SILK AND SECRETS (20 page)

Before Ross could say any more, Juliet said, “If you think cauterization best, so be it.” Her strained voice seemed on the edge of breaking. “Khilburn can do it.”

Ross felt as if a cold hand had clenched around his heart. Was the damned woman deliberately trying to drive him crazy? He had performed cauterizations in the past and had also once endured the procedure himself; the thought of inflicting such pain on Juliet was unbearable. Good Lord, he had found it impossible to fence with his wife even if both carried blunted foils and wore protective padding.

He opened his mouth to say that Saleh should do the procedure, but the sight of Juliet made him hold his tongue. She sat cross-legged and immobile, her neck bent and her gaze on the rug beneath her. As usual, her expression was hidden by her veil.

Yet even though she was not looking at him, he knew, with the same uncanny sense of connection he had felt earlier, that under her stoic exterior she was shaken and in pain. Her request that he do the cauterization was not inspired by a desire to torment him, but was an oddly touching act of trust. He doubted if she realized that consciously, or she would not have asked. But since she had, he could not deny her.

“Very well,” he said brusquely. “I’ll use my dagger.”

It seemed an appropriate choice, for it was the beautifully made weapon Juliet had given him at Serevan. The charcoal bed was the hottest part of the fire, so he laid the long steel blade across the glowing coals, back edge down. Taking a piece of heavy paper from his luggage, he rolled it into a tube, then blew on the coals to raise the temperature still further. The principle was the same as a blacksmith’s bellows. However, he was not going to be shoeing a horse but branding his wife.

For the next few minutes no one spoke. Murad had brought water, and he quietly put some on to boil for tea. Saleh used more to clean Juliet’s arm and rinse blood from her robe.

Finally the blade was as hot as it would get, and Ross could delay no longer. He wished they were in a Christian country so there was brandy to fortify Juliet for the coming ordeal. He could have used some brandy himself, for the thought of what he must do made his heart pound and his palms damp.

Juliet lay down on her right side, her body partially curled as she braced herself for the burning. Saleh placed his hands on her shoulder and waist to immobilize her in case she involuntarily tried to pull away.

Ross knelt beside her, careful not to let his shadow fall across her arm. Her bare skin was pale in the firelight, except for the scarlet gash of the knife wound. Face grim, he lifted the dagger from the coals. He had wrapped cloth around the handle to protect his hand, and even so the heat was uncomfortable.

He wavered a moment as he raised the blade in front of him. It glowed with ugly, sullen heat. At the thought of laying the metal against Juliet’s raw, bleeding flesh, his muscles locked, refusing to do his bidding.

“Khilburn!” Saleh said sharply.

The man’s voice pierced Ross’s numbness. Delay was only making matters worse, so Ross grasped her elbow in his left hand to steady her arm, then swiftly laid the broad back edge of the blade along the entire length of the open wound.

As the red-hot steel seared her, Juliet jerked violently against the restraining grips of the two men. Her left hand had been lying by Ross’s leg and her fingers spasmodically clutched his knee, the nails biting deeply.

The three seconds that Ross held the hot iron in place seemed eternal. To keep herself silent, Juliet had taken a fold of the tagelmoust between her teeth, but as the stench of burning flesh smoldered through the night air, she gave a suffocated cry that tore at Ross’s heart.

With a shuddering sigh of relief he finally lifted the cooling blade away from her arm, but his relief was tempered by the bitter knowledge that for Juliet the pain was far from over. Wrapped in stoic, anguished silence, she seemed unaware that she still gripped his knee.

Saleh passed over a small jar of ointment. “This will take some of the pain away.”

Hoping Saleh was right, Ross used his fingertips to gently spread the salve along the angry wound. He put a light bandage on for protection, but the bleeding had stopped. God willing, there would be no infection, though she would carry a scar for the rest of her life.

Murad, who had been watching sympathetically, helped Juliet sit up, then pressed a cup of heavily sugared tea into her hand. At first she simply stared down at it, as if drinking without removing her veil was too much effort. But after taking a deep breath, she managed to empty the cup in two long swallows.

