Where She Goes, Act Two: Quicksand, and the Truth Inside the Phantom Fire

2.1 The sand swallows them

Several months have gone by since you came out of the broken dream that is the Sasanian empire.

You left Mesopotamia, crossed Khorasan, ran into a storm in Transoxiana, and changed your water and your salt in a Sogdian matron’s house. After that came the horse markets of Ferghana, the gates of Chach, and countless ruined post stations and broken walls along the way, all of them thrown behind you one by one. That country lies between the oasis city-states and the Western Turks, and what you hear most often on the road is not the names of princes but stories about bandits: that they cut the pack ropes first, take the goods second, and only at the end pick out the people still worth carrying off.

You listen to all of it as you go, and grip your knives a little harder.

By the time you reach the southern line of the Pamirs and the dangerous road at Kashgar, the whole train is close to coming apart.

The afternoon sun makes the weathered rock walls a bleached white, without any warmth in it. The wind has hollowed out the ridges, the camel track runs crooked, and broken stone and fine sand lie underfoot: level ground from a distance, and all cracks up close. The guards keep their hands on their knives the whole way, and the bronze bells on the camels are loud enough to give you a headache.

Fire Feather says very little all day.

Now and then she lifts her head to read the wind, then looks down at the ripples in the sand, at the animals’ ears and nostrils. You see her do it, and have no time to think about it. You are watching the road, watching the shape of the column, keeping your eye on the few most valuable crates. You even give the order to bring the camel carrying the document case in towards the middle—

And the next step down, the ground is not there.

“Steady—”

You get half the word out.

The first camel does not even have time to cry out; its forelegs go down first, and the pack frame and the crates go down into the hole with it. The men behind cannot pull up in time; several porters, two animals and half an animal crate are all in the pit before you can blink.

You are dragged off balance and your left foot goes down through nothing. Fine sand comes over your ankle at once, then buries the calf, and the cold sweat goes over your whole back. You grab instinctively for the pack rope beside you, your palm slides, and you get a handful of scalding sand.

The bag with the seal in it knocks hard against your ribs. The gold seal you have guarded the whole way is still hanging there, and is of no use at all.

And then the noise breaks out all round you.

The bandits have come.

They were waiting; this collapse is exactly what they were waiting for. The head of the column goes down and the rear goes to pieces, and the whole caravan is laid out like food on a dish, goods and people and animals all in the open. Their grappling lines fly at the pack beasts, knives go at the men holding the halters, several of them make straight for the most valuable crates, and nobody cares in the least who you are.

You understand suddenly: this is not quicksand. This is a trap they laid.

The camels panic and bolt sideways like mad things. A guard has only just pulled somebody up from the edge of the pit when a knife takes him in the back; he tips over and goes down in the sand. Somebody is crying, somebody is swearing, somebody is swinging a knife wildly in front of a crate, terrified the valuable things will be taken.

Your legs are still going down.

The pit is up to your knees, and the harder you struggle the more the ground gives. You open your mouth and your throat is full of dust. Nobody comes to help you: the master and two guards are dug in around the accounts box, and one of the hired swords has thrown himself at the animal crate in case that precious cub falls into the hands of the sand bandits.

Nobody cares about you. You are only a person going down.

The bandits’ lean horses circle the outside, driving you towards looser sand. If it goes on like this they will not need to cut you down one by one; you will all die by yourselves.

And it is then that Fire Feather climbs out.

She does not run towards you.

She throws herself at a horse outside the pit, swings up and takes the reins, and before her feet are even set she drives the horse straight out of the broken column.

She has got away, you think. This is her best chance of being free again.

2.2 She runs first, and then turns back

Through all that blown yellow sand, Fire Feather takes the horse at a slant along the edge of the pit, hooves throwing up a string of sand, and she is clear of the hole very quickly.

She does not look back, and she does not look at you. In that instant something in your chest empties out, and you find you think it is the most reasonable thing in the world.

