Listen. If you’re after a slice of hell, the field of bleached bones known as Traitor’s Landing is about as close as you can get. It’s a wasteland within a wasteland. Imagine the past glaring at you through the empty sockets of silent, sandsunken skulls, and you start to get the idea. A great battle was fought there, or perhaps several, long before such events were conquered by the written word.
History was of little interest to the antiquarians who set up their tents in that desert. Keeping a wary distance from the surfaced regions of the old boneyard, they slept through the shimmering heat of the day, and sallied out at dusk to begin the exhausting work of excavation. There was money to be made – old stories, hidden in mysterious glyphs and pictograms; old treasures, tucked beneath the dunes, teasingly close to discovery. Old magicks, and tomb-curses stewed into anger by centuries of brooding neglect.
To the practised eye, some skeletons were a lot newer than others.
A novice might not realise the danger. Perching on a curule chair, with a flask of tea in hand, Sainab gazed towards the mountains with that arrogant, patrician smile you quickly grow to hate. We’re going to spend some time with Sainab, because this is her story. So you can skip the smile, if you prefer, and imagine her as a striking, confident young woman with ink-dark eyes and a dream.
She’d pitched the opening of the tent in this direction for a reason: you could see who was coming from leagues away. New arrivals meant a chance to sell trinkets and artefacts without the bother of dragging them across the mountains to a specialty market, where ignorant nobles sneered at them through crooked noses, or accused you of forging them in the copperscrap market around the corner. Better still, the trade caravans came with little luxuries of their own to sell. And Sainab was out of coffee.
It was evening when she saw them. As the sun creaked down behind her, lighting the mountains with a reddish-purple tinge, merchants began to crest the pass. The distant line of camels grew longer and longer, and Sainab’s smirk widened into a hungry grin. She couldn’t believe her luck.
“Do you see that?” The antiquarienne licked her lips, and handed her apprentice a brass-bound telescope. “Thank the sun, moon, and stars. We are going to be rich.”
“Is that an imperial caravan?” gasped the apprentice. He was on loan from the Madrasa, a scrawny, irritating, second-rate sort of student that some professor must’ve been glad to send off to the desert. The boy wasn’t much to look at, but he had two redeeming qualities: loyal as a dog and dumb as a rock. Sainab had been taking him on these expeditions for almost a year now, and he hadn’t even written a single monograph out of it. In other words, the idiot was stealing nobody’s thunder.
“No, my dear. That’s the imperial caravan. The one that carries the Gloam. The three-times-a-century, thousand men strong, heaving with silk and spending-money caravan.”
“Crikey.”
“Not only will those camels be creaking with rare goods, the merchants are likely to spend like starvelings if we show them the right stuff.”
“Oh, good.”
Sainab fetched her apprentice a slap around the head. “No. This is not good. ‘Good’ is when you find an extra coin in the biscuit tin. This is stupendously, phantasmazingly, eucatastrophically superb. That column of dawdling pack-animals carries more disposable silver than an entire merchant quarter, it’s coming right at us, and there’s no competition for miles around. If we play our cards right, you and I could make a fortune out of this lot. We’ll be set for life.”
She closed her eyes, and allowed a brief moment to disappear into fantasies of luxury and splendour. Instead of dragging herself to the scorching desert every few months to scrape at the leavings of old skeletons – needless to say, an unworthy pursuit for a lady of erudition and breeding – she could be living a full life on the other side of the mountains. In her mind’s eye, Sainab sprawled on a divan in the vaulted minarets of a mosaiced palace, eating sweet, plump grapes from a silver platter, while a pair of splendidly-toned servants in loincloths cooled her with giant fans. Her snooty friends from the Madrasa now flocked to the door of her chamber, craving a token of wealth and favour – and she made them wait, while a servant-girl painted symbols of longevity and prosperity in henna on her fingers and toes.
For a moment, she could almost smell the exotic perfumes wafting towards her across the mountains. Profit, they seemed to say.
The fantasy evaporated, and Sainab’s expression became sharp and businesslike. The caravan would arrive within a matter of days. To move her career into the minarets, she would need something a lot better than the broken scraps of archaeology that the expedition had dredged up so far. She needed a real crowd-pleaser. The jewel-crusted scabbard of a slain lord, or an ancient reliquary plated in silver and gold. Anything but tarnished belt-buckles and chipped iron spearheads.
“We redouble our efforts,” she ordered. “Rouse the workmen at once. We will work in shifts through night and day. Concentrate only on the main dig site. Tell every man I will double his pay, with a bonus for the first to strike gold.”
I doubt you’ve been on one of these jobs. Your hands are too soft, like they’ve been washed every day. So you might be thinking of something like neat rectangular trenches, marked with stakes and bits of string; or maps with little grid-lines and pretty little flags to mark the ground. You’d be wrong. Night excavation has an unwholesome, secretive look – especially out on that boneladen desert. Our candles and lanterns were suited more for a grave-robbing spree than an antiquarian expedition, and the shifting shadows they cast made the dunes seem strangely alive.
The night sky glowed like a riotous ocean of stars, the sort of vista that you can only find in a wasteland. On a normal night, Sainab would sit and document the motion of the planets and their celestial court in her diary, seeking the astrological portents of fortune or disaster. But tonight she was busy with the dig. She moved with purpose among the dozen hard-bitten labourers she’d purchased from the closing-down sale of a depleted salt mine, watching for signs of treasure in the ground, and not the sky. If she had turned her attention skyward, she would have noticed the ominous red gleam of Mars, brighter than ever, and nearing a disastrous conjunction with Saturn.
Three days later, the imperial caravan rolled through that field of bleached bones called Traitor’s Landing. They found nobody with whom to trade, though the sand was disturbed in places, as if a zephyr or dust devil had passed through.
As the trailing camel stomped over the decayed fragments of an old canvas tent, a caravan guard noticed something unusual sticking out of the sand. It was the remains of an old astrological diary, bound in leather, with gold leaf peeling from its worn surface. “Look there, mate,” he called to the other guard, grinning. “We’ve struck gold.”
Nobody noticed, when the caravan left the field of bones, that the number of walkers who tramped alongside the camels and carts had increased by one. You can’t blame them: I’m an easy man to miss. Dumb as a rock, and loyal as a dog – but only one made it out with Sainab’s treasure, while she stayed in the boneyard, grinning at all the other relics with that maddening, patrician smile.
Thank you for reading.
The outro music is an excerpt from ‘A Disastrous Conjunction With Saturn,’ an original composition by John Wheatley. Let me know your thoughts.
Really enjoyed this, pulled me in right from the get go! Should've known Traitors Landing would not be a place for a happy ending!
Nice. But when that student was first mentioned I knew that he was going to be more than she thought he was ;)