except of course us, seems to know what’s been happening and what it has to do with Dominic’s ring and with your father.”
“Are you ready for the Temple of Solomon?” called the chaplain to us happily.
But that evening when we went to the room we shared in the pilgrims’ hospice, he seemed oddly subdued. The white-painted halls were full of other travelers with crosses sewn to their shoulders. The hospice itself was very austere, the rooms small and undecorated, the beds hard, and the dining room serving only flat bread stuffed with lentils and cucumbers.
I tried to read more of
“So have we seen all the pilgrimage sites, Joachim?” I asked, kicking off my shoes and stretching out, hands behind my head. There were no chairs.
“I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “I don’t like to admit this, but there are two or three churches in here, which I myself marked that we visited yesterday, but which I now have trouble remembering.”
“They do all tend to run together after a while,” I agreed.
“But they shouldn’t!” he said with a flash of his dark eyes. “I’ve longed to visit the Holy Land all my life, to walk with living feet on the streets where Christ trod. Now that I’m here at last I can’t have the holy sites all ‘run together’!”
I pushed myself up on one elbow and looked at him. “Read the descriptions again,” I suggested. “I know you won’t have forgotten the Holy Sepulchre, so just concentrate on the smaller churches. Think about each one individually. It must say in your guidebook which ones have monks, and that will help differentiate them. You should be able to pick out the one where the porter didn’t want to admit Maffi, and the one where Dominic banged his head. If you can picture all of us standing inside and think about whatever we saw first-mosaics, altar, candelabra- you’ll then be able to get the rest of the details.”
Joachim closed the book and flopped down. “I’m not an overly-ambitious tourist,” he replied gloomily, “getting different picturesque sites confused. I’m a priest who has visited the places where Christ lived and died to bring us salvation, and who yet who still finds himself thinking about supper at the end of the day, gets sore feet from walking and standing, and needs to consult a guidebook when the experience should be burned into my soul.”
I thought about this in silence for a moment, knowing better than to offer any more of the memory tricks that had allowed me to squeak through the wizards’ school without ever being properly studious. I had, just barely, managed to save the chaplain’s life, but it was going to be difficult if he now expected me to save his soul as well.
“Maybe it’s the overall experience that’s important,” I offered, “not the details of the individual pilgrimage churches.”
He turned to look toward me, a long, intense stare that suddenly turned into a smile. “Thank you, Daimbert,” he said, stretching out again. “You’re absolutely right.”
“Right about what?” I said, startled.
“I should have realized this from the beginning,” he said with surprisingly good humor. “Now I know why I’ve been having to fight against spiritual dissatisfaction this entire journey. I’d assumed it was only the temptings of the devil, and of course in part it was, but I now realize it also came from my own misdirected attentions.”
It was no use asking him to explain what he meant. I wouldn’t understand even if he did.
“I had thought that to come on pilgrimage to the Holy Land would be the culminating experience of my life, the opportunity for my soul to rise above mundane concerns at last and reach toward God. In part it certainly has been, but I was constantly irritated in finding myself still on and of the earth, worried by earthly things.
“Now you’ve made it evident, with your clear insight, that I’d been missing the point all along. ‘The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.’ It is not my body that needed to go where Jesus lived nearly two millennia ago, but my spirit that needed to rise to meet the living Christ.” He gave me a quick glance. “God can use even a wizard for His purposes.”
“Glad to be of service,” I mumbled.
Ascelin and Dominic found the Wadi Harhammi on an old, yellowed map they came across in the bottom of the map drawer of a dark bookstore in the oldest part of the city. None of the newer maps, even the most detailed, included it.
It seemed from the rather confused symbols the mapmaker had used to be up in the stony hills a few days’ journey south of the emirate of Bahdroc. But the map showed no road leading to the Wadi.
“Do you still want to go there?” asked Ascelin. We all sat on the floor, crowded into the king’s room in the pilgrims’ hospice. “That mage certainly knew about the Wadi. I’m afraid we don’t have much hope of being the first there-even if no one else had reached there already in the last fifty years.”
“We may have to face the mage wherever we go,” said Dominic. “I’m beginning to wonder if he’s been toying with us, to let us travel all the way unmolested from Xantium to the Holy City.”
“And don’t forget King Warin,” said Hugo. “He stole Arnulf’s onyx ring from us on purpose to buy the flying horse, which by now has certainly taken him to the Wadi if that’s where he was going.”
“That is,” I put in, “unless Arnulf’s agents somehow managed to get the horse away from Kaz-alrhun first- after all, when I last saw them they seemed to think the horse was now legally Arnulf’s.”
“We should go south in any event,” said the king, “because that is the direction Sir Hugo’s party took. As the mage mentioned the Wadi Harhammi to us, he may also have mentioned it to them. We can ask after them in the oases along the way, and if we reach the emir’s city without word perhaps we can enlist his aid.”
Maffi sat in the corner, following the discussion with bright eyes but saying nothing. I wondered uneasily if he was acting as Kaz-alrhun’s agent. If so, I couldn’t see how even a mage could get information from him while he stayed as close to us as Ascelin made sure he did.
Dominic looked at his hands, where the ruby of his ring shone in the candle light. “I shall travel to the Wadi, whether the rest of you wish to accompany me past the emir’s city or not. My father died with it in his thoughts. We were too foolish for fifty years to realize there was a message hidden in this ring, but even if I’m far too late I must get there at last.”
Dominic glanced toward the king for confirmation as he finished, but the rest of us were already slowly nodding. This had been King Haimeric’s pilgrimage, but we had now completed that aspect of the journey. Somewhere between Dominic’s father’s grave and the Holy City, his quest and the search for Sir Hugo had become fused.
“I agree with you, Dominic,” said King Haimeric. “We should carry out my brother’s last wishes and at least try to find whatever he and his wizard thought was hidden in there. Tomorrow morning we can send a message to the queen, by those pilgrims who said they were heading straight back to the City, so that she’ll know we’ve been delayed.”
“Whether we find anything in the Wadi or not,” said Hugo, “the emir’s city will be the best place to look for my father’s tracks.”
“It should also be the best place to find the blue rose,” commented the king, brightening.
Ascelin rose to his feet and stretched, his hands brushing the ceiling. “Then tomorrow we’d better buy provisions,” he said, “including more waterskins. It’s going to be a dry journey.”
II
The Holy City was at the southern end of David’s Kingdom. Beyond the city, once we left behind the irrigated vineyards and olive trees, a land I had thought was already dry became even drier. The sky stretched for a thousand miles above us, cloudless and pale. The last remains of western civilization were left behind.
