“Not this time,” Faruq assured him. “You have seen the map. You must remember it.”
“Not a bit,” Sebastian said cheerfully. “You see, I only had a quick squint by candlelight. I know the hoard was stashed somewhere in the vicinity of Ashkelon, but these hills are full of hidey holes. Couldn’t tell you anything more if my life depended upon it.”
Faruq laughed. “It does not,” he assured Sebastian. From the folds of his robes, he produced a pistol and pointed it straight at my heart. “Hers does.”
My entire world seemed to narrow to a single point—the black hole at the end of Faruq’s pistol. I was aware of Sebastian near me, unmoving and his voice still maddeningly calm.
“Oh, do stop waving that thing around,” he told Faruq.
“Sebastian,” I croaked.
His expression was one of acute boredom. “Well, honestly. It’s just bad manners, and damned silly to boot. To begin with, if you kill her, do you really think I’d tell you anything? I’d turn the bloody gun on myself just to spite you.”
Faruq considered this. “Very well.” Without another word, he levelled the gun at Sebastian. “I must persuade you.”
Without another word, he pulled the trigger. The explosion was deafening in the still air, and for an instant I thought he had merely meant to frighten us. Then I saw the spreading crimson stain on Sebastian’s robes as he slid to the ground.
I shrieked his name and flung myself on top of him, but his eyes were closed, and I whirled to Faruq. I cursed him then, hurling every insult I could think of, most of them highly profane, thanks to my younger brothers’ vocabulary. I rose, my hands curled into fists and he waved the gun.
“But I did not kill him,” he protested. He brandished the pistol at me, warning me to keep back. “Look,” he urged. “I only grazed his arm.”
I turned back to where Sebastian was lying flat on his back. I saw then that the stain was confined to his sleeve, and I fell on him again, my face close to his.
“Sebastian, can you hear me?”
A sound seemed to roll up from his chest, a deep rattling groan, and I gave a choked sob. “Oh, Sebastian, you mustn’t die. Can you hear me?”
“A dead man could hear you,” he muttered. His eyes fluttered open, and he gave a sigh.
I gripped his face in my hands. “Are you really all right?”
“Not at the moment,” he told me in a strangled voice. “You are sitting on my stomach.”
I climbed off and he sat up, brushing the dust off his clean sleeve. The other one was torn and he was still bleeding, but slowly now. I peeled back the cloth to see a slender mark, the barest furrow in his flesh.
“The bullet barely touched you,” I told him coldly.
He gave me a sulky look. “It still hurt.”
I stood up and faced Faruq. “He’s fine.”
Faruq nodded. “Just as I told you. I am a very good shot. I meant only to persuade him to give me the information he remembers from the map.”
“Why not ask her?” Sebastian demanded with a jerk of his head towards me. “She saw it longer than I did.”
“I did not—” I turned to gape at him, and he looked at me, his face in profile to Faruq. Carefully, he winked with the eye closest to me, and I covered my surprise. “That is, I did not see it for long, but I daresay I remember more of it than you do,” I said.
Faruq looked pleased. “Excellent. Between the two of you, I will have the directions to the gold.” He drew a piece of paper from inside his robes and a stub of pencil. “You will draw what you remember.”
Sebastian touched his bleeding arm. “I’m afraid you shot me in my writing arm, old man. And the lady might remember the landmarks, but she’s got utterly no sense of scale,” he said quickly. “We’ll have to lead you there.”
Faruq didn’t like it but he had no choice. Sebastian waited calmly for him to reason it out, and apparently Faruq didn’t like the option of firing his weapon again. He nodded finally, and I felt rather than saw the tension in Sebastian’s arm ease.
Faruq tossed us ropes from his saddlebag. “You will bind each other. There will be no trickery, for I will look at the knots when you are finished.”
We did as he told us, and I tried hard not to jar Sebastian’s arm too badly when I tied him up. He merely gave me a casual look and clucked his tongue at the stain on his sleeve.
