He stood up, soiling his legs in doing so, his body wracked with shudders.
It was the Scourge he was hearing, he had no doubt. The sound was muted, but indisputable. A voice of grief, and power; and summoning. It offered them a signpost. They would not have to go blindly into the wilderness, hoping luck would bring them to their destination. They'd follow the route the wind had come. Sooner or later wouldn't it lead them to the creature whose voice it carried?
He hoisted up his trousers and opened the door. The wind was running wild through the tiny town, depositing sand wherever it went, whining at the houses like a rabid dog. He listened again for the voice of the Scourge, praying that it was not some hallucination brought on by his hunger. It was not. It came again, the same anguished howl.
One of the villagers hurried past the spot where Shadwell stood. The Salesman stepped out of the doorway and took the man's arm.
‘You hear?' he said.
The man turned his scarred face towards Shadwell. One of his eyes was missing.
‘Hear?' said Shadwell, pointing to his head as the sound came again.
The man shook off Shadwell's grip.
‘Alhiyal,' the man replied, practically spitting the words out.
‘Huh?'
‘Al hiyal...' he said again, backing away from Shadwell as from a dangerous idiot, his hand at the knife in his belt.
Shadwell had no argument with the man; he raised his hands, smiling, and left him to his troubles.
A curious exhilaration had seized hold of him, making his starved brain sing. They'd go tomorrow into the Quarter, and damn his intestines to Hell. As long as he could stay upright on a saddle he could make the journey.
He stood in the middle of the squalid street, his heart pounding like a jack-hammer, his legs trembling.
‘I hear you,' he said; and the wind took the words from his lips as if by some perverse genius known only to desert winds it could return the way it had come, and deliver Shadwell's words back to the power that awaited him in the void.
II
OBLIVION
1
Nothing, neither in the books he'd read nor the testimonies he'd listened to, nor even in the tormented voice he'd heard on the wind the previous night, had prepared Shadwell for the utter desolation of the Rub al Khali. The books had described its wastes as best words could, but they couldn't evoke the terrible nullity of the place. Even Emerson, whose mixture of understatement and passion had been persuasive in the extreme, hadn't come near to touching upon the blank truth.
The journey was hour upon relentless hour upon relentless hour of heat and bare horizons, the same imbecile sky overhead, the same dead ground beneath the camels' feet.
Shadwell had no energy to waste on conversation; and Hobart had always been a silent man. As for Ibn Talaq and the boy, they rode ahead of the infidels, occasionally whispering, but mostly keeping their counsel. With nothing to divert the attention, the mind turned to the body for its subject, and rapidly became obsessed with sensation. The rhythm of the thighs as they chafed against the saddle, or the taste of the blood from the lips and gums; these were thought's only fodder.
Even speculation about what might lie at this journey's end was lost in the dull blur of discomfort.
Seventy-two hours passed without incident: only the same curdling heat, the same rhythm of hoof on sand, hoof on sand, as they followed the bearing of the wind on which the Scourge's voice had come. Neither of the Arabs made any enquiry as to the infidels' purpose, nor was any explanation offered. They simply marched, the void pressing upon them from all sides.
It was worse by far when they stopped, either to rest the camels, or to offer their sand-clogged throats a dribble of water. Then the sheer immensity of the silence came home to them.
Existence here was an irrational act, in defiance of all physical imperatives. What kind of creature had chosen to make its home in such an absence, Shadwell wondered at such moments: and what force of will must it possess, to withstand the void? Unless - and this thought came more and more - it was of the void: a part of the emptiness and silence. That possibility made his belly churn: that the power he sought belonged here - chose dunes for its bed and rock for its pillow. He finally began to understand why Immacolata's visions of the Scourge had brought sweat to her brow. In those nightmares she had tasted a terrible purity, one that had made her own pale by its light.
But he was not afraid; except of failing. Until he stepped into the presence of that creature - until he learned the source of its cleanliness, he could not be cleansed himself. That he longed for above all things.
And, as the night fell on their fourth day in the Quarter, that desire came still closer to being realized.
Jabir had just set the fire when the voice came again. There was little wind tonight, but it rose with the same solemn authority as before, tainting the air with its tragedy.
Ibn Talaq, who'd been cleaning his rifle, was the first to his feet, his eyes wide and wild, either an oath or a prayer on his lips. Hobart was on his feet seconds later, while Jabir went to soothe the camels, who had panicked at the sound and were tearing at their tethers. Only Shadwell stayed beside the fire, gazing into the flames as the howl - sustained as if on one monumental breath - filled the night.
It seemed to go on for minutes before it finally died away.
When it did it left the animals muttering, and the men silent. Ibn Talaq was first back to the fire, and the business of rifle-cleaning; the boy followed. Finally, Hobart too.
‘We're not alone,' said Shadwell after a time, his gaze still on the flames.
‘What was it?' said Jabir.
‘Al hiyal,' Ibn Talaq said.
The boy pulled a face.
‘What is al hiyal? Shadwell said.
They mean the noise the sand makes,' Hobart said.
The sand?' said Shadwell. ‘You think that was the sand?'
The boy shook his head.
‘Of course not,' said Shadwell. That's the voice of the one we've come to meet.'
Jabir threw a handful of bone-white sticks onto the fire. It devoured them immediately.
‘Do you understand?' Shadwell asked.
Ibn Talaq looked up from his work, and stared at Shadwell.
They understand,' said Hobart.
‘I thought maybe they'd lose their nerve.'
Ibn Talaq seemed to sense the implication of this remark.
‘Rub al Khali,' he said, ‘we know. All of it. We know.'
Shadwell grasped the point. They were Murra. Their tribe laid claim to this territory as its own. To retreat before the mysteries of the Empty Quarter would be tantamount to disinheritance.
‘How close are we?' said Hobart.
‘I don't know,' Shadwell replied. ‘You heard it the same as me. Perhaps very near.'
‘Do you think it knows we're here?' said Hobart.
‘Perhaps,' said Shadwell. ‘Does it matter?'
‘I suppose not.'
‘If it doesn't know tonight, it will by tomorrow.'
2
They set out at dawn the next day, to cover as much distance as they could before the sun mounted too high, following the same bearing as they'd followed on the previous four days.
For the first time in their journey the landscape they were crossing showed some subtle change, as the rhythmical rise and fall of the dunes gave way to much larger, irregular rises.
The sand of these hills was soft, and collapsed in sibilant avalanches beneath the feet of animal and human alike. Nobody could ride. The travellers coaxed the animals, still jittery after the night before, up the ever steeper slopes with curses and kindness in equal measure, only to reach the top and find a yet larger dune ahead of them.
Without any words being exchanged, Ibn Talaq had relinquished his position at the head of the quartet, and it was Shadwell who now set the pace, leading the party up the faces of the dunes and down into the troughs between. There, the subtlest of winds blew, more distressing in its ingratiating way than any storm, for it seemed to whisper as it ran over the sand, its message just beyond the reach of comprehension.