Ragnar looked fondly down at his men from the steering platform. Like Ragnar, they were stripped to the waist, the muscles of their backs and shoulders gleaming with sweat as they pulled the ship through the ominous waters. Also like Ragnar, each of them wore the linen head coverings bound with strips of cloth the local people called
nemes
.
In the bow, on a smaller version of the steering platform, stood the strange, high-ranking
negeren
court slave pressed on him by Harald, and the slave’s even stranger companion, a gigantic eunuch named Barakah who took care of the
negeren
’s personal needs as well as recording their whereabouts with fantastically detailed maps, sketches and drawings, made at his master’s order. The black man’s name was Abdul al-Rahman and it was he who suggested that Ragnar and his men adopt the
nemes
after two of the warriors collapsed over their oars, stunned and terribly sick with the sun.
Just below the steering platform, Aki, the last oarsman on the starboard side, called out the cadence with an old kenning chant:
Most men know that
Gunnbjorn the captain
lies long buried in this mound;
never was there
a more valiant traveler
of the wondrous-wide ground of Endil
his tale told proudly and with honor
in the skalds
till Njörðr, god of oceans,
Drowns the land.
Ragnar turned to his steersman, a gruff, powerful man named Hurlu who’d been steersman on
Kraka
for years before Ragnar became her captain. “How long have the men been rowing?”
“Since the morning daymark.” Hurlu squinted up at the sun, which was almost directly overhead. “Six hours at least. Too long.”
Ragnar nodded. He’d done his time at the oars often enough and knew the weight of the heavy blade digging through the water. His shoulders ached at the memory. “We should pull into shore,” said Ragnar. “Let the men rest.”
“I agree.” Hurlu nodded.
Ragnar let it pass. In a younger man it would have been an insubordinate response, but Hurlu was as old as the planks in
Kraka
’s bilge and he’d been piloting ships since Ragnar had played with balls of yarn in his mother’s lap.
“We’ll need shade,” said Ragnar. He looked out at the bleak, arid land on either side of the river. There was nothing to see but bare rock and high ridges of sandstone baking in the relentless sun.
Hurlu made a brief sound of disgust and spit over the sternpost. He nodded toward the bow. “Ask your pet monkey up there; maybe he’ll know where we can find some.” Hurlu had a superstitious mistrust of the black man and made no bones about it to anyone, including Ragnar.
Ragnar whistled shrilly, and when al-Rahman looked back he gestured for the black man to join him in the stern. Al-Rahman said something briefly to Barakah, who nodded, then stepped off the little platform down onto the narrow plank gangway that ran the length of the ship. As he moved, his long white robes swirled elegantly around his ankles.
Al-Rahman had the grace of a dancing girl but he was no simpering
rassragr
; Ragnar had seen evidence enough of that when they were loading stores in Alexandria. That same dancer’s grace had turned to a warrior’s brutally agile fury when a gang of cutpurses had confronted him in an alley and demanded payment for passage through to the street beyond, making it clear that he would suffer the consequences if he refused. Al-Rahman had sliced all four ragged men to ribbons in a few short seconds, a short, curve-bladed Saif appearing magically in his right hand from beneath those same swirling robes.
“
Aasalaamu Aleikum
, Ragnar; you wished to speak with me?”
“Wa-Aleikum Aassalaam
,
Abdul,”
said Ragnar, using the response he’d been taught by al-Rahman. Beside him, Hurlu scowled and spit over the side again, just as Ragnar knew he would. Ragnar grinned; he enjoyed getting the older man’s goat whenever the opportunity presented itself. Al-Rahman’s ornately tattooed face broke into a smile as well; he knew just what the tall, blond Dane was thinking. They were a strange pair: Ragnar as broad as an oak, al-Rahman as slim as a willow, but both equally strong, each in his own way. They were too different ever to become real friends but over their time together they’d developed a mutual trust and respect.
