catch it if it slipped through her fingers, but the creature rapidly stilled. Then Anthony was able to make out two spots a bit darker than the tan of the rest of its body, but nothing he would have called eyes.
“Hanging like that freezes them, for some reason,” Panyat said. “Now you may chop off its head, grill it, and feed upon it.”
He turned away with a shudder.
Balkis stared at him in distress, but Anthony said, “Unlike him, we must eat,” and took the creature, to prepare and cook it.
From her earliest days, when Balkis had been saved by nixies, she had not eaten fish, out of respect for the water-spirits. But these fish surely had little to do with water, and with her hunger now, she looked forward to eating.
“What are these called?” Anthony asked Panyat as the tantalizing aroma rose into the night.
“The traders call them sandfish,” the Pytanian answered, still with his back turned. “After all, if this is a sea of sand, why should it not have fish? They come to the surface about an hour after sundown. Only then can you catch them, for they swim too deeply during the day.”