Yousef's troubles were not yet over. The next dawn left him with two of his men gone, one of them Shojan, who had decided that he had seen and tasted enough of Yousef's generalship and would do better on his own. He had made the right decision, for on the following day, Yousef and what remained of his band ran straight into the captain of the Emir's guard and were taken prisoner.
Each of them was carefully skinned alive and staked out on the desert floor to slowly roast under the relentless sun of Persia. It was a horrible, torture-filled death. Without their skins to keep in the moisture, in less than a full day their bodies would be dried to rubbery husks which the captain would bring back to Apnea in triumph.
Casca was just beginning to experience his own kind of torture, torture worse than any he had ever known in the centuries since the Jew had damned him to eternal life.
The first plunge into the blackness of the Bottomless Pit was of course filled with pain — pain Casca had known. But when his body had hit the jagged rocks, the jirad shaft inside him had splintered, the two sawtooth edges raking back and forth inside his burning gut, and that alone would have made him scream. But a rock had smashed into his head and had broken bones, pinched his nerves, and paralyzed the functions of his voice as well. He jerked into and out of consciousness, awake when his falling body smashed into the rocks on the side of the pit so that he knew the full pain of the thousand-foot drop, unconscious as he entered the complete darkness.
He was awake, though, when he hit the water, shockingly cold water that gagged him, suffocated him, drowned him.
Death.
He had often longed for death, longed for the eternal sleep that would end the misery of his eternal life. But this was not death as an eternal sleep. It was a gagging, suffocating horror that repeated itself over and over and over. Quite literally, he was dying a thousand deaths, one by one. In one of his conscious moments he surmised that he was in a qanat, in one of the underground rivers the wise men had said existed, but he had no way of knowing whether he was being carried along by the river or simply hanging in one spot. He had no sense of time whatever. The recurring horror he was experiencing could've taken hours, days, weeks, or years. He had no idea. At first he wondered how he could return to consciousness, then gag, suffocate, and drown again. Finally he realized that the strange healing powers of his body were working. When he was below water, he was dead, drowned. But apparently there were pockets of air over parts of the river, and when his dead body would rise into such a pocket, the healing would bring him back to life — only to suffer the gagging death again when the waters swept him under.
But was the water carrying him along? Or was it that his body was simply bobbing up and down in the same spot, the same pocket of air? He had no way of knowing. The wise men had said that the qanats fed the oases. If that was so, and the river was carrying him along, then he might have some hope of getting out of here. But how long would it take? And would he have gone completely mad by the time it happened?
But what if it was the same spot, over and over and over again?
He was certain of one thing.
He knew time passed because his wounds healed. Sometime during the ordeal he even pulled the two ends of the broken jirad from his body. Finally, in the brief moments of waking, he was completely healed. When that happened he found that he could prolong his time of "life" by treading water until the swift current forced him under again. But that in itself told him something. He was being carried along. And the air pockets were different. Some were much larger than the others. Maybe there really were underground openings to the oases…
He hit upon a rough way to calculate time. By assuming that he might hit two pockets in a single day, he began to reckon in his mind how long he was under. Using this method, days passed… weeks.. months…
Always when he came "alive" he was ravenously hungry and terribly thirsty — for wine — not water.
There was something else he wanted.
Something he wanted even more than all the others put together..
Revenge.
Long before the first "month" was up he had made a promise to himself of what he was going to do if and when he got out. No longer were other people going to be doing things to him. When he got out he was the one who was going to do the doing. And he knew how he was going to start.
Bu Ali.
It was the Mameluke captain who was responsible for all his misery. And it was the Mameluke captain he would make pay. Not the bandit chief and his men. There was nothing personal in their killing him. The Emir? Perhaps. But Bu Ali came first. As the days passed, the weeks, the months, the ways in which Casca imagined killing Bu Ali multiplied. But he never really got confused about method. One way or another, once he was free, he would waste that bastard. Eventually, of course, he tired of keeping track of time. One moment of "life" melted into another. But with its passage the fire within him burned stronger: nobody sure as hell better get in his way…
As time passed Casca noticed that the air pockets were beginning to get bigger and bigger, and the flow of the river not nearly as swift. Were they approaching an oasis?
Finally…
An underground cavern. Muddy floor, but a floor nevertheless. Casca could walk upright. And up ahead, something strange.
The faintest sliver of light.
He had come to an oasis.
He was alive, healed, ravenously hungry And ready to even the score.
Getting out wasn't as easy as he expected. The passage narrowed, and though he got down on his hands and knees, he still couldn't get out. He would have to dig his way through an earthen dam, with only his hands to pull away the mud, earth, and rocks. And when he did it, the built-up pressure of the water would probably grab him and thrust him upwards.
Unless there was a ridge of solid rock within the earthen dam.
In which case he would stay here forever, conscious, the length of his own body away from freedom…
And unable to reach it.
He began to dig…
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the year 1095 (by the Frankish reckoning) two groups of pilgrims were approaching each other at a certain oasis in Persia. One group was Christian, pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Jerusalem. The other group was Muslim, pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Mecca. Both had armed protectors, though the size of the guard of either was not apparent to the other. Consequently they viewed each other as harmless and peaceful religious folk on a pilgrimage.
Therefore, as they approached the oasis, each signaled their peaceful intentions to the other.
In actuality each had concealed three-fourths of its soldiers and was planning to do the other in, this oasis being too remote for anybody to interfere.
It never occurred to the leaders of either that the other side might be planning the same thing they were.
So both groups proceeded peacefully toward each other.
It wasn't much of an oasis, but adequate as oases go. It was larger than usual, that is, except for the water. Actually, it covered quite a bit of ground, and there were some fairly large-size trees, but these were in rising ground at least five hundred feet away from the spring. In truth it was a shallow pool of fairly stagnant water surrounded by a very much larger expanse of mud. The underbrush did not really start to get very thick until two or three hundred feet from the pool, and then it shaded rapidly up into heavier growth that completely concealed what might be in the grove of trees on the rising ground. Odd. One would expect the big trees to be where most of the water was.
The two groups of pilgrims paid no attention, however, to this odd geological fact. Nor did they notice that there was a thin, almost invisible, spiral of blue-gray smoke coming from the area of the densest tree cover. (There was also a rather odd odor — definitely not jasmine — emanating from this same area, but considering how they themselves smelled, it was not to be expected that this would come to the pilgrims' attention.) Neither group was close enough to see that the surface of the muddy pool was being periodically disturbed by some force beneath it.