There was a respectful quiet as he did his best, striving for pure and golden notes but aware that without the plangent twanging of the kithara the strange Greek intervals would sound baffling to his audience.
Then a soft tone sounded – and another. In the right places and while not in strict Phrygian mode, they were a very good approximation. He looked round. Ying Mei with her borrowed juan had come around to his side.
She stood beside him, watching intently.
They finished the song together to a wondering applause.
He bowed, touched at her gesture. ‘Thank you, My Lady.’
She smiled – but without a word returned to Tai Yi.
CHAPTER FORTY
Day followed day as they passed through a moonscape of ragged sere cliffs and sand bluffs.
For all of one stage the camels trudged through a salt-encrusted surface of hard-packed clay, what remained of the inland sea Lop Nor. The spongy grit slowed them and made them spit harshly. At one point Su stopped the caravan while chunks of salt were lifted and stowed for later use.
Occasionally there were old watercourses, meandering to peter out among the sand-blown flatlands with relics of past times of plenty – low thorny bushes, stunted clumps of wiry grasses, bleached skeletons of long-ago tree life.
The heat rose and the stony plains shimmered and rippled into an uncertain distance, each plodding pace an effort of will, the only distraction the occasional whirlwind of sand moving over the ground like a dancing ghost.
How Su could make out where to go in the stony wastes was beyond Nicander. If it was by recall, he would need to remember hundreds, thousands of miles of a featureless landscape from all perspectives and all seasons – or was it by some other way, perhaps watching the angle of the sun, the stars at night?
One afternoon the camels imperceptibly quickened their pace, raising their heads and snorting. They came upon a small group of wells, each some four feet across, and with age-withered fitments including ropes and buckets. The caravan stayed several hours, sitting under makeshift awnings while the animals took their fill. However, this water was brackish and no one felt inclined to drink it.
Then it was the dunes again – a broad tongue of the Taklamakan that had to be crossed before the Gobi beyond.
The camels wound up into the maze of vast dunes, picking their way along the crests and into the hollows between in patient, slow steps.
The yellow-grey sand was an endless succession of immense curved waves, shimmering in the heat. There was no rest, Su was anxious to be quit of the soft dunes.
At last they subsided and quite abruptly terminated in a vast wall.
The caravan wound down on to the flat desert floor and Su called a halt, then climbed to the top of the tallest dune.
‘We overnight here,’ he announced bleakly when he descended.
It had been some time since he had last been this way and the dunes had shifted inexorably forward. Not only that, but their shape was now quite different and they were without any kind of track or sign. After the traverse, the waterhole he had expected was not there.
They were lost.
As the camp soberly prepared for the night, Su rode out on a tarpan. He returned just before dark set in, his face long.
The travellers turned in early; who knew what lay in store for them the next day?
Even before the stars had left the sky the caravan was assembled and ready to depart. Su looked gaunt as he went over his orders yet again for the conserving of water and protection from the sun.
When it became light enough to see he would have to decide the heading: his choice would save them or doom them to a slow death.
The order was made. To the east, toward the orb of the dawning sun.
It was a different, bleaker landscape. The sand was swept clean from the desert floor; they now faced a stippled plain of stones – not the familiar water-rounded ones about a river but sharp, many-coloured gravel.
A wind arose that whipped up spiteful sand particles, stinging exposed flesh and working into clothing.
They pressed ahead. Beside Nicander, Meng Hsiang paced on, his uncomplaining calmness a reassurance, a fellow living creature who was not intimidated by their peril. There were lessons to be had even from a beast of burden, and he vowed to bring it up with Dao Pa – when he could find him.
He reached out and patted the big flank.
Out of the distance huge vertical forms coalesced out of the haze. Thrusting up out of the flatness of the desert, fluted and pillared, these seemed like the very bones of the earth rearing up.
The caravan reached the monoliths, the travellers awed by their majesty and height, their untouchable silence. They threaded through and Su called a halt in the shade of one.
They dismounted, and as if there were safety in numbers, stayed together and sipped from their gourds.
‘We can’t go on like this!’ one of the merchants moaned. ‘While we’ve got the chance we should take it.’
‘What’s that, then?’ Korkut grunted, looking up from his seat on a rocky slab.
‘Accept that we’re lost. Turn round, go back and over the dunes. Then at least we’ll know where we are.’
‘Su knows what he’s doing,’ Zarina said. ‘I trust him to get us through!’ The desert had not been kind to her: dust-blown, her clothes worn, she was not the sparkling dancer of some nights before.
‘If he does, then why are we lost?’ the merchant came back instantly. ‘To go back we lose a few days, but to go forward without knowing-’
‘He’s striking out until he finds the track he knows,’ Korkut snapped. ‘Let him get on with it!’
‘Why should we all…’
Nicander wandered away from the bickering, remembering his foreboding as they left Chang An. He stared up at the forbidding monoliths and wondered at their meaning. Were they emerging from some subterranean hell into the world of man, a fearsome token of the diabolic realm of devils and demons – or were they the cast-down remains of giant columns that once reached into heaven?
A memory of his mother squeezed at his heart. It was so unfair; that he had shortly to lay down his life in this-
There – in the shadow under a rock slab…
‘Dao Pa! You…’
The man was sitting cross-legged, his hands in his lap cupped and facing upwards.
‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been asking-’
He turned slowly. ‘Solitude is the highest blessing to the soul. Grant that I may so take of it.’
‘Master, we’re in such danger and you need to be alone?’
‘You think deliverance is to be found in the company of others in like affliction? You may share their bitterness, they may feel yours – but a true release is only to be found within yourself. To understand your place in the Tao, to have your being at last one with the universe.’
‘When we face… what we do, you still find time for such?’
‘What better? Tell me; in your philosophy, Ni lao na, what course do you take when all else is in vain and hopeless?’
‘We…’
‘Then preparing the soul for what must come seems to me the more rational course.’
‘Yes, Master,’ Nicander said humbly.
‘There are powers within, that you are unaware you possess. Together we will realise them.’
‘We have no time.’
‘Rest your fears. Su is right – soon he will find an oasis of running water and the knowledge of his position. We will have time.’
‘What! How can you know this?’
‘You have much to learn, Ni lao na, but you will achieve it. And now, for myself I crave the benison of meditation.’
He raised his head and closed his eyes.
The caravan got under way at first light, still eastwards. They would proceed on until the last possible minute of daylight before stopping on the flatness between two monoliths.
After an uneasy night they resumed their onward toil. The monoliths were left behind and the landscape became overlain with undulating ripples of hard-packed sand and further on, the fantastic sight of a fleet of sculpted rock formations, streamlined and sleek.