again. But that in itself told him something. He was being carried along. And the air pockets were different. Some were much larger than the others. Maybe there really were underground openings to the oases…
He hit upon a rough way to calculate time. By assuming that he might hit two pockets in a single day, he began to reckon in his mind how long he was under. Using this method, days passed… weeks.. months…
Always when he came 'alive' he was ravenously hungry and terribly thirsty — for wine — not water.
There was something else he wanted.
Something he wanted even more than all the others put together..
Revenge.
Long before the first 'month' was up he had made a promise to himself of what he was going to do if and when he got out. No longer were other people going to be doing things to him. When he got out he was the one who was going to do the doing. And he knew how he was going to start.
Bu Ali.
It was the Mameluke captain who was responsible for all his misery. And it was the Mameluke captain he would make pay. Not the bandit chief and his men. There was nothing personal in their killing him. The Emir? Perhaps. But Bu Ali came first. As the days passed, the weeks, the months, the ways in which Casca imagined killing Bu Ali multiplied. But he never really got confused about method. One way or another, once he was free, he would waste that bastard. Eventually, of course, he tired of keeping track of time. One moment of 'life' melted into another. But with its passage the fire within him burned stronger: nobody sure as hell better get in his way…
As time passed Casca noticed that the air pockets were beginning to get bigger and bigger, and the flow of the river not nearly as swift. Were they approaching an oasis?
Finally…
An underground cavern. Muddy floor, but a floor nevertheless. Casca could walk upright. And up ahead, something strange.
The faintest sliver of light.
He had come to an oasis.
He was alive, healed, ravenously hungry And ready to even the score.
Getting out wasn't as easy as he expected. The passage narrowed, and though he got down on his hands and knees, he still couldn't get out. He would have to dig his way through an earthen dam, with only his hands to pull away the mud, earth, and rocks. And when he did it, the built-up pressure of the water would probably grab him and thrust him upwards.
Unless there was a ridge of solid rock within the earthen dam.
In which case he would stay here forever, conscious, the length of his own body away from freedom…
And unable to reach it.
He began to dig…
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the year 1095 (by the Frankish reckoning) two groups of pilgrims were approaching each other at a certain oasis in Persia. One group was Christian, pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Jerusalem. The other group was Muslim, pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Mecca. Both had armed protectors, though the size of the guard of either was not apparent to the other. Consequently they viewed each other as harmless and peaceful religious folk on a pilgrimage.
Therefore, as they approached the oasis, each signaled their peaceful intentions to the other.
In actuality each had concealed three-fourths of its soldiers and was planning to do the other in, this oasis being too remote for anybody to interfere.
It never occurred to the leaders of either that the other side might be planning the same thing they were.
So both groups proceeded peacefully toward each other.
It wasn't much of an oasis, but adequate as oases go. It was larger than usual, that is, except for the water. Actually, it covered quite a bit of ground, and there were some fairly large-size trees, but these were in rising ground at least five hundred feet away from the spring. In truth it was a shallow pool of fairly stagnant water surrounded by a very much larger expanse of mud. The underbrush did not really start to get very thick until two or three hundred feet from the pool, and then it shaded rapidly up into heavier growth that completely concealed what might be in the grove of trees on the rising ground. Odd. One would expect the big trees to be where most of the water was.
The two groups of pilgrims paid no attention, however, to this odd geological fact. Nor did they notice that there was a thin, almost invisible, spiral of blue-gray smoke coming from the area of the densest tree cover. (There was also a rather odd odor — definitely not jasmine — emanating from this same area, but considering how they themselves smelled, it was not to be expected that this would come to the pilgrims' attention.) Neither group was close enough to see that the surface of the muddy pool was being periodically disturbed by some force beneath it.
So neither group was prepared for what happened when they were almost within charging distance of each other.
The pool blew up.
The small muddy pool suddenly shot a plume of water high up into the air, high as the mosque at Isfahan, and then almost immediately afterward exploded upward into a great blooming mass of water, mud, and rock, roaring like a lion whose testicles have been caught in thorns.
Before the exploding material had a chance to land on the hapless men of God, from straight out of the ground where the middle of the pool had been and where now there was a huge, spurting fountain of crystal clear water, shot a man — a very dirty, muddy one in ragged clothes that had almost rotted off — a man so filthy that even the clear water propelling him upward could not cleanse him.
There was one other thing about him.
He was as mad as hell.
When he opened his mouth, the roar that came out of it seemed to the startled pilgrims to be ten times louder than the roar of the waterquake.
Instantly the coming battle was forgotten by both sets of pilgrims. They turned and fled, believing that Casca's roaring body was some sort of bad omen from their respective gods. One fearful monk was in such a rush to be gone from this place of horror that he took off on foot, leaving his bewildered ass behind.
Soon there was little evidence that the pilgrims had even been to this watering hole.
The spring — and Casca — stopped roaring.
Silence.
Casca's eyes had been in total darkness for several years. So at first all he saw was light, lots and lots of very wonderful light. When his eyes eventually did focus the first thing he saw was the ass the terrified monk had left behind.
Casca grunted. 'Fellow, I come out of a hole in the ground, and the first thing I see is an ass.' His voice didn't work right. Roaring had been one thing; this trying to say words was another. But the ass didn't seem to mind. He brayed. Then lifted his nose to sniff.
Casca grinned. 'Yeah, fellow, I guess I do smell kinda strong.' By now his eyes were working fine. He looked around him.
He was standing knee-deep in what was apparently the shallow end of a very large pool of clear, bubbling water. At the other end of the pool there was quite a flow of water over a rocky ledge, a miniature waterfall more than a cubit high. The runoff formed a fast-flowing stream, glistening in the sunlight. It had already begun to cut a channel in the dry soil. All around was evidence of the explosion of water and dammed-up pressure that had brought Casca into the air once he had pierced the underground dam that held back the qanat. Casca saw all this, saw also how the green vegetation grew up toward the rise where the trees were. The green… the trees… they
