Waiting for the Barbarians Page 9

  The girl stands with her arms stretched like wings over the necks of two horses. She seems to be talking to them: though their eyeballs glare, they are still.

  “Our tent is gone!” I shout in her ear, waving an arm toward the sky. She turns: beneath the cap her face is wrapped in a black scarf; even her eyes are covered. “Tent is gone!” I shout again. She nods.

  For five hours we huddle behind the piled firewood and the horses while the wind lashes us with snow, ice, rain, sand, grit. We ache with cold to our very bones. The flanks of the horses, turned to the wind, are caked with ice. We press together, man and beast, sharing our warmth, trying to endure.

  Then at midday the wind drops as suddenly as if a gate has been closed somewhere. Our ears ring in the unfamiliar quiet. We ought to move our numbed limbs, clean ourselves off, load the animals, anything to make the blood run in our veins, but all we want is to lie a little longer in our nest. A sinister lethargy! My voice rasps from my throat: “Come, men, let us load.”

  Humps in the sand show where our discarded baggage lies buried. We search downwind but find no sign of the lost tent. We help the creaking horses up and load them. The cold of the tempest is as nothing to the cold that succeeds it, settling like a pall of ice upon us. Our breath turns to rime, we shiver in our boots. After three unsteady seesawing steps the front horse crumples on its hindquarters. We throw aside the firewood it carries, lift it to its feet with a pole, whip it on. I curse myself, not for the first time, for setting out on a hard journey with an unsure guide in a treacherous season.

  * *

  The tenth day: warmer air, clearer skies, a gentler wind. We are plodding on across the flatlands when our guide shouts and points. “The mountains!” I think, and my heart leaps. But it is not the mountains he sees. The specks he points to in the distance are men, men on horseback: who but barbarians! I turn to the girl, whose shambling mount I lead. “We are nearly there,” I say. “There are people ahead, we will soon know who they are.” The oppression of the past days lifts from my shoulders. Moving to the front, quickening my pace, I turn our march towards the three tiny figures in the distance.

  We push on towards them for half an hour before we realize that we are getting no closer. As we move they move too. “They are ignoring us,” I think, and consider lighting a fire. But when I call a halt the three specks seem to halt too; when we resume our march they begin to move. “Are they reflections of us, is this a trick of the light?” I wonder. We cannot close the gap. How long have they been dogging us? Or do they think we are dogging them?

  “Stop, there is no point in chasing them,” I say to the men. “Let us see if they will meet one of us alone.” So I mount the girl’s horse and ride out alone towards the strangers. For a short while they seem to remain still, watching and waiting. Then they begin to recede, shimmering on the edge of the dust-haze. Though I urge it on, my horse is too weak to raise more than a shambling trot. I give up the chase, dismount, and wait for my companions to reach me.

  To conserve the horses’ strength we have been making our marches shorter and shorter. We travel no more than six miles that afternoon across firm flat terrain, the three horsemen ahead of us hovering always within eyesight, before we make camp. The horses have an hour to graze on what stunted scrubgrass they can find; then we tether them close to the tent and set a watch. Night falls, the stars come out in a hazy sky. We lounge about the campfire basking in the warmth, savouring the ache of tired limbs, reluctant to crowd into the single tent. Staring north I can swear that I glimpse the flicker of another fire; but when I try to point it out to the others the night is impenetrably black.

  The three men volunteer to sleep outside, taking turns with the watch. I am touched. “In a few days,” I say, “when it is warmer.” We sleep fitfully, four bodies crammed together in a tent meant for two, the girl modestly outermost.

  I am up before dawn staring northward. As the pinks and mauves of the sunrise begin to turn golden, the specks materialize again on the blank face of the plain, not three of them but eight, nine, ten, perhaps twelve.

  With a pole and a white linen shirt I make a banner and ride out towards the strangers. The wind has dropped, the air is clear, I count as I ride: twelve tiny figures on the side of a rise, and far behind them the faintest ghostly intimation of the blue of the mountains. Then as I watch the figures begin to move. They group in a file and like ants climb the rise. On the crest they halt. A swirl of dust obscures them, then they reappear: twelve mounted men on the skyline. I plod on, the white banner flapping over my shoulder. Though I keep my eye on the crest, I fail to catch the moment at which they vanish.

  “We must simply ignore them,” I tell my party. We reload and resume our march towards the mountains. Though the loads grow lighter every day, it hurts our hearts to have to flog the emaciated animals on.

  The girl is bleeding, that time of the month has come for her. She cannot conceal it, she has no privacy, there is not the merest bush to hide behind. She is upset and the men are upset. It is the old story: a woman’s flux is bad luck, bad for the crops, bad for the hunt, bad for the horses. They grow sullen: they want her away from the horses, which cannot be, they do not want her to touch their food. Ashamed, she keeps to herself all day and does not join us for the evening meal. After I have eaten I take a bowl of beans and dumplings to the tent where she sits.

  “You should not be waiting on me,” she says. “I should not even be in the tent. But there is nowhere else to go.” She does not question her exclusion.

