Laura Kinsale (10 page)

The boy was living on camel’s milk. It was perfectly healthy; in a bad year the Bedu survived all summer on their camels’ yield, but in this heavy sand, without grazing, the lone female was only producing a pint or two a day, and Arden had drunk half that much himself for breakfast.

“God curse you,” he shouted at Selim, “if you get any thinner, I’ll leave your bones for the wind to pick!”

The boy looked at him with a stricken expression. “I’m sorry,
el-Muhafeh,”
he said, as if he did not know what to be sorry for.

“Wretched little beast,” Arden muttered with savage injustice. He was sharply aware that without Selim he would not have had a prayer of survival. He jerked a leather knot tight on the camel’s load. His absurd irritation sustained him through the slogging torture of the morning, but by midday all emotion had been burned out of him, leaving nothing but the pounding of his heart in his ears as he battled the camels upward through knee-deep sand. He had worn a hole in the woolen sock, and each step brought a spike of pain at his heel. When the drug wore off, Bin Dirra began to moan endlessly, whispering garbled prayers.

The sand cascaded down, pooling around Arden’s ankles, imprisoning him. He had to push the female, who was roaring and refusing to go on, while Selim dragged on her headrope. By the time they reached the crest, the camel stood trembling with exhaustion and Arden sank to his knees, fumbling with the compass.

Ahead, he could see nothing but more red sand, endless waves in an infinite horizon. Selim stood next to him. Arden tried to take a reading, but the compass face swam before his eyes. His ears rang. He leaned against Selim. Just for a moment, he thought, just rest for a moment. The boy stood patiently, bracing him. Arden could feel the quick panting rise and fall of Selim’s breath.

He pushed himself upright and took the reading. “There—” he said hoarsely, pointing at the next great curved face of sand in an infinite array. ‘That heap of brush, do you see?”

Selim stared to the southeast. “My lord,” he said, with a little rise in his voice. “There is another on the one beyond it.”

Arden hardly understood him, but he caught the note of excitement and hauled himself to his feet, the dune crest crumbling under him.

“It is a marker! There is another!” Selim cried. “Do you see them? We have found the road!”

Arden stared ahead of them. The dunes marched away, innumerable. But he could see the little pile of roots, and the one beyond, with heat waves rising around them.

If it was a road, he thought blearily, it was only in the imagination of some fiend out of hell.

He dreamed that night of the angel again. He wanted to beg it for water, and tried so hard to speak that he woke himself.

At first he thought he was yet asleep, because the angel vanished into the sensations of reality, his blanket beneath him, his empty belly and parched throat, but still he heard the singing.

It was unearthly, so lovely and real that it almost frightened him. An English hymn—he even knew the words.

He sat up abruptly, reaching instinctively for his rifle. The singing stopped. Selim’s voice said sharply: “What is it, my lord?”

Arden let go a long breath. He leaned back on his hands. “My God—is that you singing?”

There was a little silence. He could see the boy’s black outline, sitting as always beside Bin Dirra.

“Yes, my lord,” Selim said faintly.

He wet his lips. The unreal aura of the song still seemed to cling to him, so that he hardly wanted to speak.

“Bin Dirra will not remember,” the boy said. “It quiets him.”

Arden lay back down, staring at the sky.

“Do you dislike it?” Selim asked.

He looked up at the huge well of stars that seemed to hang so close and shimmering he might fall upward into them, passing weightless into a dark mirror with light reflected back on every side.

“It’s beautiful,” he whispered, his voice cracked by thirst and sleep. “Go on.”

The boy paused. And then he began to sing again, a small, clear voice in the staggering silence.

Arden thought the camels were dying. They trembled and hesitated, and every time the female lay down, he was afraid she would not get up again. He had to unload her, while Selim coaxed the male ahead with Bin Dirra lying weakly in the saddle.

Arden bore the water, what was left, which was only a gallon. The five days had gone; the afternoon sun was searing, burning down on their eighth, and he was certain that they had missed Jubbeh and now made their way by tortuous inches into the inferno. He found that he hardly cared.

They had lost the brush-pile markers two nights past, by trying to travel in the moonlight. He hauled on the grieving camel’s halter, urging her to rise. He fell down when she came immediately to her feet. He stared at the blazing sand beneath him, vaguely amazed that she would rise at all, and sure that he could not. The heat scorched his palms and baked his chest. Then he hefted the water skin and baggage onto his shoulders. He stood up, reeling and weak.

The distance between him and Selim seemed a long way, a great stretch of level ground. He did not look up, but put one foot in front of the other. Selim was always ahead of him, moving, the ruthless angel of exhaustion, and he had to follow.

