An hour went by, and another, and intermittently Khai would start awake at the cry of some creature of the night; so that when Kindu gently shook his shoulder, he jerked upright with a small cry of alarm.
“Shh!” whispered the black. “All is well, Khai, and it is my turn to keep the watch. You can crawl under the first blanket beside Nundi, where I have left a warm space, or beneath the second blanket and warm a place for yourself. Sleep well.”
A mist had drifted over the long grasses, wreathing them in slowly swirling tendrils that glowed silvery-gray in the moonlight. Moisture dripped from Khai’s nose and his flesh felt cold and numb. Without a word, he handed Kindu his sword and crept through the gap in the thorns. He stepped around the first blanket, a dark lumpy mass on the bare ground, and got down on his knees beside the second. Whoever slept beneath it, more than sufficient blanket had been left over to accommodate Khai. With a sigh of relief he slipped under the rough weave, curled up and almost immediately began to fall asleep.
A moment later, in his final seconds of awareness, he felt a warm hand touch his cold arm, then the warmth of soft breasts against his back and rounded thighs against the back of his own thighs. And when his body was as warm as her own and his breath had slowed into sleep, then the girl carefully wrapped her arms round his neck and hugged him close in the cradle of the night. Sobbing quietly, she rocked him in her arms as if he were the young husband whose body the slavers had tortured and hung from a tree in the clearing where Khai first found them… .
Morning came with a golden glow low on the eastern horizon. With that, and with a warning of the terror to come.
Nundi, hearing an excited babble of human voices, the whining of dogs and breaking of branches in the forest close by, quickly woke up the others and breathlessly chivvied them into activity. With the sounds of pursuit moving closer, they left the patch of thorn bushes and headed out across the mile-wide strip of grassland toward the wall of forest on the other side.
Long before they could gain the cover of the trees, a cry went up behind them and they heard the high, nervous barking of saluki trackers. Looking back, Khai could make out not only the brightly colored garb of slavers as they burst from the forest wall in a long line, but also the dull yellow of Khemish soldiery. It fully appeared that the slavers had asked for military aid in rounding up the runaways, and that Arabban numbers had been heavily supplemented with troops out of Phemor.
Moreover, when he had looked back, Khai had been astonished to glimpse, at a distance of some three hundred yards along the grass-belt, a second party of Nubian slaves. There were at least a dozen of them and in all probability they, too, had spent the night in thorn-bush bomas. They had been sufficiently far away from Khai’s party, however, that their presence had been unsuspected. Now, flushed into flight, they too raced for the green and protective wall of the forest.
As Khai bounded through the last of the long grass and plunged headlong into the shade of the trees, hot on the trail of his more fleet, completely panic-stricken companions, suddenly he found his mind working overtime. There had been something about the shape of that curved line of pursuers glimpsed at the far side of the grass-belt: a crescent-shaped formation closing like a net. He had seen it before: it was the formation used by beaters when they were beating up game for the hunting nobles of Khem. And Khai knew at once that he, his friends and the larger party of Nubians on their right flank were all being driven into a trap!
Actually, the trap had been set for the larger group of escapees, so that the smaller party was a bonus for the jubilant slavers, but Khai could not know that. He only knew that there was danger up ahead, and a cry of warning was already growing on his lips when disaster struck. He tripped on a root and flew forward, the side of his head glancing against the bole of a tree, his body thrown down on springy ground in a crumpled tangle. For a moment, his senses continued to function—if in a sort of slow-motion—and he stared dazedly into the heart of the forest, where the forms of his black friends were already disappearing into shrubs and undergrowth.
Kindu had seen him take his tumble, was heading back for him when two Arabbans sprang out from the bushes. The black gave a cry of fury and gutted one of the slavers with a single stroke of his sword, then smashed the hilt of his steaming weapon into the face of the other. But his efforts were useless and he could do nothing for Khai. As the bushes seemed suddenly to teem with slavers and soldiers coming on the scene from the flanks, so Kindu threw a last despairing look at the white boy where he lay, then turned and hurled himself after his black companions. That was the last Khai was to see of Kindu for almost four years….
III
Back to the River
Khai regained consciousness to the sound of feet trampling leaves and grasses. He remembered enough of what had gone before to know that he must keep his eyes closed. There was a rocking motion and his body swayed in a sort of hammock, so that he soon came to realize he was being carried on a makeshift stretcher. When he finally did open his eyes a fraction, it was to squint up through high treetops to an evening sky. A breeze moved those high branches—a familiar wind from the north— and it brought to Khai a smell he had not expected to know again for some days: the smell of the Nile, which he recognized as surely as the lines in his own palm.
As he closed his eyes again the soldiers who carried him began to talk to each other, confirming the fact that indeed he had been transported many miles back toward his starting point. “Fifteen, sixteen miles at least,” the man at the head of the stretcher complained. “Sixteen miles through the forest and the heat of the day—and for what?”
“Don’t ask me,” the one at the back grunted. “Those damned Arabbans get all the fun. We round up their runaways for them ... they carry ’em off to Asorbes and sell ’em! What justice is there in that?”
“Not a lot, I’ll agree,” the first voice replied. “They get the black wenches and we get a white boy! And he gets, uh!—heavier with every mile, damn his hide!”
The one at the back stumbled a little and cursed, then answered: “Aye, and I rather fancied a firm black tit to chew on. Huh! Some hope…. Who do you reckon the lad is?”
“Well, it’s obvious he’s no Nubian. A hostage, that’s what he was—like Captain Pan-em said—or a prisoner, at any rate. Maybe there’ll be something in this for us after all. I mean, we saved his life, didn’t we? Took him off that bunch of blacks before they made off into the forest. The slavers got the main pack, but not that lot. There’s no telling what sort of tortures those blacks would have worked on this poor lad but for us.”
“This poor lad? You were complaining about how heavy he is a minute ago! And anyway, what was he doing with that bow of his—and the knife?”
“Look, he was running, wasn’t he?” the man in front answered with a patient sigh, as if he were explaining to a small child. “We must have come on them just as he’d made his escape. My guess is that he was probably out hunting yesterday with his father or friends, and the runaways picked him up as a hostage on their way home. Pity we didn’t get the black dogs!”