第7章 The Salt Flat

The Ovaz flats were not sand. That was the first thing Zeyla had to teach herself again, because the eye insisted on sand and the eye was wrong. The flats were salt, a lake bed that had dried and cracked into plates and then broken into a loose crust the color of old bone, and walking on them was like walking on a floor that had been tiled and then vandalized. Every step went through the crust with a small, hollow snap. Ten thousand steps, and the sound never varied, and by the end of the first hour it had worked its way into her skull and would not leave. There was no shade. There was no horizon worth trusting, because the flats had their own horizon, a band of pale shimmer that hovered a hand's width above the ground and turned everything beyond it into an argument. Zeyla checked the compass every twenty minutes, not because she doubted it but because the country was teaching her not to doubt anything else. They carried water for three days and planned for two. That was Tufan's rule, and he explained it while they walked, in the flat, measured voice he used for rules. "A man who carries for three days and plans for two arrives thirsty but alive. A man who carries for two and plans for three arrives dead. The difference is not courage. It is arithmetic." He adjusted the strap of the waterskin on the mule. "You are the one who counts letters. Count the water." Zeyla counted the water. She counted it at noon, when the shimmer made the far edge of the flats look like a city. She counted it again when the shimmer resolved, briefly, into the shape of a truck standing at an angle two kilometers away, and then dissolved again into nothing when she looked a second time. She counted it a third time when the wind began, and the salt lifted off the flats in a fine, stinging haze, and the world narrowed to a white blur that rang against her teeth. The wind lasted an hour and took the afternoon with it. When it cleared, the truck was gone, if it had ever been there, and the light had changed, and ahead of them, standing alone in the middle of nothing, was a stone. It was dressed, one measure, cut to the shape of a saddlebag, and it stood upright on a base of packed salt as if it had been planted the previous week. Zeyla's heart rose before her judgment could stop it. She walked to it, and circled it, and knelt, and read the column of characters that had been cut into its face. Then she sat back on the salt and let out a breath that was close to a laugh. "It is a decoy." "How do you know?" Tufan said. "Because it is too easy. Nobody leaves a marker standing in the middle of a lake bed where any shepherd can find it, and Sarpel was not careless. But more than that." She pointed to the third line. "The number is nine. The sequence says the ninth stone is the last. And the letters say the reader must not trust it." "Do not trust the ninth." "My grandmother read the same stone. She came out here, or she read a copy, and she wrote the warning in her notebook because she understood what it meant." Zeyla stood and dusted the salt from her knees. "Sarpel put a false ninth at the end of the sequence. A marker that says, here, at last, the answer. So that anyone who collected stones without understanding the sequence would end their search here, in the middle of a dead lake, with nothing." Tufan looked at the decoy for a long time. "That is a cruel thing to build." "It is a surveyor's thing to build. The whole system is a test that only rewards the person who reads it the way he did." Her voice had gone flat and hard without her intending it. "Which means the ninth real stone is not the last one on the road. It is the one he hid, the tenth, the one on the road that no longer exists. The false ninth is the lock. The tenth is the key." They made camp that night on a raised shelf of rock at the flats' edge, where the salt gave way to gravel and there was, at last, a horizon. Tufan built a small fire from dry thorn, which produced more smoke than heat, and they ate bread and olives and did not talk. Zeyla wrote in the margin of the notebook, in pencil, in the only blank space left: V, A, T. South, east, west. Read alone, meaningless. Read together, a heading. Before sleep she climbed the shelf and looked back across the flats. Far out on the white plain, a single point of light moved, steady, deliberate, following the decoy stone's line exactly. They had found the trap. They would spend tomorrow at the decoy, and the consortium would find them there. She went down and woke Tufan and told him, and he listened without surprise, and then he said the thing that had been waiting in both of them since the pass. "We should let them have the decoy. Let them believe they have the last stone. It will cost them a week and a crew and a truck, and it will buy us what we actually need." "Which is?" "The village under the hill," Tufan said. "Yelviran. The third dot. If Mehve marked it, she went there. And if she went there, someone in that village remembers a woman who came asking about nine stones." They made the plan in the dark and did not write it down. In the morning they would walk out to the decoy and stand around it in plain view for an hour and photograph it from every side, and then walk away south, toward the highway, where anyone watching from the consortium's position would see a woman and a guide going the wrong way with the satisfaction of people who believed they had finished. The shepherd paths ran north, up the long valley toward Yelviran, and a pair of shepherds crossing a salt flat at noon with a mule and no truck were, in that country, invisible. Zeyla disliked the theater of it. But she had learned, in the years after the committee, that being underestimated was the only kind of armor that could not be confiscated. She lay awake and counted water, because Tufan had told her to, and found that the arithmetic was better than she had feared. Three days carried, one spent. Two to reach Yelviran and one to come back to the road. It would leave them dry at the far end, and dry was survivable if you had a destination, and now they had one. She turned the number over the way she turned inscriptions, looking for the lie in it, and found only the ordinary risk that every road carried. Before dawn she woke to find Tufan already up, standing at the edge of the shelf with his back to her, watching the plain. The point of light was still there, farther off than it had been, moving slowly now, the way a man moves who has stopped hurrying because he believes the thing he is following has nowhere left to run. "Let him believe it," Zeyla said, and went to wake the mule. ---