It was at
dawn on the sixth day alone in the desert that I saw the city.
It lay across the western horizon, its pink
and yellow sandstone walls gilded by the rising sun. Above the walls, spires
pointed skywards like delicate stone needles, looking as fragile as departing
dreams.
It was vast and it was lovely, and it
should not have been there. It would have been talked about, in the towns of
the borderlands and on the caravan trails. A city of this size, in fact, should
have its own caravans coming and going, keeping it fed and clothed and
supplied. But I had heard nothing.
For a long time I stood watching, wondering
if it was real, or only my mind, worn out with exhaustion, playing tricks on
me. But the sun rose, the city came into clearer view, and I could hear, far
away though it was, the noises and bustle of any town coming to life.
Slowly, wearily, I trudged through the
sand, headed towards the town. I could not have passed it by; my food had given
out three days earlier, and I had moistened my mouth with the last drops of
water during the night. Beyond, as far as I could see, stretched only further
empty desert.
As I came closer, the walls grew higher, as
though holding up the sky. They smooth and polished with the wind and desert
sand, so that the sun glinted on them like glass. From atop them, pigeons flew
in flocks into the air and as swiftly settled again. At the base of the wall
there was a deep dry moat, which I only noticed when I was almost at the wall;
a moat deep enough that four tall men standing on each other’s shoulders would
not have been able to reach the top.
I had followed the curve of the wall round
to the north when I saw the gate. It was on the other side of the moat, and
spanned by a small drawbridge. Two guards stood on either side of the portal,
watching me as I came towards them.
They were alike as twins, I saw; a pair of
very tall, well-muscled men, their skins as dark as oiled wood, their leather
armour inset with black metal panels. Under the brims of their conical helmets,
their eyes were expressionless, and their hands still on the shafts of their
heavy spears.
I had a vision of myself, as in a flash, as
they must have seen me; small, dusty, stained by the desert, my cloak tattered
and my cheeks sunken. I must have looked utterly incapable of harm, but their
vigilance did not relax for a moment.
They waited until I was on the drawbridge
before they reacted to my presence. “What do you want?”
“I have been travelling through the desert,”
I said. “I am lost and wandering, and I need shelter.”
His eyes did not even flicker. “Where have
you come from?”
“I was travelling with a caravan across the
desert,” I said. “It was attacked by bandits and dispersed. I was separated
from the others. For six days now I have been wandering the desert, alone and
starving.”
They glanced at each other. “You have come
from Outside,” the one who hadn’t yet spoken said. The way he pronounced the
word “outside” seemed to give it some additional significance.
“Outside?”
“From outside the desert.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m not from the desert.”
They looked at each other again. “In that
case,” the first one said, “you may enter.”
************************************************
The city’s
streets were broad, but after the weeks of travel through the desert, and the
days wandering alone with nothing but sand on all sides, they seemed narrow and
extremely crowded to me. The people, of both sexes, were as tall and dark and
good-looking as the guards at the gate. The women, silver bracelets around their
wrists, were dressed in robes of blue or brown or black; the men wore pink,
grey and light yellow, the colours of the desert. They all paused to watch as I
entered, and it was as though a wind blew alongside me and parted the crowds.
Now that I was inside the city, I suddenly
realised that my problems were far from over. I had no money, nor anything else
even remotely valuable. I could, at best, throw myself on the charity of these
people; but looking at their faces, I saw only blank interest. I might have
been dried but picturesque vegetation, blown in on the desert winds.
I need not have worried. “You are from the
Outside,” a man said, falling into step beside me.
“Yes,” I nodded. “I’ve been wandering alone
through the desert ever since the caravan I was in...”
He raised a hand – not far, just a movement
in the corner of my vision, but far enough. “You will need rest and food. Come.”
I walked along with him through a side
street, glancing at him covertly. It was hard to tell his age, as with everyone
else I’d seen; he might have been forty or sixty or both ages and all in
between. His grey robe swirled around him as he walked, just slow enough to
allow me to keep up.
“I’m afraid I have no way to pay,” I began.
“I lost everything with the caravan.”
He glanced at me from the corner of his
eye. “There’s no need to worry,” he said. “In this city, you are our guest, for
as long as you should choose to stay.”
“It seems to me that you don’t have many
visitors,” I said.
