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Moray grinned as he untied the bindings of the water skin. “Aye, the same thought had occurred to me. Like a horse. A workhorse. See what you’ve made of me?”
“You said there are Saracens everywhere. Why is that?”
“I don’t know. They’re probably looking for fugitives like us, people who escaped from Hattin. You look better than you did earlier, thanks be to God. Here, have some of this.”
He knelt and held the water skin to Sinclair’s mouth, and when he had finished drinking, the injured man looked around at the moonlit waste surrounding them.
“You have no idea where we are?”
“South and west of Hattin and Tiberias, perhaps four leagues, or five. I must have come five miles at least, pulling you, and we walked all night last night. Do you remember that?”
Sinclair looked almost hurt. “Of course I do.” He hesitated. “But I don’t recall much else.”
“I dosed you with some medication I had in my scrip and you’ve been asleep for hours. How much pain are you in?”
Sinclair made a movement that might have been a shrug. “Some, not much. There’s pain, but it’s…distant, somehow.”
“Aye, that will be the drug. I’ll give you more of it later.”
“Be damned if you will. I need no drugs.”
Moray shrugged. “Not now, it’s plain. But later, if you start raving again, I’ll be the one to make that decision.” He peered up at the sky again, as though expecting to see clouds. “In the meantime, we have to keep moving. The moon’s high, so we’ll have light for an hour or two more, but after that, if I can’t see the ground underfoot, it might be nasty for both of us.”
“Then keep your eyes open for another place to hide during the day that’s coming. The loss of an hour or two of darkness won’t make much of a difference to our journey if we don’t know where we are or where we’re going. But what about water? Have we enough?”
Moray hefted the water bag. “We have until we reach the end of this. After that we’re in God’s hands.”
“We’re in God’s sands, Lachlan, and like to die here if He doesn’t provide for us.”
“Well, we’ll find that out tomorrow. For now, I walk and you take your ease.”
He fastened the water bag carefully in place, then strapped on the harness again and set off. They did not speak to each other after that, for they both knew how sound can travel in the desert at night and they had no wish to attract company. Moray quickly steadied himself into the plodding gait he had been using for hours, but he was aware from the outset that fatigue was rising in him. He gritted his teeth and willed himself to ignore the shooting pains in his calves and thighs, concentrating solely on the incessant rhythm of placing one foot ahead of the other.
Some time later, much later, he decided afterwards, an agonized groan from Sinclair brought him back to awareness, and he stopped short, surprised to see that the terrain around him had changed completely and that he had walked from one desert zone into another without realizing it.
“Alec? Are you awake?”
Sinclair did not answer him, and Moray stopped on the point of peeling off the harness that felt now as though it had embedded itself into his body. Instead, he straightened up, arching his back and suddenly aware of the pain and stiffness he had blanked out of his mind until then, and looked about him carefully. The moon was low in the sky, but it still threw sufficient light for him to see his surroundings clearly enough to be amazed at what lay before him. The ground beneath his feet now was hard, scoured down to bedrock by the wind, and he was standing on the edge of what he saw as an enormous tilted bowl that loomed above and ahead of him, a broad, almost circular area of flat land, more than half a mile in extent, that was littered with great boulders and surrounded on all sides, except for where he stood, by towering, featureless walls of sand. Mountainous dunes, their gigantic slopes painted silver and black by moonlight and shadows, swept up on both sides of him to shut out the horizon ahead, eclipsing the stars. As he stood there, hearing only the pounding of his own heartbeat, he became aware of the stillness of the night; nothing moved and no smallest sound disturbed the absolute calm.
“Alec, can you hear me?” There was still no response, but he spoke again, quickly, as though he had heard one. “We’re in a different kind of place here, but it looks promising, as far as finding shelter goes. There are boulders ahead, within reach, and we should be able to find a spot among them where the sun won’t roast us tomorrow. It’s late, and the moon’s almost gone, and I’m too tired to go much farther, so I’m going to take us there and find a spot to rest. And then I’m going to sleep, perhaps for the entire day tomorrow. But first I’m going to feed you some more of those drugs you don’t want. That is if I can force my feet to move again. Hold on, and I’ll try.”
He bent to the traces again and, after the first few faltering steps, found the plodding rhythm that had enabled him to keep forging ahead for hours. Within another quarter of an hour he was close enough to the largest pile of boulders to see that there was shelter aplenty among them, chinks and crevices that looked large enough to swallow both of them with ease. He lowered Sinclair’s bier to the ground and peeled himself agonizingly out of the network of straps and braces that had sunk into his tortured flesh. As he bent to check his friend’s breathing, Sinclair opened his eyes.
“Lachlan. It’s you. I was dreaming. Where are we?”