Noticing how white her arm looked through the slashed sleeve, Ross decided that the tear should be repaired tonight. He always traveled with a basic sewing kit, so he dug it out, then closed up the torn fabric with crude but adequate stitches. Juliet sat cross-legged and uncommunicative throughout the procedure. Her mute suffering reminded him of an injured animal.

Saleh suggested, “Jalal, take some opium so you will sleep.”

“No,” she said brusquely. “I need only rest.” She rose rather shakily to her feet, then crossed to her sleeping rug, which she had laid out earlier in the evening. Taking that as a signal that it was bedtime, Murad and Saleh went to their own rugs and settled themselves for the night.

Ross decided that this was one time that discretion could be damned, so after banking the fire he rolled out his own rug beside Juliet’s. Since he doubted that he would be able to sleep, it should be safe to be near her, and he had a powerful, irrational need to stay as close as possible.

Juliet did not object to his presence. In fact, she had said scarcely a dozen words since the fight.

Most of the rest of the camp was already sleeping, and soon Saleh and Murad were also breathing with slow, deep regularity. Ross lay on his back and watched the night sky, acutely aware of Juliet’s nearness. She was also lying on her back, since that position was the most comfortable for her injured arm.

After a half-hour or so had passed, he guessed that he and Juliet might be the only two people in the caravan who were not sleeping. Tuned to every one of her tense breaths and slight, restless movements, he knew that she was awake and in pain. In a voice so soft it could not have been heard more than a yard away, he said, “Clever of you to get into a fight with Habib. If you wanted revenge for what I put you through by diving into the flooded wadi, you’ve got it.”

She responded with a breathy, scarcely audible chuckle. “I guess that makes it all worthwhile.” More seriously she added, “I’m sorry I asked you to do the cauterization. I don’t know what I was thinking of, but I don’t imagine that you much enjoyed doing it.”

“About as much as you enjoyed having it done,” he said dryly. “But someone had to.”

After another few minutes had gone by in silence, Juliet whispered, “You sew rather well, for a marquess.”

Ross smiled into the darkness. “You fight rather well, for a marchioness.”

She sighed. “None of my talents are the least bit ladylike.”

Her words dissolved the control that Ross had been exercising for the last two hours, and he could no longer restrain himself from touching her. She was only eighteen inches away, so he reached out and took her restless hand in his.

Her cool fingers moved and he thought she was pulling away. Instead, she turned her hand palm upward and twined her fingers through his in a gesture that expressed the night’s strain and pain more eloquently than words.

It was one of those odd moments between them when the past seemed more alive than the present, and Ross felt his tension begin to ease as her hand warmed under his.

In fact, to his drowsy surprise, it was even possible for both of them to sleep.

Using a couple of rugs to make a comfortable nest in the sand, Juliet lounged back with her head supported by a saddlebag and watched Murad prepare their dinner.

It had been a lazy day. In order to rest for the last and most grueling leg of the journey, Abdul Wahab had decreed that the caravan would stay three nights at the oasis of Merv. Their group was too large for the small caravansary, so many of the travelers had to make camp outside under the palm trees. That was fine with Juliet; she preferred sleeping outdoors rather than in the crowded confines of a caravansary cell.

Even in the shade, the afternoon was very warm and she found herself yawning. One advantage of a tagelmoust was that it was not necessary to cover a yawn with a hand, so she didn’t. If she got any lazier, she would turn into a rock.

Glancing across the campground, she saw Ross and Saleh approaching, carrying supplies they had bought in the town bazaar. She had been excused from that duty because of her arm, though it felt much better today than it had the day before. In a few days she would scarcely notice it.

After their purchases had been stored away, both men sat down on the opposite side of the fire, making idle conversation about the town. Ross’s previous journey across the Kara Kum had not included Merv, so the community was new to him.

