Escape from Cabriz

by Linda Lael Miller

  He kissed her lightly on the temple, his breath ruffling her hair. “In a way,” he said, “I’m going to be sorry when this is over.”

  Kristin closed her eyes tightly so she couldn’t cry. She didn’t answer, not daring to speak.

  Somehow, Zachary seemed to know that she needed holding as much or more than she’d needed his lovemaking. He kept her tucked close to his side long after he’d drifted off to sleep. And even though she was wide awake, Kristin dreamed.

  She dreamed of being married to Zachary, and of bearing his children, and of finally making a real place for herself in the scheme of things. She saw herself taking pictures for a newspaper and writing about things that really mattered.

  Because she was so caught up in her thoughts, she was startled when Zachary suddenly stiffened beside her and then groped for the pistol.

  A strange voice came out of the darkness, speaking in swift Cabrizian dialect, and Kristin caught enough of the general meaning to be terrified.

  “Leave the gun where it is and you won’t get hurt.”

  The horses nickered and fretted in the darkness, and Kristin finally picked out the figure of a small man standing on the other side of the dying camp fire and pointing a rifle at them.

  Zachary’s body was perfectly still, his words evenly modulated. “Who are you?” he asked in the robber’s own language.

  “We need horses,” the bandit replied, and it became obvious to Kristin that he was nervous. “We won’t take the woman, we won’t take the food. Just the horses.”

  “No,” Zachary said as forcefully as if he had a choice in the matter. “The horses are ours. Leave them here.”

  The man was insane as far as Kristin was concerned. Why else would he talk that way to someone who was holding a gun on him? “Go ahead,” she said in the halting dialect she remembered from embassy days. “Take the horses. Just so nobody gets hurt.”

  Zachary’s elbow landed in the middle of her stomach, just hard enough to cut off her wind.

  The bandit came close enough to kick Zachary’s pistol out of reach, then backed out of the firelight. Moments later the clip-clop of hooves was heard as the horses were taken away.

  Zachary spat a swearword and scrambled out of the sleeping bag, searching the ground for his pistol. By the time he found it, the horses and the bandit were long gone.

  And Zachary took his frustration out on Kristin. “I ought to drag you out of that sleeping bag and blister your backside!” he yelled.

  Kristin shimmied out on her own and quickly pulled on the yellow robe, as though that could offer some protection. “What did I do wrong?”

  “What did I do wrong?” Zachary mimicked furiously. “You drew his attention, for one thing. You should have kept your mouth shut!”

  “That wouldn’t have stopped him from stealing the horses,” Kristin replied reasonably, folding her arms. “Do you think he was alone?”

  “Probably not,” Zachary answered, picking up his shoulder holster and jamming the pistol inside.

  “I told you one of us should have kept watch.”

  “Right.” Zachary was putting on his clothes in jerky, outraged motions. “I can see it now. You probably would have invited them for coffee and asked them if they wouldn’t like to steal our food and sleeping bags, as well as our horses. Then we could have been totally annihilated, instead of just in the biggest damn trouble of our lives!”

  Kristin stirred the fire and added a few of the twigs and broken branches Zachary had gathered earlier. “Don’t you dare try to foist the responsibility off on me—it isn’t my fault we were bested by one skinny little bandit!”

  Zachary glared at her for a long moment, then startled her completely by chuckling. “He was skinny, wasn’t he? If this ever gets back to the guys in the agency, I’ll never live it down.”

  Kristin’s concerns were more immediate. “What are we going to do now, Zachary?”

  “Sleep,” he answered with a deep sigh. “Tomorrow we walk.”

  “Carrying our packs?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  She got back into the sleeping bag, still wearing the robe, and snuggled down. “Do we have enough food?”

  Zachary didn’t join her, but sat up beside the fire, staring ponderously into the flames. “Probably not,” he replied. “Get some rest, princess. Tomorrow is going to be a long day.”

  He was right.

