A black brow arched in a parchment-brittle face. “Truly a lordling, accustomed to command.”
“I want to see him! Now!”
It took all his strength to put force into the order—and by the amusement flickering in Chal Kabir’s eyes, the old man knew it. He gestured with one gnarled hand to young Fadhil, who disappeared out the tent flap, brushing against wind chimes as he did so. “He will bring the horse around. A splendid animal. We will accept him in payment for your life.”
Azzad bit back a hot retort. Fear and relief had followed each other too quickly, leaving him dizzy. He must be cautious. Laws of hospitality aside—those same laws that in theory compelled these people to tend him without requiring recompense—Chal Kabir had mentioned tests. This might be another.
It was.
Chal Kabir snorted a laugh. “Ayia, you can control yourself. Good, good.”
Movement in the triangle of light at the tent flap caught Azzad’s gaze. Khamsin: whole and sleek and fractious, needing three boys to hang onto his halter. A whistle from Azzad calmed him at once, and he followed the boys decorously enough out of Azzad’s sight.
“Interesting,” commented Chal Kabir.
“He obeys no one but me,” Azzad said, sinking wearily back down onto the pillows. “We have been each other’s since the moment of his birth.”
“You claim brotherhood with a horse?”
“With this horse, yes.”
“And he allows you onto his back?”
Azzad peered up at the old man. “I trained him.”
“Is it difficult, this training?”
Outraged: “You don’t think I’d hitch him behind a cart or a plow, do you?”
Chal Kabir had a closed countenance behind his gray-streaked beard, but Azzad suddenly knew that this was precisely what horses were used for here. Wherever here was.
“We will speak more later, when you are stronger. Sururi zoubh.” He touched his fingertips to his brow; Azzad recognized the ancient sign for I mean this with my thoughts, and gulped because the hand had not touched the chest. That would have meant I mean this with my soul. But what the old man said was harmless enough—a simple wish for sweet sleep.
Azzad watched him limp across the sunlit brilliance of the rugs. “Chal Kabir? If it is permitted, please do me the favor of thanking the ladies Meryem and Leyliah for their good care of me.”
Beneath the brown, dusty robe, the bent spine suddenly straightened—and not without pain, to judge by the flinching shoulders. Chal Kabir did not turn as he said flatly, “No women have been inside this tent while you have been within it.” And then he was gone, and the flap closed, and heated darkness shut him in once more.
Azzad folded his arms behind his head. The old man had lied to him. Why?
Ayia, it was improper for a woman to be inside a tent with a man not her husband or brother or son or father—even if the man was drugged to the eyes and incapable of lifting a finger, let alone his male member. Having satisfactorily explained Chal Kabir’s lie, he began puzzling out the truth.
First, who were these people? The tent proclaimed nomads, yet Chal Kabir had implied that they used horses to plow the ground. No meandering tribe he’d ever heard of cultivated crops. The only water was poisonous—he had hazy memories of the water hole, Ma’ar Yazhrad, the old man had called it, and “bitter drinking” it truly had been. But by then he was too stuporous with heat and hunger to have any idea what he was doing. He recalled very well, however, the forbidding land around him: crystalline salt flats, immense sand dunes, ravines dry for a thousand years and littered with sharp stones. What plow could turn this cracked and tainted soil? And even if it could, what could possibly grow?
In retrospect, the look of the desert surprised him. He’d always thought that across The Steeps lay endless sand dunes of the kind that formed the borders of Rimmal Madar beyond the mountain stronghold of the alMa’aliq. Horses could not pull wagons through shifting sand like that, but they could over the hard-baked, unyielding earth he remembered from the time before his collapse.
And remember it he suddenly did—the suffocating heat even at night, the dwindling of his supplies, the pain in his thigh, the blisters suppurating on his feet. What had made him think he could traverse this waste? Sleeping by day in the scanty shade of rock outcroppings, dreaming of a sand-tiger stalking patiently behind him and a screaming hawk flying ahead of him, unsure when he woke which was real, or if either could be real. And then that last day, the churning in his belly, the agony in his gut, the sparks and specks before his eyes, the dizzying loom-and-retreat of the bleak landscape. No growl behind him, no shriek in the sky ahead. There had been no one and nothing in view—or so he’d thought. Where had this tribe come from?
He knew there were at least seven people here—Chal Kabir, Fadhil, Meryem, Leyliah, and the three boys who’d brought Khamsin to the tent. The boys must have parents; the men and women must be married and have children. At least thirty people, and quite likely thirty more. Water and food for so many would be difficult to carry from place to place. They would know the land, of course, and centuries of inbred instinct would detect hidden springs and secret water holes. They would not be here unless they could survive, becoming part of the land themselves. But how did they survive? Perhaps they were shepherds? Ridiculous. Where could sheep graze in such barrenness?
It was a puzzle he wasn’t likely to solve until he was up and about. But had not Chal Kabir said there would be many tests before he was allowed to leave this tent? Wondering what these tests might be, Azzad shrugged, relaxed into the carpets, and slept.
If there were tests, Azzad was unaware of them. Over the next few days he saw Fadhil many times, Chal Kabir twice, and no one else at all. The food was bland but nourishing and plentiful, the water remarkably sweet. He wondered what herbs they put in their storage jars, or what nearby spring they drew it from. He asked Fadhil about it, but the young man merely shrugged and said, “That is women’s business, not men’s.”
Azzad couldn’t decide whether he meant that domestic responsibilities were beneath masculine notice or that fresh water was a thing much too important to be left for men to argue about.
Fadhil was politely curious, asking questions in roundabout ways, but communicated little about the tribe. Azzad answered honestly enough, speaking of the great city and the mighty land of his birth. But Fadhil had never heard of Rimmal Madar, much less of Dayira Azreyq. From this, Azzad deduced in some shock that in the days since he’d fled home, he’d somehow managed to travel beyond the routes of even the most adventurous caravans.
Unless the young man was lying, as Chal Kabir had done.
“Is Chal Kabir really your uncle?” Azzad asked one afternoon as he practiced walking on increasingly steady legs and feet that didn’t hurt too much anymore. “You don’t look very alike.”
Fadhil was tidying medicines on a low table. “’Chal’ is the title given our healers.”
“Ah. Then Lady Meryem is a healer also, for I heard Leyliah call her ‘Challa.’”
Fadhil, being even younger than Azzad, was less guarded than Kabir. “You heard nothing of the kind,” he snapped, much too quickly. “Neither Meryem nor Leyliah has been in this tent.”
Azzad smiled. “Then how do I know their names and the rule of the qufaz?”
Fadhil’s dark eyes went wide in his golden-skinned face. After a struggle to speak, he managed, “You—you know nothing of such things. You may know nothing. Speak of this to no one else, do you understand?”
“It is forbidden for me to know the ladies’ names?”