Roel shaded his eyes and above the lash of wind he called, “I see no movement.”
Celeste frowned. “Perhaps it is abandoned,” she said, raising her voice to be heard.
“Oui, so it seems.”
“Mayhap this is where we’ll find the gray arrow,” said Celeste.
“We can only hope,” replied Roel, “as well as hope we find water therein. Come, let us ride.” With their cloaks whipping about, they started down the long run of sand, and Celeste said, “Think you this is the place marked Spx on the chart?” Roel grunted and shrugged, and on they fared.
They had covered perhaps half the distance when the day about them darkened. “What th-?” Roel looked up toward the sun and then back. “Celeste, we must fly!”
The princess glanced ’round; behind and hurtling toward them came a great dark roiling wall looming miles up into the sky and blotting out the very sun.
“Ride, Celeste, ride!” cried Roel, spurring forward.
Celeste whipped her mare into a gallop, the gelding running after, and down the slope and toward the city she and Roel and the horses fled. And rushing after roared a boiling wall of sand that would flay them alive should it catch them.
“Yah! Yah!” cried Celeste, driving her mare to even greater speed, and over the barren ground they now flew. Yet the storm was even faster, and for every stride they took it gained three.
Celeste drew even with Roel, and he called out,
“Shelter behind the stone ramparts.” And on they careered, the horses now running flat out, and Celeste, with her lighter weight, slowly drew ahead of Roel.
Oh, Mithras, I can’t leave him.
But Roel, as if he were reading her thoughts, cried,
“Ride on, Celeste, ride on!”
And so on she rode, as the great black wall of the storm hurtled after, now but mere heartbeats arear, now but mere moments ere it would roar o’er all.
Before her lay the gateway, flanked by two tall stone statues, a king and a queen, perhaps, their feet buried in drift, sitting on stone thrones beside the massive pylons; and as she flashed past and through the opening, she thought she saw the figures turn their heads toward her, but in that moment the stygian wall slammed into the gateway even as she veered leftward out of the slot to take refuge behind the high rampart; and the blast of sand screamed past and above and shrieked in rage at missing her, or so it seemed.
Celeste sprang down from her mare, and pulling the horses after, she headed for the base of the wall for better shelter. Finally she reached the stone bulwark, and there she stopped.
In the darkness she looked about.
Of Roel there was no sign.
Celeste called out, but the black storm ripped her words to shreds and flung the remnants away.
Oh, Mithras, Mithras, please let him be safe.
But only the howl of the tearing wind came in answer to her prayer.
33
Abulhol
The storm roared among the pillars and buildings and steles and pylons and statues and ruins, sand hammering against stone as if to obliterate this anomaly within the pristine desert. And behind the protection of the wall where Celeste had taken shelter, dust swirled and tried to choke these interlopers, woman and horses both. Celeste tied a cloth across her mouth and nose, and she put a ration of oats into two feed bags and, with difficulty, she slipped them onto her mare and gelding, for they were affrighted, agitated by the ceaseless howl.
And she soothed them, and food seemed to help. And when they settled somewhat, she loosely draped cloth
’round the brims of the feed bags to fend dust from their breathing as well. She tethered them to one of the slender pillars bracing an overhanging walkway; she unladed the gelding and unsaddled the mare, and then she sat down, her back to the stone of the wall, and waited.
Oh, my Roel, are you safe? Out of the wind, out of the storm? Or are you trapped within its clutches? Please, Mithras, let him not be in harm’s way.
And the furious storm raved, the shrieking wind clawing at anything and everything in its path, yet in spite of the thundering blow, Celeste fell into slumber.
And she dreamed. .
. . At one and the same time she sat on a cushion and watched herself dance, and she was naked, but for a small strip of cloth about her loins and the garlands of blue lotuses gracing her form. Her skin was dusky, and her hair raven black, and her eyes a brown so deep as to seem ebon. A man sat beside her and watched her dance as well, his enormous erection jutting out from his loincloth. And she was jealous of herself and enraged, and she felt exhilaration that as she spun and gyred she provoked such desire in this powerful man.
He would be hers, he would be hers, and as she whirled the lotus blossoms lifted up from her breasts and the gauzy strip twirled out from her loins, each revealing and then concealing, and she knew he would build a city for her, and it would be a funeral monument as soon as she crushed the lethal juice from the deadly flowers and contrived a way to poison this little scheming, spinning slut with her kohl-painted eyes and red-ochre lips and her lithe, myrrh-scented body, who thought to take her place, for she would have no one become First Wife over her. .
. . A jackal-headed man presided over the three-moons-long preparations as her envenomed organs were removed from her body and treated with sea salt and linen-wrapped and preserved in canopic jars; and her corpse was also treated with salt and then scented oils and fragrant spices and bestowed with gold and gems and rings and bracelets and necklaces, and then linen-wrapped to be sent on her way. A portrait mask was put over her face so that the gods would recognize her, and, along with the canopic jars, she was laid in a rosewood coffin, and that in turn was placed in her lapis-lazuli-decorated, gilded sarcophagus. .
. . And the funeral was delicious, and the great man wept, and he turned to her for solace, even as she watched as she was solemnly entombed with her jewelry and wine and servants and provisions and trinkets and couches and divans and clothing and gold and food and other such goods she would need in the afterlife.
And as she took the great man to bed, she looked out from her vault as the boatman came to ferry her and her servants across to Duat and-
— Celeste jerked awake.
What th-? What was that sound?
She peered ’round. The horses stood adoze, their feed bags yet in place, and all was still, and stars glittered overhead.
The storm. It’s gone. It’s blown itself out. -Roel!
Celeste scrambled up and pulled the dusty cloth away from her equally dusty face and called out, “Roel!” There was no answer.
Keeping next to the wall, to the gateway she stepped and out, and she peered through the starlight and the glow of the half-risen half-moon and into the desert beyond.
No one was there: all was emptiness.
Back in through the gateway she trod, and she looked to her right, and in the distant shadows she saw large forms-horses-and Roel sat with his back to the wall, his sword unsheathed and lying at hand, and he was sound asleep.
“Oh, my love, my love,” she cried, and she ran to him and dropped to her knees.
He opened his eyes, and he reached out and took her in his arms and pulled her into his lap.
Fiercely she embraced him, as tears of relief and the release of tension ran down her dust-laden cheeks, leaving tracks of mud behind.
“Oh, Roel, I thought you lost.”
“Non, love, I galloped right behind, but I deemed you had turned dextral, not sinister. I should have known: left is right, but right a mistake, and it seems I made that mistake.”