by Melanie Rawn
And then it occurred to him that the horse was more loyal to him than he had been to his family.
Ayia, what good would it serve if he too had died? Who would be left to avenge the al-Ma’aliq? The new granddaughter? Not even if Nizzira allowed her to live. Indoctrinated from her first breath, taught to despise half her heritage—
No. Azzad had been spared for a reason. And as he rode brashly through the pass in the gathering heat of the day, he thought of his family for what he swore must be the last time until he was ready to exact retribution for their deaths. When word filtered through the city that he was dead, there would be no one to mourn. Never again would he watch with hawk’s eyes as his friends blushed in his sisters’ silked and scented presence. Never again would he see his mother arch a sardonic brow at his latest exploit or listen to his father and uncles recite The Lessons of Acuyib at dawn prayers. And never again would his grandfather peer at him from beneath bristling white brows and bark, “Well, boy? Which pretty charmer have you seduced now? Would I have risked my venerable balls for ten minutes alone with her?”—and then laugh until he choked on his glee.
Azzad arrived at the tents of the Ammarad the next day. The vast mass of the encampment was denied him; he was not allowed past the outermost tents, which were reserved for travelers who had no shelter of their own. As the laws of hospitality required, the wound on his thigh was tended by the tribe’s chief tabbib, a grizzled old man whose treatment seemed to rely more on incantations and the pattern of thrown stones on a carved wooden plate than on any medicines in his satchel. But the chants did no harm, and the wrappings he used on Azzad’s thigh were clean and smelled of a spicy salve. Khamsin was fed and watered, Azzad was shown a corner of a tent to sleep in, and everyone appeared to believe his story of going out to prove his worth to his father by hunting down a sand-tiger—which had so vehemently left its mark on his leg.
It rankled to accept their food and drink, but he did just that for three days. For Khamsin’s sake, he told himself. He could guess what lay ahead of them in the desert.
“And where do you go now?” the elderly tabbib asked as he prepared to leave.
“East,” Azzad lied.
“I know all the tribes who make their camps in the east, Zaqir.” The unspoken question was From which do you come?
Azzad had called himself falcon, for he intended to fly as free and swift as a hawk and kill with utter ruthlessness. But he had not mentioned a family name. “I would not disgrace my tribe by naming them,” he said slowly. “I failed in my quest.”
A shrug of bony shoulders. “That you did not succeed in taking the rimmal nimir’s pelt is no dishonor, Zaqir. You have the marks to prove you faced the beast. And I am certain your mother will be just as glad that you lived to tell of it.”
Azzad gave a nod and a slight smile of thanks. He thought about the tabbib’s words as he rode away to the west. His mother would indeed be glad he had survived, he knew that—but what would she think of his means of survival? He’d paid more heed to an illicit tryst than to a royal command, and then he had run away. Still, he was alive, and to squander that gift would be to dishonor those who had died. Azzad vowed to be worthy of survival—and put back on his finger the al-Ma’aliq ring before turning Khamsin south, to the Devil’s Graveyard.
“But who can he be?”
“Besides a fool, you mean?” A clucking of tongue against teeth. “You tell me, Leyliah. What do you learn from looking at him?”
“Rich, of course—”
“His clothes were ragged.”
“But the ring—”
“Stolen.”
Azzad opened his eyes and denied it strenuously—or thought he did. Leyliah’s voice was young; the other woman’s was older. Both were lilting, liquid voices, oddly accented around the r sounds, but he understood them readily enough.
“The horse was stolen, too?” Leyliah asked shrewdly.
“Sometimes you are my favorite student, and at others you make me despair that you will ever learn how to trim a hangnail! Don’t look at the things, Leyliah. Look at the man.”
There was a pause. Azzad called frantically on every muscle in his body. Not a single one responded.
“His hands,” Leyliah said at last. “There are no old calluses—only new ones, from recent blisters.”
“Very good. What else?”
“His feet are rubbed raw where very soft, very fine boot leather has worn away.”
“Therefore . . .”
“Therefore he must be rich, as I said before!”
