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As the ley-line caravan glided east out of the Zuwayzi capital, Hajjaj smiled at his secretary and said, "Isn't it astonishing how quickly I've recovered from the indisposition everyone thinks I have?"

Qutuz smiled, too. "Astonishing indeed, your Excellency. And I am very glad to see you looking so well."

"I thank you, my dear fellow, though I think I ought to ask whether you need new spectacles," Hajjaj said. "I don't look particularly well. What I look is old." He paused a moment in thought. "Of course, a man my age who does not look well is liable to look dead."

"May you live to a hundred and twenty," Qutuz replied, a polite commonplace among the Zuwayzin.

"I've been over halfway there for a while now, but I don't think my private ley line will stretch quite so far," Hajjaj said. "Tewfik, now, Tewfik seems bound and determined to take the proverb literally. I hope he makes it."

"Someone does every now and then, or so they say," his secretary answered.

"They say all sorts of things," Hajjaj observed. "Every now and then, what they say is even true- but don't count on it." As foreign minister of a kingdom with a large, unfriendly neighbor and an arrogant cobelligerent, Hajjaj didn't see the advisability of counting on much of anything.

Qutuz leaned back in his seat- King Shazli had laid on a first-class caravan car for Hajjaj and his secretary- and remarked, "The scenery is prettier than usual, anyhow."

"Well, so it is," Hajjaj agreed. "It was high summer the last time I traveled to Najran, and the sun had baked the life out of everything. Gray rock, yellow rock, brown thornbushes- you know what it's like most of the year."

"Don't we all?" Qutuz spoke with a certain somber pride. In high summer, the sun of northern Zuwayza stood right at the zenith or even a little south of it, something seen nowhere else on the mainland of Derlavai. Except at oases and along the banks of the few streams that flowed down from the mountains the year around, life seemed to cease. Qutuz's wave urged Hajjaj to look out the window. "Certainly not like that now, your Excellency."

"No, it isn't." As his secretary had said, Hajjaj could for once enjoy peering through the glass. Late winter was the time for that in Zuwayza, if ever there was such a time: some years, there wasn't. But, by Zuwayzi standards, this had been a wet winter. The thornbushes were green now. Flowers of all sorts carpeted the usually barren hills and splashed them with crimson and gold and azure.

Had the ley-line caravan halted, Hajjaj would have been able to spy butterflies, moving bits of color. Toads would be croaking and creeping in the wadis, the dry riverbeds, that weren't quite dry now. Had Hajjaj been lucky, he might have spotted a small herd of antelope grazing on greenery whose like they wouldn't see again for months.