“Hazard a guess. You’re as likely to be right as I am.” Moray was massaging his right arm, moving his elbow in circles and grimacing with pain as his fingers dug into the muscles of his shoulder. “Damnation, but you make a heavy load, Sinclair. I feel as though I’ve been hauling a dead horse behind me since the day I was born.” He saw his friend’s quick frown and waved away the apology before it could be uttered. “You would do the same for me. But I’m looking forward to having you back on your feet and walking again. Then you’ll be able to pull me.” He grunted and switched his ministrations to his other shoulder. “I believe I’ve found us a place to rest out of the sun tomorrow, but I’m going to leave you here while I make sure of it. In the meantime, you should pray and give thanks to God that I was clever enough to get rid of all our armor before we set out on this little sojourn. I’ll be back.”
He returned quickly, a strange expression on his face, so that Sinclair, after hawking to clear his throat, asked, “What’s wrong? Did you not find a place?”
Moray shook his head. “Did you pray? You must have. I hoped to find a gap between the stones that would shelter us. I found a cave instead—a cave that has been very recently in use as a living place. I found a cache of bread—stale but edible—along with water, dates, dried meat and a bag of dried dung, camel and horse both, for fuel. If I had not been here in this accursed Holy Land for so long, I would think it a miracle. As it is, it’s a stroke of fortune of the kind a cynic like me can barely contemplate.”
Sinclair was frowning. “Who would live out here?”
“Some nomad. There are more than a few of them out here. And who but a nomad would think to hoard dry dung?”
“But—think you he might be still around here?”
Moray stooped and hoisted the bier by the short cross-brace at its head, throwing the mass of straps across Sinclair’s legs at the same time. “I doubt it,” he said, grunting with the effort of lifting Sinclair’s weight again. “Whoever he was, he’s probably at La Safouri now, or at Tiberias, celebrating our defeat. Since you appear to be praying effectively, pray then that I am correct. One way or the other, we will know soon. Now lie back, it’s not far.”
SINCLAIR AWOKE IN THE DAWN LIGHT, his arm on fire, the pain of it a living thing that he could feel somewhere at the back of his throat, or so it seemed to him. He knew immediately what had happened to him, and that his arm was broken, but he had no awareness at first of where he was or how he had come there. Then he heard a soft sound and turned his head to see Moray’s shape silhouetted against the morning brightness at the cave’s mouth, and everything came back to him. He tried to call Moray’s name, but on the first attempt, although his lips moved and he articulated the sounds, nothing emerged. He swallowed, trying to moisten his dry mouth, and tried again, his voice emerging as little more than a croak.
“Lachlan.”
Moray did not stir, although Sinclair knew he must have heard him, and his eyes narrowed as he took note of the tension and rigidity of the other man’s posture. Moray stood stiffly in the entranceway, one hand braced against the side of the deep cleft in the rock that was their shelter, his entire body inclined slightly forward as he peered at whatever it was in the distance that had caught his attention.
“Lachlan, what is it? What can you see?”
Moray straightened slightly, the tension fading from his stance as he did so, and spun to move purposefully back towards Sinclair. “Vultures,” he said, as though the word explained everything. “I saw them circling when I went outside to piss and I’ve been watching them ever since, until the last of them disappeared.”
Sinclair felt as though he were missing something painfully obvious. “I don’t understand. There are always vultures in the sky out here in the desert. Always one, at least…”
“Aye, until something dies, and then they gather in flocks as by magic. No one knows how they know, but they always do.”
“What are you saying?”
“There were scores of them, Alec, and now they’re all gone. They’re down and feeding, on dead men, I am sure, for only large carcasses would attract so many of them. And they’re not too far from here.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“I can see that, but consider: here we are, in dire straits. We have a small amount of food, thanks to our absent, solitary host, but we ate most of it last night. Our water supply is little better. But if there are bodies lying out there on the sand within reach of us, there might well be food and water lying by them, for the taking. I have to go and find out, and I have to go now, because I mislike the cast of the sky out there. The air is dead calm and sultry and there might be storms about. I’ll prop the end of your bier up on that low ledge, so that you’ll be above the floor and comfortable, and I’ll leave you here for the morning. I should not be gone longer than that. I gauged the distance from the size of the birds, and my guess is that I’ll be an hour, perhaps slightly more, in reaching them, and then the same in coming back, so I should return before noon.”
“What will you use to fight them off?”
Moray smiled. “What, the vultures, or the dead men? I’ll take the Mussulman’s bow with me. How is your arm?”
“It feels as though it’s afire. Hot, but little pain, unless I jar it.”
“I thought as much. I have another packet of the powder I fed you before, and you will please me by taking it without complaining. The first one worked wonders for you, so this next one should do even more, and if you improve as much between now and tonight as you did yesterday, then you’ll be able to walk on your own and I will not have to break my back again.”
He busied himself then mixing the powder with water while Sinclair watched, and when he was done, the sick man swallowed the potion down obediently, with only the wrinkling of his nose denoting any unpleasantness of thought or taste.