“Or he stole the boots as well.”
Sightless, frustrated in his need to move, he was forced to use his other senses. Scents of dry wool and sensuous spices; taste of skin-stored water flavored with an herb he couldn’t identify; and, past the voices of the two women, the faint ring of hammers on metal and a light breeze ruffling wind chimes. Not much information; nothing to comfort him. Except that they hadn’t killed him. Yet.
“You were right,” the older woman admitted, “but using the wrong evidence. The ring and the horse and the boots could have been stolen. The clothes tell us nothing. The things tell us nothing. But the body, this tells us all. We have here a spoiled, wealthy, feckless young fool who tried to cross the Gabannah. He has paid for it with heat sickness, scorched skin, feet that will not carry him for at least fifteen days, and the festering claw-marks of a rimmal nimir, bandaged by either an ignorant fool or someone who wanted him dead. Now, the next thing we ask ourselves is why he would attempt so dangerous a journey. He was not ill before he began it, so he cannot be one of those who seek our healing. Have you any answers?”
“None, Challa Meryem. Unless he truly is crazy—in which case we’d better tie him to the tent poles to prevent his doing us or himself any damage.”
“Pampered men such as this one do not stir themselves to folly without good reason. Deadly reason, I suspect. Even a fool must be aware that the Gabannah is death to those who do not know it intimately. So perhaps there is another death behind him, chasing him—one he feared more than the death that nearly found him here.”
Leyliah’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Do you think he killed someone?”
“Ayia, more likely someone wants to kill him. And by the look of him, for seducing a wife or daughter or sister.”
“I’d wondered if you’d noticed! Long eyelashes, long nose, long legs, long—”
Azzad felt sudden heat in his face; had he been able to, he would have turned away in embarrassment. Not at the words of praise, which he knew he deserved; nor that the words came from a woman, for his mistresses had made similar observations; but that the woman who said these things was unknown to him and had seen him naked.
All at once he wondered if she was pretty.
“Keep your eyes in your head, Leyliah, and your tongue between your teeth—and your fingers inside your qufaz when you salve his skin. Who knows what diseases may slither from him to you at contact with his blood?”
“But the texts all say—”
“The texts are no substitute for practical experience. Now, spoon more medicine down his throat, and we’ll leave him to heal.”
A gentle finger inside a whisper-thin leather glove parted Azzad’s lips. Water slid onto his tongue, tasting sticky-sweet with herbs and honey. Again he tried to move, and again failed. Instinct made him swallow against his conscious will. And within a remarkably short time instinct, consciousness, and will all faded away.
When next he woke, it was to the sound of men’s voices. His eyes opened readily enough, and he could shift his muscles, though sluggishly, legacy of whatever the women had given him. It was dim inside the wool tent, and hellishly hot.
“Chal Kabir, he wakes.”
Shuffling footsteps crossed thick carpeting, then sudden light flared as the tent flap was shoved aside. Azzad blinked and put a hand over his eyes. His fingers encountered sweat-sticky hair tumbling down his brow. Running his hand down his face, he was appalled
to discover a thick beard. How long had he lain here?
“Eleven days,” said a young man’s voice from an old man’s gray-bearded face. Azzad blinked again. “The date is the second of Ta’awil Annam.”
He had left Dayira Azreyq nearly sixty days ago. Why did he remember so few of them?
“Bad water,” the ancient continued, as if in answer to the unspoken question. He seated himself on a tripod stool beside the heaped carpets that were Azzad’s bed. “It takes the belly in sickness, and the memory as well. Ayia, city boys are too stupid not to fill their bellies at Ma’ar Yazhrad. Worse, they water their horses. The beast died, you know.”
Azzad’s whole body spasmed, and he moaned. “No! Khamsin—!”
Chal Kabir nodded. “You see, Fadhil,” he said over his shoulder, “he cares more for the horse than himself. A good sign.” Then, to Azzad: “Your Khamsin is safe. I told you otherwise as a test. There will be many more before you are allowed out of this tent.”
