Chapter 329: 329: Four Roads one Destination part two
---
Mardek took his thousand north into place that rolled like the back of a sleeping bull. He walked with his hands behind him as if he were on holiday. That smile of his sat in the corner of his mouth like a piece of difficult fruit he had decided to enjoy. He led them up onto a knife ridge where the wind could see them and did it on purpose.
He wanted birds to lift. He wanted eyes in watch posts miles away to note movement in a place that was not the place he intended to go. He stayed up there long enough for rumors to settle like pollen across the line, then turned his men hard southeast into a string of dunes thin as blades.
He taught the first fifty to read the sand the way sailors read the set of a sail and put them out in a scattered fan. When the wind shifted those fifty changed their lines without looking at him.
They had practiced it when their feet were cracking and the heat sat on the top of their skulls like a boiling egg. They had memorized the difference between a dune that would hold and one that would collapse into a pocket of soft air.
Mardek’s water allotment was more generous than Yavri’s for the first two days and harsher on the fourth. He liked to give comfort before he asked to take it. A kid goat crossed their front with the loose-legged cockiness of animals that have not yet learned sharpness. A scorpion rose from a shadow and put its sting into the goat’s leg.
Mardek caught the scorpion in one hand, pinched its tail clean, and tossed the body to a goat who had never eaten scorpion that fresh. He kept the venom sac and tied it off with a hair. Later he would be bored and the thought of mixing that venom with a little acid would please him.
By the time the sun heaved itself free of the horizon, all four columns had made enough ground that they would not be easy to find unless someone already knew where to look. By afternoon each line took on the habits that would keep it alive.
Skall’s men stopped speaking even to swear. Oru’s men spoke, but only to say the names of plants because the names trained the tongue to move without calling predators.
Yavri’s men sang a song that had no words you could repeat alone. It was a cadence of marching feet and breath, and it told your body that it had not yet reached the end of what it could do.
Mardek’s men argued quietly about which way the wind would be at dusk, because men who argued about something harmless were men who did not argue about fear.
At night the four thousand slept in four different shapes. Skall set a grid, dug shallow sumps so that water would find them instead of the men, and laid reed mats over the worst places. Oru cut brush in the dark and made nothing that would show in the morning from the air. Yavri built a circle and left one place in it that looked weak on purpose so that any night hunter would come for that place, meet six spears, and die fast. Mardek found a spine of stone and lined the leeward side with bodies and cloaks as if he were making a wall of warm animals, which in a sense he was.
When they woke up again at first light, they ate without speaking. They tied off small cuts. They checked their straps. They moved. From the air the first day looked like the finger bones of one large hand stretching toward the edge of the desert. From the ground it felt like four different answers to the same question.
By the third day they had left the comfort of trees. The marsh thinned under Skall’s line and became a cracked riverbed. He welcomed the change, because in dry country he could move his men faster even if their feet ached with the heat.
Oru ran them along the underside of a ridge where the rock itself gave shadow and the air tasted like old ash. Yavri found an abandoned well with a dead rope that had broken under someone else’s weight and made her men draw water without losing a single drop.
Mardek cut across an old caravan path and did not follow it. He buried an empty flask at the edge of it as a joke and told the nearest captain that if anyone behind them dug in that spot the flask would make a useful story.
All four had the same thought at least once that day. The mountain in the middle of the desert and the forest is wrong. They had not seen it yet, but it had moved into their minds where the afterimage of a bright thing sits. General Vorak wanted a man with white hair to kneel under his boot and bleed onto a small carved stone.
The vice generals wanted other things as well. They wanted the feel of competition without a show. They wanted to be the first to send a messenger back with proof. They wanted to watch each other try and fail. They wanted to carry a crate that was heavier than a man could lift and know that inside were the beginnings of seven star rank.
They marched, and each hour brought them closer to the desert’s edge where heat made the air writhe and truth became the thing you could hold, not the thing you liked to believe.
(Back to Kai.)
Kai did not see it and knew about the march. He had no need to. His thoughts were already leaning east and right, where the desert’s skin puckered into a line of trees that did not belong to the sands. He had slept for a few hours while Shadeclaw and Silvershadow walked the night lines.