Weird Tales - Summer 1990

by Vol. 51 No. 4

  I raised the bow.

  He stuttered, "Y-you wouldn't dare."

  "Count to three. See how far you get."

  Instead he tried to call his lance-bearer.

  I put the arrow in his heart.

  The big horse skittered away from the fallen body and ran nervously into the desert. Somewhere a calm voice spoke. The roan veered toward it. A fig­ure moved out of a patch of deeper shadow and took the horse's headrope.

  "Come here," I called. "There'll be no more trouble."

  He took a moment to make sure the roan was calm before releasing the rope and approaching me without hurry or reluctance.

  It was the man with the cast in one eye who had ridden with Zuhayr that morning. He was unarmed. He looked down at what had been his master and spat disinterestedly.

  "His friends may mourn him but I don't know why."

  The words were callous enough to make me say, "Didn't you owe him loyalty?"

  "Loyalty!" He laughed shortly. "Lis­ten. He had me ride up here late this afternoon with a lance and a sword and find a hiding place and wait. I said, 'If you're so eager to get rid of this Talal, come with me; when he shows up we'll ambush him and it'll be over.' He said, 'Why take chances, we'll let Kadhim do it for us; if something goes wrong we're the surprise reinforcements.' He was supposed to come up the hill right be­hind Kadhim's party, not wait till the fight was over and everything was quiet."

  "You were a great help," I reminded him.

  A shrug, eloquent in its spareness.

  "Everyone involved in this quarrel was under someone's protection, so it was disobey my master or get an arrow in my liver or get done to death by one of the protectors." His head shook. "Then when Zuhayr finally did arrive, I got very interested in what you two were saying . . ."

  He looked around, found Mujahid's body.

  "You'll want to bury your friend."

  My odd calm, the sense of unfamil-iarity approaching disbelief, hadn't left me. It didn't now. I hoped vaguely that it was some sort of natural condition and not a sign of spirit world interfer­ence. The spirit world was too arbi­trary. I didn't want its enmity, and I didn't want to be singled out for favors that could mean I was being brought onto one side of some game I didn't know was being played nor by what rules. The spirit world might be as much a place of rivalries and cross-pur­poses as our world. In which case some day Zuhayr's male Gods might triumph after all, and old Umar bin Auda's pat­terns of the Gods were no more than accidents, as unplanned as the patterns of flying dust.

  "The others too," I heard myself say. "I don't want angry ghosts cursing me."

  "Leave them. Someone will take care of Kadhim. Everyone's going to know what happened anyway" — his voice fell to a murmur — "unless you want to kill that one on the horse?"

  "Goddess, no! Enough killing."

  I took the sword from Mujahid's body and snapped the blade between two rocks and threw the pieces away. Zu­hayr's man helped me bury my brother in a scant grave we dug in a sandy hol­low hot far off. Then we rounded up the animals. I roped Kadhim's camel to our own and took all the waterbags. Shaykh Salah and Zuhayr's family could have the other animals back. Zuhayr's man thought that was silly; why didn't I steal them as spoils of war?

  "I have no quarrel with Salah," I said. "I didn't mean to blacken his face."

  "But you did. He and the Bayt Ali hotheads will be after your blood. Even Zuhayr got that part right."

  "How long before I can come back?"

  "Never."

  He promised to get help for the wounded Hilali. I mounted my camel and led the other animals into the night.

  V