Laura Kinsale (6 page)

“No. But neither do I mean to haul you to Beyrout, so put any hope of that from your mind. I’ll leave you in the first place we come to, if you like. Mezarib, perhaps. Or Bozra, if we’ve come as far south as I intend that we have.”

“Bozra!” She had heard of it, a caravan town some days out of Damascus, on the hajj road to Mecca. She would no longer be in the mountains there—she would be in worse case than here, farther than ever from Beyrout, abandoned on the edges of the desert itself where the Bedu raided most frequently; and a part of the desert where she knew neither friends nor allies.

The dismayed expression of his companion was not lost on Lord Winter. “If you start blubbering again, I’ll abandon you right here,” he said caustically. “Get down and make yourself useful. And what the devil is your name?”

Zenia, well broken to the voice of command, ducked her head and dismounted. She choked back a sound of pain as her cold and swollen feet touched the ground.

“Selim, your excellency,” she said, the first Arab name that came to her tongue.

“There’s food in the packs,” he said, “and the animals need grain and water.”

She limped hurriedly to do his bidding, the rocks icy and rough beneath her bare feet. She was shivering so badly in the cold mountain air that she could hardly untie the donkey’s halter.

Lord Winter seemed uninterested in her labors. He stepped up onto an elevated ledge and knelt there, overlooking the mountainside, the beautiful rifle balanced across one knee. Zenia had no quarrel with that: she was glad to know he kept watch. She led the animals to the spring and filled a goatskin with fresh water.

She carried it to Lord Winter. He took it from her. Zenia stood shuddering in the chill while he drank.

“Bring the food and sit here,” he said, pointing below him. “Out of the wind. We’ll rest an hour.”

Wordlessly, she searched among the baggage, found unleavened bread and olives, and brought them back to the place where he waited. They ate in silence, Lord Winter still mounted upon the rock and Zenia huddled below, while the last stars began to disappear and the wind swept across the mountaintops.

“What Arab are you?” Lord Winter asked.

“I am Anezy.”

“Oh, that is instructive!” Arden said dryly. It was a huge tribe, the largest in the desert, with kinsmen spread from Syria to his destination in the center of the Arabian Peninsula. “What tents among the Anezy?”

This time the silence was longer. Finally, the boy said, “El-Nasr.”

“Wellah,”
Lord Winter murmured, somewhat disappointed. The Nasr was a small
fendi
of the tribe, greatly weakened since the days when they had been Lady Hester’s old Bedu allies. Their sheik was still respected over all the Anezy, Arden thought, but they were a family of the north. He should have guessed—the boy was bitterly thin, but too tall, and too timorous, to be home-bred in the pitiless crucible of the southern deserts.

But still, a member of el-Nasr would have a passport to his distant Anezy kinsmen in the south.

“Does el-Nasr have any blood feuds?” he asked.

“No,” the boy said reluctantly. “But I am not sure—I haven’t been in the desert for—” He paused, and shrugged. “For a very long time.”

“How long?”

“Many summers,” he said vaguely.

Lord Winter smiled. “Just how many summers have you seen in your life, O ancient one?”

Selim appeared to be much interested in discarding the seed from his olive. “I don’t know, my lord.”

The viscount looked down upon the boy’s dark head. A puzzle in many ways, young Selim. The Bedu made little of time—in the desert the seasons passed without remark beyond some extraordinary event or another, but Selim spoke English so well, with only a trace of accent, a little lisping slur here and there, that Arden supposed Lady Hester must have gone to some lengths to educate him. Surely he knew how long he had been with her.

“Can you read and write?” he asked.

“Yes, my lord!” The answer came quickly and positively. “In English and Arabic.”

“So,” Arden said, “I suppose you want to go to Beyrout and be a clerk.”

“I do not wish to be a clerk. I wish—” The boy stopped abruptly.

“What?”

“It is no matter, my lord.”