“We have none,” he corrected. “Here, in the
heart of the desert, nobody from Outside comes. Except you.”
We passed a market with a crowd at the stalls.
People all stopped to watch as we passed, as though at a signal. There was
something strange about them, apart from their uniformly handsome appearance,
but I couldn’t identify it at first; then I realised that there were no
children among them, no babies in arms. And, briefly, I wondered where the
produce came from. But it was a huge city, and there must be cultivated areas
within the walls.
“I am Seviram,” the man said. “Welcome to
my house.”
It was large and built of honey-coloured
stone, so smoothly merged into the street that it might almost have been carved
out of bedrock. There were, on either side of the door, statues of winged
lions, but they seemed as though they belonged there, not as though – as they
might have seemed anywhere else – like an affectation. Other statues perched
high on the walls, and at the corners, but my exhaustion had begun to creep up
on me and my vision had begun to waver.
“You’re staggering,” Seviram said with
concern. I felt his hand on my elbow. “Come in quickly, before you fall. You’re...”
When I next grew aware of my surroundings I
was lying on a low couch, and someone was passing a cool, wet cloth over my
forehead. Opening my eyes, I found that I was looking up at a girl’s concerned
face. She glanced over her shoulder. “He’s awake.”
“I trust you’re feeling better.” It was
Seviram’s voice. He came up behind the girl. “You gave us quite a scare there.”
I tried to sit up, but the girl pushed me
down. “Not yet. Rest.”
“Listen to her,” Seviram laughed. “She’s
the authority on questions of health. This is my daughter, Lis.”
“I’m...” my voice came out as the merest
whisper, like grains of sand rustling. “My name is...”
“It doesn’t matter, not now.” Lis laid a
finger against my lips. “Lie down, rest, and get some of your strength back.”
I lay back and closed my eyes. Lis
continued wiping my face and neck with the cool cloth, humming gently under her
breath like a lullaby. After some time, I slept.
I must have slept for a considerable
period. When I awoke, the sun was a red ball sinking over the desert, its rays
slanting across my face through the window. Groggily, I sat up. Lis was sitting
at the foot of the couch, watching me.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,”
she said with a smile. “I wasn’t quite certain you’d ever come back all the way.”
She was very lovely, I noticed, or maybe it
was just that it had been so long since I’d been alone with a pretty woman. She
smiled, seeing me looking, and motioned. “It’s time you had something to eat
and drink.”
There was a table next to the couch, which
hadn’t been there earlier; it was laden with fruit, discs of bread, and tall
glasses filled with scented, chilled water. Lis watched me eating, as though
each bite I took, each swallow of water, gave her physical satisfaction and pleasure.
“Tell me about the caravan,” she said. “Tell
me about what happened after.”
So I told her, as much as I could recall;
from the first moments when the bandits appeared, riding past the caravan to
cut it off, the scattering of men and animals in a desperate attempt to get
away, and how I suddenly discovered that I was alone. I told of how I’d found
the bag of dried food and a bottle of water, abandoned by someone else in their
flight, which had lasted me since then. But the events of the days of wandering
were already beginning to grow hazy in my mind, days and nights flowing into
one another.
As I talked, the sun had set and the first
stars sprinkled the sky with points of light. Lis got up and lit lamps set on
stands at the corners of the room. Their wavering flames on her skin made her
look as though she was made of dark fire herself.
“You’re very brave,” she said at last, when
I had finished. “To have gone on for so long, through the desert, not knowing
which way you were headed – that took real bravery.”
I snorted with laughter. “Brave? All it
took was stupidity – to be too stupid to know when to sit down and die.”
“So you say,” she said, smiling faintly,
and then her smile faded. “You’re from the Outside.”
“Yes, as your father must have told you.”
“The Outside,” she repeated. “You know, I’ve
never been on the Outside.”
“Never?”
“No. And I’ve never met anyone from the Outside
before either.” In a rush, she’d slipped off her stool and was kneeling on the
floor beside me. “Tell me,” she said, holding my hands in hers and looking up
into my face. “Tell me about the Outside. Tell me about the fields, and the
mountains, the rivers and the seas and forests. And then,” she leaned her head
against my leg. “Then tell me about the rain.”
“The rain?” I repeated.
