Through the curtain that divided us, I addressed Tom. “Thank you for giving him the rifles.”
“You’re welcome,” Tom said. After a moment he added, “I would have given my left arm to go with them. These raids have been causing no end of trouble for the Aritat, and I suspect it’s because of us.”
The enmity between the two tribes went back a long way … but from what I could tell, it was not always so active as this. “I fear you may be correct.”
“I don’t know what to do about it, either,” Tom said. “This is about more than just our scholarly curiosity; there are governments involved. The caliph is the one who told them to gather dragons and eggs for us.”
I nodded, even though Tom could not see me through the thick goat-hair fabric of the curtain. “All the more reason for us to reach a point where we no longer need supply from the desert.”
Then I paused, thinking. My thoughts were interrupted shortly thereafter by Tom saying, “I recognize that kind of silence. What are you thinking about?”
I smiled ruefully. “I am thinking that we ought to have had this conversation before I dressed for bed, so that I could come to the other side of the curtain without being completely scandalous. But I am also wondering why the Banu Safr should care.”
“About the dragons? I’ve been considering that myself. They supported the old caliphate, you know, before the Murasids came to power. They may just be eager to interfere with anything the caliph is trying to do.”
Unlovely though it is to admit, I hoped Tom was right. That would mean Scirland’s involvement here was peripheral to this conflict, rather than central. We would merely be an excuse: the spark that lit the bonfire, not the fuel itself.
These thoughts, combined with worry for Suhail, made sleep difficult that night. Ordinarily I sleep like a very tired log in the field, but all I could seem to manage was a fitful doze, from which I was roused by every little sound: a camel grunting, men laughing around a distant fire, Tom turning restlessly in his own bed. I had just made up my mind to call out and ask if he, too, was still awake, when I felt a breeze across my cheek.
Had I resided for longer in that tent, I might have understood more quickly. As it was, I thought Andrew had finished his watch and lifted the flap to come in. Then my sluggish brain pointed out that the breeze was coming from the wrong direction for that.
I rolled over just in time to meet a hand bearing a damp piece of cloth.
This hand reacted quickly to my movement, clamping itself over my nose and mouth, muffling all sound. Someone was kneeling over me, almost invisible in the darkness. I shoved at his arm, trying to dislodge his hand, and kicked with my legs, hoping to hit something that might topple over and make a sound. All I caught was air, and my fiercest efforts made no mark on his arm; I cursed the way fieldwork destroyed my fingernails, leaving me without claws.
But it was not failure that made my struggles subside. My mind was lifting free of my body, floating into the night sky on a dragon’s wings; and then I had no awareness of anything at all.
* * *
I awakened on the back of a camel, galloping through the darkness.
My immediate response to this was not heroic in the slightest: I vomited. An intense nausea wracked me, and it was not made any better by the swaying motion of the camel, when night gave me no stable point upon which to fix my gaze.
The man in front of me growled under his breath. I had, on instinct, turned my head aside—but this had not entirely spared him. As my senses returned, however, I felt no guilt whatsoever for this. For I realized that he had drugged me (or if not him, then one of his comrades); and having accomplished this, he had kidnapped me.
My voice answered but weakly when I tried to shout. Even that feeble croak, however, made my kidnapper pull a curved knife from his sash and hold it up so that it caught what light was to be had. The message was clear, and I fell silent.
Shouting would not have done much good anyway. I could tell by the terrain—flattish desert, quite unlike the wadi I had gone to sleep in—that we were no longer anywhere near the Aritat camp. Sound carries far across the open desert, but at this distance, the best I could hope for was to be mistaken for a hyena.
What other options did I have? I tried to force my disoriented brain into motion. Even my best efforts, however, turned up little. By wiggling I might have unbalanced myself enough to fall from the back of the camel; this would have earned me only bruises and perhaps some broken bones. I could not hope to overpower the man in front of me, and even if I did, there were others around us who would subdue me rapidly enough.
The thought of others made me look about. I soon spotted Tom, bare-chested and still unconscious, riding pillion on another camel. Far too late, it came to me that the sound I had taken for restlessness on his part had likely been another kidnapper drugging him. Were it not for that blasted curtain … no, even then matters would not have ended well. They would simply have synchronized their attacks more precisely; or matters would have become violent. I took some minor solace in knowing they did not wish us dead. It would have been far easier to slit our throats than to spirit us out of camp.
Did the men of the Aritat follow us? With my hands lashed to the saddle, I could not turn to watch our trail. It depended on whether our captors had gotten us out quietly, I supposed. It might be that no one even knew we were gone. Once they did …
I slumped, trying not to lean against the man in front of me. (Oh, if only propriety had compelled them to put me on my own camel.) The best warriors of the clan were gone, pursuing the raiders. Had that been a diversion? Either way, I was not sure how many men could be spared for a second pursuit. Andrew would not be held in camp, of that I was sure—but alone, he could not do very much.
