“I do not understand how you like these beasts,” she said. “I’ve never met a horse so stubborn.”
“You could try being a bit friendlier,” Stone said, giving his camel a pat on the neck. “I bet she can sense your animosity.”
“With respect, I think she’s too stupid to sense anything,” Alexis said. “Whose idea was it to saddle and ride these things?”
Stone clucked his tongue, urging both the beasts onward at a slightly faster pace. “However much you dislike them, you have to admit that they’re better suited for the terrain here. When we leave the desert behind, we’ll find ourselves some horses.”
The look she gave him was truly scathing. “In that case, we cannot reach the coast soon enough.”
❖❖❖
As days of travel passed, they rode side by side often and spoke when they could—that is when the wind was quiet enough for them to hear each other without their voices rising into shouts. Even when they did not speak, when neither of them was in the proper mood for a story or a playful bout of banter, the silence was companionable.
“Like this,” Alexis told him, stacking the firewood, showing him how to move the sticks in a manner that would eventually form a live coal. “You’ve truly never done this before?” she asked, watching him struggle to grip them correctly.
“Truly,” he said. “In the land I am from, we have devices that make fire in a snap,” he said, gesturing to the bow-drill he was working. “Much less complicated.”
Sometimes, when he spoke of the novelties of his home, she didn’t look as though she entirely believed him.
“Devices,” she echoed, with a shake of her head. “Sounds more like magic of some sort to me—like the powers possessed by the gods.”
She wasn’t too far off, but he couldn’t tell her that. There was no way he could possibly explain marvels like electricity and vehicles without delving into the fact that he was from a different time as well as a different land. Since they’d slept together in the village (and many times since) he’d toyed with the idea of telling her the entire truth. It had its merits. He could be fully honest with her, without policing any of the things he said. He could be rid of the nagging guilt that stirred in his chest each time they lay together under the stars.
He shook the thoughts from his head. “This is impossible,” Stone said, sitting back and staring at the blisters that were already forming on his hands.
“Now you understand how I feel about camels,” she said with a wry smile. She knelt next to him, her shoulder jostling his own, and took the sticks he was working with from his hands. “Here,” she said. “Give your hands a break. I will finish this. You can learn by watching.”
There was nothing cocky or callous in her voice. She spoke the words with the casualness of fact. She never bragged, not seriously, only offered to help.
“Let me teach you,” she said, once their dinner had settled in their stomachs. He looked up to find her holding a sword with absent skill and found that he could not turn down the offer. Like all the things she had offered to show him thus far, it was undeniably useful.
“I’d like that,” Stone said, standing up from where he had been feeding the flames, watching them carefully to make certain they did not flicker down to nothing and die. “But I’ll warn you,” he added. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”
She raised an incredulous brow. “You killed a slaver on the ship,” she said, offering the words up like a compliment on a silver platter. The thought of the man’s death still bothered him; however necessary it had been.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “But that was nothing but luck. I’ve never been taught.”
There was a curious softness on her face as she looked at him. “Alright,” she said, plainly underestimating the depths of his ignorance.
He removed the supposed blade of Leonidas and held it in mimicry of the way she held her own.
“Do not hold it so stiffly,” she said. “Have you never played with your father’s blade?”
It took all the composure he had to resist the urge to laugh at the question. “No,” he said. “The weapons of my homeland are…very different from this.”
“Ah,” she said with an accepting nod. “Like spears, you mean?”
Laughter bubbled out of his lips, impossible to contain. The sound bounced off the surrounding rocks of the hills they were camped in.
“I do not see how it is such a funny question,” Alexis said. Her voice was stern, but there was a great deal of mirth in her eyes.
“I was a scholar, remember,” he said, when he was able to speak without snickering. “When it comes to weapons, I’ve practiced with nothing at all.” He could recall a few childhood incidents that involved challenging a neighbor to a duel with plastic lightsabers, but nothing more noteworthy.
She taught him, just as she promised, though Stone could tell at the end of their first lesson that it would be a slow process. It wasn’t safe, she informed him, for them to truly go at it with blades when he’d never trained with them before. They’d need wooden staves or sticks cut or chosen for their weight and balance. In lieu of this, she taught him the basics, movements for both killing and defending. That first night, he mostly practiced removing his sword from its scabbard without accidentally stabbing someone nearby. His first attempts were so terrible that he could not help but laugh at himself. Alexis laughed as well, but carefully, making sure that the sound of it did not cut into him deeply enough to scar.
“You are improving,” she told him, when at last they stopped for the night. He could already feel soreness settling into his muscles.
She sat alongside him on one of the blankets they’d been gifted. The stars were now bright overhead. Stone watched as she checked their position, her mouth a thin line as she focused. She looked down at the map several times, marking it with a piece of charcoal. He’d looked at it himself several times, and had been initially shocked to find that it was without words. Everything of importance, from wells to villages to the occasional oasis, was marked with symbols in place of letters strung together.
“Are we horribly off course?” he asked.
