Ruha’s heart began to pound like the hooves of a racing camel, and her knees grew as weak as those of a suckling calf. The man atop the dune was the one she had seen in her premonition.
Two
At’ar the Merciless hung in a deep blue sky, bathing the desert in the fiery radiance of her insufferable passion. Though At’ar’s orb had risen less than three hours ago, the heat already shimmered from the golden sands in skin-blistering waves. To Ruha, crouched atop a dune ninety yards from the oasis, it seemed nothing dared to stir beneath the yellow goddess’s gaze. The wind lay heavy and listless upon the barren ground, and the green fronds of the palm trees dangled motionless and lethargic. Even N’asr’s children, those great white-bearded vultures that ferried spirits to the camp of the dead, hovered overhead without so much as flapping a wing or twitching a tail-feather.
Ruha envied the vultures their patience, for her own thirst was making her grow desperate. Three hours beneath the morning sun had made her tongue so swollen it occasionally gagged her, her throat so dry she could not swallow, and her mind so muddled she could not keep the events of the previous night separated from what was happening at the moment.
Ruha recalled that her last drink had come from Ajaman’s waterskin, after she had left her hiding place last night and gone to him. She remembered the despair washing over her as she had taken her dead husband’s head in her lap and, in her mind, she returned to where she had sat in the sand at El Ma’ra’s base.
In Ajaman’s chest was a charred hole as big as her head, but his face betrayed no fear or sorrow. He held his dark brow furrowed in astonished fury, more angry at being soiled by magic than at being killed. The widow touched her mouth to her dead husband’s, then slipped his jambiya and its sheath off his belt and took the crushed amarat from beneath his body. These would be her only keepsakes.
Though Ruha had come to like Ajaman during the two days of their marriage, she could not say that she loved him. It was a surprise to her, then, that tears were streaming down her cheeks. It was proper for a widow to grieve her dead husband, but for Ruha to claim that she wept on Ajaman’s account seemed out of place and insincere. The tears, she realized, were for herself. With Ajaman gone, she was likely to spend the rest of her life as Qoha’dar had spent hers—a shunned woman.
In similar circumstances, any other woman might have returned to her own khowwan, assured that her tribe would have received her with open arms. For Ruha, that possibility did not exist. Even if she returned to the Mtair Dhafir, the old women would blame her for the Qahtan’s disaster and, with a grim air of reluctance, the elder warriors would persuade her father to banish her.
With her magic, Ruha knew she could survive alone in the desert, but the thought of being forced into hermitage made her stomach queasy, and it horrified her. The young woman had not asked for her premonitions, and she had never done anything to deserve banishment. Still, she did not blame her father or the Mtair Dhafir for ostracizing her. To them, her presence seemed dangerous, and they were just doing what they thought necessary to survive. Given similar circumstances, any Bedine would have done the same.
“You do what you must to survive, and I will do the same,” Ruha said, speaking to the distant tribe of her birth. “I’ll ride with any khowwan that will take me, though it be the blood enemy of the Mtair Dhafir.”
As she spoke, Ruha found her throat so dry that the words came out in a series of croaking gasps. Realizing that she was desperately thirsty, the widow reached for Ajaman’s waterskin. The fall had burst the neck open, leaving only a few last swallows in the corners. Ruha placed her lips over the neck to prevent the loss of even a drop, then tilted her head back to drain the precious water into her parched throat.
Nothing.
Ruha tried to swallow again. Still nothing.
With a start, Ruha snapped back to the present, and she realized that she was a half-mile from her dead husband. He was still at El Ma’ra, buried in the cool, shallow grave she had dug for him earlier. Now, she was sitting atop a dune, exposed to At’ar’s full glory and so sun-sick that she was hallucinating.
The young widow angrily pulled Ajaman’s crushed amarat horn from around her neck, then threw it down the dune’s slip-face. It slid clear to the desert’s rocky floor.
“Why did you fall on your waterskin, husband?” she croaked, looking toward El Ma’ra’s tawny pinnacle. “An honorable man would not leave his wife without water!”
Of course, Ajaman did not answer, but Ruha did not doubt that he heard her.
“Ajaman, if you do not send me some water, there will be nobody to wash your body before the journey west,” Ruha threatened, still staring in the direction of her husband’s body. “Tonight, when the vultures come to take you to N’asr’s tent, the odor of life will cling to you like blood on a newborn calf. Surely, the Pitiless One will give you to his djinns, and it won’t be my fault.”
Bartering with the dead was dangerous, the widow realized dimly. Even those who had been friends often repaid their debts with plague and pestilence, but Ruha thought she had done everything she could to find water on her own. She remembered checking the canteen of the straggler she had killed last night. It had been empty. She had even found the milk skin she had been carrying when the attack started, but it had been trampled into the sand by the caravan. Ruha was desperate.
At the oasis there was plenty of water, but she did not dare approach it. In the entire khowwan, not a Qahtani remained alive. The men had fallen in contorted, inert poses at the camp perimeter. In the oasis itself, dog and camel corpses lay scattered among the tents and trees. The women and children were gathered beneath shredded and charred khreimas, their locations marked by lumps and dark stains in the cloth.
But it was not corpses that prevented Ruha from going to the oasis pool and drinking the water she needed so badly. The pale-skinned stranger who had appeared last night in the caravan’s wake was searching the entire camp tent by tent. He had been since dawn. Methodically he furled back each khreima, then kneeled amongst the corpses. After a few moments, he covered the bodies again and went to the next tent. Never, as far as Ruha could tell, did he take anything from the dead or their households.
His behavior was a stark contrast to that of his companions, two creatures who stood about four feet tall. Ruha could tell little about the pair, for they were swaddled head to foot in white burnooses. The short bipeds were robbing the Qahtani warriors, pulling rings off dead fingers and prying jewels from scimitar scabbards.
Watching the strangers continue their desecrations, Ruha wondered who they could be and what they were doing at El Ma’ra’s oasis. Her muddled mind could not even guess at an answer, any more than she could imagine the origin of last night’s murderous caravan. She had never seen anything like either group in the desert, and her ignorance of the lands beyond Anauroch was complete. Both the caravan and the three strangers remained an utter mystery to her.
For the next hour, the widow pondered her ignorance and waited for the strangers to leave. A gray haze appeared on the southern horizon, and Ruha knew that a sandstorm was ravaging some distant part of the desert. She paid it no further attention, for it would not arrive soon enough for her to sneak to the oasis pond beneath its cover.