Such calculations were not cheering, but they gave me some minor distraction from the bone-deep chill that soon robbed me of all feeling in my bare toes. I tucked my feet against the camel’s warm sides, curled in on myself, and endured. Dawn came as a blessing, even though we did not stop; we rode on until it was nearly midday. Then we halted amid some rocks that offered shade for a few, while the remainder propped up their cloaks to form miniature tents and huddled inside.
By then I was tormented with thirst. The day was not hot, but the air was terribly dry, and I had not had anything to drink for hours. Pride made me want to refuse when my riding partner offered me a waterskin; I knew I would be grateful to him for it, and did not want to give him such influence over me. But I would need water eventually, and the longer I delayed, the more precious the gift would seem. I took it and drank: one swallow only, after which he pulled the container from my hands.
They kept Tom separate from me, in the shade of a different rock. Unprotected though I might be in my nightgown, he had it worse, fair as he was; his shoulders and back were already painfully red. “Please,” I said to my captor, in my very best Akhian, city-inflected though it was. “Have you any robe or cloak that might shelter us from the sun?”
He made no reply, but only scowled at me. Then he got up and went to a man I promptly marked as their leader. Hope rose in my heart—but when he came back, the only item of clothing he bore was a gag, which he stuffed into my protesting mouth. Tom was similarly gagged soon after; and so we remained for the rest of the journey, except when freed to take water and food.
(I wondered at the time why they had not gagged us from the start. I cannot say for certain, but I believe they knew the drug they had used—later identified as ether—would cause vomiting after we roused; to gag us would have been to risk us choking on our own spew. Which raised any number of interesting questions about how they had obtained ether, and learned the use of it. The chemical was first discovered by an Akhian chemist, Shuraiq ibn Raad al-Adrasi … but that does not mean it is commonly found in the middle of the desert.)
Once a little time had passed, we mounted and rode again. By nightfall it was apparent to me that any pursuers were unlikely to catch us before we reached
enemy territory. It was not merely cold that made me shiver as I tried to sleep.
Long-time readers of these memoirs may recall I had been kidnapped in the night once before, during the expedition to Vystrana. The difference between the two situations, however, could not have been more stark. There it had been my own foolishness that put me at risk; here I had been doing nothing more foolish than trying to sleep in my own tent. There my captors had been relatively decent men: smugglers, to be sure, but more interested in making a living by illicit means than sowing mayhem. Here it was apparent that my captors only needed me alive, and any suffering I might endure along the way was of no concern to them.
I did not think I could talk my way out of this one.
I lay on the hard ground and stared up at the sky, watching the stars swim back and forth. When I blinked the tears away, my gaze lit upon a constellation I recognized: Kouneli, the Rabbit. The sight was so unexpectedly comforting that I almost broke down in a mixture of sobs and laughter. There, I thought. At least one thing here is familiar to you.
It also gave me a notion of which direction we traveled in. Our path curved back and forth somewhat to follow the terrain, but overall we had been heading southeast. That might prove useful, and so I filed the information away.
We rode throughout the next day, with the usual pause when the sun was at its height, and arrived at another camp just before sunset. By then Tom was in a wretched state, his skin blistered from overexposure to the sun. I had unbraided my hair during that first halt and used it to shelter my neck as best I could, but my feet were almost as badly off as Tom’s back. Any plan for escape would have to account for those injuries, or we would not get very far.
I was half afraid they would leave us in a heap on the bare dirt. But no: we were dragged into a tent, and after one of the men gave us water, he left our gags off. I supposed there was no reason to fear noise now.
It meant we could talk at last. “Tom,” I said urgently. “Are you all right?”
An inane question, of course—and yet one asks it all the time, in such moments. He tried to sit up, and made the most extraordinarily unpleasant noise when his movement brought part of his blistered arm into contact with the ground. “Stay still,” I said, and looked about for anything that might help. The tent was very bare, but there was a jar not too far away that proved to contain more water. I conveyed some to Tom in a cheap tin dipper, then drank my own fill. Then I found a nearby rag—it looked as if it had once been a man’s headscarf—and soaked it before laying the fabric across the worst of the blisters. Tom hissed through his teeth when it touched him, but then he sagged and said, “That helps. Thank you.”
“I assume these are the Banu Safr,” I said, as much for distraction as because I thought it needed saying. “If Suhail and the others went out to get a few camels back from their enemies, we can only hope they will do as much for us.”
“One hopes. Yes.” Tom shifted position, wincing. “Isabella, if you have a chance to get free, then go. Don’t wait for me.”
“Don’t be absurd,” I said, my heart beating so strongly I could taste my pulse. “I would not last two hours out there.” But he was not the only one thinking of escape. Two days and a night: a camel could go that long without water, easily, and a person might survive it. That assumed, however, that we could find our way back as efficiently as we had come. Under the circumstances, leaving without a supply of water would be suicidal.
Nor would I leave without Tom. They had not killed us … but if one vanished, who was to say the other would remain safe? (If I may be permitted the exaggeration of calling our situation there “safe.”) I said, “Now that we are here—and no longer gagged—we may be able to talk to someone. Negotiate a trade, perhaps. There must be something they want.”