  In the morning Kristin washed up in the spring and dressed in the blue jeans and T-shirt she’d worn the day before, then drank a cup of Zachary’s camp-fire coffee. She had no appetite for breakfast, given the situation and yesterday’s berry binge.

  At first, hiking with a loaded pack on her back was a novelty, and Kristin enjoyed it. It just went to show that all those people who thought she was nothing more than a social butterfly—Zachary and her father, for instance—were dead wrong. Inside her slender form lurked the spirit of an intrepid adventurer.

  Then they started traveling uphill.

  After advancing only about a hundred yards up the incline, Kristin sank onto a fallen log and covered her eyes with both palms.

  Zachary had gone some distance before he realized she wasn’t behind him, and stopped. “What’s the matter?” he called back, sounding for all the world like a big brother forced to let a small and helpless child tag along on an important mission.

  Kristin struggled ingloriously to her feet, almost unbalanced by the pack. “Nothing,” she returned with stubborn good cheer. “I just wanted to take a little breather, that’s all.”

  “We’ve got to keep moving,” Zachary replied. And then he turned and went on, and Kristin had no choice but to trudge after him.

  The next challenge was a narrow path leading around the edge of a steep slope.

  The last of Kristin’s bravado teetered on the edge of extinction as she looked down the rocky grade to a pile of mean-looking boulders about a hundred feet below. The path seemed inadequate to say the least—it was hardly more than a line drawn in the dirt—and the weight of two people was sure to send it sliding downhill.

  Zachary must have seen the fear in her face, because he laid one hand gently on her shoulder and said, “It’s okay, princess. Just hold on to the back of my belt until I tell you to let go, and don’t look down.”

  Kristin drew a deep breath and let it out again. She couldn’t fold now, when the time element was even more important than before. With a trembling hand, she reached out and clasped Zachary’s belt.

  They began to edge slowly along the narrow path, and Kristin looked neither right nor left, up nor down. She just fixed her gaze on the back of Zachary’s head, where the hair on his nape curled against the tanned flesh of his neck, and moved as he did.

  For all her careful obedience, something went wrong. She set her right foot down and the path fell away beneath it.

  With a shriek, Kristin went over the edge, still clinging to Zachary’s belt, both feet flailing in an effort to find solid ground.

  How he kept his balance Kristin would never know, but Zachary managed to turn and grasp her arm and somehow get her back onto the path.

  “Are you all right?” he asked when she was beside him again, face pressed to the rock wall above the ledge, eyes squeezed shut as she battled down the lingering terror.

  “My knee,” she whispered. “I hurt my knee.”

  Zachary reached around her, unfastening the backpack. “Okay, Kristin,” he said in a reasonable, steady tone of voice, “listen to me. I want you to stay right here while I take your pack to the other side. Once I’ve gotten rid of it, I’ll come back and help you go the rest of the way. All right?”

  Kristin swallowed, still afraid to open her eyes. If she so much as glanced down and saw those huge boulders below, waiting to smash her bones, she’d panic and then everything would be lost. “All right.” She felt relief as the weight of the backpack was removed.

  “Don’t try to move,” Zachary reminded her, and she could hear the distance
growing between them, even though she dared not look. Pure fear rushed into her throat, scalding and vile. “I’ll be back in a minute, Kristin. I promise.”

  Sweat trickled between Kristin’s shoulder blades and breasts, and the pain in her right knee intensified. Somehow, when trying to break her fall, she’d twisted it. “Please hurry,” she whispered, having no hope that he was close enough to hear.

  But he was. “One minute, Kris.”

  Struggling not to lose her tenuous grip on composure, Kristin nodded and began to count slowly, silently, to sixty.

  She felt Zachary’s heat and strength just as she reached fifty-seven.

  “How’s the knee? Can you walk?”

  Kristin tested the idea and felt stabbing pain, but she nodded. “I can make it if you’ll help me.”

  His hand rested, firm and strong and very reassuring, on the small of her back. “Just one step at a time, babe—that’s all you have to do. I’ll be right here to keep you from falling.”

