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For my part, I was struggling still to learn to live with the Name of God. Betimes it was quiescent, a slumbering seed lodged in my brain, and I could nearly forget I carried it. And then something would set it off-the fecund odor of soil, a bird on the wing, or the Falls; Blessed Elua, the Falls. And then it would fill me like the sound of trumpets and I would be lost in reverie, staring, witnessing life as if it were created anew on the instant, over and over. When we reached the Great Falls, I stood on the verge of the opposite cliff gazing down into the roaring, mist-wreathed abyss for ages, watching tons of water moving without cease, seeing the Name written in patterns on the boiling foam.

“Phèdre.”

It was Imriel who drew me back, and I saw in his twilight-blue eyes that he was afraid. And then I tried harder to keep the Name from filling me wholly, but it was not easy.

A half-day’s ride past the Falls, we said farewell to Eshkol and his men. He wept upon leaving us, too. I watched the tears fill his eyes and overflow his lower lids, trickling like drops of rain on his mahogany cheeks, whispering the Name of God in the path they traced. “You have given me a dream,” he said. “I am not sure of what, but it is a
dream
. I never had one before.”

“You will know,” I said, certain. It was written in the geometry of his bones, the sharp jut of his cheeks and his eloquent hands. It sounded in his voice, and the passion that threaded it. “Whatever Saba is to become, you will help shape it with courage and wisdom.”

“I pray it is so,” he said, bowing. “Adonai guide you.”

“And you,” I said, watching them go. “And you.”

Mile by slow mile, we began retracing our steps.

It took me sometimes in the highlands, atop the vast mountain peaks where the green carpet of forest spread below us. I watched hawks and buzzards circling over the valleys and grew dizzy at their grace, the gyres etched by their sharp-tilting wings. If the Jebeans had thought I was god-touched before, they were sure of it now; half-mad and blessed with it, but apt to endanger myself. I wasn’t, I don’t think. I cannot be sure. Semira had spoken truly; it was a mighty thing to bear.

The Yeshuite mystic Eleazar ben Enokh had claimed the Name of God was the first Word spoken, the Word that brought all creation into being. Whether or not it is true, I do not know; no two nations hold the same story as to how it came to pass. We are Elua’s children, the last-born, and we took the world as we found it. But I know there was great power in that Name, and when it blazed in my thoughts, I beheld the world through different eyes.

Imriel didn’t like it.

I learned why, a week into our journey.

It was the campfire that struck me that night, the glowing orange caverns of embers beneath the stacked branches, the flames leaping above and sparks ascending in a column into the black, black sky. How long did I watch it, marveling? A few seconds, I thought, though I daresay it was a good deal longer, until I realized my arm was being shaken.

“Phèdre!”

“Yes?” I inquired. “I’m sorry, I was thinking.”

Imriel shook his head and looked away. “You weren’t,” he muttered.

“Imri.” I waited until he looked back at me. “I’m trying. It’s like having someone shout in your ear, can you understand? When it happens, it’s all I can hear. I didn’t know it would be like this, or I would have told you. But there was no one to ask and no way of knowing.”

“You look like you did in Daršanga,” he said, half under his breath.

“
What
?”

“You look like you did in Daršanga.’” His voice rose, scared and defiant. “When you sat with the Mahrkagir, in the festal hall, your face-you looked the same, exactly the same!”

“Really?” I asked Joscelin.

He raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

It made me laugh. Elua knows why, but it did, and once I had started, I was hard-put to stop. All the absurdity of our long journey, the immensity of our task, the chaos that followed in our wake, the endless variations of the pattern I seemed destined to follow; it all came upon me at once. “Ah, Elua.’” I gasped, wiping my eyes. “Well, gods are like patrons, it seems. The shape of their desire may vary, but the manner of possession all comes to the same in the end.’”

Imriel regarded my mirth with apprehension.

“She’s fine,” Joscelin told him.

He looked doubtful.

“Oh, Imri.” With difficulty, I managed to gather my composure. “It’s nothing like Daršanga, I promise you. Listen, and I’ll tell you what happened.”

I told them both, then, what had happened after I had entered the temple on Kapporeth, and it seemed my laughter had freed my voice to speak. I told them the furnishings were those described in the ancient writings of the Tanakh, and how the priest offered incense, then led me into the inner sanctum. And I told them of the Ark of Broken Tablets, and the cherubim atop it with faces like those of Elua’s Companions. I told how the priest and I had lifted the lid, and the silent rubble had formed a Name I could not read.