“I’m going out there now, and as I say, it ought not to take me long, but we are in the desert, so it makes sense to take precautions against my being delayed. I might get lost, or have an accident, or even meet some of Allah’s faithful servants. You are not strong enough to come looking for me and it would be foolish of you even to try. I’ll leave this bag of food above you, hanging from this peg provided by our thoughtful host, and with it will be this bag of water. I’ll take some food and the smaller water bag with me, since it is lighter.” He tilted his head, smiling down at Sinclair, whose eyes were now dull and unfocused beneath fluttering lashes as he fought against the powerful opiate. “Alec? Can you still hear me? Your eyes are closing. Will you remem…”
FOUR (#u183db421-6a00-549a-ad14-91c1c5436974)
Sinclair woke up to find the cave filled with whirling sand and the pandemonic screaming of a wind such as he had never heard. His mouth and nostrils were clogged, so dry that he was unable even to spit to clear them. The terror he felt at that moment was overwhelming. He tried to move, but he was hampered by his bound arm. Several times he tried to reach the water bag that Moray had hung on the peg above him, but his efforts were wasted against the howling force of the wind. There was light, too, filtering weakly through the depths of the churning dust, so there was still daylight beyond the cave, although it appeared to be more dusk than day out there. Moray had wrapped the sole remaining fragment of his torn surcoat about his shoulders. With one trembling hand Sinclair now wound it around his head, covering his face as completely as he could, worrying that he might not be able to breathe, but fearing the sandstorm more. He struggled with the burden of his tightly trussed arm until he managed to turn onto his right side, his back to the cave’s entrance and the calamitous wind that raged through it. The stupefying noise was unrelenting, but lying on his side, with his good hand cupped over the folds of cloth about his face, he found it easier to breathe. With nothing more in his power to help himself, he fell into unconsciousness again, wondering about how Moray might be faring and hoping he had been able to find some kind of shelter before the tempest struck.
Sinclair’s next conscious thought was that the silence had awakened him, for it was tomblike after the tumult of the awful dreams that lingered, shapeless yet full of noise and dread, in the deep recesses of his memory. He continued to lie there for some time, motionless, eyes closed, focusing his mind on the absolute stillness around him, and it was only when he finally attempted to open his eyes that he realized that something was seriously amiss, for although his eyelids twitched obediently, there was pressure against them, weighing on them and preventing them from opening. Panicstricken, he drew in a quick breath and tried to claw at his face with both hands, forgetting that his left arm was tightly bound. His right hand sprang up quickly enough and landed heavily against what felt like a cloth, a cloth covered with sand, enveloping his face. Still deep in the grip of panic, he clutched at the thing and tried to jerk it away from him, only to discover that it was wrapped about his head. His fingers still gripping the bindings that shrouded him, he slowly sagged back against his bracings, knowing with sudden certainty that his nightmares had been real. He had dreamed of a chaos of noise, the demented screaming of a multitude of damned souls, and seething clouds of roiling smoke that threatened to choke the life from him and hurl him into Hell. But it had been no dream.
What was it Lachlan had said? The air is dead calm and sultry and there might be storms about. He was right, then. But where was he now? He had not been in the dreams.
“Lachlan? Are you there?”
His voice was muffled by the folds of cloth, but it was loud enough, nonetheless, for Lachlan to have heard and answered, and in the ensuing silence he realized, with great reluctance, that he was not surprised. Lachlan Moray must have been out there when that cataclysm came down, and Sinclair knew that the odds against his having been able to locate their cave under such conditions were incalculable.
Cautiously then, working one-handed, he hunched forward as far he could and unwound the remains of his white linen surcoat from his head.
Now, in the deathly stillness of the cave, he took stock of his condition as best he could. If he was to survive from now on, he knew it must be by his own efforts. He flexed the fingers of his left hand and felt them move, very slightly but blessedly without pain. The pain had gone, or abated, and he felt clear headed and healthy. But he was lying on his back and he knew he had to get up, and he knew, too, from past experience, that this would not be a simple thing to achieve with his left arm lashed rigidly along his side. He made to swing his legs to the side, to his right, but they would not move and he felt fear flare up in his breast again, wondering what was wrong with him now. He opened his eyes, hugely relieved to discover he could do so without pain, then pushed himself up on his elbow as far as he could, straining against his own lack of mobility until he could look downward, his chin on his breast, to see that his entire lower body, from the waist down, was covered in sand. To his left, a blaze of brilliance announced that there was daylight beyond the cave, but inside, everything was shaded and muted by the carpet of sand that surrounded and half covered him.
He thanked God that Lachlan had thought to prop the top end of his bier against the ledge at his back. Had he not done that, Sinclair knew the sand would have covered him completely, smothering him in his drugged sleep. Calming himself then, he concentrated on moving his legs, one at a time, kicking and flexing his knees with great difficulty until first one, then the other came free and lay atop the sand that had covered them. That done, he twisted slowly to his right, grasping the pole on that side tightly and using the leverage he gained to pull himself up and swing his legs until he was sitting, with his feet on the sand that covered the floor of the cave.