“We need shade and freshwater, and soon; my men are wilting like flowers, Abdul. How likely are we to find it in this oven of a place?”
“Flowers,” grunted Hurlu. “Huh.”
Al-Rahman turned and pointed. “We will pass this ridge and the Great Snake will make a sudden turn. In its coils you will find a
waha
the old Greeks called Chenoboskion.”
“Waha?”
Ragnar asked.
“A watering place in the desert, a sanctuary,” explained al-Rahman.
“How long?”
“At this rate?” Al-Rahman shrugged. “An hour perhaps.”
Ragnar turned to Hurlu. “You hear that, steersman? It seems we’re not dead yet.”
“No,” said Hurlu, “just dried-out old corpses like they use for their cooking fires in that pigsty of a city back there.” He nodded his head downriver.
“Al-Qahira,” said Ragnar, remembering the name of the squalid place and its ironic meaning: “the victorious.”
“That’d be the one,” said Hurlu. “Using the corpses of their forefathers for kindling, pah!”
“Well, Hurlu, can our wilting flowers do it?”
The grizzled older man spit over the side again. “Can they do it?” He turned and called down to the stroke oarsman seated on the bench below him. “Aki! A war song for our lord and master here! Battle speed!”
Kraka
leaped forward.
In less than half the time al-Rahman had predicted, they came within sight of their goal, the dark river churning white under
Kraka
’s stern as the oars bit smoothly into the water. The
waha
, as al-Rahman had called it, was a few rudely built huts of mud and daub huddled under the protection of a gathering of date palms, their high, broad leaves bright green in the dazzling sun. The dark windows of the huts had the blank, sightless look that marked long abandonment.
Ragnar shaded his eyes and looked toward the shore. Perhaps a few fishermen had lived here once, but like everything else in this forsaken country, that was long past. The huts would be home only to scorpions and spiders now, seeking shade, just like Kraka’s crew. Ragnar could also see a small stream tumbling down the shallow bank of the river, coming from some spring hidden within the stand of trees. Back home, on the shores of Flensburg Fjord, the stream, barely a trickle, would have been ignored; here it was a life-giving torrent.
The men scarcely needed the order to pull toward the shore. Grunting a little with the effort, Hurlu turned the long steering oar against the current. According to al-Rahman this was the time of full flood for the river, and the water was high. A few moments later
Kraka
ran easily up onto the muddy bank. The two forward oarsmen hauled up the stone-heavy wooden anchor and heaved it over the side to hold
Kraka
against the flow. The landing was done silently and with ease; these men had beached their ship a thousand times on a thousand different shores, and the operation went with almost mechanical smoothness, but even so the men sat with rigid discipline until Hurlu called out the order; their throats were parched and their lips cracked with thirst but, as always, the ship came first.
“Ship oars!” Hurlu bellowed. The oars rattled through their leather-slung tholes as the men pulled them inboard until all thirty-two stood like a forest above the gunwales.
“Rack oars!” Moving from bow to stern the men swung their oars inboard and dropped them into the forward and aft cradles that already held the stepped mast, furled sails and boom as well as an entire set of replacement oars. In bad weather the filled racks sometimes acted as ridgepole for a tentlike space above the stores to keep dry under.
“Out you go, lads!”
With weak, croaking shouts of approval the men went forward to the bow and jumped down onto the mud- and pebble-strewn beach. Usually, if the water was shallow enough, the men would simply jump over the side where they rowed, but not here.
They’d all seen the gigantic, long-jawed, scaly creatures that lived in the shadowed waters of the Great Snake, and watched in horror as a pair of them took down a bullock calf quietly drinking at the shore just outside the town al-Rahman called Al-Qahira. The two creatures, acting in concert, had nearly bitten the bullock in half before they hauled it into deeper water, still bleating piteously until its cries were swallowed up and drowned.
With
Kraka
empty, the men staggering into the trees to find the hidden spring, Hurlu turned to Ragnar.
“Good enough?”
“Good enough.” Ragnar nodded.