If you all die here, nobody will ever ask whether she ran. Nobody will turn back the pages of that book. Nobody will remember that you once put her down in front of everyone as mine.

You are half buried in the quicksand; it has come up to your waist, and the more you struggle the further you go down, and the gold seal is bruising your ribs. All around you camel bells jangle, scabbards clash, animals scream, people shout and swear; the whole train has been torn into pieces by the pit and the bandits, and nobody can see to anybody else.

You understand suddenly: you are going to die here. You are a follower of the God of Light, and to your faith death is a shameful thing, a victory of the devil. You pray under your breath to the god of light and ask him to keep your soul.

You had thought that at the end you would remember the great city of Ctesiphon, or a stage of flowing gold, or Queen Boran — the way she passed you at a festival and stopped for one moment and looked at you, and in that moment set out the mission you have been guarding with your life all the way here.

But now that the moment has come, the thought that rises in you is a very simple one: if Fire Feather gets away, that is good too.

At least one of you lives.

You think: you could not save the queen’s life; at least you took another woman’s life back out of the devil’s hands.

You are thinking that, and then you see, in the middle of all the confusion, a bright knot of fire.

It is not natural fire. It is more like a living demon fire, glowing a faint blue, and it moves as though it were alive, skimming fast along the ground, rolling out past the ridge and the overturned wagon. Right behind it a second and a third come alive as well; the firelight goes bright and dim in the wind and gives the smoke on the sand a strange colour. You hear a thin shrill whistle come out from behind the dust, now far, now near, like an animal calling and also like somebody crying, and it makes your scalp crawl.

“Corpse fire! There’s corpse fire!”

Somebody is screaming, and then the bandits’ horses start to shriek.

Several of the lean horses rear and throw the men on their backs about. Before the bandits can get the reins under control, a spread of coloured smoke bursts open beside the overturned wagon. The smoke rises along the ground with sparks caught inside it, flickering, and it makes the animal crates look as though they held monsters.

Then the crate locks spring open and the frightened animals inside come out at a rush, straight into the smoke, their shadows stretched long by the firelight — now horned, now winged, now some creature wrapped in fire — until even you cannot tell for a moment whether that was a cub, a horse, or your own eyes playing tricks on you in your fright.

And in the middle of that strange, shifting confusion, Fire Feather appears.

She is like somebody back in the place she knows best. Her body is low on the horse’s back, and as she sweeps through the broken column her sleeve keeps throwing out new sparks and new knots of smoke, the whistling coming faster and faster, and the frightened animals going wilder with every note.

The sand bandits had come to close a net, and now they are being knocked about by panicked horses and beast-shadows and firelight. Some turn and run. Some swing their knives at nothing. One of them curses and recites something you cannot understand at the same time, as though this confusion really were some demon fire, some evil omen.

You are stuck in the quicksand watching all of it, and for a moment you forget to struggle.

Only now do you truly understand what you bought out from under the whip. Not just an animal handler who can look after a cub. What she knows is not the ceremonial of an empire; it is this kind of place, and how to work light and shadow and fear on people’s minds — the way that woman in Ctesiphon did with her horse and her fire dance, tearing an opening through a dead situation with a piece of theatre.

And now that opening has been torn open again, by a woman.

Several bandits are knocked down by bolting horses; several more, going for the crates, are sent rolling by the animals. The master’s people finally come to themselves and, in the confusion, go in to take back the pack animals and the cargo boxes.

Under the firelight, the smoke and the charging horses, the bandits’ line breaks, and they run.

The fire sinks down. The wind takes the smoke apart.

Fire Feather rides straight up in front of you, sand and black ash all over her face and hands, and those amber eyes look as though there were a layer of late sunlight in them.

She does not say a word. She only swings an arm, and the rope comes through the air and drops exactly in front of you.

“Get up, my lady.”

2.3 Dragged back out of the pit

The bandits are gone.

They pulled back fast, like a pack of wolves scattered by firelight and beast-shadows: savage coming in, and not daring to look back going out.

