Jame bowed to her hostesses and, at their invitation, sat cross-legged opposite them. Jorin curled up beside her. His nose twitched at the smell of food.
“I am Kalan,” said the younger. “This is Laurintine. Our kinswoman, whom you tried to save, was Laurintine’s great-granddaughter, Lanielle.”
“I’m sorry that my rescue failed. She tried to send you a message, but died first. My condolences.”
Age and weight notwithstanding, Jame thought, these two ladies bore a striking resemblance to each other and to the young seeker who had so unnervingly crumbled to dust in her arms. They might almost have been the same woman at different ages.
They offered sweetened tea and small honey cakes. Everything was gritty with dust. The canvas walls flexed as the wind buffeted them and the flame in a hanging brazier danced wildly. Jame sipped, wondering what else this was all about.
The two seekers exchanged glances.
“Tell her,” said the older one in a hoarse voice, as if the desert had her by the throat. “We agreed.”
Kalan sighed. “Very well. You may have heard that this is a special caravan, perhaps the last of its kind. That may be. If so, someone in the Kencyr camp should know why in case anything goes wrong. King Krothen may demand secrecy, but your people have always been kind to us. For that and for Lanielle, we chose you.” She sighed again. “Where to begin.”
“Long, long ago . . .” croaked Laurintine.
“. . . there was a southern city named Langadine, on the edge of a great inland sea, surrounded by ancient civilizations. Of them all, though, it was the richest and the most dazzling, home to merchants, nobles, and gods. But no place is paradise to all. One day a girl fled from that fabulous city and tried to drown herself in the sea. She was with child, you see, and unwed. That was a great shame then . . .”
“As it is . . . to this day.”
“Well, yes, but the water would not receive her. As she floundered in it, it turned to the salt of her tears. In the morning after a tempestuous night, she found herself lying on a dry salt plain with nothing but the bones of her city behind her.
“Wanderers found her and took her to Kothifir. There she bore her child, a girl, and there she lived for many years. Eventually, however, she grew homesick and longed to return to Langadine. The king had heard her story. Intrigued by the idea of a great city in the Wastes, where he only knew of ruins, he mounted an expedition to take her and her daughter home. Thus she became the first seeker of the Langadine line.”
“Did they find the city?” asked Jame.
“They did. The northerners were amazed at its wealth, especially at a certain sheer fabric which they had never seen before.”
“Silk.”
“Yes. They took a bolt of it back to Kothifir led by the daughter who thus, because she had been born in Kothifir, became the first Kothifiran seeker. She had, by now, had a daughter of her own, who accompanied her. The travelers were welcome, but not by the king who had sent them. What for them had been only a few weeks’ journey for Kothifir had taken years.”
“So they had traveled in time as well as in space.”
“Again, yes. The king sent a trade mission, but they only found ruins in the desert. Langadine was not rediscovered until one of its two daughters, the maiden, agreed to lead an expedition. And so it has gone ever since. We seekers are always female members of the same lineage, able to find the city of our birth. There are usually three of us bound to each city: the maiden, her mother, and her grandmother, sometimes with a skip in generations, but there are fewer and fewer of us. I can lead this expedition back to Kothifir, having left a recently dead husband and a baby daughter behind me in that city, but my mother is also dead and Laurintine is the last Langadine seeker now that her great-granddaughter Lanielle is also gone.”
There was silence for a moment. Kalan clenched a plump fist and beat it against her thigh. Her hazel eyes were bright with unshed tears. “Ah, I should not have left my child and would not if she had not been ill. Will she live until I return? This is a hard life, always traveling to satisfy the greed of others. The lords of both cities ask too much of us. I only want a home and family of my own, before it is too late.”
“As it is . . . for me?”
“Laurintine, I am sorry. Service to the caravans has worn you to a bone, and all your children are dead.”
The wind soughed, the canvas boomed. All without was desolation. Here within, life was the fragrant if gritty cup of tea which the older woman poured and offered to the younger.
Jame watched them share the moment, the misery. Her own hand instinctively sought Jorin’s rich coat for comfort and he nuzzled her fingers. Could she have left a child behind, a sick baby? The very thought of children was alien to her, but she was young. Perhaps someday she would fully understand Kalan’s distress. She already knew what it felt like to long for a home.
“What about the time distortion?” she asked.
Kalan pulled herself together. “That,” she said, “is the other great worry. It varies from trip to trip. At first time passed faster in the north than the south, the present faster than the past, but that stabilized and then reversed. Now only two things are sure. For one, seekers cannot revisit their own pasts. Our lives lead forward, at whatever pace our surroundings decree. Whatever is done to us, we cannot undo.”
“And the second thing?”
“Langadine is catching up with Kothifir, or rather I should say with the Kothifir of three thousand years ago. Around that period, the southern city suddenly collapsed in some final, fatal cataclysm. We don’t know what happened, except that beforehand the sea turned to salt water and began to dry up. The process had already begun the last time I was there. What has taken them centuries is only years to us.”
Jame sat back on her heels, considering. “We could slip through one last time,” she said, “or we could get caught on the cusp of disaster. Here and now, though, I don’t know what we can do about it.”
“Turn back,” said Kalan.
Laurintine gripped the other’s knee with a bony claw. “I want,” she rasped, “to die . . . at home.”
“And the wagon masters aren’t likely to listen to me,” Jame added. “Would they to you?”
The two seekers looked chagrined.
“I thought not.”
An idea struck her. “The spoils of the Wastes can only survive in the present if King Krothen touches them. Lanielle hadn’t met him yet. Is that why she died after she was injured?”
Kalan inclined her head without speaking.
Leaving their tent, Jame paused on its threshold to consider the situation. If she understood her people’s role, they wouldn’t be permitted beyond the boundary between past and present. That should put them out of the path of disaster unless, as Kalan said, something went wrong.
And it always does.
G’ah, she hated being out of control, but this situation loomed like the mountain ranges to the east and west, not to be changed by any puny effort on her part. At least the wind seemed to be abating. In another day or two, they should reach the edge of the Great Salt Sea.
X
The Sea of Time
The next day dawned clear and hot, revealing that the caravan had camped on the very edge of the sand dunes. Flat, rock-strewn land stretched away before them in unparalleled monotony, broken here and there by wind-tortured stone formations. Once again the wagons were unpacked, the wagon wheels restored, and their loads returned. Jame supposed that the rocks, as small as they were, would scrape on the sledge bottoms. Lambas whiffed and hooted, not eager to resume their harnesses. Over the past few days without water, their swollen bellies had shrunken noticeably and their girths needed to be tightened. Soon they would require another deep drink.