“Come along, camel,” he mumbled in English, having come to love and hate the soft-eyed beast. “Come along, come along, poor girl. Not far now. Not far, my poor pretty.”

She groaned and stumbled, the voice of his soul. Together they moved by fits and starts and increments, until he reached Selim, who had stopped.

Arden thought in befuddlement that it was too soon to stop. He blinked at the boy.

Selim was weeping, shaking his head. Arden looked up beyond him, at a dune face that rose above and ran like a mammoth wall as far as he could see to the east and west.

Oh God,
he thought.
We are finished.

The boy gave a faint sob. Arden said, “Don’t blubber. You’re wasting water.” He dropped the skins and baggage where he stood and stopped, lifting Selim up onto the female. The boy felt lighter than the water bags, hardly even a load for the beast. “Lead the other,” he said, handing up the male’s rope.

Arden drank deeply, lightening the skin still further, and then dragged the baggage onto his shoulders.

A foot at a time, he forced a way up the slope. He had learned what shape promised a little footing, and what would shear down under him, eating up two steps for every three. But he was dying. Halfway up the slope, the air was rasping in his throat, and dizziness pulled him down into a spinning well. His blood was going to burst in his head. He thought he heard church bells, and someone calling him.

“Stop,” Selim was saying. “Stop, stop!” The boy had somehow gotten in front of him, off the camel, floundering in the sand. “Bin Dirra—” he panted. “Jubbeh!”

Arden held himself upright with a painful effort. He looked up at the Shammari.

“Where are you going?” the Bedui whispered. Arden could hardly hear above the laboring of his heart. Bin Dirra lifted his hand, gesturing weakly back along the trough of the dune. “There. I can see the rocks of Ghota. Why do you climb this?”

CHAPTER SIX

Selim sat sullenly in the light from the doorway, plaiting hair that hung down below his shoulders. Outside, the streets of Hayil were busy and quiet, with that eastern quiet of whitewash and mud walls where no wheels ever passed. Even the voices seemed distant, swallowed up by the desert air, unless some argument erupted nearby and assaulted the ear with a sudden tumult like a donkey’s braying.

The boy was in a high state of persecution, because Arden had bid him paint kohl about his eyes, given him a new robe and a pure white kuffiyah with a gold fringe, and bright turquoise beads to braid into his two long side-locks. Such was manly adornment in the desert. Arden thought he made a very pretty bachelor, even if the rest of his head was a hopeless rat’s tangle of dusty curls under the kuffiyah.

“Ay billah,
you will be the talk of the harem,” he said, kneeling to tie the last touch in place himself: a single large pearl to dangle down behind Selim’s ear.

The boy scowled. “I do not wish to be the talk of the harem.”

“Reluctance will only send them into raptures, I’m afraid. Perverse creatures, females.”

Zenia gave him a piqued glance as he leaned over her. In the sands, the sun had burned him to a deep tawny gold. “And I suppose you have a very great knowledge of females, my lord?”

“A vast knowledge. Silly bores, the lot of them.” Lord Winter tossed the drape of her kuffiyah back over her shoulder. His hand brushed her throat without ceremony as he parted a lock of her hair with his fingers. “But sweet as honey.”

“What can be sweet about them, if they are so boring?” she demanded sulkily.

“Well, it isn’t their tiresome prattle, I assure you. But they can’t talk all the time, by God’s mercy.” The back of his fingers pressed against her skin while he tied the pendant. “Their bodies are their honey, wolf cub.”

Zenia stared down at her lap, her cheeks growing hot. Since the nefud, she had new and painful feelings about Lord Winter. She was no longer afraid of him. She thought about him every moment, worry and misery and longing.

He grinned and gave her hair a light tug as he sat back on his heels. “You’ll figure it out, little wolf. When the time is ripe.”

She felt suffocated and resentful, because she liked the touch of his hands on her. Because if he knew the truth he would scorn her for her sex. Because she did not have a body sweet as honey. If she had, he would surely have noticed by now. But no man noticed. And of course she did not want Lord Winter to notice. Her whole welfare depended upon him not noticing. And yet she was perversely unhappy that he did not.

“Arab women are silly,” she said. “Englishwomen are more interesting, I think.”

“I beg your pardon,” he murmured, lifting his black eyebrows. “I did not know you were a connoisseur.”

“Englishwomen are more beautiful. Their skin is like silk.”

“All women have skin like silk if you look in the right places, my cub.”

“Englishwomen have shoes,” Zenia said, curling her legs under her. “Their feet are soft.”