“Flowers,” grunted Hurlu. “Huh.”
Al-Rahman turned and pointed. “We will pass this ridge and the Great Snake will make a sudden turn. In its coils you will find a waha the old Greeks called Chenoboskion.”
“Waha?” Ragnar asked.
“A watering place in the desert, a sanctuary,” explained al-Rahman.
“How long?”
“At this rate?” Al-Rahman shrugged. “An hour perhaps.”
Ragnar turned to Hurlu. “You hear that, steersman? It seems we’re not dead yet.”
“No,” said Hurlu, “just dried-out old corpses like they use for their cooking fires in that pigsty of a city back there.” He nodded his head downriver.
“Al-Qahira,” said Ragnar, remembering the name of the squalid place and its ironic meaning: “the victorious.”
“That’d be the one,” said Hurlu. “Using the corpses of their forefathers for kindling, pah!”
“Well, Hurlu, can our wilting flowers do it?”
The grizzled older man spit over the side again. “Can they do it?” He turned and called down to the stroke oarsman seated on the bench below him. “Aki! A war song for our lord and master here! Battle speed!” Kraka leaped forward.
In less than half the time al-Rahman had predicted, they came within sight of their goal, the dark river churning white under Kraka’s stern as the oars bit smoothly into the water. The waha, as al-Rahman had called it, was a few rudely built huts of mud and daub huddled under the protection of a gathering of date palms, their high, broad leaves bright green in the dazzling sun. The dark windows of the huts had the blank, sightless look that marked long abandonment.
Ragnar shaded his eyes and looked toward the shore. Perhaps a few fishermen had lived here once, but like everything else in this forsaken country, that was long past. The huts would be home only to scorpions and spiders now, seeking shade, just like Kraka’s crew. Ragnar could also see a small stream tumbling down the shallow bank of the river, coming from some spring hidden within the stand of trees. Back home, on the shores of Flensburg Fjord, the stream, barely a trickle, would have been ignored; here it was a life-giving torrent.
The men scarcely needed the order to pull toward the shore. Grunting a little with the effort, Hurlu turned the long steering oar against the current. According to al-Rahman this was the time of full flood for the river, and the water was high. A few moments later Kraka ran easily up onto the muddy bank. The two forward oarsmen hauled up the stone-heavy wooden anchor and heaved it over the side to hold Kraka against the flow. The landing was done silently and with ease; these men had beached their ship a thousand times on a thousand different shores, and the operation went with almost mechanical smoothness, but even so the men sat with rigid discipline until Hurlu called out the order; their throats were parched and their lips cracked with thirst but, as always, the ship came first.
“Ship oars!” Hurlu bellowed. The oars rattled through their leather-slung tholes as the men pulled them inboard until all thirty-two stood like a forest above the gunwales.
“Rack oars!” Moving from bow to stern the men swung their oars inboard and dropped them into the forward and aft cradles that already held the stepped mast, furled sails and boom as well as an entire set of replacement oars. In bad weather the filled racks sometimes acted as ridgepole for a tentlike space above the stores to keep dry under.
“Out you go, lads!”
With weak, croaking shouts of approval the men went forward to the bow and jumped down onto the mud- and pebble-strewn beach. Usually, if the water was shallow enough, the men would simply jump over the side where they rowed, but not here.
They’d all seen the gigantic, long-jawed, scaly creatures that lived in the shadowed waters of the Great Snake, and watched in horror as a pair of them took down a bullock calf quietly drinking at the shore just outside the town al-Rahman called Al-Qahira. The two creatures, acting in concert, had nearly bitten the bullock in half before they hauled it into deeper water, still bleating piteously until its cries were swallowed up and drowned.
With Kraka empty, the men staggering into the trees to find the hidden spring, Hurlu turned to Ragnar.
“Good enough?”
“Good enough.” Ragnar nodded.
Hurlu jumped down from the raised platform, stomped down the long gangplank and heaved himself over the side. Finally Ragnar and al-Rahman went ashore themselves, followed by Barakah, the silent eunuch.
The source of the tiny trickling stream turned out to be a large pool of almost unbelievably cool freshwater sparkling beneath the little forest of palms. Some of the men dropped down on their bellies and stuck their heads into the water; others simply stripped off their tunics and boots, then flung themselves naked into the pool.
Ragnar and al-Rahman slaked their thirsts with a little more decorum, then watched the men.
“Man needs; Odin provides.” Ragnar laughed, quoting an old saying his mother had taught him at her knee.
Al-Rahman smiled. “Not Odin or any other god,” he said. “This pool is the gift of time.”
“I thought you believed in your own god, Allah,” said Ragnar.
“I believe in the teachings of his great prophet Muhammad, may he be blessed, but Allah is not for man to know or pretend he understands. The Hebrews will not even speak their own god’s name for the same reason.”
“And kuffar, like us. Infidels?” Ragnar smiled, remembering the word al-Rahman had taught him.
Al-Rahman smiled back at the burly Dane. “Muhammad commands us to pity you and teach you the True Way.”
The two men left the pool and strolled through the stand of palms. The grass grew long here, and where rotted dates had fallen more sprigs of greenery grew. Ragnar realized that it was the first time he had relaxed in days. On the edge of the little grove of trees, with nothing but the open desert sands before them, they discovered a great slab of rock jutting from the soil. It was black and smooth as glass except where it had been deeply etched with lines and figures. Some of the figures were clearly meant to be men but others were pictures of strange, fantastic animals: huge horned bulls, some sort of gazelle with a neck so long it looked over all the other figures and additional, smaller creatures: a cat with enormous fangs, and something with gigantic ears and legs like tree stumps, two horns jutting from between its lips. Smaller lines had been scratched to indicate fields of grass and below everything was a thick black snake that could only be the great river behind them.
“Some man’s fever dream from long ago?” Ragnar said, letting his fingers trail over the lines.
“Or a memory,” said al-Rahman. “Perhaps this place was once a paradise of green grass and trees and hunters’ game. Perhaps the pool your men are bathing in is nothing more than rain that fell ten thousand years ago and now springs up here and there to remind us of the past.”
“How can paradise become a desert?” Ragnar asked.
“How can the civilization that built the great pyramids and the ancient temples we passed have vanished?” al-Rahman responded. “Nothing is impossible; everything fades away.”
Ragnar turned back and stared through the stands of trees at the river.
“Is our quest possible? Will we really find the Mines of Solomon?”
“The Romans thought it was real enough.” Al-Rahman shrugged. “There are other stories.” The black man paused. “There was once a great king named Sogolon Djata who could have been mistaken for Harald’s Solomon. His children grew very rich and it is said their very houses were made of gold. There are also tales of their great city in the desert, called Timbuktu, a place of vast wealth and a storehouse of even greater knowledge.”
“Could such a place really exist?” Ragnar said.