But then he rounds a bend and stops dead in his tracks — there, mounted astride his stallion like a colossus, is Dassoud, the reins of the explorer’s horse in his hand. Beside him, perched dolefully on the doleful blue ass, is Johnson. Johnson shrugs his shoulders.
Dassoud gestures toward the waiting saddle, then slips the scimitar from his belt and points northward — in the direction of Benowm.
“Better climb aboard,” says Johnson.
The explorer hesitates, crestfallen. The cries of the refugees echo round him; he can’t seem to catch his breath.
“I’m tellin’ you, Mr. Park, he means business.”
As if on cue, Dassoud cuts the air with a titanic swipe of his sword.
Something like a grin creases his lips.
Mungo mounts the horse.
♦ ♦ ♦
An hour later, and miles from the road to Bambarra, the three horsemen are picking their way down a rocky slope littered with the remains of oryx and bushbuck, when suddenly Johnson reaches into his toga, produces a silver-plated dueling pistol and shoots Dassoud’s charger in the left eye. The horse rears back, beating its head from side to side as if it were trying to clear its ears, and collapses atop the Chief Jackal. “Let’s make tracks!” shouts Johnson, frantically lashing the backside of his ass as Dassoud heaves up from beneath the dead horse. The explorer doesn’t have to be asked twice. He kicks his heels deep into Rocinante’s flanks and the animal breaks into a halfhearted canter, its lungs heaving like a bellows filled with water. Meanwhile, Dassoud strips off his sandals and jubbah, touches his toes four or five times, and takes off after them, scimitar clenched in his teeth.
Johnson jogs over the rocks on his balky blue ass, Mungo bears down on his stumbling nag. Ahead, an unbroken plain studded with scrub. Behind, Dassoud, leaping hazards like a panther. “If we can m-m-make the p-plain we’ll hav-have him!” Johnson cries. Mungo holds on, and prays. Dassoud is no more than twenty feet away, running like a bandit. Ten feet, five — but now the smooth, hard-packed earth of the plain drums under hoof and they begin to draw away from him. He falls back twenty feet, then fifty, and Mungo begins to cheer. Johnson looks worried. “Why so glum?” the explorer calls.
“You see the way that sucker is runnin’?”
Mungo glances over his shoulder. Dassoud has dropped back nearly a hundred yards now. His face is set, the light fixed in his eyes. He is a naked man, muscled like a statue, running against his heart and lungs, the sun and the plain. “What of it?”
“He goin’ to catch up with us, that’s what.”
The explorer’s horse gears down from a canter to a walk, staggering from one lame leg to another, the saddlebags clacking like maracas. The ass cranes its neck to snap at Johnson’s knee. Mungo is suddenly alarmed.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “We’re mounted.”
They jog along in silence. Dassoud pumps his arms, holding steady at a hundred yards. The sun, of course, is like a freshly stoked smelting furnace.
Johnson squints up at him, a sad and suffering look in his eye. “You mean to tell me you never heard the stories about this maniac?”
“Unnhhhh,” says the horse, slowing to a brisk amble. The ass sways along beside it, ears in motion. Clotta-clot, clotta-clot, clot.
“No,” says Mungo, something tightening in his groin. “I never heard.”
♦ DASSOUD’S STORY ♦
He was born at Az-Zawiya, on the Mediterranean coast of Libya, third son of a Berber sultan. When he was six he was caught in a stampede. Sharp black hoofs pounded over him for a quarter of an hour. He wasn’t even bruised. At fourteen he joined his father in a punitive expedition against a party of Debbab Arabs. The Arabs were camped at the oasis of Al-Aziziyah, fires strung across the plain like a fallen constellation. Dassoud, at fourteen, was already over six feet tall. The firelight was lurid, there were the screams of the women. A man came at him with a pike. He disengaged the man’s leg with a swipe of his scimitar, then crushed his collarbone and severed his head. The man retaliated by spurting blood in his face. Dassoud leaped back, shocked and dazed, his pulse pounding, the raw salt taste of blood on his lips. . then went looking for more. Two days later his father was murdered. Sixteen Debbab renegades rode off across the desert for the bleak plateau of Al-Hammada al-Hamra. Dassoud followed them. One by one they died in the night.
When he was twenty he led a caravan across the Great Desert. Their destination was Timbuctoo, on the River Niger, sixteen hundred miles to the south. It was a difficult crossing. Sandstorms swallowed them, camels evaporated, wells ran dry. By the time they reached Ghat they’d lost nearly half their number. The sun rippled the horizon, dunes rolled off into the sky like waves on an iron sea. When the wells at Tamanrasset failed them, they fell on one another. Dassoud stood six feet four inches tall, two hundred thirty-five pounds. He was one of the survivors. The other twelve crowded round him. “We’ll make for Taoudenni, in the northern reaches of Ludamar,” he said. “It’s our only chance.”
The oasis of Taoudenni was set in a pocket of basaltic hills that rose up out of the sands like the molars of a half-buried giant. It had been the principal watering stop on the trip from Tamanrasset to Jarra since the days of the Prophet. Its wells were said to be inexhaustible. When the caravan drew within sight of the oasis they had been without water for three days, their eyelids swollen, throats raw. The trade goods — Persian rugs, salt, muskets, kif — trailed out behind them over the dunes, still lashed to the backs of rotting animals. As they approached the wells, the sole surviving camel stumbled and fell, its hoofs pedaling the void. One of the men cried out: impaled on the animal’s foreleg was a human ribcage. The bones clacked and rattled, dice in a cup. The merchants looked round. There were hummocks in the sand — hundreds of them — a hand reaching out here, the back of a skull glistening there. Taoudenni was dry.
Dassoud claimed the camel. Two men challenged him. He killed them both. Then he bled the animal, drinking deep from the open artery and draining the excess into a guerba. He ate the inner organs, the lining of the stomach, moist and raw. When he last saw the others, they were huddled round a crack in the rock where there had once been water.
He traveled by night, unearthing insect larvae, scorpions and beetles by day. He crunched them like nuts, scanning the wind-scrawled dunes, his head gone light, his life at the far end of its tether. This amused him. The more hopeless it became, the stronger he felt. One night, alone in the universe and hopelessly lost, the guerba empty, his tongue sucking at the shell of a scorpion, he realized that he was enjoying himself. The desert was hard. He was harder. If the whim had taken him, he could have turned round and strolled back to Libya.
Two weeks after leaving Taoudenni, Dassoud stumbled across the well at Tarra. He drew a guerba from the depths and drank till he vomited. While vomiting he became aware of a shadow which had fallen over him, a shadow cast by three of Ali’s elite horsemen. They were pointing their muskets at him as he knelt in the sand. Poaching from a well was as heinous a crime among the Moors as kidnapping or having sex with one’s neighbor’s livestock. The penalty was death. Dassoud listened to the click of the hammers. He was starved, dehydrated, exhausted, unarmed. The first man shot him through the elbow, the second brought a scimitar down across his face, the third was easy. When he finished with them he tore the leg from one of the horses, devoured it, and lay down to sleep. The following morning he rode into Benowm, thundered up to Ali’s tent, and offered his services as henchman and human jackal.