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but the insistent presence of the Sacred Name grew easier to bear in the days that followed.
    Like as not, though, it was the rains.
    They began two days after our conversation. After our travels in Khebbel-im-Akkad, I thought I knew somewhat of rain. I was mistaken. The rains that fall in Jebe-Barkal are like naught else, and no one travels in them. We did, though. If I had not seen that landscape once already, I would be hard pressed to describe it, for more often than not, it was a solid veil of rain through which we journeyed. We rode where we could, and walked where we could not, leading our horses through treacherous gullies and over rain-loosened scree. In the plains, we plodded along the banks of a rain-swollen Tabara River, our heads lowered, water running off us in sheets.
    In the early part of the day, the rains would cease for a time. That was when the flies came. Blood-flies, Kaneka had called them; I remembered that, now. They were black and vicious and their sting hurt like fury. Our animals were half-maddened by them, and we humans were scarce immune. It got so one welcomed the rains. In the evenings, the rain and smoke kept them at bay, when we could muster a fire. Betimes the firewood was so sodden, not even Bizan could coax a flame. We all took to carrying tinder wrapped in oilcloth.
    “We can make camp, lady, and wait out the rains,” Tifari Amu said to me after five days of misery. “In the highlands, it is not so bad. We can build shelters that will last, and there is easy game.”
    “How long?” I asked him.
    He shrugged. “Three months, perhaps.”
    It would be winter by the time we reached Menekhet, and too late for any ships. I gazed at Imriel, shrouded in a burnoose; Joscelin, his shoulders hunched against the downpour. Our bearers cursed and pleaded with the donkeys, whose short legs sunk deep in the mire. “What do you say, Tifari?”
    “That only madmen travel in the rainy season.” He regarded the straggling line of our company. “Madmen, and us. You ask me? I want to go home, lady. If you have the heart for it, I say we press onward.”
    “Onward it is,” I said, thinking, home .

Eighty
    IT WAS a miserable journey.
    There are no words to describe it. We took to travelling in the morning hours, when the rains had ceased. Once the sun rose, it heated the muddy earth until it was like journeying through a steam-bath, thick and swampy, the air filled with the green reek of rotting vegetation. It was impossible to keep anything dry. Our stores of grain rotted and sprouted in the sack.
    We lived, for the most part, on game. And when we could not get it fresh, we went hungry, for most of what we carried had spoiled. Mercifully, there was water in abundance, and lush grass for our mounts. Would that we could have eaten the same! But Tifari and Bizan brought down game enough between them to fill our bellies two days out of three, and where we followed the river, Joscelin was able to fish. The fish, at least, didn’t mind the rains.
    Flies continued to plague us, and illness. Yedo, one of the bearers, caught a fever that laid us up for three days. At its worst, he raved incoherently, and his brow, when I felt it, was dry and burning for all the moisture about us. Willow bark might have helped, had we any, but we didn’t. I sat with him through the night, sponging his brow, remembering Ismene, the Hellene girl who had died after we left Darsanga.
    Ismene died. Yedo lived, the fever breaking before dawn, leaving him wrung-out and sweating freely in the damp air. Who can say why?
    And then we broke camp once more, and slogged onward, treading through the sucking mire, making our slow way toward Meroë. The saddles chafed our horses and their proud Umaiyyati heads hung low, sodden manes plastered on drenched hides. It went no better for the donkeys, bearing heavy packs. We treated the sores with powdered sulphur, which turned to a damp paste in the humid air. It didn’t help, much. Nothing did. Where there were sores, the blood-flies laid eggs at night. Imriel and I grew deft at picking them out, our fingers smaller than the rest.
    “You could have been at court,” I reminded him. “Eating poached quails’ eggs and sugared violets from a silver platter.”
    He scowled at me from beneath his dripping burnoose. “I would rather be here .”
    To his credit, Imriel never complained-and he kept up with our company, his boy’s hands grown adept at handling the reins of his gelding.