She shook her head. One handheld the map; the other tugged absently at a stray lock of hair, twisting it round and round. It was one of many habits he had noted, collecting them the way he’d once collected memories of his father.
“I don’t think I’ve doomed us yet,” Alexis answered, rolling the map up with care, and tucking it away with the rest of their supplies. She pointed to the stars. “I could teach you this as well,” she offered, with a trace of teasing in her eyes.
“You could,” Stone said. “And there are a few things I could show you.”
Her eyes glimmered, reminding him of the clink of bottles on a bonfire lit beach weeks and weeks ago. He thought, for the first time in at least a week, of Malak and Clinton, the acquaintances turned friends whom he’d abandoned so swiftly and accidentally. He hoped they weren’t looking. He wished there was a way to tell them that he was safe—or as safe as one could be in the middle of the desert—and happy. The thought surprised him. He was happy, here in the middle of nothing with a woman who fascinated him.
Alexis stretched her hand towards him. Stone was not shocked at her acceptance of the offer. Compared to the women of his past, her hands were almost rough against his skin, strong and calloused almost more so than his own, but he found that he liked the contrast. He liked the surety with which she touched him, with no trace of hesitation and no inkling of shame. She stayed silent for a time, aside from her fingertips tracing stories against his skin. In response, he whispered promises, alternating between filthy and sweet, that made her hands tremble.
She breathed a sound, a question. “More. Please.” It was not an inconvenience in the slightest for him to oblige.
In the morning, when they pulled themselves free of the bedroll and of each other and finally moved on, they found signs of a fire not far away. The embers had been cold for at least a
day, but the sight of it still made them uneasy.
❖❖❖
Weeks passed, and Stone continued collecting habits.
Alexis clenched her jaw when she was irritated, liked to sit with her legs crossed, one atop the other, and spoke sweetly to her camel when she thought he was out of earshot. Her laughter was perhaps his favorite thing. It was often dry and dark, the sort of sound that he might’ve expected from a soldier on a battlefield, but on occasion, he was privileged to the sight of her tossing back her head and roaring with delight.
None of this shocked him; he’d known from their first exchange that he was drawn to her as he’d never been to anyone else. He’d yet to acknowledge it out loud, but he could tell she felt some shadow of it herself. Stone saw it in glances, sly smiles, and the way her hands kindly but firmly coached him in the correct way to swing a sword.
Once he had gotten the basics down, they had started practicing in the morning as well. Stone wasn’t terribly out of shape—he was trim and fit from hiking in the deserts of Egypt, and before that, from working on a construction crew as often as his father’s illness would allow. His body was unused to the movements that came with swordplay though, and for a time, his arms and shoulders were so sore that even Alexis massaging the strained muscles wasn’t a worthy reward.
“Soon,” she said. “We will be able to spar. I look forward to it.”
“You’re looking forward to wiping the floor with me,” he countered.
She paused in the midst of tossing their belongings in the saddlebags of the camels and aimed a sly smile over her shoulder. “I do not know what that means.”
“I mean, you’ll kick my ass,” he said.
“Probably so.” Her eyes sparkled. It was strange that they could do that, dark as they were. “But then, you have a way of surprising me.”
He had not seen her really fight. Part of him wanted to, though he knew that for such a thing to happen, they would need to be in dire straits. It felt too much like tempting fate to ask for such a thing, and he pushed the thought from his mind as he hoisted himself onto his camel.
She had grown more comfortable atop the beast but was still adamant about her preference for horses. Stone had been no expert when they first left the village and was ridiculously proud of the progress he’d made. He had reached the point where he felt at ease with the reins in his hand.
“When we sell the camels,” Alexis suggested, “We should find someone who will take both beasts. They have grown to be friends, I think.”
Stone tried not to appear as startled as he was. She was nearly always the pragmatic, practical one. “That’s awful sentimental,” he said.
She cut him a sly look from where her camel had pulled slightly ahead of his own. “You’ll soon learn that I’m most apt to be sentimental when it comes to animals,” she admitted. “Even these beasts.” Her words were filled with disdain, but her hand, as she stroked her mount along the neck, was shockingly gentle. “My father used to tease me for it—I once insisted on naming them all, even the chickens.”
Stone was struck by an image that nearly made his teeth rot with its sweetness, of a small girl, her dark head alight with curls, racing about a farm with a chicken under each arm. Alexis drove the smile from his face with a clearing of her throat and a finger that pointed straight ahead.
“According to the map, that tiny dot just there should be our well.”
She took off without warning, driving her camel into a gallop and racing onward. Stone, of course, followed, unsurprised when Alexis beat him soundly to the well. As he drew closer to the spot where her camel had stalled, he noted the birds overhead; the black, winged shapes were a sure sign that water was indeed close. They had stopped several times since beginning this leg of their journey, both to refill their canteens at various points and to trade with small villages and nomadic tribes.