Only when the last lean horse has disappeared behind the ridge does the broken column gather itself again.

When the count is done, nobody can believe how little was lost to an ambush.

Two camels are too badly hurt and have to be killed where they lie; one of them is yours. Four or five people are injured: a guard with a knife wound in the shoulder, a porter whose calf was trodden by a bolting animal, and the guard who used the whip that first evening, who has broken his arm and gone grey-green with the pain — and is still muttering thanks to god.

Several crates have gone over, several waterskins have split, and a corner of the animal crate has cracked.

And in the whole train, not one person has died.

On a road like this, it is nearly unimaginable.

The camp goes up quickly at the edge of the sand pit. Carts make a fence around a patch of open ground, the injured are moved out of the wind, fires come up one after another with soup on them, and the smell of blood, lamp oil, camel and bitter herbs all stirs together and goes up thinly with the smoke.

You sit beside a wooden wheel half sunk into the sand. Your robe is worn through, your cuffs and your front are covered in grit, and there is fine sand in your hair that will not shake out however you try.

Fire Feather did not go gently when she dragged you out of the pit. It was close to rough.

Your shoulder and your side still ache dully; breathe deeper and there is something like broken stone in your chest. You bend over and cough twice, spit out a little more sand, and there is nothing in your throat but the taste of blood.

Fire Feather comes over with a pottery bowl and crouches beside you.

“Drink a little,” she says.

She sits down next to you and sorts out the things in her hands. A small packet, the corners burnt black, the tie half broken. You recognise it at once. It is the something to keep me safe that the matron’s attendant pushed into her hand the day you left the Sogdian oasis town.

“What is that?”

Water does not wash away tiredness; your voice is badly hoarse.

She opens the cloth. There is only a little powder left inside, and a few lengths of charred cord.

“People who do the shows in the oases always carry this. Fuse cord soaked in oil, smoke powder, ground verdigris, and a bit of stone dust that gives off light. Once the fire takes, the colour changes — blue, or green. Give it a wind and it goes straight at people, bright as anything.”

She goes on digging in her coat and brings out two or three thin shining things. She picks one up and tilts it beside the fire.

“Broken mirror,” she says. “And copper beaten thin. For dazzling people’s eyes. Works on horses and camels too.”

Then she flicks that little pinch of ash, and it goes up with a puff and disappears into the night.

Camel bells sound in the distance; one of the injured camels cries out.

You frown and look at her.

“It wasn’t magic?”

Fire Feather looks up at you and pulls the corner of her mouth up, as though smiling.

“Where would magic come from,” she says. “Only the old tricks of an oasis player. Fear grows inside people. Ghosts and gods only live in your imagination—”

She stops, and looks up. The day’s wind has dropped, and the sand haze that covered the ground has gone, and now the night sky is as clean as a lake, with the stars out.

“Those bandits were Turks who got cut loose from somewhere,” Fire Feather says. “Did you see it on the way in — we went past a big stretch of graves. There was a town here once, and people died here. Those Turkish brutes aren’t afraid of the living, but they’re afraid of ghosts, and when they rob people they set a lot of store by omens. They see corpse fire and they think it’s unlucky, a disaster—”

You listen, and slowly the chaos of earlier comes back to you.

Blue fire rolling along the ground. Coloured smoke spreading low. The shadows that came out when the crate locks sprang. And her whistling, now far and now near.

Not a miracle, not a demon fire. Only a few cheap things the great and the noble look down on as the lowest of trades — and here, they really did talk a good many lives back out of the hands of sand bandits.

“Lucky they’d never been to Ctesiphon, and never seen the people who do the shows.”

You say it, and immediately feel it was the wrong thing to say, as though you looked down on the players yourself.

Fire Feather seems not to have heard. She only folds the little cloth packet up again and pushes it back into her sleeve.