And I told them how the tongueless priest had spoken it, and what had befallen me.

They listened, the both of them, and Imriel was wide-eyed as any child hearing a tale of wonder, no longer fearful. What Joscelin thought, I could not say.

“Do I really look like I did with the Mahrkagir?” I asked him later that night, lying against him in the tent with our cots pushed together.

“Mm-hmm.” He was half-asleep, his arms around me. “And like you did at the bathing-pool, after I caught that fish.”

“Where we made love?” I propped myself up on one elbow to look at him.

“Yes.” His eyes opened in the dim light, amused. “And when that arrow grazed you and Imri put snakeroot on the wound, and in Nineveh, when you informed me we had to go into Drujan. Phèdre, I’m used to it. Daršanga was different, but this … your wandering around with the Name of God in your head is just one more damned thing to get used to.”

“Am I that hard to live with?” I asked.

“Yes.” His arms tightened around me. “But it’s worth it.”

Matters might have fallen out differently that night if Imriel had not been asleep in the tent with us; as it was, it merely made me think-and suggest to Imri with no especial tact that he might enjoy bunking with Bizan or Nkuku the following night, which he did with a good will, for any display of affection between Joscelin and I gladdened him. I may say that we made good use of the time, and I was well content with it. And whether it was the purgative effect of laughter, relating the story or our lovemaking, I cannot say, but the insistent presence of the Sacred Name grew easier to bear in the days that followed.

Like as not, though, it was the rains.

They began two days after our conversation. After our travels in Khebbel-im-Akkad, I thought I knew somewhat of rain. I was mistaken. The rains that fall in Jebe-Barkal are like naught else, and no one travels in them. We did, though. If I had not seen that landscape once already, I would be hard pressed to describe it, for more often than not, it was a solid veil of rain through which we journeyed. We rode where we could, and walked where we could not, leading our horses through treacherous gullies and over rain-loosened scree. In the plains, we plodded along the banks of a rain-swollen Tabara River, our heads lowered, water running off us in sheets.

In the early part of the day, the rains would cease for a time. That was when the flies came. Blood-flies, Kaneka had called them; I remembered that, now. They were black and vicious and their sting hurt like fury. Our animals were half-maddened by them, and we humans were scarce immune. It got so one welcomed the rains. In the evenings, the rain and smoke kept them at bay, when we could muster a fire. Betimes the firewood was so sodden, not even Bizan could coax a flame. We all took to carrying tinder wrapped in oilcloth.

“We can make camp, lady, and wait out the rains,” Tifari Amu said to me after five days of misery. “In the highlands, it is not so bad. We can build shelters that will last, and there is easy game.”

“How long?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Three months, perhaps.”

It would be winter by the time we reached Menekhet, and too late for any ships. I gazed at Imriel, shrouded in a burnoose; Joscelin, his shoulders hunched against the downpour. Our bearers cursed and pleaded with the donkeys, whose short legs sunk deep in the mire. “What do you say, Tifari?”

“That only madmen travel in the rainy season.” He regarded the straggling line of our company. “Madmen, and us. You ask me? I want to go home, lady. If you have the heart for it, I say we press onward.”

“Onward it is,” I said, thinking,
home
.

Eighty

IT WAS a miserable journey.

There are no words to describe it. We took to travelling in the morning hours, when the rains had ceased. Once the sun rose, it heated the muddy earth until it was like journeying through a steam-bath, thick and swampy, the air filled with the green reek of rotting vegetation. It was impossible to keep anything dry. Our stores of grain rotted and sprouted in the sack.

We lived, for the most part, on game. And when we could not get it fresh, we went hungry, for most of what we carried had spoiled. Mercifully, there was water in abundance, and lush grass for our mounts. Would that we could have eaten the same! But Tifari and Bizan brought down game enough between them to fill our bellies two days out of three, and where we followed the river, Joscelin was able to fish. The fish, at least, didn’t mind the rains.

Flies continued to plague us, and illness. Yedo, one of the bearers, caught a fever that laid us up for three days. At its worst, he raved incoherently, and his brow, when I felt it, was dry and burning for all the moisture about us. Willow bark might have helped, had we any, but we didn’t. I sat with him through the night, sponging his brow, remembering Ismene, the Hellene girl who had died after we left Darsanga.