  “Never mind,” I tell her. I touch my hand to her cheek, sit down for a while and watch her eat.

  It is futile to press the men to sleep in the tent with her. They sleep outside, keeping the fire burning, rotating the watch. In the morning, for their sake, I go through a brief purification ceremony with the girl (for I have made myself unclean by sleeping in her bed): with a stick I draw a line in the sand, lead her across it, wash her hands and mine, then lead her back across the line into the camp. “You will have to do the same again tomorrow morning,” she murmurs. In twelve days on the road we have grown closer than in months of living in the same rooms.

  We have reached the foothills. The strange horsemen plod on far ahead of us up the winding bed of a dry stream. We have ceased trying to catch up with them. We understand now that while they are following us they are also leading us.

  As the terrain grows rockier we progress more and more slowly. When we halt to rest, or lose sight of the strangers in the windings of the stream, it is without fear of their vanishing.

  Then, climbing a ridge, coaxing the horses, straining and pushing and hauling, we are all of a sudden upon them. From behind the rocks, from out of a hidden gully, they emerge, men mounted on shaggy ponies, twelve and more, dressed in sheepskin coats and caps, brown-faced, weatherbeaten, narrow-eyed, the barbarians in the flesh on native soil. I am close enough to smell them where I stand: horse-sweat, smoke, half-cured leather. One of them points at my chest an ancient musket nearly as long as a man, with a dipod rest bolted near the muzzle. My heart stops. “No,” I whisper: with elaborate caution I drop the reins of the horse I am leading and display empty hands. As slowly I turn my back, take up the reins, and, slipping and sliding on the scree, lead the horse the thirty paces down to the foot of the ridge where my companions wait.

  The barbarians stand outlined against the sky above us. There is the beating of my heart, the heaving of the horses, the moan of the wind, and no other sound. We have crossed the limits of the Empire. It is not a moment to take lightly.

  I help the girl from her horse. “Listen carefully,” I say. “I will take you up the slope and you can speak to them. Bring your sticks, the ground is loose, there is no other way up. When you have spoken you can decide what you want to do. If you want to go with them, if they will see you back to your family, go with them. If you decide to come back with us, you can come back with us. Do
you understand? I am not forcing you.”

  She nods. She is very nervous.

  With an arm around her I help her up the pebbly slope. The barbarians do not stir. I count three of the long-barrelled muskets; otherwise they bear the short bows I am familiar with. As we reach the crest they back away slightly.

  “Can you see them?” I say, panting.

  She turns her head in that odd unmotivated way. “Not well,” she says.

  “Blind: what is the word for blind?”

  She tells me. I address the barbarians. “Blind,” I say, touching my eyelids. They make no response. The gun resting between the pony’s ears still points at me. Its owner’s eyes glint merrily. The silence lengthens.

  “Speak to them,” I tell her. “Tell them why we are here. Tell them your story. Tell them the truth.”

  She looks sideways at me and gives a little smile. “You really want me to tell them the truth?”

  “Tell them the truth. What else is there to tell?”

  The smile does not leave her lips. She shakes her head, keeps her silence.

  “Tell them what you like. Only, now that I have brought you back, as far as I can, I wish to ask you very clearly to return to the town with me. Of your own choice.” I grip her arm. “Do you understand me? That is what I want.”

  “Why?” The word falls with deathly softness from her lips. She knows that it confounds me, has confounded me from the beginning. The man with the gun advances slowly until he is almost upon us. She shakes her head. “No. I do not want to go back to that place.”

  I scramble down the slope. “Light a fire, brew tea, we will stop here,” I tell the men. From above the soft cascade of the girl’s speech reaches me broken by the gusting of the wind. She leans on her two sticks, the horsemen dismounting and clustering around her. I cannot make out a word. “What a waste,” I think: “she could have spent those long empty evenings teaching me her tongue! Too late now.”

  * *

  From my saddlebag I bring out the two silver platters I have carried across the desert. I take the bolt of silk out of its wrapping. “I would like you to have these,” I say. I guide her hand so that she can feel the softness of the silk, the chasing on the platters, fishes and leaves interlaced. I have also brought her little bundle. What it contains I do not know. I lay it on the ground. “Will they take you all the way?”

  She nods. “He says by mid-summer. He says he wants a horse too. For me.”

  “Tell him we have a long hard road before us. Our horses are in a bad way, as he can see for himself. Ask if we cannot buy horses from them instead. Say we will pay in silver.”

  She interprets to the old man while I wait. His companions have dismounted but he still sits his horse, the enormous old gun on its strap over his back. Stirrups, saddle, bridle, reins: no metal, but bone and fire-hardened wood sewn with gut, lashed with thongs. Bodies clothed in wool and the hides of animals and nourished from infancy on meat and milk, foreign to the suave touch of cotton, the virtues of the placid grains and fruits: these are the people being pushed off the plains into the mountains by the spread of Empire. I have never before met northerners on their own ground on equal terms: the barbarians I am familiar with are those who visit the oasis to barter, and the few who make their camp along the river, and Joll’s miserable captives. What an occasion and what a shame too to be here today! One day my successors will be making collections of the artifacts of these people, arrowheads, carved knife-handles, wooden dishes, to display beside my birds’ eggs and calligraphic riddles. And here I am patching up relations between the men of the future and the men of the past, returning, with apologies, a body we have sucked dry—a go-between, a jackal of Empire in sheep’s clothing!

