These thoughts, combined with worry for Suhail, made sleep difficult that night. Ordinarily I sleep like a very tired log in the field, but all I could seem to manage was a fitful doze, from which I was roused by every little sound: a camel grunting, men laughing around a distant fire, Tom turning restlessly in his own bed. I had just made up my mind to call out and ask if he, too, was still awake, when I felt a breeze across my cheek.
Had I resided for longer in that tent, I might have understood more quickly. As it was, I thought Andrew had finished his watch and lifted the flap to come in. Then my sluggish brain pointed out that the breeze was coming from the wrong direction for that.
I rolled over just in time to meet a hand bearing a damp piece of cloth.
This hand reacted quickly to my movement, clamping itself over my nose and mouth, muffling all sound. Someone was kneeling over me, almost invisible in the darkness. I shoved at his arm, trying to dislodge his hand, and kicked with my legs, hoping to hit something that might topple over and make a sound. All I caught was air, and my fiercest efforts made no mark on his arm; I cursed the way fieldwork destroyed my fingernails, leaving me without claws.
But it was not failure that made my struggles subside. My mind was lifting free of my body, floating into the night sky on a dragon’s wings; and then I had no awareness of anything at all.
I awakened on the back of a camel, galloping through the darkness.
My immediate response to this was not heroic in the slightest: I vomited. An intense nausea wracked me, and it was not made any better by the swaying motion of the camel, when night gave me no stable point upon which to fix my gaze.
The man in front of me growled under his breath. I had, on instinct, turned my head aside—but this had not entirely spared him. As my senses returned, however, I felt no guilt whatsoever for this. For I realized that he had drugged me (or if not him, then one of his comrades); and having accomplished this, he had kidnapped me.
My voice answered but weakly when I tried to shout. Even that feeble croak, however, made my kidnapper pull a curved knife from his sash and hold it up so that it caught what light was to be had. The message was clear, and I fell silent.
Shouting would not have done much good anyway. I could tell by the terrain—flattish desert, quite unlike the wadi I had gone to sleep in—that we were no longer anywhere near the Aritat camp. Sound carries far across the open desert, but at this distance, the best I could hope for was to be mistaken for a hyena.
What other options did I have? I tried to force my disoriented brain into motion. Even my best efforts, however, turned up little. By wiggling I might have unbalanced myself enough to fall from the back of the camel; this would have earned me only bruises and perhaps some broken bones. I could not hope to overpower the man in front of me, and even if I did, there were others around us who would subdue me rapidly enough.
The thought of others made me look about. I soon spotted Tom, bare-chested and still unconscious, riding pillion on another camel. Far too late, it came to me that the sound I had taken for restlessness on his part had likely been another kidnapper drugging him. Were it not for that blasted curtain… no, even then matters would not have ended well. They would simply have synchronized their attacks more precisely; or matters would have become violent. I took some minor solace in knowing they did not wish us dead. It would have been far easier to slit our throats than to spirit us out of camp.
Did the men of the Aritat follow us? With my hands lashed to the saddle, I could not turn to watch our trail. It depended on whether our captors had gotten us out quietly, I supposed. It might be that no one even knew we were gone. Once they did…
I slumped, trying not to lean against the man in front of me. (Oh, if only propriety had compelled them to put me on my own camel.) The best warriors of the clan were gone, pursuing the raiders. Had that been a diversion? Either way, I was not sure how many men could be spared for a second pursuit. Andrew would not be held in camp, of that I was sure—but alone, he could not do very much.
Such calculations were not cheering, but they gave me some minor distraction from the bone-deep chill that soon robbed me of all feeling in my bare toes. I tucked my feet against the camel’s warm sides, curled in on myself, and endured. Dawn came as a blessing, even though we did not stop; we rode on until it was nearly midday. Then we halted amid some rocks that offered shade for a few, while the remainder propped up their cloaks to form miniature tents and huddled inside.
By then I was tormented with thirst. The day was not hot, but the air was terribly dry, and I had not had anything to drink for hours. Pride made me want to refuse when my riding partner offered me a waterskin; I knew I would be grateful to him for it, and did not want to give him such influence over me. But I would need water eventually, and the longer I delayed, the more precious the gift would seem. I took it and drank: one swallow only, after which he pulled the container from my hands.
They kept Tom separate from me, in the shade of a different rock. Unprotected though I might be in my nightgown, he had it worse, fair as he was; his shoulders and back were already painfully red. “Please,” I said to my captor, in my very best Akhian, city-inflected though it was. “Have you any robe or cloak that might shelter us from the sun?”
He made no reply, but only scowled at me. Then he got up and went to a man I promptly marked as their leader. Hope rose in my heart—but when he came back, the only item of clothing he bore was a gag, which he stuffed into my protesting mouth. Tom was similarly gagged soon after; and so we remained for the rest of the journey, except when freed to take water and food.
(I wondered at the time why they had not gagged us from the start. I cannot say for certain, but I believe they knew the drug they had used—later identified as ether—would cause vomiting after we roused; to gag us would have been to risk us choking on our own spew. Which raised any number of interesting questions about how they had obtained ether, and learned the use of it. The chemical was first discovered by an Akhian chemist, Shuraiq ibn Raad al-Adrasi… but that does not mean it is commonly found in the middle of the desert.)
Once a little time had passed, we mounted and rode again. By nightfall it was apparent to me that any pursuers were unlikely to catch us before we reached enemy territory. It was not merely cold that made me shiver as I tried to sleep.
Long-time readers of these memoirs may recall I had been kidnapped in the night once before, during the expedition to Vystrana. The difference between the two situations, however, could not have been more stark. There it had been my own foolishness that put me at risk; here I had been doing nothing more foolish than trying to sleep in my own tent. There my captors had been relatively decent men: smugglers, to be sure, but more interested in making a living by illicit means than sowing mayhem. Here it was apparent that my captors only needed me alive, and any suffering I might endure along the way was of no concern to them.
I did not think I could talk my way out of this one.
I lay on the hard ground and stared up at the sky, watching the stars swim back and forth. When I blinked the tears away, my gaze lit upon a constellation I recognized: Kouneli, the Rabbit. The sight was so unexpectedly comforting that I almost broke down in a mixture of sobs and laughter. There, I thought. At least one thing here is familiar to you.
It also gave me a notion of which direction we traveled in. Our path curved back and forth somewhat to follow the terrain, but overall we had been heading southeast. That might prove useful, and so I filed the information away.