  Their progress seemed impossibly slow to Kristin, who finally dared to open her eyes but could look nowhere but at Zachary’s face. Finally, though, after several minutes, they reached a grassy plateau on the other side.

  There Kristin collapsed, engulfed in pain and relief, and sat clasping her knee.

  Zachary knelt beside her and gently felt the injured limb, looking for obvious injury. “I don’t think anything’s broken,” he said softly.

  Kristin leaned forward and let her forehead rest against his shoulder. The pain was starting to subside, but she didn’t have the breath to say so yet.

  He put his arms around her, kissed the top of her head. “It’s okay, princess. We’ll rest until you’re ready to move on.”

  Kristin nodded, and he released her to go and rummage through his backpack. When he returned, he thrust a little package of half-crumpled cookies into her hand.

  “I was saving these for the last night, but I think you need them now,” he said.

  Kristin looked at the treat in disbelief for a few moments, then laughed and wiped her dirty, sweaty face with the back of one hand. “You’ve been holding out on me!”

  He grinned and opened the package for her. “Didn’t you tell me once that when you were hurt you used to go to the kitchen for a medicinal cookie?”

  Kristin sank her teeth into her lower lip, touched, afraid she’d cry and spoil all her efforts at being brave. Since she didn’t trust herself to speak, she just nodded.

  Zachary took the only cookie that hadn’t broken from the rigors of the trip and touched its edge lightly against Kristin’s mouth.

  6

  “I’m all right,” Kristin insisted, running one hand over her sore knee. At least it had stopped throbbing. “I just pulled a few muscles, that’s all.”

  Zachary smiled, still kneeling beside her, brushed the cookie crumbs from her lips and rose to his feet. “Let’s see if you can walk,” he said, offering Kristin his hand.

  She took it and allowed him to pull her up. A shaft of pain shot from her injured knee up her thigh, and she grimaced, turning her face so Zachary wouldn’t see. Her first step was sheer agony, but then she took another and another.

  A memory flashed into her mind: she was seven, and she’d fallen from the embassy banister and broken her arm. She heard her father’s clipped, impatient voice. Stop sniveling, Kristin. It’s your own fault that you fell.

  She held her chin high. “I can make it,” she told Zachary quietly.

  Zachary caught her chin in his hand and made her look at him. “You can barely stand,” he countered, reading the expression in her eyes. For good or ill, he’d always been a master at that.

  Stubbornly, Kristin reached for her pack and moved to sling it into place, only to have Zachary take it away again.

  “Sit down before you collapse,” he ordered tersely, and his manner was nothing short of cantankerous.

  “Thanks for the concern,” Kristin retorted, “but we can’t stay here. You know that as well as I do.”

  “So have it your way!” Zachary hissed through his teeth. Then he grumbled, “Come on,” and set off across the plateau.

  Kristin limped along behind him, her teeth sunk into her lower lip, but when Zachary glanced back at her she was ready with a smile and a firm gait.

  Grudgingly he moved on, leading the way through thick pine and fir trees. The ground was uneven, but at least they weren’t climbing. Kristin didn’t know if she could maintain the charade on an incline, even without her pack.

  By noon, when Zachary stopped, the pain in Kristin’s knee was only a dull ache, but it had sapped her strength, and she knew she was pale.

  While she sat on the ground eating cold corned beef from a can Zachary had given her, he paced, agitated and watchful.

  “Are we being followed?” Kristin asked, chewing.

  “No,” Zachary answered, standing on a high ledge and looking down over the mountain they’d been climbing for almost three days. “But I think I see our horses.”

  Kristin bolted to her feet, wincing at the resultant pang in her knee. “What? Where?”

  He pulled a small pair of field glasses from the pocket of his leather jacket and, after checking the position of the sun, peered into them, squinting. “At the edge of that village down there. Looks like our horse thief is a hometown boy.”

  “What are we going to do?” Kristin asked, following Zachary as he turned away from the ledge with a thoughtful frown on his face.

  “We’re not going to do anything,” he said without looking at her.

