We rode throughout the next day, with the usual pause when the sun was at its height, and arrived at another camp just before sunset. By then Tom was in a wretched state, his skin blistered from overexposure to the sun. I had unbraided my hair during that first halt and used it to shelter my neck as best I could, but my feet were almost as badly off as Tom’s back. Any plan for escape would have to account for those injuries, or we would not get very far.
I was half afraid they would leave us in a heap on the bare dirt. But no: we were dragged into a tent, and after one of the men gave us water, he left our gags off. I supposed there was no reason to fear noise now.
It meant we could talk at last. “Tom,” I said urgently. “Are you all right?”
An inane question, of course—and yet one asks it all the time, in such moments. He tried to sit up, and made the most extraordinarily unpleasant noise when his movement brought part of his blistered arm into contact with the ground. “Stay still,” I said, and looked about for anything that might help. The tent was very bare, but there was a jar not too far away that proved to contain more water. I conveyed some to Tom in a cheap tin dipper, then drank my own fill. Then I found a nearby rag—it looked as if it had once been a man’s headscarf—and soaked it before laying the fabric across the worst of the blisters. Tom hissed through his teeth when it touched him, but then he sagged and said, “That helps. Thank you.”
“I assume these are the Banu Safr,” I said, as much for distraction as because I thought it needed saying. “If Suhail and the others went out to get a few camels back from their enemies, we can only hope they will do as much for us.”
“One hopes. Yes.” Tom shifted position, wincing. “Isabella, if you have a chance to get free, then go. Don’t wait for me.”
“Don’t be absurd,” I said, my heart beating so strongly I could taste my pulse. “I would not last two hours out there.” But he was not the only one thinking of escape. Two days and a night: a camel could go that long without water, easily, and a person might survive it. That assumed, however, that we could find our way back as efficiently as we had come. Under the circumstances, leaving without a supply of water would be suicidal.
Nor would I leave without Tom. They had not killed us… but if one vanished, who was to say the other would remain safe? (If I may be permitted the exaggeration of calling our situation there “safe.”) I said, “Now that we are here—and no longer gagged—we may be able to talk to someone. Negotiate a trade, perhaps. There must be something they want.”
“Ransom,” Tom speculated. “It will take them a long time to write to Pensyth in Qurrat, or Lord Ferdigan in Sarmizi. Longer to hear back. We may be here for a while.”
On that cheering note, we fell silent.
I had time to re-wet the rag twice before they came for us. One of the men cursed when he realized we had taken water from the jar; I presumed that meant we were in his tent. But not for long, as they dragged us upright and took us across camp to another shelter.
A woman waited for us there. The sight of her startled me: I had been thinking of the Banu Safr only as our enemies, and had therefore conceived of this as a military camp. But of course that was absurd; they were a tribe like any other, and had women, children, all the elements of ordinary life. I would have noticed them sooner, had I not been so concerned with the simple task of walking. I had pressed my feet often against the sides of the camel to keep the soles from being burnt, but the tops were in poor shape, and the rocks on the ground were sharp besides.
She took me behind a curtain to inspect me, while someone else presumably did the same to Tom. “My name is Isabella,” I said quietly to her as she moved around me. “What is your name?” She made no answer. I tried again, my Akhian broken more thoroughly than usual by the tension of my circumstances. “Please, water? My feet—pain. Cool is good.” But it seemed she was not there to treat me, for no help was forthcoming.
The inspection done, I was pulled back out into the main part of the tent, where a man waited. Tom soon joined me, and was pushed onto his knees at my side. I mentally identified the man as their sheikh; his clothing was finer than the others’, and he stood as one who is accustomed to wielding authority. To us he said, “You speak Akhian?”
Tom nodded, swaying on his knees with exhaustion. I said, “A little.”
“You are sojana,” he said. “Do you understand this?”
“Prisoners?” I said in Scirling, which of course did no good at all. Thinking of the words we had used for our dragons, I shifted to Akhian and said, “Captive.”
He nodded. “Please,” I said before he could go on, “what do you want? From us, or from others. Money? Camels?” I did not know the word for “ransom,” and could not assemble a good enough sentence to explain that I would be happy to negotiate.
The sheikh shook his head. “Someone else will come for you. Until then, you stay.”
Someone else? I doubted he meant the Aritat. Some unknown party, perhaps? The Banu Safr were rebellious; they did not have a city sheikh this man might answer to. But there could be a sheikh of greater renown, someone leading a different clan of his tribe. Or perhaps I was wrong, and he was not the sheikh. That man might be out even now with the raiding party that had stolen the camels, and this one waiting for his return.
“If we—” I stopped, frustrated with my linguistic limitations. I did not know how to ask whether there was any practice among the nomads that amounted to a white flag, a signal of peaceable parlay, under which we might be permitted to communicate with our friends and prevent them from doing anything foolish. I was not even certain I wanted to prevent them: as much as I feared the consequences if they staged a counter-raid, that might be our best chance at freedom. Once we were transferred to that unknown third party, who knew what would happen.
The sheikh did not wait for me to sort out what I wanted to say, much less how to say it. He left the tent, and Tom and I were alone with our captors.
TEN
I was able to guess some things about our captors. Based on physical resemblances and the way the woman behaved, I surmised that the two men who slept in the tent were brothers, and she was the wife of one. The husband had participated in the kidnapping, but the brother had not. I never did learn their names for certain; I thought the brother might be called Muyassir, but they were taciturn around us and addressed one another rarely. I thought of them as Kidnapper, Brother, and Wife. Kidnapper, Brother, and Wife
Tom and I were tethered to the two central poles of the tent, with tough leather cords we could not easily break nor unknot. These gave us some freedom of movement, but not much; and in any case neither of us was in a hurry to go anywhere. Tom spent most of his time lying facedown on the rugs that covered the ground, protecting his burned skin as much as he could. Despite his care, some of the blisters broke; any time I was given water, I used some of it to rinse the sores, hoping to prevent infection. When I moved about the tent, I did so on all fours, with my feet up in the air to keep them from scraping against anything. I could only do this in the brief periods when we were alone: to show the soles of the feet is a terrible insult in Akhian society, and the first time I put mine up to protect them, Brother retaliated with an immediate blow. This almost led to disaster, as Tom lunged to stop him from striking me again, and was himself struck in turn. I threw myself to the ground, babbling apologies in a mixture of languages, and learned my lesson.