Then he saw the roadblock ahead. The tree trunks and boulders made sure nobody was going forward. From behind the roadblock, a man shouted in Arabic: "Surrender, you dogs! You cannot hope to get away!"
"If you want us, you'll have to take us!" the caravanmaster yelled back. He was up on horseback. His sword leaped free of the scabbard. The blade flashed in the sun. He shouted again, this time in French: "God and Jesus and sweet Henri with us!"
A dozen men popped up behind the barricade. They rested their muskets on the timber and stone to steady their aim. The boom of the volley stunned Jacques' ears.
Something slammed Jacques in the chest. He groaned and staggered. Breathing hurt, but not the way it would have if he'd got a bullet in the lungs. He tore open his surcoat and looked down at himself. His back-and-breast was lead-splashed and dented, but it had held the bullet out.
Not everyone was so lucky. Men went down, some dead, others wounded. The caravanmaster's horse fell, too. The master had kicked free of the stirrups, though, and was on his feet, still waving that sword. "Come on, men!" he cried. "We can beat these swine!" If the robbers spoke French, that would make them angry. You couldn't call a Muslim anything worse than a pig.
Those musketeers ducked away from the barricade to reload. Another dozen or so took their place. They poured another volley into the guards at the head of the column. More brigands were shooting from the woods to either side. Jacques ground his teeth. Whoever'd planned this attack knew just what he was doing.
"Forward!" the caravanmaster shouted, aiming his sword at the roadblock. "They can't have any more men with guns back there now!" He trotted toward the jumble of stones and felled trees. Cheering, the guards still on their feet followed.
But he was wrong. A man aimed a cavalry pistol at him and shot him in the chest. The caravanmaster was unarmored. He hadn't thought he would need to be a general, too. He groaned. He gurgled. He dropped his sword. He staggered and fell.
The charge he would have led came to a ragged halt. More musketeers popped up behind the barricade and gave the guards another volley. This one was more ragged than the two that had gone before. Jacques knew what that meant. The bandits who'd fired the first volley had reloaded, and the faster men hadn't waited for the slower ones to finish.
A bullet cracked past his ear. That was the noise bullets made when they came too close. Jacques laughed, not that it was funny. How could you come any closer than getting hit square in the chest? But his face wasn't armored. His arms and legs weren't, either.
Another bullet flew by. An instant later, it struck home with a soft, wet, slapping sound. A horse screamed. Jacques thought it was a horse, anyway. With sounds of pain, you couldn't always tell.
"What do we do?" somebody cried, panic in his voice. "Jesus and Henri, what can we do? Do they aim to murder us all?"
If they did, they were like no bandits Jacques had ever heard of. Part of the profit in robbing a caravan came from selling its goods. The rest came from selling people into slavery—or, if they were rich enough, from holding them for ransom. Jacques wasn't rich. Fear made his limbs feel light. He didn't want to fall into slavery. But he didn't want to die here, either.
Screams and shouts and curses rose from farther back along the length of the caravan. He knew what that meant. The bandits were seizing traders, who couldn't fight back so well. They had the guards right where they wanted them.
He started running back. He couldn't help anybody where he was, not even himself. Farther back, he might be able to do Khadija and her family some good. As he ran, he realized he should have thought of Muhammad al-Marsawi and his family. Well, too bad. He'd thought the way he'd thought, and he'd meant it, too.
He got shot a few heartbeats later.
One moment, he was running as fast as he could. The next, he lay in the dirt by the side of the road, howling like a won". Blood turned the can" of his left trouser leg red. He pulled up the trouser leg to look at the wound. It could have been worse. A bullet had torn a chunk of meat out of that big muscle. But it hadn't hit a bone, and he dared hope it hadn't torn the tendon. If the wound didn't fester, he might not even limp in a few weeks.
But that would be in a few weeks. Now . . .
He took his knife from his belt and cut a strip of cloth from the trouser leg to bandage the wound and slow the bleeding. He'd just finished, biting his lip against the pain, when a man with a sword ran up to him. "Yield or die!" the bandit shouted, first in Arabic, then in French.
Jacques let the knife fall in the dirt. "I yield," he said in Arabic. Even if he killed this robber, he couldn't hope to get away.
"Ah, you speak a real language. That means you will sell for more." The bandit sounded happy. Jacques had used Arabic for just that reason. If he was going to be a slave, he wanted to be a valuable one. He'd get treated better. The man who stood over him asked, "Can you walk?"
"I don't think so," Jacques answered. "Not far, anyway."
"All right." The bandit shouted for a friend. The friend came up leading a horse. Earlier that morning, one of the merchants in the caravan had been riding it. Now it was just loot. Jacques realized he was just loot, too. The only reason the robbers kept him alive was to make money selling him. He was glad they had any reason at all.
He couldn't mount by himself, not with the wounded leg. The brigands helped him up onto the horse's back. They tied his feet together under the animal and tied his hands to the reins. By then, the fighting was almost over. A last few bangs, a last few screams, and it ended. The merchants and the guards were either dead or captured. All their trade goods were spoil for the bandits.
Unwounded men who'd surrendered were put to work clearing the roadblock. Jacques got to watch that. He was no good as a laborer, not right now. One of his captors gave him water to drink. He would rather have had wine, but took what he could get. Up there on horseback, he looked around for Khadija and her father and mother. He didn't see any of them. He hoped she was all right—and her parents, too.
When Annette Klein woke up, she wished she hadn't. In those first horrible seconds, in fact, she wasn't sure she had. She was convinced she'd died and gone to hell. For one thing, her head still felt as if it wanted to fall off. Most of her wished it would. She'd seen plenty of movies and TV shows where the hero got knocked cold and was running and jumping and fighting again five minutes later. Real life didn't work like that. She felt as if her brain had just banged off the inside of her skull—and it had.
For another, her eyes didn't want to focus. And even when they did, she didn't want to believe they had. The ground seemed much too close, and everything else was upside down.
She tried to raise a hand to her aching head, and found she couldn't. What with everything else that had gone wrong, she wondered for a panicky instant if she was paralyzed. Then she realized she couldn't move her hands because they were tied to her feet. After she got clouted, somebody'd slung her over a horse's back and tied her up so she couldn't fall off—or get away.
The world made more sense. That didn't make her feel any better, though. The pounding pain in her head and the unnatural way the ground going by looked combined to make her seasick or horsesick or whatever the right word was. She threw up all over the dirt below.
Somebody in robes came up to her. She could see only the bottom half of him, and that was as upside down as anything else. "So—you are awake, are you?" he said in Arabic.
Annette spat a couple of times before answering, trying to get the vile taste out of her mouth. She didn't have much luck. "I—think so," she said.
He laughed. It was the laugh of someone who'd seen plenty of people in the same boat as she was. It was, in other words, the laugh of a man who took slaves. Ice and fire ran through her. She hated him and feared him at the same time. Whatever else he was, though, he wasn't a man who was more cruel to his livestock than he had to be. "Would you like some water?" he asked. "Can you sit right side up on a horse?"