He succeeded in struggling to his feet on the third attempt and stood swaying, clutching the pole that had risen with him as soon as his weight was removed from the bed. The peg lodged in the wall still held the bags of food and water that Lachlan had left for him, but it also supported a belt with a sheathed, single-edged dirk attached, and he looked down immediately at the lashings that bound his arm against his body. Moments later, he lodged the sheath firmly between his body and his bound arm and withdrew the foot-long blade. Three slashes freed the splinted arm, but the weight of it, bound as it was by the solid steel bolts of the splints, dragged immediately at his shoulder, bringing echoes of the pain he had felt the day before. He dropped the dirk at his feet and reached for the water bag, knowing as soon as he felt its sagging, flaccid bulk that it would not be an easy task to drink from it one-handed. But Lachlan’s drinking cup was there, too, he knew, and close to hand, somewhere beneath the sand.
He looked about him for the best place to sit, and then slowly lowered himself to the ledge that had supported his bier. He cradled the bag on his knee and reached down and dredged with his fingers until he found the cup, then lodged it securely between his knees. He drew the stopper from the bag with his teeth and very slowly, moving with excruciating care, manipulated the cumbersome, wobbling container until it lay along his forearm. Then, twisting down and sideways with the caution of a tumbler balancing on a rope, he brought the open spout to the rim of the cup and dribbled the precious liquid gently into it as slowly as he could until it was half filled. He barely spilled a drop, but he had to sit up again and replace the stopper with his teeth before he could lay the bag down and take up the cup.
He rinsed his mouth carefully with the first mouthful, then spat it out and rinsed again, and this time he was able to feel more water than sand in his mouth. On the third and last draft, his mouth felt normal and he swallowed gratefully before carefully pouring another half cupful. He sipped at it this time, watching the tiny ripples on the surface, caused by the trembling in his hand, and thinking that nothing in his life had ever tasted so sweet and pure. Then he filled his mouth with it, swished it around and swallowed it with a definite feeling of triumph, feeling the life spring up in him again, even if only faintly.
He sat up straighter, noting everything there was to see in the cave, which was shallow but wide. He could find no sign that Lachlan Moray had ever been there. Sighing, and refusing to think about what that might entail, he opened the bag of food and found several flat, hard disks of unleavened bread, a cloth-wrapped bundle of surprisingly fresh dates, a hard lump of something unidentifiable that he guessed was goat cheese, and several small pieces of dried meat. He did not feel hungry, but he knew he needed to eat, so he tore a piece of meat off with his teeth and spent the next few moments thinking that he might as well have been chewing on dried tree bark. But as his saliva began to moisten the meat its flavor, strong and gamy, began to emerge and with it came his appetite, so that he discovered he was ravenous and he had to restrain himself from eating everything in the bag.
When he had repacked the remnants of his food, he sat back, gritting his teeth against a sudden temptation to feel sorry for himself. He had never been the type to wallow in self-pity and could not abide people who did so, but nonetheless he felt a need to fight against some kind of creeping lethargy that felt very much the same as self-pity, and he wondered if it might be caused by Moray’s drug, whatever it might have been. He knew he had to do something to help himself, alone as he was and ludicrously defenseless. He might be hurt, he told himself determinedly, but he was not yet dead or dying, and he had no intention of simply giving up and rolling over simply because he had been left alone. And so he sat up straighter yet and looked about him, searching for inspiration among the scant resources available to him.
He discovered that the bier or litter on which he had lain was made from a pair of spears lashed together to a short cross-piece that had supported his head and given the frail-looking device some rigidity, and he made short work of cutting away the lashings, along with the woven network of straps that had supported his body. Two spears were useless to him, one-armed as he was, but one would serve him well as a walking staff and provide him with a weapon of self-defense, since he had no idea what had happened to his sword. That concerned him for no more than a moment, aware as he was that he would have been incapable of using it to any effect.
Because his useless arm was rigidly splinted, it was utterly inflexible. He studied the ends of the steel shafts encircling his wrist and then, using his good hand and his teeth, he set about fashioning a sling from the longest of the straps from the bed of the litter. By dint of much knotting and adjustment, and muttering to himself as he worked, he eventually created a primitive harness that worked quite effectively, a large loop fitting around his neck while a smaller one was hooked firmly around the ends of two of the crossbow-bolt splints. The device was not comfortable—the strap cut sharply into his neck and shoulder muscles—but it kept the limb from hanging straight down from his shoulder like a leaden weight.
Sinclair could not believe how difficult it was to do even the smallest thing properly with only one hand. The simple effort of removing the belt from its peg and cinching it about his waist, weighted as it was with its sheathed dirk, became the most infuriating task he had ever undertaken, requiring eight attempts and a variety of outlandish contortions, and he achieved it only by clamping the belt in his teeth in the correct place and feeding the other end through the buckle with great care. Three times he lost his grip while transferring the weight, and had to restart each time. After that, seated and with the belt securely buckled, he tried unsuccessfully to shrug his massive shoulders through the loop of the belt, but he had to be content in the end with hanging it diagonally across his chest, and even then he had to undo the sling he had arranged so carefully a short time before, in order to hang the bags containing his food and water comfortably across his chest and beneath his left arm, because his earliest attempt, to make them hang comfortably over the rigid limb, quickly proved futile.