“People like us make a living out of these,” she says. “At a feast, you fool a noble into being pleased. In a bad year, you fool a bandit into backing off. It comes to the same thing. They’re not stupid. It’s that once a person is afraid, they start making up a story for themselves, and by the time they’ve finished it they believe it. Those brutes thought they saw corpse fire, so it was corpse fire. Those nobles of yours in the capital, in their brocade robes, think they’ve seen a miracle, so it’s a miracle.”

So she did hear. She takes the water bowl you have drunk from and finishes it without ceremony.

“I didn’t expect conjuring tricks to frighten off that many of them either. If a few of them hadn’t been afraid, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here talking.”

It is the first time you have heard her say this much.

Before, she was always silent, as though one more word would be a waste.

The firelight is on the side of her face now, and those pale amber eyes look very quiet. And you realise suddenly that she is not silent by nature. It is only that most of what she has had to say on this road, nobody was going to take seriously.

The camel bells fall quiet in the distance, the smell of blood thins out, and the smell of meat roasting comes up off the fire. Half a day ago it was carrying you; now it is dinner.

You ought to feel hungry, and tired. You ought to speak up and stop them wasting it, ought to give orders, have the meat divided and hung behind the carts so the desert wind can dry it and turn what used to be a companion into food for later… And just now you do not want to do any of it. There is only a hollowness, as though a piece had gone missing somewhere inside you.

You look down at yourself.

Your palms are skinned, your skirt is torn in several places, everything grey with dust, and there is not a trace of anything precious left about you. What kept you alive was not the documents, not the gold seal, not the amulet, and not the standing you have been gripping the whole way. What actually dragged you out of the quicksand was a length of hemp rope, a horse, a few small tricks, and this woman beside you whom you took on as a servant from a great height.

The fire cracks and a few sparks go up and come down again.

You are silent a long moment before you look up at her.

“You were already away,” you say. “Why did you come back?“

2.4 Rations, salt, and the smell of an empire rotting

That night the camp is quieter than usual. Perhaps people who have just got through something sleep heavily.

The injured have had hot water and herbs put on them; the men on watch have banked the fires down to a little dull red under ash. The yellow dust that would not be driven off all day seems to have been swept clean by somebody after dark, leaving the sky and the ground clear.

When you sit up with a felt blanket round you, the sky is full of stars, bright almost to the point of sharpness, nailed one by one into the deep blue.

And it is in that stillness that you hear Fire Feather’s voice.

It is the trilling she makes with her tongue, light, broken, with a very odd rhythm in it.

You follow the sound and find her on a sheltered patch of ground outside the camp. She is half kneeling, with the horses that were frightened today gathered round her and the cub as well. When she lifts a hand her movement is very light, and the small animal puts its head into her palm; she hums low, and a horse lowers its neck and brushes its nose against her hair.

The confusion of the day had taken your thoughts away; only now do you see one thing clearly.

The corpse fire and the monstrous shadows were a trick. This skill with animals is real.

She seems to know by instinct how to touch them, what sound to make, to let frightened animals settle again. With them, the hard shell on her seems to loosen a little. You stand and watch for a while, until she says, “Your footsteps are a lot lighter than they are in the daytime.”

So she knew you were there.

In the evening you asked her why she turned back, and she did not finish; the master called her away to count the missing animals. By now even the cub that clings to her most is asleep on a straw mat, and under this sky there are only the two of you again.

She has no blanket; she leans against a camel and takes the animal’s warmth to get through the cold night. Her knife lies across her leg, with some blood still on it, perhaps from some unlucky bandit.

“Where I come from, there are rules.”

She uses Persian, and it is stiff, with some of the Sogdian words of the road mixed into it.

“A loaf. A mouthful of water. A pinch of salt… all of it gets written down.”

She stops, as though looking for the right word.

“You write it on paper. We write it in the belly.”

When she has said that she laughs at it herself.

“People who’ve eaten the same hard bread and drunk from the same waterskin can’t be left in the sand to die. Once a life’s been saved, a life has to be paid back. This… you understand it too. Salt. Namak.” She looks up at you. “A person who can’t keep salt is rotten meat, even alive.”

