"Water? Oh, please!" Annette said. The other took more thought, and thought wasn't easy. "I'll try to sit up. It has to be better than this." Maybe she could escape when they untied her. It worked in the movies.
By the time they got through dealing with her, she decided she would never take another movie seriously as long as she lived. She was still too sick and woozy to run, let alone to fight anybody. But even if she hadn't been, the man who let her down from the horse called a couple of friends over. One of them had a pistol. The other one had a musket. Those weapons weren't accurate out to any distance. But the bandits couldn't very well miss if she was only a meter or two away.
They didn't come any closer than that, either. "You're the one who sent Ibrahim flying, aren't you?" the fellow with the pistol said.
Her memory of the fight was fuzzy, but she nodded. A moment later, she wished she hadn't—pain stabbed through her battered head. She was lucky she didn't have a fractured skull— or, for all she knew, maybe she did.
"In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful, could you teach others that trick?" the bandit asked eagerly. "We're all still laughing at Ibrahim because of the way he came down, thump!"
"Maybe," Annette said vaguely. She had to try three times before she could climb up into the saddle. She sat there swaying, doing her best not to see double. She pointed a shaky finger at the pistoleer. "And how dare you call God 'the compassionate, the merciful' when you speak of fighting tricks?"
All the bandits thought that was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. "Hear how she talks-—like a qadi al-Islam" the pistoleer said.
"She was an honest judge, Daud, for you did wrong," replied the man with the musket.
The brigand who'd let Annette down from the horse now tied her feet under it. He straightened up, another length of rope in his hand. "She is a warrior maid and a scholar, both at once," she said. "Truly she will bring a great price."
"Inshallah" the other two murmured—if God wills it.
"Here," the first man said to Annette. "Give me your hands, and I will tie them to the reins. We don't want you getting away— oh, no, indeed."
Numbly, she did. He knew what he was doing with ropes. He tied her tight enough to keep her from getting loose, but not tight enough to cut off her circulation. This all seemed more like a bad dream than reality—except for her headache, which was much too real. But I'm supposed to start at Ohio State soon! She wanted to shout it. She wanted to scream it. But she knew too well it wouldn't do her the least bit of good.
She looked around. If she moved her head very slowly, she could do that without hurting herself too badly. "Where are my mother and father?" she asked. It wasn't quite like screaming, Mommy!—although she felt like doing that, too.
The bandits put their heads together. After half a minute or so, the one with the pistol said, "Our friends who are going on to Marseille must have taken them."
"We're . . . not going on to Marseille?" Annette asked. Another hope crashed and burned. Dad might have been able to use his radio—if a robber hadn't stolen it. Even if a robber did, she and her family might have been recognized there. Crosstime Traffic people could have bought them or stolen them away. That might still happen with her mother and father. Annette gulped. "Where—are we going?"
"Madrid," the pistoleer answered. "A really great city with a really great market. Madrid!"
Now Jacques knew what Khadija looked like. The slavers had stripped the veils off all the Muslim women they'd captured. Their modesty wasn't worth protecting any more—a slave had no modesty, except what the master granted. And buyers would want to see what they were getting before they parted with their dinars.
Some of the Muslim women took it very badly. By the way they fussed and carried on, the bandits might have stripped them naked. And so the bandits might have, if they'd wanted to—who could have stopped them? Those women tried to cover their faces with their hands and turned their heads away whenever they saw a man looking at them. When men looked at them from two directions at once, they didn't know what to do. It might have been funny if it weren't so sad.
Khadija wasn't like that. She rode along like a captive princess—her attitude told the world that, whatever had happened to her, it wasn't her fault. She had a big, nasty bruise on one side of her face. A slaver must have had to hit her hard to make her give up. Somehow, that didn't surprise Jacques.
But for the bruise, she was very pretty—not beautiful, but very pretty. He'd already known she had large brown eyes. Her nose was strongly arched, but not too big. She had the finest, whitest, straightest teeth of anyone he'd ever seen. His own teeth were good. Even his wisdom teeth were coming in without giving him torments, the way so many people's did. But her teeth were better. He had to admit it. A good thing the bandit hadn't broken them when he hit her. Of course, he might have been careful about that, because broken teeth would make her worth less. The bruise would go away. Broken teeth were there for good.
The brigands didn't mind if friends among their captives rode with other friends. Jacques was shy at first about moving up next to Khadija, but he soon did. She was the only person in this luckless crew he cared anything about. His fellow guards—older men—were gloomy and sour, and they had reason to be. They had to know they'd likely go to the mines or to galley slavery or something like that—a short life, and not a merry one.
All Khadija said when they first got close enough to talk was, "So they caught you, too."
"I'm afraid so," Jacques said. "How are you?"
"My head hurts," she answered matter-of-factly.
"I believe it," he said. "The whole left side's all over purple."
"Is it?" Her mouth twisted. "Well, I'm lucky not to have a mirror, then. What happened to you?"
He knew what she was asking. Did you just give up? She would have scorned him if he'd quit without putting up a fight. But he hadn't, and he had the wound to prove it, even if it was on the side away from her. "I got shot in the leg," he said, not without pride.
"Oh!" Khadija's mouth got bigger still. "How is it?"
"It hurts." He was as matter-of-fact as she had been. "But it's not too bad. No broken bone, and I'm not hamstrung. As long as the wound doesn't go bad, I'll be all right in a while." Telling that to himself—telling that to the world—made him feel a little less as if a wildcat were gnawing on the leg. A little.
"I hope so." She sounded as if she meant it. "They're taking us to Madrid. Isn't that dreadful?"
Jacques only shrugged. "Madrid? Marseille? Naples? What difference does it make to a slave?"
"It makes a difference to me," Khadija said. "My family and friends are in Marseille. If I went on the block there, they'd buy me and set me free. My father and mother are on the way there now, with the rest of the slavers." Up till then, she'd been strong as an iron bar. But at last her face crumpled. "And I'm all alone here, and I don't know what to do."
He couldn't even reach out and pat her hand, not when he was tied to his horse's reins. In French, he said, "You're not alone here unless you want to be." He wasn't sure he could get the exact meaning across in Arabic, and he didn't want her to misunderstand him here.
She didn't say anything for most of a minute, and her face didn't show anything, either. He remembered she was a master merchant's daughter. She would have more ways than a veil to hide her thoughts. When at last she smiled, the sun might have come out, even though it was already shining. "That is very kind," she answered, also in French. "Truly we are partners in misfortune." She added, "That is the kind of fortune that never misses."