Finally, after one last look around the sand-filled cave, he took up his spear staff and carefully made his way to the cave’s mouth. He was forced to stoop lower and lower as he approached because the opening had filled up with blowing sand and was less than one third its former size. Beyond it, however, was where the surprise lay concealed, and Sinclair stood in the doorway, his eyes wrinkled to slits against the severity of the blazing sun as he tried to comprehend what he was seeing.
It had been dark when they arrived, but the moonlight had been strong enough to reveal the scoured earth of the boulder-littered bowl in which they had sheltered beneath the shadows of the giant dunes. He stood gazing now for a long time, feeling apprehension tightening his throat, for he could see nothing that he recognized. The silence was absolute, and the vast expanse of windblown sand before him bore no tracks of any living creature. The sun was halfway up the sky, but even so, he thought, it might be halfway down, because he had no means of identifying direction. He had paid no attention to such details as Lachlan dragged him into the cave, and for a moment the enormity of his own ignorance threatened to overwhelm him. Rather than give in to that feeling, however, he harangued himself in silence. Come on now, he thought. You’re alive, you’ve eaten and drunk, and you have both food and water to keep you going. You’re in no more pain than you might be with a bad toothache. You even have a weapon, by God, and it will double as a walking staff, so stop whining to yourself like a lost little boy and get on with it! But he had no clue which way to go and so he stood there, helpless.
The worst part of his helplessness sprang from not knowing where he could even begin to search for his friend Lachlan, who had done so much for him. Moray could be anywhere out there, sheltering miles away in some rocky hole or in the lee of a dune, or he could be lying dead within paces of this cave, smothered and buried by drifting sand. Frustrated beyond bearing, to the point of not caring who else might hear his shout, he cupped his good hand by the side of his mouth and called Lachlan’s name at the top of his voice, then listened carefully for an answer from the silent immensity of the desert. Four times he tried, facing a different direction each time, before accepting the futility of what he was doing. He inhaled deeply then, gritted his teeth, and set out strongly without looking back, trudging ankle deep in sand towards wherever the Fates directed him, and although aware that he was leaving deep and unmistakable tracks as he went, he consoled himself by almost believing that Lachlan Moray might stumble across his trail and follow him.
SINCLAIR SOON DISCOVERED that the sun had been halfway up the sky when he set out, because as he walked onward, taking great care over where he placed each foot, it climbed higher until it was directly overhead. He thought about stopping to eat and drink at that point, but he was on a long, level stretch and, remembering the difficulty he had had with the water bag, he decided to wait a little longer in the hope of finding something to sit on before making the attempt. And so he moved on, changing his direction slightly towards a low rise in the sand ahead of him and to his right. Soon after that, although he could see no incline, the increased strain on his legs told him that he had begun to climb, and some time later he crested the high point of a long, low ridge and stopped to stretch and work the kinks from his hips and shoulders.
Standing straight and eyeing the distant horizon, he caught a flicker of movement at the edge of his right eye and spun to face it. But there was nothing to be seen other than bare, smooth sand and the slowly rising edge of the ridge, curling away from him, back the way he had come, to form a large dune. He stared for a long time, his eyes narrowed to slits as he quartered every inch of rising ground up there, and it came again, a definite flicker of movement, low to the ground, just as he was about to turn away. But he lost it again immediately. He flexed his fingers on the shaft of his spear and set out determinedly, up the length of the low ridge, feeling the pull of the slope sapping the strength from his tiring legs, and straining for another sight of whatever it was up there that had moved. It was small, he knew, but he was also hoping it would be edible and sufficiently accommodating to allow itself to be caught and eaten.
Several minutes later he saw the movement again, but as soon as he focused on the spot where the movement had been, he also saw what had confused him: indistinguishable from the sand behind it, the edge of the spine that formed the ridge was curling back to his right just at that point, and the space behind it had been scooped clean by the wind. What he had seen was the twitching ear of a horse that was hidden by the edge of the spine. Now he could see the animal’s entire head, a pale and unusual golden color, almost the exact shade of the sand surrounding it, and as he saw it for what it was, the beast lowered its head out of sight again.
Sinclair had instantly frozen into a crouch, raising his spear defensively and fighting against the rush of tension in his chest, for where there was a horse, so far from any signs of life, there must also be a rider. It was several moments before he decided he was not in imminent danger of attack, and he moved forward slowly, inch by inch, until he could raise his head above the edge of the sandy spine and look down into the place below.
The horse skittered away from him as soon as it saw him, but Sinclair paid it no heed. His entire attention was claimed by an unevenness in the flat, windswept sand beneath the shelter of the ridge, and a small triangle of green-and-white cloth that lay just at the edge of the irregularity. He rose up cautiously and scanned the area around the disturbance for footprints, but the only tracks were those made by the horse, and so he stepped off the crest of the ridge and plowed down the steep slope, leaning far back and bracing himself strongly with the shaft of the spear.
