Maysoon hit the ground hard, rolling over several times before finally coming to rest on her back. Through groggy eyes, she saw Conrad appear beside her, leap off his horse, and hurry to her side.
“Maysoon,” he yelled as he slid to his knees beside her. “Are you all right?”
She wasn’t sure. She stayed down for a moment, heavy-headed, her body racked by aches and bruises, her breathing ragged, then tried sitting up, but her hand gave way under her and she toppled back.
“My wrist,” she groaned. “I think it’s broken.”
Conrad helped her sit up and held her hand gently. Trying to move it shot a bolt of pain up her arm. It was badly sprained or broken, but either way, it was out of action.
She held it up to him with a bittersweet smile. “Now we’re two halves,” she said.
He took her hand, kissed it softly, then leaned in and gave her a long, intense kiss.
He helped her to her feet. The valley was quiet and still. There was no breeze, no movement anywhere. The sun was just creeping over the edge of a steep, bare slope to their right. It would soon get much warmer.
The wagon lay a few yards away, on its side, broken up, a trail of wooden debris behind it. The trunks had fallen out and were scattered around it. They walked over to survey the damage. Two of the trunks were intact, but the third had split open during its fall and its contents were spewed around it.
The horses were nowhere in sight.
“We need to get those horses back,” she said.
“They’re long gone,” Conrad replied, downcast. “No reason for them to come back.”
Maysoon was about to answer when she spotted something behind him, about a hundred yards away. A human-shaped lump. She frowned and nodded it to Conrad. He turned and saw it too.
They walked toward it together. It was the trader’s corpse, twisted around and covered in dust. They reached it and stood there, with Maysoon just staring at her dead father in silence. After a long moment, she heaved out a long sigh and said, “It’s my turn to ask you to help me bury someone.”
Conrad put his arm around her. “Of course.”
He used his scimitar to dig into the parched soil. Maysoon helped him with her one good hand. He didn’t say anything at first. She seemed to need to be left to her thoughts.
After a while, he said, “Earlier, when I asked you about why you were doing this. You said if I knew you better, I’d understand. What did you mean?”
She was still for a moment. “My father, my brother … things weren’t always like this. When I was a child, in Konya, we had a good life. My parents were good Sufis. My mother especially. She filled our home with caring and love. And I think my father was different back then too. I still have memories of them, together. But after she fell ill and died … everything changed. We left Konya. We traveled around. My father became more bitter and nastier by the day. My brother fell under the spell of the Ghazis. He’s been wanting to join them, you know. The idea of spreading the faith by the might of the blade holds great appeal to him. And my father was a clever man. He could see the way the wind was turning. He knew they’d end up conquering all these lands, and he wanted to make sure he was on the winners’ side.”
“And you disagreed with them?”
“You don’t know about Rumi. You don’t know what it means to be a Sufi. And for them to turn their backs on something so noble, so sublime … I couldn’t just sit back and watch them turn into these monsters.”
Conrad nodded. “They didn’t take that well, did they?”
She shook her head, her face flooded with sadness. “No. Not at all.”
“Why didn’t you leave? Run away, maybe go back to Konya?”
“You don’t think I tried?”
He remembered the bruises and nodded, then reached out and gave her face a gentle carress. “I’m sorry it had to come to this.”
She shut her eyes and leaned into his hand, enjoying it for a moment. Then she kissed it and pushed it gently away. “Come on. We have work to do.”
It wasn’t the deepest of graves, but it would have to do. And Maysoon was right. They still had a lot to do.
They had to deal with the trunks and their contents.
They couldn’t take them with them. All they had was one horse, the one Conrad had ridden in on. They couldn’t just leave them there either. And whatever they were going to do, they had to do it fast. At some point, her brother and his outfit would recover their horses. They’d ride up the valley and find them.
Time was running out.
Then Conrad saw something. In the steep hill that rose up from the valley, now more noticeable under the high sun.
Its face was pockmarked with black holes.
Caves.
Hundreds of them.
They would have to do.
It took hours, but they managed it. Conrad cut up several six-foot-square sections of the canvas cover, then used them as makeshift wraps to ferry loads of the trunks’ contents that were light enough for him to carry. Maysoon helped him divide the contents up into manageable loads. He chose one of the upper caves, one that was big enough to crawl through comfortably and tucked out of view, and slung the packs over his shoulder and hauled them up to it, one by one. It took almost nine trips, but by the end of it, the entire contents of the chests were safely nestled in the cave, wrapped in a protective layer of canvas, out of view.
Conrad wasn’t comfortable about leaving the wagon behind. If and when Maysoon’s brother and his men came across it, they might suspect that the consignment it held was still around somewhere. On the other hand, the Turks had no way of knowing who had attacked them, or how many they were. It had been dark, and no one had seen him or Maysoon close enough to be able to identify them. Provided the trunks were gone, Conrad felt there was a strong chance that the Turks would think whoever had attacked them had brought along enough horses to carry them off.
As long as he got rid of the trunks.
Which he did, using his scimitar to pry the lids off the two that weren’t broken, then lugging all three of them up in pieces, to a different cave. Once he’d done that, he used some dried bushes to sweep away his tracks from both caves.
They could finally make a move.
“Will you remember how to get us back here?” he asked her.
Maysoon surveyed the valley, taking note of any landmarks that would help her identify it again. Her eyes settled on the distant mound that was her father’s grave. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t forget this place. Not soon enough.”
He helped her onto his horse, then climbed up behind her.
“Which way?” he asked.
They needed to find food, shelter, and horses, camels, or mules, any kind of transport that would allow them to recover the trove and complete their intended journey. A journey that, given the deaths of Hector and Miguel, now seemed questionable.
She nodded ahead and said, “North. There are Christian communities there, small villages and monasteries built into cliffs. They’ll take us in.”
Conrad gave her a doubtful look.
“They don’t need to know what you just hid in those caves,” she told him.
He shrugged. She was right.
He spurred his mount forward.
They trotted away, leaving behind her father’s grave, leaving behind the trove that so many had died for, uncertain about what to do with it from here on.
Chapter 42
Reilly advanced cautiously across the canyon, hugging the shadows. He’d spotted the dusty Cherokee parked in a small clearing by the side of the road, sitting slightly apart from a handful of other cars. A rusting sign in three languages had told him it was a staging point for hikers setting off to explore the Zelve canyons and had set his Spidey-sense tingling.