“Ransom,” Tom speculated. “It will take them a long time to write to Pensyth in Qurrat, or Lord Ferdigan in Sarmizi. Longer to hear back. We may be here for a while.”
On that cheering note, we fell silent.
I had time to re-wet the rag twice before they came for us. One of the men cursed when he realized we had taken water from the jar; I presumed that meant we were in his tent. But not for long, as they dragged us upright and took us across camp to another shelter.
A woman waited for us there. The sight of her startled me: I had been thinking of the Banu Safr only as our enemies, and had therefore conceived of this as a military camp. But of course that was absurd; they were a tribe like any other, and had women, children, all the elements of ordinary life. I would have noticed them sooner, had I not been so concerned with the simple task of walking. I had pressed my feet often against the sides of the camel to keep the soles from being burnt, but the tops were in poor shape, and the rocks on the ground were sharp besides.
She took me behind a curtain to inspect me, while someone else presumably did the same to Tom. “My name is Isabella,” I said quietly to her as she moved around me. “What is your name?” She made no answer. I tried again, my Akhian broken more thoroughly than usual by the tension of my circumstances. “Please, water? My feet—pain. Cool is good.” But it seemed she was not there to treat me, for no help was forthcoming.
The inspection done, I was pulled back out into the main part of the tent, where a man waited. Tom soon joined me, and was pushed onto his knees at my side. I mentally identified the man as their sheikh; his clothing was finer than the others’, and he stood as one who is accustomed to wielding authority. To us he said, “You speak Akhian?”
Tom nodded, swaying on his knees with exhaustion. I said, “A little.”
“You are sojana,” he said. “Do you understand this?”
“Prisoners?” I said in Scirling, which of course did no good at all. Thinking of the words we had used for our dragons, I shifted to Akhian and said, “Captive.”
He nodded. “Please,” I said before he could go on, “what do you want? From us, or from others. Money? Camels?” I did not know the word for “ransom,” and could not assemble a good enough sentence to explain that I would be happy to negotiate.
The sheikh shook his head. “Someone else will come for you. Until then, you stay.”
Someone else? I doubted he meant the Aritat. Some unknown party, perhaps? The Banu Safr were rebellious; they did not have a city sheikh this man might answer to. But there could be a sheikh of greater renown, someone leading a different clan of his tribe. Or perhaps I was wrong, and he was not the sheikh. That man might be out even now with the raiding party that had stolen the camels, and this one waiting for his return.
“If we—” I stopped, frustrated with my linguistic limitations. I did not know how to ask whether there was any practice among the nomads that amounted to a white flag, a signal of peaceable parlay, under which we might be permitted to communicate with our friends and prevent them from doing anything foolish. I was not even certain I wanted to prevent them: as much as I feared the consequences if they staged a counter-raid, that might be our best chance at freedom. Once we were transferred to that unknown third party, who knew what would happen.
The sheikh did not wait for me to sort out what I wanted to say, much less how to say it. He left the tent, and Tom and I were alone with our captors.
TEN
Kidnapper, Brother, and Wife—Oddities in camp—The first attempt—Another breeze—A less dreadful journey—Suhail departs
I was able to guess some things about our captors. Based on physical resemblances and the way the woman behaved, I surmised that the two men who slept in the tent were brothers, and she was the wife of one. The husband had participated in the kidnapping, but the brother had not. I never did learn their names for certain; I thought the brother might be called Muyassir, but they were taciturn around us and addressed one another rarely. I thought of them as Kidnapper, Brother, and Wife. Kidnapper, Brother, and Wife
Tom and I were tethered to the two central poles of the tent, with tough leather cords we could not easily break nor unknot. These gave us some
freedom of movement, but not much; and in any case neither of us was in a hurry to go anywhere. Tom spent most of his time lying facedown on the rugs that covered the ground, protecting his burned skin as much as he could. Despite his care, some of the blisters broke; any time I was given water, I used some of it to rinse the sores, hoping to prevent infection. When I moved about the tent, I did so on all fours, with my feet up in the air to keep them from scraping against anything. I could only do this in the brief periods when we were alone: to show the soles of the feet is a terrible insult in Akhian society, and the first time I put mine up to protect them, Brother retaliated with an immediate blow. This almost led to disaster, as Tom lunged to stop him from striking me again, and was himself struck in turn. I threw myself to the ground, babbling apologies in a mixture of languages, and learned my lesson.
I did achieve one minor victory early on. Our kidnappers had dragged me out of my tent in my nightgown, and I was exceedingly aware of this fact at every turn. I soon hit upon the tactic of huddling under one of the carpets, demanding in a loud voice to be provided with suitable covering against the eyes of all these strange men. Before long Wife took up my cause; it was the one point upon which we were united. I do not think back on the woman with any fondness, and I doubt it was my well-being which motivated her to speak; but I am grateful to her for that small measure of support, whatever the reasoning behind it.