“Hold!”
A shepherd blocked the path. It would be simple enough to run him down, but for the fact that he held a massive bow with an iron-tipped shaft nocked, aimed, and ready to loose. Azzad sighed, dropped the reins, and held both hands open and away from his body.
“I mean you no wrong,” he said. “I am but a traveler, alone and unarmed.”
He heard the men approach behind him. Pressure of one heel turned Khamsin once more to face them. Too late, he remembered the tempting glint of silver on the stallion’s saddle and gold from the necklace on his own chest.
“Who are you?” the eldest of the men demanded, teeth showing yellow, like an aged wolf’s, through his thick white beard. “Why are you here?”
“My name is Azzad. I am from a faraway land and seek only to pass through your mountains.”
This did not impress. The elder came forward, leather boots soundless on the gravelly road, his iron-headed staff poised. When he was within three paces of Khamsin, the stallion took advantage of the lax reins and stretched his head forward, teeth bared. The old man stopped and glared, but neither flinched nor retreated.
“I apologize,” Azzad said humbly. “He is not kindly disposed to strangers.”
After a moment, the man nodded thoughtfully. Over his shoulder he said, “This one is safe. Let him pass.”
“But—Abb Sharouf—”
Azzad repressed an untimely impulse to laugh. Father of Sheep? Either he had peculiar habits or there was a lack of women—
“I have decided!” snarled the old man. “Further, he may have water for himself and his horse. Further, a loaf of bread and a portion of fresh-cooked meat. Further, a woolen blanket for the nights he will spend in the high country. Further—”
“You are too generous, Abb Sharouf,” Azzad said, wishing nothing more than the furtherance of his journey.
The interruption won him another glare. “Further, a satchel of herbs to ease his breathing in the heights.” He reversed his staff and thunked the metal tip on a rock, striking a spark. Khamsin danced away from it, rolling his eyes. “I have said it, and it will be.”
Azzad was escorted silently up the road to the village. The promised water came from a well. The food he ate hurriedly. The blanket was tied to his saddle; Khamsin snorted a little at its powerful stink of sheep. The small leather sack of herbs was given over with a curt admonition to brew it strong every morning. He felt their eyes on his back as he rode up the slope, and as he passed into a stand of trees, he heard them begin to argue behind him.
Expelling a long sigh, he shook his head, thanked Acuyib for the blessing of survival, and followed the narrowing trail up into the mountains.
He did not understand then, of course. He still did not believe. Thirty days later, he was living in the town of Sihabbah. He found lodging for himself and the noble Khamsin, and employment caring for a rich man’s horses and donkeys, having decided to hoard the pearls until he could travel to the great city of Hazganni in the spring.
It was on the thirty-first day, with but three days until the new year of 612, when the young woman and her father and brothers and uncles and cousins came to Sihabbah, that he finally began to comprehend what the friendship and protection of the Shagara truly meant.
5
Angry voices outside in the stable yard made Azzad swing around and squint into the sudden sunlight flooding the stable. Shadows loomed in the doorway, darkening the cobbles and his dazzled eyes. As his vision adjusted, the rake in his hands clattered to the stones.
“He is the one who despoiled my wife’s only daughter! Seize him!”
So startled that he didn’t even have time to think about running, Azzad found his arms wrenched painfully behind his back. His feet were kicked out from under him and his body unceremoniously lugged out into the stable yard. There they were: the father, the brothers, and eleven other men—five old, six young, all furious, all armed with knives, all righteously intent on shedding his blood over the flagstones he himself kept clean. The girl huddled by the water trough, wearing an ugly brown cloak, weeping.
Azzad was deposited ungently on the ground. He lay there, flat on his back, wondering dazedly how this could have happened. This mountainside town was not Bayyid Qarhia—it was nowhere near Bayyid Qarhia. He’d made sure of it before he decided to tarry the winter here. And yet here they were, practically slavering at the mouth now that they’d found him.
The girl had bungled it. He saw it in her reddened eyes when she dared a glance at him. Somehow, despite his excellent instructions, she’d said the wrong thing, and her father had fixed on Azzad as the malefactor. And now Azzad was sprawling in a stable yard like a calf at a gelding party, with all her male relations holding carving knives.
The village elder, Abb Ferrhan, and Azzad’s own employer, Bazir al-Gallidh, respectfully invited the father to explain why the peace of Sihabbah had been invaded by knife-wielding strangers. With every word more and more people crowded around; this was the best entertainment since a vagabond troupe of acrobats and mimes had come through at the last harvest festival.
“And then what did she do,” cried the father, “when her mother asked if she’d been with him, but weep and cry out that she had not?”
“A woman protecting her lover,” said Abb Ferrhan, stroking his scraggly white beard, “as plain as the sun in the sky.”
“Or a woman telling the truth,” mused Bazir al-Gallidh, whose family was the richest in Sihabbah and whose name was a byword for exquisite manners. “If he were the guilty one and if she wanted him for her husband, would she not admit to his name?”
“It could have been no one else, I tell you!” the father raged, unable in his fury to accord the nobleman proper respect.
“You could wait and see if the child looks like him!” someone in the crowd called out, to general laughter and the wronged family’s increased humiliation.
“Better like him than like the mother,” muttered Mazzud, one of the stable hands, who had no manners at all and had never seen the need for any that Azzad could tell.
“Ayia, Azzad?” asked Bazir. “Did you sire this woman’s child?”
“No!” He struggled to sit up and repeated, “No! By my hope for Acuyib’s Light and Glory when I die, I did not.”
“Liar!” shrieked her father. He and his kinsmen had to be physically restrained from slicing into Azzad. Some of them had brought two knives.
“What’s all this?” demanded a new voice. “Brother, what goes on here?”
“Zellim,” said Bazir, “you are come at the right moment, as always. We have need of a legal turn of mind.”
The situation was explained to the eminent mou’ammi, who practiced law in faraway Hazganni. Zellim al-Gallidh listened, eyed Azzad and then the girl, pursed his lips, and shrugged elegant shoulders beneath a snowy white robe.
The father folded his arms across his chest. “Now that you have heard all, you must agree—they will marry at once!”
The girl burst into renewed tears. Zellim—not quite so polite as his brother—winced at the volume. The father, belatedly realizing the foolishness of annoying the most important people he had ever met, snarled at her to be silent.
“Stop that!” Azzad ordered before he could think about it.
“You see? You see? He protects her! Defends her! He is her lover!”