“Pity. I quite liked this robe. It was very expensive,” he told Faruq with a touch of asperity.
Faruq ignored him and, after inspecting the knots, lashed the two of us loosely together by a long rope. He gave a nod. “And now we will go. You will direct us,” he told me.
I closed my eyes as if trying to remember, or at least I pretended to. I peeped through the fringe of my lashes to see Sebastian give a quick flick of one finger. West. I made a show of opening my eyes widely and said with a decisive nod, “West.”
Faruq stepped back and let me go ahead. Sebastian trotted immediately after, and Faruq brought up the rear, keeping enough of a distance he could easily shoot us before we managed to unhorse him, but not so much we could lose him in the scrubby hills.
After we had walked a long way, dodging low bushes and winding our way through the hills and out onto a desert plain, I ventured to ask Sebastian a question that had been nagging at me. “Why did you tell him I had seen the map?”
I kept my voice very low and Sebastian’s reply was almost inaudible. “Because information is what will keep you alive. If he thinks you know, he won’t kill you. If you don’t know, he has no reason to spare you.”
I thought this over. “But if we both know, there’s no point in letting us both live. And you indicated to him that I remember more of the map than you do.”
“Exactly,” he said, his jaw rigid.
I tripped over a bush as I understood what he intended. “You want him to kill you instead of me if it comes to it,” I said, hardly managing to keep my voice down.
He shrugged. “It won’t come to that. I won’t let it,” he promised.
“But if it does,” I persisted, “you made the choice for him. He’ll kill you and spare me.”
“Only until he discovers you don’t have the faintest idea of where you’re going,” he warned. “So mind you make it look convincing. Now, hush before he decides we’re plotting against him and kills me for sport.”
I bit off my reply and stumbled ahead, hardly aware of putting one foot in front of the other. I wouldn’t have believed him capable of it, but not only had Sebastian thought with lightning speed on his feet, he had ensured with the lie that if one of us were killed, it wouldn’t be me. It was the most heroic act of sacrifice I had ever seen, and my eyes burned with unshed tears.
“God, don’t get sentimental,” he hissed.
“I can’t help it,” I whispered back. “It’s so brave, so—”
He swore at me then, and I lapsed back into silence, the tears drying up as fast as they had come. He was the most maddening creature I had ever met, I decided. He made what might prove to be the ultimate sacrifice for me with one breath and cursed at me with the next. I squared my shoulders and stomped on, leading the way with absolute conviction. It was only when I’d covered another half mile that I realised pricking my temper had been another of his clever tricks. If I was angry, I hadn’t the time to be frightened or overly emotional, either of which could be fatal in our current predicament. I thought of my Aunt Julia then, and her penchant for confronting murderers without adequately thinking things through, and I cursed my impetuous March blood.
We walked another few hours, stopping occasionally for water, and it was on one of these stops, while Faruq worked a stone out of his horse’s shoe that Sebastian caught my gaze and flicked a quick glance to the horizon. I looked to see that Faruq was still occupied, then peered into the distanc
e. There was a slight smudging of the horizon, a blurring of the line between earth and sky that could mean only one thing. We were being followed.
I felt a rush of confidence then, and as soon as we had drunk our water, I set off again, but this time I held the pace as slow as I dared. Faruq fussed a little, but his horse seemed perfectly content to amble along, and Sebastian said nothing. I understood he didn’t dare add to the delay to give our pursuers time to catch up, but he was careful not to move faster than I did. He didn’t look back, but once he tripped over a bush and I saw him dart a quick glance under his arm as he righted himself. Faruq did not notice, but merely clucked his tongue in irritation, urging us forward.
“I say, it’s getting a bit warmish,” Sebastian said finally. “How about another drink?”