“The rain,” she whispered, and there was a
wealth of yearning in her voice. “I want to hear about the rain.”
“Haven’t you...” I began.
“No, I have never seen rain. Never. I yarn
to know about it. I have always wanted to hear about rain, but never got the
chance. Tell me all about it.”
And I told her. I told her of spring
showers, coming suddenly and falling lightly on the earth, and as suddenly
gone. I told her about the smell of wet earth, and the green of growing grass,
breaking through the soil. I spoke of dark clouds that blotted out the sky,
spitting forked tongues of lightning, and the thunder that raced across the sky,
so loud that it could be felt through walls and the air.
I spoke to her of rain. I told her of
downpours that made it difficult to see, of how the earth ran with water
because it could not drink down any more, until the rivers ran turbid with the
flood. I told her of drizzles so thin that the tiny drops of water twirled and
spun as they fell to earth, and lay like dew on leaves.
I told her of it all. I told her of the
feel of a lover’s kisses as rain fell on our faces and lips, on our closed
eyes. I told her of the earth and air washed clean, of beginnings new. I spoke
until I could speak no more.
When I had finished, she sat silent, for so
long that it seemed as though she were in a trance. Then it was as though she
suddenly awoke.
“I need to dance,” she said, rising to her
feet. “Would you like to see me dance?”
I must have said something that signified
assent, because she moved the table away and stepped to the centre of the
floor. Rising on her toes, she raised her hands over her head and began to
spin.
Of what I saw next, I can give no clear
description. She spun and twirled, and her arms and hands flashed in the
lamplight, and her swirling robes caught the light, and plucked the shadows
from the air. She spun and danced, and the light and the shadows merged and
danced with her. She danced, and the air took her movements and made them
music. She danced, and outside the window the air grew thick with moisture, and
the stars were blotted out as clouds filled the sky. She danced, and outside
the lightning flashed, thunder grumbled, and the first drops of rain spattered
on the stone.
She danced, and the room and the air, the
desert and the sky, all danced with her, danced with her and through and round
me, the clouds and the lightning, the thunder and the rain, dancing. Dancing.
*******************************************
The sun
was shining bright in my face when I woke, and I knew at once that something
had changed. Under my back was rough stone, and the sunlight was far too bright
to be coming through a window which pointed westwards, where the night went to
sleep.
My eyes flicked open. I was lying on the
stone floor of a roofless hut, with broken walls. Water from the night’s rain
had collected in little puddles on the floor.
I got up and stumbled out through a gap
which might once have held a door. The mighty city of the day before had gone.
All around me were a low sea of crumbled ruins, and, beyond them, the flat
desert stretching to the horizon.
I found her sitting on a broken wall, her
back to me, staring out over the desert. Her dark blue dress, which had drunk
the lamplight when she’d danced and woven it with shadow, looked worn and
bleached, as though it had bled away all its colour.
“Go away,” she said, without looking at me.
“Just go away.”
“Lady Lis...” I began.
“Didn’t you hear me?” she snapped. “I don’t
want you here. Go away.” She threw up an arm and pointed off to the right. “Go
that way, and you’ll find one of your precious caravan trails. Just leave.”
“But what happened?” I felt something
clutch at my throat, as though with fingers, from the inside. “Where is the
city?”
“Don’t you understand?” Her shoulders shook
with some emotion I could not name. “This is the city. This is all that’s left.”
“From the rain?” I was honestly befuddled. “But
how could a night’s rain do this?”
She said something, so low that I had to
strain my ears to hear. “I’d been waiting so long,” she said. “Waiting and waiting,
from the dawn of forever, here in the heart of the desert. Anticipating,
knowing that someday I would find out, would know what it was like. I’d
created...this reality...to fulfil my waiting. Knowing that when I knew what it
was like, I could bring it forth. And now that it’s here...what’s left? What’s
left, when what you lived waiting and hoping for is done?”
I touched her shoulder. “Lady Lis?”
And then she turned round, at last, and the
next thing I knew, I was stumbling away through the desert, my eyes squeezed
shut, to block out the sight of that face, the face of something that had been
waiting from the start of time and now had only despair.
And my hands were tightly clapped over my
ears, but I could not keep out the sound of her keening.
Copyright B Purkayastha 2016