“Khamsin—?” Azzad managed, relief and suspicion flooding him simultaneously.
“Safe,” Chal Kabir repeated, settling his sand-colored robes around him. An unusual ring of braided silver and gold and copper flashed from his left thumb.
“I want to see him.”
A black brow arched in a parchment-brittle face. “Truly a lordling, accustomed to command.”
“I want to see him! Now!”
It took all his strength to put force into the order—and by the amusement flickering in Chal Kabir’s eyes, the old man knew it. He gestured with one gnarled hand to young Fadhil, who disappeared out the tent flap, brushing against wind chimes as he did so. “He will bring the horse around. A splendid animal. We will accept him in payment for your life.”
Azzad bit back a hot retort. Fear and relief had followed each other too quickly, leaving him dizzy. He must be cautious. Laws of hospitality aside—those same laws that in theory compelled these people to tend him without requiring recompense—Chal Kabir had mentioned tests. This might be another.
It was.
Chal Kabir snorted a laugh. “Ayia, you can control yourself. Good, good.”
Movement in the triangle of light at the tent flap caught Azzad’s gaze. Khamsin: whole and sleek and fractious, needing three boys to hang onto his halter. A whistle from Azzad calmed him at once, and he followed the boys decorously enough out of Azzad’s sight.
“Interesting,” commented Chal Kabir.
“He obeys no one but me,” Azzad said, sinking wearily back down onto the pillows. “We have been each other’s since the moment of his birth.”
“You claim brotherhood with a horse?”
“With this horse, yes.”
“And he allows you onto his back?”
Azzad peered up at the old man. “I trained him.”
“Is it difficult, this training?”
Outraged: “You don’t think I’d hitch him behind a cart or a plow, do you?”
Chal Kabir had a closed countenance behind his gray-streaked beard, but Azzad suddenly knew that this was precisely what horses were used for here. Wherever here was.
“We will speak more later, when you are stronger. Sururi zoubh.” He touched his fingertips to his brow; Azzad recognized the ancient sign for I mean this with my thoughts, and gulped because the hand had not touched the chest. That would have meant I mean this with my soul. But what the old man said was harmless enough—a simple wish for sweet sleep.
Azzad watched him limp across the sunlit brilliance of the rugs. “Chal Kabir? If it is permitted, please do me the favor of thanking the ladies Meryem and Leyliah for their good care of me.”
Beneath the brown, dusty robe, the bent spine suddenly straightened—and not without pain, to judge by the flinching shoulders. Chal Kabir did not turn as he said flatly, “No women have been inside this tent while you have been within it.” And then he was gone, and the flap closed, and heated darkness shut him in once more.
Azzad folded his arms behind his head. The old man had lied to him. Why?
Ayia, it was improper for a woman to be inside a tent with a man not her husband or brother or son or father—even if the man was drugged to the eyes and incapable of lifting a finger, let alone his male member. Having satisfactorily explained Chal Kabir’s lie, he began puzzling out the truth.
First, who were these people? The tent proclaimed nomads, yet Chal Kabir had implied that they used horses to plow the ground. No meandering tribe he’d ever heard of cultivated crops. The only water was poisonous—he had hazy memories of the water hole, Ma’ar Yazhrad, the old man had called it, and “bitter drinking” it truly had been. But by then he was too stuporous with heat and hunger to have any idea what he was doing. He recalled very well, however, the forbidding land around him: crystalline salt flats, immense sand dunes, ravines dry for a thousand years and littered with sharp stones. What plow could turn this cracked and tainted soil? And even if it could, what could possibly grow?
In retrospect, the look of the desert surprised him. He’d always thought that across The Steeps lay endless sand dunes of the kind that formed the borders of Rimmal Madar beyond the mountain stronghold of the alMa’aliq. Horses could not pull wagons through shifting sand like that, but they could over the hard-baked, unyielding earth he remembered from the time before his collapse.
