By the time they reached Aksu, they had lost one of the camels and had been forced to improvise a kind of cart on runners to hold all the crates, chests, and barrels the camel had carried; their six ponies, tough and hardy, had to struggle in the face of the relentless fury of winter, while the two remaining camels trudged on, their shaggy coats becoming matted and the pads on their feet cracking from the constant freezing temperatures; Zangi-Ragozh wrapped their feet in straw and rags, which stopped the worst of the chapping but failed to prevent sores from cold entirely. The weather continued to deteriorate, remaining blustery and chilly, the sun moving higher in the sky, but bestowing little heat, still veiled by invisible clouds. Cutting winds and vast eddies of blown snow made travel dangerous and laggard as Zangi-Ragozh and Ro-shei pressed on to the West; they encountered only three groups of travelers, and one of them was a company of Turkish merchants returning from the West with as much bad news from Persia and the Syrian plains as Zangi-Ragozh could give on China. At Aksu they had waited three weeks before setting out again, and when they did, it took them two weeks past the Vernal Equinox to reach Kashgar: the Takla Makan desert lay behind them; ahead was the rising mass of the Pamir Mountains.
“Where are you coming from? Where are you bound?” demanded the guard at Kashgar in bad Persian.
“We come from China and are bound for Constantine’s City,” said Zangi-Ragozh in much better, but slightly old-fashioned Persian.
“Are you begging?”
“We are merchants, not beggars,” said Zangi-Ragozh.
The guard laughed, a high, delirious sound. “They are much the same thing, in these times.”
“Except that the beggars have died,” said Zangi-Ragozh somberly.
“That they have.” The guard glanced at the few tents some distance from the town walls. “There are fewer of them every day.”
“The same is true for all of the living,” said Zangi-Ragozh.
“Do you have any food?” the guard asked abruptly, as if recalled to his purpose.
“For our animals,” said Zangi-Ragozh. “We have been living off whatever we can find.”
“Including men?” The question cracked like breaking ice.
Zangi-Ragozh stared at the guard, his compelling eyes fixed on the other man’s. “No,” he said at last. “We have not fed on men.”
“Are there more of you?” The guard was attempting to reestablish his authority, and floundering.
“There are just the two of us, our six ponies, and two camels. We had a third camel, but it got a fever from an injured foot and died.” Zangi-Ragozh studied the guard, noticing that the man had scabs on his face and his cheeks were hollow. “What is the condition of your town?”
“What is the condition of any town in these times? The old and the young are dying, and those strong enough to endure hunger are suffering.” The guard laughed again, a grating sound like a rake over pebbles. “We can’t bury the dead; the ground is frozen and most of the men are too weak for hard labor in the cold. So we stack them beyond the camel-middens, as if they were Towers of Silence, such as they have in Persia; only the lammergeiers will benefit, if they haven’t all died.” He laughed again, this time with an underlying note of mania. “If any of us remain in the summer, and the ground is warm enough, we will have to make a large, general grave for those who—”
Zangi-Ragozh made a sign to Ro-shei, and they moved back from the gates. “If the town has so much to deal with, we will move on.”
“There is snow in the mountains, yellow snow, and it is still deep. We have seen few caravans coming from the West, as you must know.” The guard looked at the ponies. “If you wish to remain here, you have to contribute to our welfare. We will let you sleep in a bed in exchange for a pony.”
“We need all our ponies,” said Zangi-Ragozh, his voice firm and soothing at once.
“Do you? Surely you could do with one less.” The guard’s stance became pugnacious. “My companions and I have need of one pony, at least, no matter how skinny it may be.”
Zangi-Ragozh could see no other men at the gate, and his sense of alarm sharpened. “How many companions do you have.”
“Enough,” said the guard, making it a threat.
“I think it would be best if we moved on,” said Zangi-Ragozh, reaching for his spear, just in case.
“No! You must not!” The guard lifted his bow and fumbled an arrow to the string, drawing hardly far enough to send the arrow across the distance between them. “We are starving! You must leave us something to eat.”
“I have nothing I can spare,” said Zangi-Ragozh, uncomfortably aware it was true.
“A pony. You can spare a pony!” The guard took a step toward him.
Zangi-Ragozh motioned to Ro-shei to move back. “I regret that I cannot give you what you ask.”
“You can,
you can!”
the guard insisted. “Just one pony. We are all going to die, anyway.” He pointed accusingly at the two foreigners. “You are keeping what you have for yourselves!”
“That is a great misfortune for you,” said Zangi-Ragozh. “If I could alleviate your suffering, I would.”
The guard’s expression grew crafty. “But you can. If we have a pony, we can—”
“Live to starve another day,” said Zangi-Ragozh, pulling his pony around and tugging on the leads of those carrying crates and chests. “Ro-shei! The camels!” He was able to get his ponies to a trot, and they were quickly beyond range of the two arrows fired ineffectively in his direction.
“I have them moving,” Ro-shei assured him.
“Then hurry. They may send riders after us!” Zangi-Ragozh glanced back once and saw three men on emaciated ponies attempting to follow them; one of the riders carried a lance, the other two had mauls. It did not take long for Zangi-Ragozh and Ro-shei to outrun them; they slowed as soon as they could, wanting to spare their animals.
“Was that as dire as it appeared?” Ro-shei asked as they pressed on past the walls of Kashgar.
“It may have been much worse,” said Zangi-Ragozh, thinking back to his days in the Temple of Imhotep, the battlefields of Dacia, the mal aria in Athens, the worst days of the Roman Circus. “The guard was suffering from lice, which usually means fever, especially if the people are weakened by hunger. He might have been able to attack if he had felt less ill. As it is, I wish I did not find so much relief in his sickness.” He turned in his saddle and stared back in the direction of the town. “I wonder if the Desert Cats made it this far.”