Faruq sighed, checking his horse. “You are worse than the woman,” he told Sebastian, but he was unwilling to let either of us collapse on the walk. That would have meant either shooting us on the spot or sharing his horse, and he didn’t seem keen to do either for the moment. Sebastian drank deeply from the goatskin then ignored Faruq’s outstretched hand and passed it to me. I drank my share, darting a quick glance to the horizon. At the last second, Faruq noticed the direction of my gaze, and Sebastian lifted his bound hands.
“There!” he proclaimed.
Faruq turned to look where he pointed, in the opposite direction of our pursuers.
“That is where the map leads,” Sebastian told him firmly. Ahead of us there was a ridge, and atop the ridge stood a square Crusader castle, crumbling to ruin.
“Isn’t there a single building in this bloody country still standing?” I muttered.
“Syrians don’t take care of their things,” Sebastian told me solemnly.
That earned him a quick slap across the face from Faruq, and when it was done, Sebastian was smiling with a bloody lip.
“You oughtn’t provoke him,” I told him softly.
He shrugged. “I was bored.”
I rolled my eyes and we moved on, out of the shadow of a spindly tree and up the ridge. The going was slow with our hands bound before us, and more than once Faruq cursed us, his tone so vicious I was glad I didn’t speak Arabic. But Sebastian kept up a steady translation, commenting with admiration on the ruder bits.
“I say, old man, you’re quite wrong. I would never do that to a donkey,” he called back at one point. “They kick, you know.”
“His temper is worsening,” I told Sebastian quietly as we scrambled over stones.
“He’s getting nervous,” he replied, using the sound of the shifting rocks to cover our voices. “It’s going to make him unpredictable.”
“Then should you really be baiting him?” I demanded.
“I know what I’m doing,” was all he would say in reply. We toiled upwards, climbing over ever-larger rocks until at last Faruq was forced to dismount and leave his horse. He carried his saddlebag and kept his pistol trained upon us, but he needn’t have bothered. With the tortuous ground and our hands firmly bound, we were lucky to keep upright, and we didn’t always manage that. More than once we stumbled, sometimes because I got too far ahead and sometimes because Sebastian lagged too far behind. We grew too tired and too hot to talk, and finally we reached the top of the plateau, the ruined tower of the castle keep looming above us in the afternoon sun.
“The Chastel Noir, built by the Templars during the Crusades and ugly as sin,” Sebastian pronounced. “Part of a series of citadels they erected to establish Western rule in the Outremer.”
“Invaders,” Faruq spat. “Coming here to take away our faith and replace it with your own.”
“Steady on,” Sebastian said lightly. “I seem to recall your lot did the same thing to Spain. It’s a bloody bad idea when anyone does it, I think we can agree.”
Faruq did not respond. He merely jerked his chin towards the castle keep. “Inside.”
I moved to obey, walking under the arched stones that had stood nearly a thousand years, impervious to the desert sands and sea-borne winds. It might stand a thousand more, bearing no trace of the lives that had been lost within its walls, I thought grimly. And two of those lives might well be ours.
Twenty
Faruq still gave no sign of noticing our pursuers and Sebastian was careful not to draw any attention to them. I was fairly giddy with the notion that help was so close at hand, but Faruq had already proven he was at ease with violence and not particularly sensible when it came to employing it. I made every effort to keep myself calm and focus on the essentials. The sun was lowering itself beyond the western horizon. Somewhere behind the hills the Mediterranean Sea was glittering in the waning rays, and I wondered if I would ever see it again.
Sebastian read my thoughts as handily as a carnival trickster. He caught my eye and gave me a firm nod, lifting his chin with an expression of resolve so complete, I felt my chest tighten and sudden tears prick my eyes. He wanted to save us, and he would try until his last breath to do it.
I made up my mind then that I would do everything in my power to save us both. I could not have his death on my conscience, and although the current situation was beyond anything I had experienced, there had to be something I could do.
Faruq fed and watered his horse, and after it was comfortably settled turned his attentions to us. “I will leave you tied together for now,” he told us. “You can eat easily enough.”