By the time he reached the bottom he was grimacing with pain as his heavily braced broken arm objected to the violence of his lurching descent, but as soon as his feet touched level sand he drew himself up and stood swaying, gritting his teeth until the pain subsided to a tolerable level. He looked about him before crossing to the triangle of cloth, which he grasped and tugged. It moved only very slightly, weighted as it was with sand, but what he had uncovered was enough to confirm his suspicions. He had often seen the desert nomads using large cloth squares to fashion temporary shelters from the sun, and sometimes from the wind, weighting the rear edges with sand and propping up the leading edge with a stout stick, or sometimes two of them, to erect a small, primitive one-man tent. The man this one had been made to protect was probably dead beneath it, but Sinclair barely gave that a thought. That man had been an infidel, perhaps even a Saracen, and Sinclair’s sole concern at that moment was for his own welfare. Had the fellow been carrying food and water when he died?
He took note of the right-angled corner and the lines of the triangle’s edges, then traced its approximate shape and size with his right heel, digging an outline and gauging the length of the sides from memory. When it was complete, he slowly knelt, taking care not to overbalance, then began to scoop holes for his knees, piling the sand up on his left side as he removed it. By the time he had judged his knee holes deep enough, there was a pyramid beside him, and he braced his useless left arm with his other hand as he lifted it and placed it on top of the small mound, immediately relieving himself and his shoulder joint of the weight of the rigid limb. Only when it was firmly braced did he bend forward again, and, using his good forearm as a shovel to sweep the burden of sand from the cloth beneath, he began working doggedly, one-handed, to uncover the fabric, but making no attempt to raise it in any way.
Before he was halfway done, he had felt the outline of the corpse beneath him and had formed a picture of the dead man, lying on his left side, his legs outstretched stiffly, his right foot pointed as though frozen in the act of kicking someone. But there were other shapes beneath there, too, and as the thirst grew in him, aggravated by the hard work, Sinclair prayed that some of them were vessels containing water.
Finally the green-and-white-striped cloth lay almost completely exposed, the outline of the dead nomad clearly limned beneath it. Sinclair straightened his back and drew in one great, deep breath and held it. He took one corner of the cloth in his hand, counted to three, and then swept the covering away with one great, swooping tug, steeling himself against the possibility of finding a long-dead, rotting corpse. He found nothing of the kind, no rush of foul air, no swarming flies or insects, and he breathed normally again.
The man who lay there, face pillowed on the ground, was newly dead, but his rich clothing and fine armor made it plain he had been no common desert nomad, caught and overwhelmed by the storm. On the sand at his back was a folded pile of white cotton cloth that Sinclair recognized as a kufiya, the large, square scarf that the nomadic people of the Arab races used to shield their heads from the desert sun, and on it the man had carefully positioned a finely made Saracen helmet, its tapering crown rising to a high spike. The edges of the headgear were trimmed with a light, intricately fashioned visor and a shoulder-length canopy of fine mail. Beside it rested a long, curved scimitar, its bone hilt polished by age and its scuffed scabbard attesting to years of use. Whoever he was, the man had bled to death. His entire lower body was blackened and encrusted by a seemingly solid casing of gore-clotted sand. Beneath one outstretched foot, the one Sinclair had noticed as being frozen in a kick, was the stick that had supported his shelter, and Sinclair had no difficulty in imagining what had happened. The dying man’s last, agonized kick had brought the shelter down upon him, shutting off his life.
Moved by the solitary tragedy of such a death, Sinclair found himself searching for words to say over the body, before it came to him that anything he might say would be wasted. This was a Muslim warrior, an infidel who would have thanked no man for commending his soul to the Christian God of his enemies. Nevertheless, he bowed his head, looking down at the corpse, and muttered, “Rest in peace, whoever you were. Not even your Allah would object to my wish of that for you.”
He turned his head away and looked at the other objects that had been covered by the tent cloth, and the first thing he saw was a water bag, swollen and heavy. Nearby, its position suggesting that the dead man might have used it as a pillow, was a beautifully made saddle, the leather of its seat coated with dried blood, more heavily on the left side than the right, as though the rider had been wounded in the groin. Reins and a bridle lay carefully coiled beside it, and beyond those, within reach of the supine man, lay the water skin and a set of solidly packed saddlebags.
Carefully cradling his injured arm, Sinclair nudged the heavy saddlebags with his foot, pushing and sliding them until they were close to the largest pile of sand he had swept up, and then he lowered himself to sit on the small pyramid and bent forward to seize the bags with his good hand and drag them to rest against his leg. They were heavy, and he sensed that whatever weighed them down might be useful to him.
Sinclair now went about the business of removing his own water bag from about his neck, securing the cup between his knees and settling the bag’s sagging, untrustworthy bulk along his bent forearm before he removed the stopper with his teeth. It seemed to take hours, and his lips and mouth were parched and sore throughout, but eventually he was able to set down the bag and drink from the cup. He resisted the temptation to refill it when he had finished, and stuffed the cup firmly inside his leather jerkin. His eyes were fixed on the saddlebags.