Ismene died. Yedo lived, the fever breaking before dawn, leaving him wrung-out and sweating freely in the damp air. Who can say why?

And then we broke camp once more, and slogged onward, treading through the sucking mire, making our slow way toward Meroë. The saddles chafed our horses and their proud Umaiyyati heads hung low, sodden manes plastered on drenched hides. It went no better for the donkeys, bearing heavy packs. We treated the sores with powdered sulphur, which turned to a damp paste in the humid air. It didn’t help, much. Nothing did. Where there were sores, the blood-flies laid eggs at night. Imriel and I grew deft at picking them out, our fingers smaller than the rest.

“You could have been at court,” I reminded him. “Eating poached quails’ eggs and sugared violets from a silver platter.”

He scowled at me from beneath his dripping burnoose. “I would rather be
here
.”

To his credit, Imriel never complained-and he kept up with our company, his boy’s hands grown adept at handling the reins of his gelding. The frailty of Daršanga’s ravages had concealed a wiry strength and he had, Elua be thanked, a strong constitution. While the rest of us coughed, itched, ached and stung, beset by flies and agues and thorns, Imri remained hale. The worst injury he took was a fierce sunburn from riding bareheaded in the clear morning hours, his sodden burnoose hung from his saddle to dry.

I may say, once again, that without Tifari Amu and the others, we would have been hopelessly lost a dozen times over, wandering the highlands to catch sight of the river where it cut, deep and rushing, through gorges. Despite my best efforts to protect it, Raj Lijasu’s map got soaked in the omnipresent rains, the ink running until the markings were blurred and unreadable. In the mountains, Tifari took the lead; in the plains, it was Bizan. And the bearers-Nkuku, Yedo, Bomani and Najja-contributed in no small part.

In this manner did we make our way north across Jebe-Barkal, mile by weary mile. We saw no other human life, which was as well, for our passage-tokens from Meroë were battered and mud-caked and wholly unrecognizable. We saw lions, at a distance, and my heart leapt at the sight. It was in the early morning, across the rain-washed plains, sun-gilded steam rising in the dawning heat of day. They’d made a kill, or found one-lions, Bizan told us, were nothing loathe to scavenge-and surrounded it, five females and a single male.

“Look,” he said, pointing across the broad expanse of the river.

We drew our mounts to watch them worry an antelope’s carcass, safe on the far side of the Tabara. I marked the awesome power of them, how muscles surged beneath their tawny hides. The syllables of the Name of God tolled within my mind, enumerating them in every part. One of the females lifted her bloodstained muzzle, gazing at us. The male padded to the river’s edge, pacing back and forth, shaking his massive mane.

No wonder, I thought, meeting his golden stare across the waters. Ah, Elua, no wonder so many have seen the face of god in such a beast!

“They are lazy,” Nkuku offered, grinning. “In his heart of hearts, he is glad we are on the other side of the river. It is the women who do the work, yes?”

After that, the rains began again and we spoke no more, trudging through the endless mud and clambering once more into the green mountains, following the river’s gorge. Tifari’s mount contracted thrush, a disease of the vulnerable frog of the hoof, and we were laid up a day while Najja brewed a foul poultice of roots he swore would draw out the infection. Our tents leaked, the blood-flies came in clouds and tempers grew surly. What else is there to say? It was a miserable journey.

And like all journeys, it had an end.

I failed to recognize the spreading eucalyptus trees as we descended from the highlands onto another expanse of plains. It was afternoon, and raining, clouds piled in thunderheads as far as the eye could see. We made camp that night and dined on strips of half-smoked gazelle meat from a kill two days old.

And on the morrow, we reached a place where a solidly built village of mud huts stood alongside the swollen Tabara River.

“Debeho,” said Tifari Amu, smiling faintly.

It goes without saying that our welcome was a joyous one. It was a damp one, to be sure; no place is immune from the rains in Jebe-Barkal. But the village turned out as if we were its own. Shoanete herself came out to meet us, hobbling on her sticks. And Kaneka! She looked like a veritable queen, with water streaming down her Akkadian finery. I flung both arms around her, glad of her tall strength, glad beyond words to see her.