He proved his point by giving us nothing but cold flatbreads, which we shared between us. Sebastian scrupulously tried to divide the portion in half, but I refused to finish all of mine, and he shrugged and took the rest, bolting it down with scarcely a chance to chew it. He must have been utterly starved, I thought with a pang. When we had eaten, Faruq untethered us from one another long enough to let us take a moment’s privacy behind a bush that had forced its way out of the citadel walls, twisting itself into a parody of a shrub. It wasn’t much privacy, but it was something, and I was grateful to have a moment to myself even if my hands were still bound. I must have taken too long because Faruq raised his voice, calling out cheerfully, “If you are not out by the time I count to twenty, I will shoot him in the other arm.”
I was back before he reached five. Sebastian gave me a ghastly smile, and I thought it must be playing havoc with his nerves to be threatened so often with physical violence. I tried to give him a reassuring smile in return, but I suspected it came off a bit sickly. I was wondering what was keeping our saviours from staging a rescue, and it was not until Faruq left to take his own moment behind the bush that Sebastian muttered an answer to the question.
“Waiting for daylight,” he said softly. “Suicide to try this track in the dark. Better to come on at first light and try to surprise him while he’s still asleep.”
I nodded and Sebastian leaned into me, giving me a cordial shove with his good shoulder. “Try to get some sleep tonight. The real fun will start tomorrow.”
His sudden bravado moved me as much as the sight of him, battered and bloodied, and I promised myself I would stay awake as late as I could, plotting some sort of strategy to free us both.
But the long walk and the hot sun had taken their toll, and by the time the purple twilight had faded to blackness, I slipped into sleep. Faruq did not kindle a fire, and Sebastian and I slept back to back, taking warmth from one another as the cool velvet shadow of night fell over the citadel. Faruq talked in his sleep, muttering something in Arabic, while Sebastian slept heavily, rolling over onto my arm more than once and pinning me under his substantial weight. I tried to shift him without waking him, but it proved impossible, and so I slid into sleep again, dreaming I was weighted down by stones, crushed to death by Faruq’s slow torture as he demanded the location of the treasure—a location I could not give.
I woke with a start, my face damp with sweat, to find Faruq grinning at me.
�
�Pleasant dreams?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said loftily. “I was handing you over to the authorities for arrest. It was quite gratifying.”
He laughed then, but there was an edge to his mirth that told me I had struck a nerve. He reached out a booted foot and kicked Sebastian, who groaned deeply.
“Don’t do that!” I ordered.
Faruq shrugged and I roused Sebastian as gently as I could. He slept like the dead, and in the end I was forced to pinch him soundly on his bare cheek just above his beard.
“Ow!” he complained, sitting upright and rubbing at his cheek. “That was uncalled for.”
“Not entirely,” I told him. “It’s morning.”
He looked around, a small smile touching his lips. “So it is.” He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the sweet sea-borne air of the hills, and I marvelled at his good mood.
“You haven’t any coffee. I would have thought you’d be a misery this morning,” I told him.
Faruq rose to check on his horse, and Sebastian turned to smile at me, his expression deeply malicious. “A misery? Not a chance, dear child. There’s going to be a fight today. And a good one.”
I stared at him in dismay. “Sebastian, I hardly think you’re in any shape to take on Faruq,” I began.
He kept his grin. “It won’t be with Faruq.”
Before I could ask what he meant, he rose and stretched, testing his wounded arm. He looked through the slit in the robe.
“How is it?” I asked.
“Passable. It could do with a thorough cleaning and perhaps a stitch or two, but I’ve had worse.”
“I can’t imagine how,” I said repressively. “Honestly, if you insist on treating this all as a game,” I began, but he had stopped listening. He had edged us closer to the wall of the citadel, a broken course of stones that only came to our waists. He peered over, sweeping his eyes over the plain below. His gaze fixed on a small tree some hundred yards off the base of the hill. There was movement underneath it, and his smile deepened. “Come on, then,” he muttered.
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