The deeper they traveled into the Salt Desert, however, the harder it became to summon water. Her eyes dried and her lips cracked, despite all the balm of fat and herbs she could muster from the contents of her medical bag. There was just too little moisture in the air to make a difference.
At least Samarkar’s wizarding disciplines could be used to keep her from baking in the unforgiving sun. Hrahima, who did not sweat, suffered more. She did not complain, but Samarkar did not need an interpreter to read the slouched posture, the open-mouthed pant. On one particular afternoon, as Hrahima lay flat in the shade, Samarkar came and crouched beside her with a bowl of water brimming in her hands.
Hrahima cracked an eye.
“I might be able to help,” Samarkar said, as the Cho-tse reached out for the water. “There’s a meditation against the heat—”
“I know one,” Hrahima said. She pushed herself up on one elbow and took the bowl gratefully. Though Samarkar had diminished the process of fire within it until it almost smoked with cold, the air here was so dry that no moisture beaded on the outside. Hrahima cupped both broad hands against it, savoring the chill.
“And you will not use it,” Samarkar said.
A tiger’s sigh was a mighty thing. Her chest rose and fell; her whiskers blew forward. “Have you heard of ‘soldier’s heart’?”
Guiltily, Samarkar’s eyes crept to Temur. But what she said was, “I have it a little myself, I think.”
Hrahima drank deeply. When she looked up, transparent droplets shivered on her whiskers. “War begets fear. Fear begets rage. Rage propagates hate. Hate draws rage. The Sun Within abhors hate; hate is inharmonious. Hate is the weapon of entropy.”
“The Sun Within.” Samarkar fought her smile, but she wasn’t any better at keeping it inside than Temur. “That god you don’t believe in.”
The Cho-tse huff of amusement was becoming as familiar to her as a sister’s sigh. “Yes, well. He drops by once in a while and we hash it over. It’s never going to be resolved, but we’re still friends.” She spread her hands. “It is what it is.”
Samarkar thought about that, thought about this idea that one could … disagree philosophically with a force of nature. With a deity.
If you could disagree with kings, were gods so far above?
She said, “You’re a warrior. So how do you kill without rage?”
“In compassion. Because of necessity.” Hrahima set the empty bowl back in Samarkar’s hands. “The same way you carry water.”
* * *
Day fell into day, night to night. The silver earth bled into the silver sky so Temur could scarcely find a horizon, and the pale sun seared down through the haze. In the dark, the salt below seemed brighter than the heavens. The wind was ceaseless, blowing delicate rills of salt in winding bands, like the first snows of autumn.
Temur sang to his mare, the milk-letting songs and the soft-muscle songs. His own muscles hardened in new ways. His feet broke into the new boots, or possibly the other way around.
The sun did not kill them.
They walked on.
* * *
After three days in the desert, Bansh’s milk let down. It was an art of the Qersnyk to coax their mares to lactate so early in the pregnancy, he explained, when Samarkar expressed surprise that she was bearing.
Temur showed her how to make airag and explained to her that the mare’s milk was too strong for humans until it fermented. “It will make your bowels loose,” he said. “Which would kill you, here. But in three days, it is good food.”
Samarkar looked at the mare, standing patiently while Temur crouched before her hind legs, streams of milk jetting into the leather pail of white froth by his feet.
“She’ll need more water, then,” Samarkar said. “We can get some of ours from the milk, when in turn we drink it.”
If his hands hadn’t been milk-covered and busy, Temur would have put an arm around her then.
* * *
On the fifth day of the desert, Samarkar joined the mute monk in his forms.
She did not excel. Her body felt bulky, awkward, badly shaped for what was expected of it. But he was patient with her.
At dawn on the sixth day, when they had been walking all night, they found themselves climbing out of the salt basin, blistered and exhausted.
Samarkar would have hugged the first scrubby tree she saw, if it had not been so thorny.
* * *
That afternoon while the men and Hrahima slept and Samarkar kept watch, Temur dreamed again. She’d become used to his nightmares by now. Some might be prophesy, though he had not spoken of such since Tsarepheth, and the rest were likely “soldier’s heart,” as Hrahima diagnosed. He regularly mewled and kicked in his sleep, scrabbling at something Samarkar could not see and that she knew he would never explain.