'Thank you,' he said. He took a piece of fruit and bit into it, feeling the juice spurt inside his mouth, bringing his own saliva alive. He revelled in the feeling, remembering how, just a short while ago, his tongue and throat had been swollen and dry. He had a vague memory of someone repeatedly placing the neck of a water skin to his mouth and admonishing him to drink, but slowly now while he had been sleeping. There was a dreamlike quality to it but he realised it had been real. His rescuers must have thoroughly rehydrated him without actually waking him.
He took another sip of water. He wanted to ask where he was but the question seemed so banal. Instead, he indicated the people moving through the camp.
'What people are these?' he asked. She smiled at him.
'We are the Khoresh Bedullin,' she told him. 'We are desert people. My name is Cielema.' She made the lips-brow-lips hand gesture he had seen Selethen use. He didn't feel up to carrying it off in response. Instead, he made an awkward half bow from his sitting position.
'How do you do, Cielema. My name is Will.'
'Be welcome to our camp, Will,' she said. As they were speaking, he had suddenly realised how hungry he was and he helped himself to some of the delicious flat bread in the basket. There were also slices of cold roast meat and he took one, wrapping it in the bread and taking a large bite. The meat was delicious, perfectly grilled so that it was still flowing with juices, with a slightly smoky taste from the fire and lightly flavoured with delicious spices. He chewed and swallowed, then tore off another huge piece of bread and a second slice of meat, filling his mouth and chewing rapturously. Cielema smiled gently.
'There can't be too much wrong with any young man with such an appetite,' she said and he hesitated, thinking that perhaps he had shown bad manners in wolfing his food this way. She laughed and made a gesture for him to continue.
'You're hungry,' she said. 'And such enthusiasm is a compliment to my cooking.'
Gratefully, he ate more of the food. When the pangs of hunger were stilled, he brushed crumbs off his lap and looked around again.
'The man who found me,' he asked. 'Where is he?'
She gestured to the middle of the camp site. He realised that he had been placed on the fringe of the camp, probably to assure his uninterrupted rest.
'That was Umar ib'n Talud,' she told him. 'He's surely involved in very weighty affairs right now. He is our Aseikh.'
She saw the incomprehension in his eyes and explained further. 'Aseikh is our word for leader. He is the headman of the Khoresh Bedullin people. He's also my husband,' she added. 'And he knows that our tent needs mending and that I have a carpet that needs beating. This is why he is surely involved in weighty affairs right now.'
The hint of a smile touched her mouth. Will had the feeling that an Aseikh might be the leader of his people but, like husbands the world over, he answered to the ultimate authority of his wife.
'I would like to thank him,' he said and she nodded agreement.
'I'm sure he would enjoy that too.'
Chapter 28
'These Tualaghi are good at this,' Gilan said as he and Halt swung back into their respective saddles. Selethen was seated on his own mount, waiting to hear what the Rangers had found.
It was the fifth time that afternoon that they had lost the trail left by the Tualaghi war party ahead of them, and had to cast around on foot for some faint sign showing the direction they had taken.
Halt grunted in reply as they headed out again. On the first day, the Tualaghi had pushed on without making any attempt to hide their progress. But after that, they had begun to cover their tracks, leaving a small party to follow behind and obliterate the signs left by the main group as they gradually changed direction. Of course, they couldn't manage to remove every trace of their passing, but only trackers with the skill of Halt and Gilan would see the faint signs remaining.
'This is how it's been any time we've tried to follow them,' Selethen said. 'We'd see their trail clearly for a while, then they would simply disappear.'
'Makes sense,' Halt told them. 'You need daylight to cover tracks like this, just as we need daylight to follow them. The first day, they'd be keen to put as many kilometres behind them as possible. My guess is they ride out before dawn and keep pushing till the middle of the day. Then they rest and continue on in the late afternoon and evening. Then, when they've established a lead over their pursuers, they start all this zigzagging and track covering.' He looked at Selethen. 'That's when your trackers lose the trail and you have to give up,' he said. Selethen nodded glumly.
'At least this is slowing them down,' Gilan put in.
Halt nodded. 'They have to travel in daylight, the same as we do. And they're not taking a direct route. My guess is we've closed the gap by half a day.'
The two Rangers had been able to cut a few corners in their pursuit. It had quickly become apparent that the Tualaghi, perhaps overconfident in their past ability to confuse Arridi pursuers, had fallen into a pattern of false trails and zigzags. After several hours, the pattern had become predictable and Gilan and Halt had been able to ignore several of the false trails and keep on a more direct route, picking up the real trail some kilometres further on. It had also quickly become apparent that when they laid a false trail, they would take less effort to cover it. They were good, as Gilan had noted. But they lacked the important element of subtlety.
Of course, it helped that Halt and Gilan could work as a team. When they reached a diversion, Gilan would follow it for a short time, as insurance, while Halt led the Arridi party along the path the enemy had been taking previously. The fact that the pursuing party was travelling in the early morning or late afternoon was another piece of luck. The oblique, low angle light made it easier to sight the disturbances and faint hoof prints left in the thin sand covering the desert.
So far, whenever they had adopted this tactic, they had rediscovered the real trail within a few kilometres, at which point Gilan would rejoin them. Fortunately, the terrain was flat and they were able to maintain line of sight communication for considerable distances.
As Halt had said, this had put them half a day closer to the Tualaghi. But he wanted to get closer still. He looked up at the sun, shading his eyes with his hand. It was getting close to the middle of the day, when they'd have to rest from the heat.
'I'm thinking,' he said to Selethen, 'that this afternoon, the three of us might push on ahead. We'll move more quickly that way and we can leave clear signs for the rest of the party to follow. I want to get close enough by tomorrow night for Gilan to take a look at these Tualaghi.'
Selethen nodded agreement. The suggestion made sense. With a party of fifty men, they were limited by the slowest horse in the group. And the continual stop-start nature of their progress, when Halt and Gilan had to search for tracks on the hard ground, added to the time they were taking. Each time they stopped, it took that much longer to reassemble a large party and get it under way again. There was always a girth to be tightened, a stone in a horse's hoof, a piece of equipment needing adjustment, another drink to be taken from a water skin. It might only be a few minutes here and there but it all added up over a day.
'We'll keep going for a few more kilometres,' he said, is 'then we'll rest. This afternoon, the three of us will go on ahead.'
It was a significant indication of the change in their relationship, Halt thought. After his initial suspicions at the scene of the massacre, the Wakir had placed his trust in the two Rangers to guide his party. Now he was willing to isolate himself from his own men and ride ahead with Halt and Gilan.
For his part, the Wakir felt a growing satisfaction at the prospect of dealing a telling blow to the Tualaghi tribesmen. The nomads knew that he had no Bedullin trackers working with him and they were overconfident, as the bearded Ranger had explained. If he and his warriors were able to stage a surprise attack sometime in the next few days, the old enemy might not be so ready to raid in future with their apparent ability to disappear into the desert wasteland undermined. They would never know how he managed to track them across the desert and he would make sure the knowledge never reached them.