And remember it he suddenly did—the suffocating heat even at night, the dwindling of his supplies, the pain in his thigh, the blisters suppurating on his feet. What had made him think he could traverse this waste? Sleeping by day in the scanty shade of rock outcroppings, dreaming of a sand-tiger stalking patiently behind him and a screaming hawk flying ahead of him, unsure when he woke which was real, or if either could be real. And then that last day, the churning in his belly, the agony in his gut, the sparks and specks before his eyes, the dizzying loom-and-retreat of the bleak landscape. No growl behind him, no shriek in the sky ahead. There had been no one and nothing in view—or so he’d thought. Where had this tribe come from?
He knew there were at least seven people here—Chal Kabir, Fadhil, Meryem, Leyliah, and the three boys who’d brought Khamsin to the tent. The boys must have parents; the men and women must be married and have children. At least thirty people, and quite likely thirty more. Water and food for so many would be difficult to carry from place to place. They would know the land, of course, and centuries of inbred instinct would detect hidden springs and secret water holes. They would not be here unless they could survive, becoming part of the land themselves. But how did they survive? Perhaps they were shepherds? Ridiculous. Where could sheep graze in such barrenness?
It was a puzzle he wasn’t likely to solve until he was up and about. But had not Chal Kabir said there would be many tests before he was allowed to leave this tent? Wondering what these tests might be, Azzad shrugged, relaxed into the carpets, and slept.
If there were tests, Azzad was unaware of them. Over the next few days he saw Fadhil many times, Chal Kabir twice, and no one else at all. The food was bland but nourishing and plentiful, the water remarkably sweet. He wondered what herbs they put in their storage jars, or what nearby spring they drew it from. He asked Fadhil about it, but the young man merely shrugged and said, “That is women’s business, not men’s.”
Azzad couldn’t decide whether he meant that domestic responsibilities were beneath masculine notice or that fresh water was a thing much too important to be left for men to argue about.
Fadhil was politely curious, asking questions in roundabout ways, but communicated little about the tribe. Azzad answered honestly enough, speaking of the great city and the mighty land of his birth. But Fadhil had never heard of Rimmal Madar, much less of Dayira Azreyq. From this, Azzad deduced in some shock that in the days since he’d fled home, he’d somehow managed to travel beyond the routes of even the most adventurous caravans.
Unless the young man was lying, as Chal Kabir had done.
“Is Chal Kabir really your uncle?” Azzad asked one afterno
on as he practiced walking on increasingly steady legs and feet that didn’t hurt too much anymore. “You don’t look very alike.”
Fadhil was tidying medicines on a low table. “’Chal’ is the title given our healers.”
“Ah. Then Lady Meryem is a healer also, for I heard Leyliah call her ‘Challa.’”
Fadhil, being even younger than Azzad, was less guarded than Kabir. “You heard nothing of the kind,” he snapped, much too quickly. “Neither Meryem nor Leyliah has been in this tent.”
Azzad smiled. “Then how do I know their names and the rule of the qufaz?”
Fadhil’s dark eyes went wide in his golden-skinned face. After a struggle to speak, he managed, “You—you know nothing of such things. You may know nothing. Speak of this to no one else, do you understand?”
“It is forbidden for me to know the ladies’ names?”
“Everything is forbidden!”
“Ayia,” Azzad said cheerfully, seating himself on his bed of carpets, “you’d best tell me all about this ‘everything’ of yours, so I don’t offend again.”
Recovering himself, Fadhil stood over Azzad—trying to dominate him physically, which really was rather funny. Even wasted with illness, Azzad was half again the boy’s size. Sternly, in obvious imitation of his teacher, Fadhil intoned, “Do you value your life, gharribeh? If so, comport yourself as befits a guest—and one whose bones would be whitening in the sun even now if not for the Shagara.”
Azzad considered intimidating the boy—easy, with his greater size and al-Ma’aliq arrogance—but decided that the scornful gharribeh indicated Fadhil felt threatened. Not in all the days Azzad had been awake and aware had the boy called him by that term—and with the inflection that meant not just foreigner but unwelcome. It was a deliberate insult and a warning.
Accordingly, Azzad bowed his head. “My life is yours,” he said in the ancient form.