Juliet paid no real attention to their words, for it was more enjoyable simply to watch her husband. That was another virtue of the tagelmoust: if she was careful, no one could tell where she was looking. She took full advantage of that fact when she was around Ross. Since a blond beard would be conspicuous, he was clean-shaven and his handsome face, sun-browned skin, and Asiatic dress made him the very image of a dashing desert explorer. Rather sourly Juliet reflected that he must be a sensation in London drawing rooms when he was between journeys.

As she did with great regularity, Juliet found herself pondering the oddities of their relationship. For example, there was the way she and Ross had held hands after the knife fight. They had both slept soundly until wakened by the dawn call to prayers; then they had wordlessly disengaged their interlocked fingers. In the day and a half since, neither of them had made a single reference to the fact that they had spent the night handfast, as if silence meant that it hadn’t happened. Not that Juliet was complaining, for she had been grateful for his gesture, but the incident had definitely been odd.

She gave herself credit for the fact that this time she had not ended up wrapped around him like ivy. She would have liked to think that was because she was becoming immune to his attractions, but knew that was not true. More likely, her injured arm had hurt so much that even her sleeping self had known better than to disturb it.

Juliet yawned again, wondering when dinner would be ready. For the first time since Sarakhs, they were having fresh meat, though the piece of lamb was a small one, in keeping with the humble way they were traveling. Murad was stewing the lamb with rice and vegetables, and it smelled delicious, but would not be ready for a while yet. That being the case, Juliet decided she might as well behave like a proper camel driver, so she pulled the end of her veil over her eyes and went to sleep.

Ross regarded his dozing wife with amusement. Her absolute lack of female fussiness had always been one of her most appealing traits, and she made such a convincing camel driver that even he had trouble remembering that she was a marchioness.

Saleh interrupted his thoughts by saying, “This morning I spoke with the kafila-bashi about Habib.”

Ross turned toward his companion. “And?”

“Abdul Wahab said that when he dismissed Habib from the caravan last night, he gave the man a stern warning not to make more trouble for you and Jalal. Apparently Habib seemed very cowed when he left.”

“I doubt that will last,” Ross said dryly. “Still, we’ll be here only another day. With luck, he’ll be too busy recovering from his leg injury to do much harm before we leave.”

Murad had brewed a pot of predinner tea, and the three men sipped in thoughtful silence. In spite of what Ross had just said to Saleh, he was not happy about the prospect of spending another day in Merv. Habib might be on crutches, but all he needed to cause trouble was his malicious tongue, and that was still in full working order.

Someone cleared his throat softly, and Ross looked up to see a small shabby Turkoman with a straggly beard. The fellow had been drifting around the campground, stopping here and there to exchange a few words, and had now reached their fire. He appeared to be a holy man, though his dress did not look like that of any of the orders of dervishes that Ross recognized.

The Turkoman bowed. “Salaam Aleikum.”

“And peace be upon you,” the three men murmured.

“I have heard that you are a ferengi, come all the way from England to learn your brother’s fate in Bokhara,” the man said, speaking directly to Ross. “My name is Abd. Never have I had the chance to speak to a man of your people. Will you tell me of the wonders of your great land?”

Ross’s eyes narrowed. Apparently Habib had been talking about him; as a result, it appeared that Ross was going to be put to another theological test. Well, he had always done well with those, and this particular dervish seemed innocuous enough. “I am called Khilburn. You are welcome at our fire. I will be honored to speak with you of my country, and beg that you will in turn tell me more of your own people.”

As Ross introduced his companions and Murad poured more tea, the Turkoman knelt with the air of a man settling down for a lengthy discussion. “You are a Christian, my lord?” When Ross nodded, Abd said, “Tell me of your beliefs so that I may better know how our religions differ.”

Thinking that that could be dangerous, Ross said, “I would prefer to discuss how our religions resemble each other.”

The dervish’s face lit up. “Truly thou art a man of wisdom. In your view, what are the similarities?”

“The desert is the home of three great religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,” Ross replied. “In these bleak and beautiful lands, there is little to stand between a man and the awareness of God’s power. I think that is why the people of the book all believe so strongly in the One God.”

Abd tilted his head to one side like a curious bird. “Being ignorant of the world that lies beyond the desert, I do not fully understand your meaning.”