There were large, dark shapes on the ground surrounding him as he eased his camel to a halt. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the glare of the sun against the sand and deduce that they were bodies, no more than a day or two dead. Once his feet were on the ground, Stone covered his nose with a hand to ward off the worst of the smell. Alexis had frozen halfway to the well, and stood before him, facing away. He counted three men, weapons belts empty, their hands loose and open in death. The one closest to Alexis was a woman. There was blood beneath her, like all the others.
She stepped forward, a bit shakily, and knelt to tug the dead woman’s skirt back into the proper place.
“The quartermaster?” he asked.
Alexis raised one shoulder. “There’s no way to be sure,” she answered, her voice dead and dull.
Stone stepped over the body of a man who’d had his skull cleaved in and did his best to ignore the sudden nausea knotting up his insides. He walked quickly to the well and peered over the edge. Through the shadows, he could see the shape of a body wedged into the narrow space, limbs dangling into the water below.
“Shit,” he whispered. He could feel his hands shaking and flexed his fingers a few times to banish the tremors. “Alexis,” he said, this time loudly enough to capture her attention. Her head jerked up from the body before her, her expression startled. “The water is tainted. We’ll need to move on. How many days to the next one?”
She took a measured breath and gave him his answer. “Just two if I’m correct. We’ll need to be careful, and the camels will be tired. But we will make it there.”
Stone nodded. Thoughts rushed through his head. The next thing he asked her to teach him would be how to read his location in the stars. Unlike swordplay, navigation would actually be a useful skill to have should he return to his own world. “Should we bury them?” he asked.
Alexis shook her head. “We should,” she said. “But it does not feel safe to linger here. Others may visit the well. We are outlanders. We may be blamed.” A thought occurred to her that made her expression darken. “If this is the work of our slaver friends, perhaps they would be right to blame us.”
Nothing more was said.
As they walked back to their waiting camels, Stone’s arm found its way around Alexis’s shoulders. He pulled her tightly against him as they walked and pretended not to notice her fingers clutching at the back of his shirt.
Alexis
“You sure this is the right way?” Stone asked.
He followed Alexis through the twists and turns of the port town, weaving through the many alleys of the bazaar on their way to the beach, where the ships were docked. Their destination was a tavern where the man they were hoping to find was said to be staying. They’d done their fair share of investigating since their arrival the previous day. It seemed that at the present moment, there was a shortage of ships headed to Greece. They’d heard of one merchant captain leaving soon and hoped to catch him before he embarked.
“Positive,” Alexis said. “Are you questioning my navigation?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Stone said. Alexis filed the odd phrase away, adding it to the growing lexicon of Solomon Stone speak in the back of her brain.
There were many things she meant to teach him, this strange man from a strange land where men were not taught to wield swords. He had finally become passable at building a fire and cooking over it without turning the food to coal, and soon, she had no doubt that he would be passable at swordplay as well. She enjoyed teaching him things. It was different than imparting knowledge to her sister. Stone listened without complaint, his eyes intent upon her face, and didn’t interrupt her with one thousand questions until she was finished explaining the first time around.
It felt unnatural to walk through such a crowded place after nearly six weeks spent in isolation, broken only by the occasional night or two spent in a small village or with a family of herders. They kept close to each other instinctively, without any discussion, simply because it had become comfortable to do so.
“I think that’s it,” she said. The tavern was at the bottom of the hill, clos
e to the sea. They stood for a moment in the narrow space between market stalls, listening to men shouting about how fine their wares were, how fairly priced. From where they stood, the ocean was visible only as a thin slice of blue. “What do you know about haggling?” she asked, as they began their descent down the rather steep hill.
“A shocking amount,” Stone answered. “It’s not done often in my homeland, but during my travels, I’ve learned a little about talking down a price.”
Alexis was familiar with how such things worked and was very comfortable being the one who sold crops and animals for her family, but things were different here. In Persia, her name was not known, and neither was her father’s. She was a stranger to the people here and a woman at that. Depending upon the character of this fabled trader, Stone would need to hold his own without her interceding, else they might think him weak.
The tavern was a small place, wedged between a stall where a merchant sold silks and woven fabrics and a shop where a blacksmith was hammering iron into weapons. She very nearly veered in that direction instead, drawn in by the sound of metal against metal and the sight of sparks flying. The Captain’s blade had been a fine one, but she’d lost it during their desperate swim to shore and replaced it with one found in the wreckage on the beach. She would have liked a blade of her own.
“Alexis,” Stone said, holding open the door, watching her salivate over the blades with a bemused expression. “You coming?”
She tore her gaze away and followed him over the threshold. Stone cast a glance back to the blacksmith. “Maybe there’ll be enough coin left to buy one, after we’ve sold the camels?”
Alexis appreciated the thought but wasn’t nearly so optimistic. “Had I not been robbed by slavers,” she said. “I could have purchased two.”
He nudged her with an elbow, the teasing tone of his voice warming her before he’d even finished voicing the response. “Had you not been robbed by slavers, you would never have seen my face.”
Solomon Stone- Survival Page 5