  “Zachary,” Kristin warned, staying doggedly at his side as he shed his pack, took the pistol from its holster and checked the chamber. “I’m not staying here by myself.”

  “Yes, you are,” he answered without missing a beat or even bothering to look at her. “You’ll lie down, and you’ll rest, and when I come back I’ll bring the horses with me.”

  “I want to go.”

  “And I want the Noble Peace Prize,” Zachary informed her. “Guess we’re both out of luck, princess.” With that, he kissed her on the forehead and started to walk away.

  “What if some bandits come and attack me?” Kristin called, hurrying after him, forgetting to hide her limp.

  He turned briefly and glared at her with such ominous intensity that she stopped in her tracks. “Ask them what their sign is,” he replied, spreading his hands. “Make small talk.”

  “Zachary!”

  He was leaving her again. “If you keep yelling, princess,” he warned good-naturedly, “they’re bound to find us.”

  Kristin sank despondently onto the ground. There was no way she could keep up with Zachary’s long strides; even without a sore knee it would have been difficult.

  She watched him until he disappeared into the trees, then got up and went back to the vantage point at the ledge. All she could see of the village were specks that might have been the roofs of huts and a haze of smoke against the sky.

  Kristin ran the tip of her tongue over dry lips and prayed that Zachary would return safely, with or without the horses.

  Now that he wasn’t there to see, there was no point in trying to pretend she wasn’t a physical wreck. Kristin collapsed on the cushiony grass of the plateau, drinking in the thin warmth of the sunshine.

  It was inevitable that she would remember the tender moments she and Zachary had shared, there in Cabriz and back in California, where they’d lived together.

  The ache in Kristin’s heart was worse than the one in her knee. To escape it she drifted backward in time, to a party her parents had given in their home in Williamsburg, Virginia….

  The ballroom of the mansion glittered. The women wore dresses as jewel bright as the lights on the towering white Christmas tree in the entryway, and the men were elegant in tailored tuxedos. A string quartet played Mozart, a fire blazed on the hearth and snow drifted past the windows in huge, swirling flakes.

  And all the atmosphere was lost on Kristin, who shared a duti
ful dance with every man who asked and kept one eye on the big double doorway the whole time. Zachary had promised to spend Christmas with her, but so far there had been no sign of him—and no telephone calls, either.

  Instead of visions of sugarplums, Kristin was seeing crashed helicopters and sprays of dust raised by machine-gun fire splattering some dusty Middle Eastern road. Normally she didn’t allow herself to think about the things Zachary might be doing when he was away on a mission, but that night she couldn’t seem to help it.

  She managed a shaky smile when her father, a tall, fit man with a full head of gray hair and shrewd blue eyes, cut in on her bewildered dance partner and took her into his arms for a waltz.

  “You look beautiful tonight,” Kenyan Meyers told her brusquely, and there was no love in his voice, despite the compliment. “But you’re a bit on the pale side. What’s the matter? Worried about your soldier of fortune?”

  Kristin ached inside. Just once she’d like to feel that her father really cared about her, that she didn’t have to put out an effort to win even the most cursory acceptance. She nodded. “Dad, what if Zachary’s been shot—or captured?”

  Kenyan was annoyed. “Do you see what this relationship is doing to you, Kristin? There are too many uncertainties, too many grim possibilities. Surely you realize that you’re headed toward emotional disaster?”

  Although she knew her father was probably right, that she should give Zachary up before the fear of what might happen to him made her crazy, Kristin hadn’t been able to walk away.

  It wasn’t that she couldn’t live without Zachary—she knew she could. But life would be a flat and endless round of classes and parties without him. “I love him,” she answered simply.

  Just then, as though the words had conjured him, Zachary appeared in the doorway. His glossy brown hair was dusted in snowflakes, and his eyes searched the long, crowded room for Kristin.

  Her heart leaped and, as always, all thoughts of making her way through the world without him dissipated like vapor.

  As the dance ended, she stood on tiptoe to kiss her father’s cheek, then swept toward the doors, her white lace ball gown whispering as she walked.