  “He says no.”

  I take one of the little silver bars from my bag and hold it up to him. “Say this is for one horse.”

  He leans down, takes the glittering bar, and carefully bites it; then it disappears into his coat.

  “He says no. The silver is for the horse he does not take. He does not take my horse, he takes the silver instead.”

  I almost lose my temper; but what good will haggling do? She is going, she is almost gone. This is the last time to look on her clearly face to face, to scrutinize the motions of my heart, to try to understand who she really is: hereafter, I know, I will begin to re-form her out of my repertoire of memories according to my questionable desires. I touch her cheek, take her hand. On this bleak hillside in mid-morning I can find no trace in myself of that stupefied eroticism that used to draw me night after night to her body or even of the comradely affection of the road. There is only a blankness, and desolation that there has to be such blankness. When I tighten my grip on her hand there is no answer. I see only too clearly what I see: a stocky girl with a broad mouth and hair cut in a fringe across her forehead staring over my shoulder into the sky; a stranger; a visitor from strange parts now on her way home after a less than happy visit. “Goodbye,” I say. “Goodbye,” she says. There is no more life in her voice than in mine. I begin to climb down the slope; by the time I reach the bottom they have taken the sticks from her and are helping her on to a pony.

  * *

  As far as one can ever be sure, spring has come. The air is balmy, the green tips of new grass-shoots are beginning to push out here and there, flurries of desert-quail chase before us. If we had left the oasis now rather than two weeks ago we would have travelled faster and not have risked our lives. On the other hand, would we have been lucky enough to find the barbarians? This very day, I am sure, they are folding their tents, packing their carts, bringing their flocks under the whip for the spring migrations. I was not wrong to take the risk, though I know the men blame me. (“Bringing us out here in winter!” I imagine them saying. “We should never have agreed!” And what must they think now that they realize they were not part of an embassy to the barbarians as I hinted but simply an escort for a woman, a left-over barbarian prisoner, a person of no account, the Magistrate’s slut?)

  We try to retrace our old route as closely as possible, relying on the star-sightings I have been careful to plot. The wind is behind us, the weather is warmer, the horses’ loads are lighter, we know where we are, there is no reason why we should not travel fast. But at the first night’s stop there is a setback. I am called to the campfire where one of the young soldiers sits dejectedly with his face in his hands. His boots are off, his footcloths unwrapped.

  “Look at his foot, sir,” says our guide.

  The right foot is puffy and inflamed. “What is wrong?” I ask the boy. He lifts the foot and shows me a heel caked with blood and pus. Even above the smell of dirty footcloths I detect a putrid odour.

  “How long has your foot been like this?” I shout. He hides his face. “Why did you not say anything? Didn’t I tell you all that you must keep your feet clean, that you must change your footcloths every second day and wash them, that you must put ointment on blisters and bandage them? I gave those orders for a reason! How are you going to travel with your foot in that condition?”

  The boy does not reply. “He did not want to hold us up,” his friend whispers.

  “He did not want to hold us up but now we have to cart him all the way back!” I shout. “Boil water, see that he cleans his foot and bandages it!”

  I am right. When next morning they try to help him on with his boot he cannot hide his agony. With the bandaged foot wound in a bag and tied he can limp along over the easier ground; but for the most part he has to ride.

  We will all be happy when this journey is over. We are tired of each other’s company.

  On the fourth day we strike the bed of the dead lagoon and follow it south-east for several miles before we reach our old waterhole with its clump of stark poplar-trunks. There we rest for a day, gathering our strength for the hardest stretch. We fry a supply of fatcakes and boil the last potful of beans to a mash
.

  I keep to myself. The men talk in low voices and fall into silence when I am near. All the earlier excitement has gone out of the expedition, not only because its climax has been so disappointing—a palaver in the desert followed by the same road back—but because the presence of the girl had spurred the men into sexual display, into a brotherly rivalry which has now declined into morose irritability directed willy-nilly against me for taking them on a foolhardy jaunt, against the horses for their recalcitrance, against their fellow with the sore foot for holding them up, against the brute impedimenta they have to carry, even against themselves. I set an example by laying out my bedroll beside the fire beneath the stars, preferring the cold of the open air to the choking warmth of a tent with three disgruntled men. The next night no one offers to pitch the tent and we all sleep outside.

  By the seventh day we are making our way through the salt wastes. We lose another horse. The men, tired of the monotonous beans and flourcakes, ask to slaughter it for food. I give my permission but do not join in. “I will go on ahead with the horses,” I say. Let them enjoy their feast. Let me not hinder them from imagining it is my throat they cut, my bowels they tear out, my bones they crack. Perhaps they will be friendlier afterwards.