Somewhere in that broken speech, you understand.

This is what the books call the debt of salt, the most important contract of the grasslands.

This desert is barren and life on it is savage, and still they hold to that plain old contract. If two people have shared salt and water, or if one has saved the other, that is loyalty and obligation settled between them. A person who keeps faith is called true to the salt, and one who does not is called a traitor to the salt.

Fire Feather did not turn back today because of your gold seal, and not because you said put her down as mine.

She turned back because you took the whip off her in the blowing sand, and because you let her eat your salt and drink your water. And so she could not leave you in the quicksand.

She goes on wiping the knife with her head down, and goes on speaking in pieces.

“When I was little… I went with a troupe. Oases, waste ground, behind the camel trains. There were fire basins, animal crates, bells. Wherever there was a market, wherever there was drink, that’s where we were.”

“Then it got bad. People were being killed everywhere, everything was being taken, and when the black banners came even the pastures went up. You’d see a man singing one day and losing his head the next…”

Her memory comes in fragments, and there are words in it you cannot even fully catch. Poor Persian, with Sogdian in it, and some Turkic proverbs.

But her voice is light and soft, like the wind that comes down off the rock ridge at night. It carries you — carries the two of you — out of this stretch of time, and your mind seems to come out of your body and rise up high.

A cruel picture of the age opens slowly in front of you.

This woman who walked out of the desert is rough as a roll of sheepskin and savage as a thorn bush, and she has seen a world you have not.

She has seen the black banners of the Arabs come over the horizon like a shadow with no edge, and an ancient city change masters in a night; she has seen the sons of a Turkic khagan draw knives over pasture and grazing roads, men who drank mare’s milk together one day throwing each other’s bodies into a gully the next; she has seen crowds of refugees dragging children, animals, pots and idols, going west in a long line, like a burn mark left by fire across grass.

And the players’ troupes of the oasis towns were among them. They carried their fire basins, rolled up their feather coats, took their crates and their bells and ran, working for food as they went, heading towards that Sasanian empire which looked so vast, so rich, so unshakeable.

Perhaps she believed it. Perhaps she even hoped. She simply arrived too late.

Sitting by the fire, you remember suddenly the lamps you saw as a child in the palace at Ctesiphon, burning stronger and brighter than this. At festivals you saw the troupes that had not yet quite scattered, and the nobles at table filling each other’s cups, as though the sky could fall and it would not reach their roof.

You once thought that was order, the backbone of an empire that would never break.

And now, looking back through these scraps of Fire Feather’s, you find that perhaps while you were still standing behind a pillar watching a fire dance, the cities out west were already burning, the pastures on the border were already bleeding, and your empire had long since rotted from the inside out.

Fire Feather stops what she is doing at last.

She lifts her head and looks at you.

“I thought Persia was a city of iron.”

She says it, and this time she is careful to say every Persian word clearly.

“Until I was sold as a slave into the royal city, and smelled it. That court smells the same as a tent the Arabs burned.”

She pauses.

“The smell of something dead all the way through.”

The wind goes between you. The sand on this desert is heavy enough to blow that sentence away — the sentence that would cost her her life.

You think of your father’s seals, of Queen Boran’s illness, of the gold seal you have kept against your body all this way, of the fact that you are still walking east, as though hanging on to a last breath. And in the end you say nothing.

She saved your life, and the whole caravan’s life. That is all.

The empty night has nothing in it but a camel breathing; somewhere back in the camp an injured man turns over and makes a low sound. A watchman’s steps go slowly across the sand and away again.

Before the night ends, you take out your own rations.

Not the share you have your servants hand out, and not the share you use to reward people. Half a hard loaf you had kept for yourself. You break it, and pour a little salt out of your small salt bag, and hold both out to her.

Fire Feather looks up, looks at your hand, and then at your face.

You do not say take it, and you do not say this is for you.

This time, what you are giving her is not a master’s pity or an envoy’s order. It is your half of the salt.