Even with only one hand, he had the bags untied in mere moments. The one on the right contained food and the materials for preparing it: a substantial bag of flour, a tiny one of ground salt, and several pieces of dried, heavily spiced meat, all of which he assumed to be goat. There was also a selection of dates, both fresh and dried, along with a handful of olives carefully wrapped in a muslin cloth. In another large square of cloth he found a hinged cooking tripod and a supple, oiled boiling bag of antelope skin to suspend from it, along with a small bowl and a plate, both of burnished metal. Another, smaller bundle held two spoons, one of horn and the other of wood, and a sharp knife.
The second bag contained a bag of grain and a folded nose bag for the horse, along with two packages, one much larger and heavier than the other and both wrapped in the same green-and-white-striped cloth that had formed the tent canopy. Sinclair opened the larger one first, to reveal a chain-mail tunic the likes of which he had never seen. The edges of its square-cut collar and sleeves were woven of some kind of flattened silver metal, too tough to be real silver, and its flat-sided links were of the finest, lightest steel mesh he had ever handled. The entire garment was lined throughout with a soft but immensely strong green fabric that showed no creases or wrinkles. He set the thing aside and opened the second packet to reveal a magnificently ornate sheathed dagger with a hooked blade, its hilt and scabbard chased with silver filigree and studded with polished precious stones in red, green, and blue. He picked the weapon up, conscious that he had never held such a valuable piece before, and hefted it in his hand as he turned to glance at the dead man beside him.
“Well, Infidel,” he murmured, “I have no way of knowing who you were, but you took pride in your possessions, so I promise you I will take good care of them and use them gratefully if ever I escape from here.”
He repacked the saddlebags and rose to his feet again, then folded the tent that had covered the dead man until he could pick it up and lay it beside the saddle and bags, aware that he would have more need of it in the times ahead than its former owner would. He collected the two supporting sticks and placed them between the folds of the cloth. He buried the Saracen as well as he could then, wrapping him in his blood-drenched cloak and laying his helmet by his head and his scimitar by his side, then dragging sand into place with one foot until he could shape it into a mound over the shallow grave, leaving no trace of the body beneath. The signs of his digging, he knew, would vanish within days, and there was a strong probability that the grave would remain undisturbed thereafter, its occupant safe from the vultures and vulnerable only to the possibility of some wandering beast smelling the decay and unearthing the meat that caused it. His task complete, he wrapped the dead man’s kufiya about his head, scrubbed the dried blood off the saddle as well as he could, using handfuls of sand, and set about capturing the horse.
Within the hour he was walking again, leading the animal by the bridle. The effort of saddling it one-handed had almost exhausted him. Luckily, the horse, once captured, had submitted to the procedure and stood patiently as Sinclair struggled to hoist the heavy saddle and wrestle it into place on its back, and then to tighten the girths and extend the stirrup leathers, for its former owner had been a hand’s width shorter in the legs than Sinclair. Now, with tent, saddlebags, and water skins securely fastened to the beast’s saddle, and the beast itself watered and fed with a handful of grain, he walked at its head, his eyes scanning the middle distance, the reins looped over his good shoulder and his only burden the tall, heavy spear in his hand.
He found what he was looking for within half an hour, a single boulder that thrust its crest above the sand in the lee of the dune that soared above it. He led the horse directly up to the outcrop and climbed up to the top of it. Using the summit as a mounting block and his long spear shaft as a counterbalance, he clambered awkwardly into the saddle, his left arm braced over the animal’s shoulders in front of him. Once there, safely settled with his feet in the stirrups, he felt immensely better and permitted himself, for the first time since awakening alone in the cave, to think, even to hope, that he might yet survive this ordeal. Only the twitching of the horse’s ears suggested that it was aware of having a new and very large rider on its back. Sinclair grimaced. What would happen if the horse were to rebel when he ordered it to move? One good, head-down heave and he’d be flat on his back on the ground.
And what was he to do, now, with his spear? It had become as useless as his former sword, since he could not hold it and ply the reins at the same time. He looked at the sturdy weapon regretfully, then stabbed the shaft point-first into the sand. He opened the left saddlebag and removed the jeweled dagger. He unwrapped its cloth binding and took a moment to admire it again before slipping the weapon into the front of his jerkin. Then he gritted his teeth, took a firm grip on the reins, and dug in his heels, regretting not having checked the horse’s former owner for spurs. The animal uttered a single grunt, then began to walk sedately, and Sinclair offered a silent prayer to whichever deity might be responsible. The gentle walk pleased him well, for he had no wish to do anything precipitate before he had time to judge the horse’s mettle against his own, but now that he was riding, he was conscious that his traveling speed had increased at least threefold.
He reached down and patted the horse’s neck gratefully, encouragingly.
“Well done, beast,” he whispered. “It looks as though it will be thee and me, together, from now on.”
FIVE (#u183db421-6a00-549a-ad14-91c1c5436974)
Lulled by the steady, familiar rhythm of the horse’s gait, Sinclair had no thought of falling asleep in the saddle, but when the horse halted suddenly, whickering softly, he snapped awake, excitement and fear flaring in his breast. He recognized instantly that he had been asleep, and he was already wondering what his folly might have condemned him to. But there was no danger that he could see, no one close by, and no threat that he could perceive. The only element of the scene that was extraordinary was that his horse was standing stock-still, its ears pointing straight ahead.