“If they did, I do not like to think what may have happened to them,” said Ro-shei, then waited a long moment. “We are low on food for the animals. Have you thought of what we are to do?”
“Not yet; I had hoped we would have time here to recover our strength and rest before climbing into the Pamir Mountains,” said Zangi-Ragozh, turning his back on Kashgar. “As it is, I must find us food of some sort, and shelter so the animals can rest; our travels have taken a toll on them.”
“Do you think the guard would have killed us for the ponies?” Ro-shei had an edge in his question as if he had already made up his mind.
“I think he tried, in any case, and his three comrades,” said Zangi-Ragozh. “If it had been possible, I believe he would have done all in his power to take our ponies, and our camels, for his cooking pots. The other three would help him for a share of the spoils.”
“Then we may find as bad along the way,” said Ro-shei.
Zangi-Ragozh sighed and squinted into the wind. “At least the snow has stopped falling.”
“For now,” said Ro-shei. He pointed to the irregular furrows in the muddy snow that marked the road. “If this freezes tonight, it will be midmorning before the ice thaws.”
“You’re right,” said Zangi-Ragozh quietly. “I think it may well be that this year may be harder than the last. The famine is under way already, and with the sun lacking in strength, next year might be worse than this one.” He pointed to the road ahead of them. “There are no merchants on the road because there is nothing left to trade—a very bad sign.”
“Those who travel may well find that there is more danger than snow and scarcity; there may be demands made that no one can meet and still manage to live,” Ro-shei observed.
Zangi-Ragozh agreed with a gesture. “I doubt many traders could get from one of the Silk Roads to the other just now without losing much of what they carry to robbers, and worse.”
“What could be worse than robbers?” Ro-shei asked.
“Killers, for one,” said Zangi-Ragozh distantly. “Desperate men do desperate things.”
Ro-shei realized what Zangi-Ragozh was implying. “A risk indeed: you mean that more than ponies might end up in the cooking pot.”
“It is a possibility,” Zangi-Ragozh said levelly.
They went some little distance in silence; then, “I wonder what sort of meal we would make?” Ro-shei mused aloud.
“Insufficient, I imagine,” said Zangi-Ragozh.
“Worse than useless, I would assume,” said Ro-shei. “A five-hundred-year-old ghoul, and a two-thousand-five-hundred-year-old vampire! They might as well try to eat mummies.”
“It would not surprise me to learn that such had been tried,” Zangi-Ragozh said, emptiness of spirit sparing him pain for the time being; he carefully blocked out the compassion that usually accompanied such insights.
“With that to consider—that everyone is at the limits of their strength and wits—where are we bound?” Ro-shei asked, his face set in austere lines.
“For Osarkand. We should be able to reach it in three or four days, providing there is nothing blocking the road, or any other hazard before us.” Zangi-Ragozh looked back at their ponies and camels, shaking his head once. “There are four bags of grain left, and enough chopped feed to last another month, if we are careful.”
“And if we have no more encounters with thieves or other miscreants.”
The night was clear; the moon in its third quarter rose in the night and shed a frosty light over the snow-clad crags. Ro-shei took advantage of the illumination to go hunting and came back after nearly a quarter of the night had passed with a hare, which he dressed and devoured before the first hint of sunlight limned the eastern horizon. As he disposed of the skin and guts, he heard a high, wailing howl.
“Wolves,” said Zangi-Ragozh unnecessarily.
“A good distance away,” said Ro-shei.
“Still, it’s just as well that we will be traveling on shortly. The packs are as treacherous as armed men, and as persistent.” Zangi-Ragozh stopped long enough to string his bow and make sure his quiver was firmly buckled to his saddle. “At least these iron foot-loops make it easier for us to aim while riding, and that improves our chance of successful hunting.”
“As you have said, it is one of the advantages of them.” Ro-shei tossed the bones of the hare far down the slope, into darkness.
For most of the day they climbed along the deep river canyon, following the muddy track that was the middle fork of the Silk Road. They spent the night at a goat-farm where the family described the death of their oldest uncle not three days ago and tried to choose which of their remaining herd would be sacrificed to the honor of their dead. Zangi-Ragozh offered the family a little jade statue of the Four Celestials; after a brief refusal, they accepted the statue and promised to give it to their gods, along with the prayers that the power of their gods would be restored.
“The sun has been bled of his vigor, and the earth is deprived of his potency to make her fertile; it is through our offering that the sun—and thus the earth—will be revived, and all the gods of place will once again provide their protection,” said the new head of the household. “We have given him kids and two milking goats, but they have not been enough. We have buried sacred images in the ground, but it will not grow anything more than weeds. We have left grain and small amounts of food at the shrines of the smaller gods, but nothing has worked.”
“That is unfortunate,” said Zangi-Ragozh, seeing the despondency in the householder’s cadaverous face. He opened his chest of trade-goods he had brought into the house and poked among the cloth-wrapped objects until he found what he sought. He held out a wooden figure of a water buffalo; he looked through the rest of the items and added a cinnabar horse to the gifts. “This may be useful in your offering: what do you think?”
“If it helps the gods, yes; we will thank you for your aid,” said the householder.
“If any of these help the gods,” Zangi-Ragozh seconded, and put the two objects on the table before the hearth. He made no mention of the risk of avalanches and landslides rain could bring to the snowy mountains, but only said, “Our travel to Osarkand should be less difficult with the rain.” He indicated Ro-shei. “We will leave at first light, to make the most of the day.”
The householder pointed to his barn, which was immediately outside his house. “The straw in the barn is a little musty, but it will make a good enough bed.” He touched his steepled fingers with his forehead. “May the gods give you a good passage to Osarkand.”