Would that I had a camel’s ability to pinch my nostrils shut against the dust. Grit caked my scarf, and slipped through where I had not tucked the edges well enough; despite that protection, I found myself coughing out bitter masses, constantly feeling as if I could not get enough air. I learned soon enough why Suhail had directed us to grease our nostrils; without that, my skin would have cracked and bled.
I wished desperately that my husband were at my side. I knew why he was not: he was more accustomed to enduring such challenges than my Scirling companions, and so had given us what shelter the little bluff could provide. Much of the time I had my eyes closed anyway, to protect them against the scouring wind; when I opened them, I could scarcely make out Tom and Andrew through the red cloud. Suhail, on the far side of Tom, might as well have been in Vidwatha. But I would have derived comfort from seeing even his silhouette, as a reminder that such things could be endured.
The sound was ultimately the part I hated the most. It reminded me of the time in Bayembe when an insect had gotten inside my tent, and its buzzing threatened to drive me mad. This was worse, because it was deafening, and it went on for what seemed like an eternity. One of the scraps of rag stuffed into my ear fell out; attempting to replace it, I opened an unwise gap in the defense of my scarf, and nearly choked on dust. For the sake of my breathing, I left that ear unblocked, and the hissing roar of the wind was loud enough that I felt partially deaf on one side for some time after. Half deaf, half mad, I crouched between my camel and the stone, and prayed with unwonted fervor for this trial to end.
By the time it did, I had so lost all sense of reality that I did not trust it. Not until Suhail came and chivvied my camel to her feet did I believe we were safe, that the blue sky clearing above was not some hallucination.
When I stood, sand cascaded from every fold of my clothes, inside and out. The skin of my face stung as I unwrapped the two scarves; peeling them away, I saw that their edges were daubed with blood. The gap between them, narrow as it was, had allowed the wind to score my skin, flaying the top layers. Suhail bore similar marks. He wet a rag and offered it to me; my breath hissed between my teeth as I cleaned the area of grit.
I lifted my head from this task to find him offering me a tired, dusty grin. “We have made it through water and sand,” he said: this, and the gale that had blown us to Keonga. “Give us snow next, and we will have collected the full set of storms.”
“Do not tempt fate,” I said, but I could not help smiling in return.
We never would have found the cache of eggs without al-Jelidah’s aid. I consider myself an observant woman, particularly where visual matters are concerned, but the desert I returned to was not the one I had left four months before. Expanses of greenery were gone, consumed by animals or simply dried up and blown away. In areas of sand dunes, the very dunes themselves had migrated. And even a short time away from the terrain had eroded my memory, so that every gully or outcropping of rock looked like every other.
But when al-Jelidah brought us to the spot, there was no question of finding the egg cache itself. Bits of it were strewn across the ground for meters in every direction.
In a voice made thin with dryness, Tom said, “God damn it.”
I stared at the wreckage, feeling as hollow as the remnants of the shells. We had missed it. All our haste, and we were still too late.
The Akhians dismounted and began to quarter the ground. Suhail picked up fragments of shell and conferred with al-Jelidah in the nomad dialect. Then he raised his voice and called out to us in Scirling. “It was animals. Hyenas, perhaps. There are still signs of their digging, and tooth-marks where they broke into the shells.”
I sagged atop my camel. Too late, yes—but not because we had failed to estimate the hatching season correctly. Predators had beaten us here.
When I persuaded my camel to kneel and went to examine the wreckage, I saw what Suhail meant. The eggs had not been cracked from within, as if by a hatchling struggling to get out. An outside force had broken them, in some cases all but crushing the egg completely. “Does this happen often?” Tom asked, gesturing with a shard of shell.
Al-Jelidah shrugged and said something, which Suhail had to translate for us. “It depends. He says that sometimes the drakes fail to dig their nests deep enough, or the wind uncovers the eggs.”
I went to one of the pack camels and pulled out the notebook where I had written my original observations. “This one was no shallower than the rest. Do you think the recent sandstorm exposed them?”
Suhail shook his head immediately. “No, the storm didn’t reach this far. And this happened longer ago than that.”
So even had we hurried more, we would still not have found the cache in time. It was cold comfort.
We camped a little distance away that night, and had the type of scant meal that was all too common during that journey: tough, tasteless flatbread baked in the ashes of our fire, with a tiny bit of coffee to wash it down. It was the month of fasting in the Amaneen calendar, but travellers are exempt from that requirement; Suhail had promised Mahira that he would make up for it when he returned to Qurrat.
Tom and I pored over our maps, but to little avail. All the other caches we had marked had been harvested by the Aritat and sent to Qurrat. If we wanted to observe a hatching in the wild, we would have to find another clutch… and quickly.
Al-Jelidah shrugged when we said this to the group. He was Ghalbi: he knew the desert like no other. He had not needed Scirling naturalists to find eggs before, and he did not need them now.
But searching would not be easy. “The Labyrinth of Drakes,” I said, touching that spot on the map. “We did not mark clutches there, so they will not have been harvested. And drakes are known to lair in that area.”
We had been planning to go there regardless—but it had been a later stage in our plans, not our sole hope for seeing a hatching. “Finding buried eggs, without being eaten by predators along the way…” Suhail mused. “Not an easy task. And travellers often get lost.”
Andrew roused enough to say, “You’ve been there.”
Suhail grinned. “In my foolish youth. And a few times in my equally foolish maturity. I’m not saying it can’t be done—only warning you. The depths of the Labyrinth are not for the faint of heart.”
“The faint of heart would not be out here in the first place,” I said. “Let us enter this Labyrinth, and see what we may find.”
TWENTY
I have tried many times in my life to sketch the Labyrinth of Drakes, and failed every time.
Mere pencil or ink cannot capture the place. Even photographs cannot do it, for such an image can only show you a limited slice of the whole, and the true experience of the Labyrinth is to be surrounded by it. The terrain there is spiderwebbed with canyons, until one cannot truly say whether the high ground is broken by these depressions, or the low ground is interrupted by hills and plateaus. In many places the canyons become so narrow, one might be in a corridor rather than out in the wild. Over the ages, wind and rushing water have carved the stone into fantastical shapes, fluid and twisting, exposing the striations of the rock.