There had been no cliffs within sight in any direction the last time Sinclair had looked about him, but now, no more than fifteen paces in front of him, a rocky escarpment towered above him to a height more than four times his own. More wide-awake now than he had been in days, he stared at the rock ahead of him, at the diagonal black slash of the fissure facing him, and at a spear, not unlike the one he had abandoned earlier, that stood in front of it, its point buried in the sand. He knew that if it was similar in length to his own it must be half-buried. He knew, too, that there might well be someone waiting inside the cave mouth to attack him, possibly someone with a bow, and that to remain where he was without moving was inviting attack.
He was on the point of wheeling away when his eyes returned to the upright spear shaft.
Lachlan Moray had found the litter made of two spears, one of which Sinclair had used as a staff; the other he had left behind in the cave where he had sheltered from the storm. What if there had been a third, he wondered now, and Lachlan had taken it with him? Unlikely, yes, but not impossible. He had been unconscious most of the time Lachlan had dragged him on the bier, and he had been behind him all the time. And if that were the case, the half-buried weapon in front of the fissure in the cliff might well be that same spear, thrust into the ground as a signal. Two paces behind it, the fissure rose stark and black from the sand that must surely have filled it, at least partially. Moray might be lying in there, asleep or injured.
Sinclair dismounted, lowering himself as gently as he could. He drew his long-bladed dirk and walked forward cautiously, squinting against the glare reflected from the rock face as he peered towards the black incision of the cave opening. But it took only two paces to reveal that he was looking at a shadow, not an opening in the wall. A bladelike protrusion in the surface jutted towards him; its sharpedged facade blended perfectly into the stone face behind, and it formed a sheltered corner, its vertical edge casting the hard, dark shadow he had mistaken for an entrance to a cave. Annoyed with himself for having dismounted to no good purpose, Sinclair straightened up from his crouch and was on the point of turning away when something, some nudging of curiosity, urged him to approach more closely and make sure that the sheltered nook was, in fact, as empty as it now appeared to be.
It was not. Wedged into the corner of the shallow cleft, the head and upper torso of a man were clearly discernible beneath a light covering of sand, slumped but apparently sitting upright in the angle made by the two walls. Sinclair’s immediate reaction was elation that Moray had found shelter and survived, just as he had wished and hoped. He advanced quickly, dropping to his knees and brushing away the sand from the cloth-wrapped head. The head moved, jerking away in surprise or protest from the unexpected touch, but Sinclair’s fingers had already hooked into the edge of one layer of cloth and the sudden movement pulled the covering free, exposing part of the face beneath. Within a heartbeat he was upright again. He brought up the point of his dirk, then stood there, swaying.
The inch or so of skin and hair that he had seen did not belong to Sir Lachlan Moray. Lachy’s hair was blond, almost red gold, and his cheeks were fair, constantly burning and peeling and never tanning in the desert sun. Whoever was lying in front of Sinclair now was no friend. The skin of that face was a deep nut brown, and the hairs about the mouth were black and wiry. Sinclair backed away another step, his dirk poised to strike. He knew he was in no danger, because the man in the corner was even more deeply buried than he himself had been, and he remembered how difficult it had been for him to struggle free. As he stood there, looking down at the recumbent form, his eye caught a small, peaked irregularity in the windblown surface of the shroud that masked the man, and without removing his eyes from the still concealed head in front of him, Sinclair sheathed his dirk, then stooped and groped at the protrusion with his fingers, finding the hilt of a sword.
He straightened up slowly, pulling the weapon with him, and found himself holding a Saracen scimitar, its curved, burnished blade worked in the intricate Syrian fashion known as Damascene. It was a fine blade, he knew, and that told him that its owner was a warrior, and therefore doubly dangerous. But Sinclair knew he had no need to kill him. All he need do was walk away, remount his horse and ride off, leaving the infidel to his fate. But even as he thought that, Sinclair knew he would not do it. He too was a warrior, and he lived by a warrior’s code. He had never killed anyone who was not attempting, in one fashion or another, to kill him. Already cursing himself for a fool, he thrust the sword point-first into the sand, close to hand, and knelt by the slumped form. As he took hold of the wrapped cloth again, the figure in the sand stirred violently, but Sinclair merely lowered his splinted arm to the area of the man’s sternum and pinned him with it while he unwound the multiple loops of cloth from about the head, then backed away to look at what he had uncovered.
The face that looked back at him was, as he had suspected, unmistakably Saracen, thin and high browed, hawk nosed, with prominent, tight-skinned cheekbones beneath deep-set, narrow eyes so dark that they appeared to be uniformly black. Lips and chin were covered in black, wiry, glistening hair, each strand apparently coated with its own covering of sandy dust. The eye whites were discolored and angry looking, irritated probably beyond bearing, he suspected, by the same grit and dust, but the face itself was not angry. The word that sprang into Sinclair’s mind, unthought of for years, was Stoic, and he thought it apt.