“Come with me,” Arden said abruptly, surprising himself. “El-Nasr has no blood feuds, and pays everyone for protection. Otherwise I’ll have to hire a new
rafik
to see me through each tribe.”

“I do not wish to be
rafik
to you, my lord.”

“Why not? I’ll pay you very well.”

“Because then I could not quit your company. I would have to share your journey even unto death, and I don’t want to die.”

He gave a short laugh. “A foregone conclusion, in your opinion!”

“They say there is no water for fifteen camel marches across the red sands.”

“Ah, but only think of how you’ll electrify all your acquaintance with the story, and be known ever after as a singularly intrepid individual.”

“You are mad,” Salim said grimly. “I wish to go to Beyrout.”

“Why the devil this longing for Beyrout, little wolf? Did her ladyship make you too soft for the desert?”

“Yes, excellency.” The boy bit down with savage effect on an olive and spat out the seed. “I hate the desert.”

“A pity. She did you no favor there.”

The boy turned on Arden suddenly. “My lord!” he demanded in English, “are you a spy?”

“I am not. Though no doubt I’ll be thought one, and you too, cub, if the pair of us burst out in English at any inconvenient moment.”

“Then why is it you come here? What can you want in such a place?”

He looked about him at the huge clear sky and the desolate country. “It’s beautiful, don’t you think?”

Selim hugged his arms around himself, shivering. “You are absurd! When you could be in England!”

He laughed. “You sound remarkably like my maiden aunt. What do you know of England?”

“I know everyone sleeps in a feather bed there,” the boy said pungently, “and not on a mule’s back on a mountainside.”

“Ah! So it’s a feather bed you want in Beyrout.”
 

“I do not want a feather bed in Beyrout. I want—” Lord Winter observed the boy’s intense face. Whatever it was, he desired it very badly. Such longing was no common thing.

“Gold?” the viscount suggested. All Bedu had a burning desire for gold coins.

Selim cast him a proud, uncertain look, a quaint mixture of disdain and interest. So, Lord Winter thought, whatever it is you want, my fine cub, it can be bought for gold.

“What do you suppose,” he mused, “it would be worth in sovereigns—the price of a
rafik
to Nejd and back again?”

The boy said nothing.

“Two thoroughbred camels?” Lord Winter suggested. “I saw them selling for thirty in Damascus.”

Selim scowled at the ground. “I have no use for camels.”

“You may buy what you like with sovereigns. Say, a purebred Keheilan mare, for a hundred.”

The boy began to look hunted. “I do not want a mare,” he muttered.

Lord Winter raised his eyebrows. “Tell me what it is you do want, and let us discuss the matter. Perhaps we’ll find ourselves in charity.”

Selim stared at him, almost through him, breathing quickly, as if his mind was grappling with some desperate calculation. “You would pay gold sovereigns? English money?”

Lord Winter nodded.

“How much—excellency—what would it cost for a passage to London?”

Arden, his curiosity aroused, had been running possibilities through his mind: the price of a doctor or a magician for some sick relative, the cost of an expensive bride, the value of a grove of date palms—but this made him look down at the boy with astonishment.

“London! Whoever do you wish to send to London?”

Selim’s delicate jaw tensed. He turned his face downward, his tangled hair falling forward to conceal him. “It is I who wish to go, excellency.”
 

In a long moment of silence, Zenia felt herself the object of unnerving scrutiny. In spite of his sharp manners, she perceived that Lord Winter did not altogether despise his wolf cub. But she dared not let him discover she was female. Lord Winter was of one mind with Lady Hester in his contempt for the weaker sex. Only as long as she was a Bedu boy in his eyes did she feel any hope that he would tolerate her, or extend the shield of his protection. He would cast off a girl instantly, most probably into the custody of the nearest village governor, who would send her to the pasha if he did not marry her to the first man, Christian or Mohammedan, who would pay him for her. She might escape to the north, if she could walk so far, limping and begging for food, without being killed or enslaved. In the desert a poor stranger would meet with hospitality, for a few days at least, but here where rebellion and Ibrahim Pasha’s soldiers had tortured the land for so long, there was no such certainty. And if she did by God’s mercy reach her old tribe the Nasr, she would only be where she dreaded to be, sunk again in the brutal misery of desert life, with no faintest hope of England.