Hurlu jumped down from the raised platform, stomped down the long gangplank and heaved himself over the side. Finally Ragnar and al-Rahman went ashore themselves, followed by Barakah, the silent eunuch.
The source of the tiny trickling stream turned out to be a large pool of almost unbelievably cool freshwater sparkling beneath the little forest of palms. Some of the men dropped down on their bellies and stuck their heads into the water; others simply stripped off their tunics and boots, then flung themselves naked into the pool.
Ragnar and al-Rahman slaked their thirsts with a little more decorum, then watched the men.
“Man needs; Odin provides.” Ragnar laughed, quoting an old saying his mother had taught him at her knee.
Al-Rahman smiled. “Not Odin or any other god,” he said. “This pool is the gift of time.”
“I thought you believed in your own god, Allah,” said Ragnar.
“I believe in the teachings of his great prophet Muhammad, may he be blessed, but Allah is not for man to know or pretend he understands. The Hebrews will not even speak their own god’s name for the same reason.”
“And
kuffār
, like us. Infidels?” Ragnar smiled, remembering the word al-Rahman had taught him.
Al-Rahman smiled back at the burly Dane. “Muhammad commands us to pity you and teach you the True Way.”
The two men left the pool and strolled through the stand of palms. The grass grew long here, and where rotted dates had fallen more sprigs of greenery grew. Ragnar realized that it was the first time he had relaxed in days. On the edge of the little grove of trees, with nothing but the open desert sands before them, they discovered a great slab of rock jutting from the soil. It was black and smooth as glass except where it had been deeply etched with lines and figures. Some of the figures were clearly meant to be men but others were pictures of strange, fantastic animals: huge horned bulls, some sort of gazelle with a neck so long it looked over all the other figures and additional, smaller creatures: a cat with enormous fangs, and something with gigantic ears and legs like tree stumps, two horns jutting from between its lips. Smaller lines had been scratched to indicate fields of grass and below everything was a thick black snake that could only be the great river behind them.
“Some man’s fever dream from long ago?” Ragnar said, letting his fingers trail over the lines.
“Or a memory,” said al-Rahman. “Perhaps this place was once a paradise of green grass and trees and hunters’ game. Perhaps the pool your men are bathing in is nothing more than rain that fell ten thousand years ago and now springs up here and there to remind us of the past.”
“How can paradise become a desert?” Ragnar asked.
“How can the civilization that built the great pyramids and the ancient temples we passed have vanished?” al-Rahman responded. “Nothing is impossible; everything fades away.”
Ragnar turned back and stared through the stands of trees at the river.
“Is our quest possible? Will we really find the Mines of Solomon?”
“The Romans thought it was real enough.” Al-Rahman shrugged. “There are other stories.” The black man paused. “There was once a great king named Sogolon Djata who could have been mistaken for Harald’s Solomon. His children grew very rich and it is said their very houses were made of gold. There are also tales of their great city in the desert, called Timbuktu, a place of vast wealth and a storehouse of even greater knowledge.”
“Could such a place really exist?” Ragnar said.
Al-Rahman laughed loudly, then clapped Ragnar on the shoulder. “I think we shall find out, Ragnar Skull Splitter, the two of us, and perhaps even return to tell the tale.”
1
“Except for that one unfortunate trip we made into Libya to rescue cousin Peggy, Africa isn’t really my thing,” said Colonel John “Doc” Holliday. “I’m more of a knights-in-shining-armor or Roman Empire kind of guy.”
“This is different,” said Rafi Wanounou. They were sitting in the living room of the archaeologist’s bright, spacious apartment on Ramban Street in the Rehavia district of Jerusalem. From the kitchen Holliday could smell the aroma of almond mushroom chicken, beef kung pao and soya duck as Peggy plated their take-out dinner of kosher Chinese food. According to Peggy the art of knowing which restaurant to order from was even more important than knowing how to cook, a philosophy she’d practiced since high school.