But Lord Winter—Lord Winter could send her to London if he pleased. Consuls would bow to him, showering golden sovereigns as he willed. Ships would arrive at the bidding of an English lord—she had seen it happen; her own mother had often commanded such things in the days of her power, before all her money was gone and the debts heaped up.

“You are a strange child,” he said thoughtfully. “I suppose it is no wonder. A Bedouin who hates the desert and speaks English superbly—I cannot imagine what your mistress contemplated for you.”

“M’lady never spoke of that, or made provision,” Zenia said, with complete truthfulness.

“Did she wish you to go to England?”

“It is I who wish to go,” she said firmly. “M’lady is dead, may Allah give her peace.”

“Very true,” Lord Winter said, amused. “By which I take you to mean that she didn’t intend you to set foot there.” He stood up, shouldering the rifle. “Well, I have no such scruples, little wolf. If you long to see England, then,
ay billah,
you shall go. After you conduct me to Riyadh and Hayil and back again as my
rafik.”

Zenia stared up at him. She had never been to the Nejd, to the very heart of the Arabian peninsula—all of her years with the Bedu had been spent in the hot plains north and east of Damascus. El-Nasr’s small
fendi
of the great Anezy tribe had never had reason or will to traverse the red
nefud
sands to the south. No one Zenia knew had even joined the hajj to go to Mecca. The southern desert was like a fabled land to them, the place of their ancestors; Riyadh the domain now of the puritanical Wahhabi princes, who would take back the world for el-Islam by arms, who hated any infidels but despised Christians most of all, who had even cut out the tongues of simple Moslemin for singing, because their exacting sheiks said innocent song might tempt the devil. Such were the stories she had heard of the land beyond the sands of the red
nefud.

“Excellency,” she said carefully, “if you will send me to England, I will do anything, but I must see the money first.”

“Oh ho, must you? Go and look your fill then, but unless you can get to Damascus and back within the quarter hour, you will find the bargain off.”

Zenia wet her lips and lowered her eyes. He gave a chuckle at her discomfiture.

“Quite the cunning desperado,” he murmured. “I don’t carry bags full of coins for young ruffians to plunder. Two sovereigns now, cub, on your oath that you will not desert me without leave, and your passage to London arranged on our return.” A sudden thought struck him, and a wicked grin lit his face. “By God, I’ll take you there myself. We’ll have tea at Swanmere with my lady mother, and be appallingly respectable.”

Zenia lifted her eyes in wonder. “Would your lady mother receive me?”

“I don’t doubt she’d receive the devil himself, if that’s what it took to get me back in her clutches.” He came down off the boulder with an easy stride and offered his hand. “What say you, wolf cub? Is it the Nejd and England for us?”

She swallowed, barely able to breathe. Such a chance, and such a hazard. And yet she had no other hope.

Hesitantly, she held out her hand. He took it in his strong grip. “As you serve as my companion,” he promised in Arabic, “I will see you to England on our return from the Nejd.”

Zenia stood with her fingers held hard in his. “Our fate is one while we journey,” she said, her voice unsteady in the formal vow of a
rafik,
“whether we live or die. I will conduct you to that place you name, and by very God I will not forsake you.” She felt his hand begin to withdraw, and suddenly clutched at it. “La Allah, the Lord sees me, that I enter under your protection!”

It was another kind of oath—
dakhilak
—that laid upon him the charge of her life if he accepted it.

She raised her eyes. He looked down at her, this mad English lord, and smiled his fierce easy smile. He could defend her from anything, she thought. She was terrified of him, because he laughed at demons and loved the desert. “Please, my lord,” she said in a small voice, “don’t let me die before I can see England.”