In the Labyrinth of Drakes (14 page)

N
IGHT
H
UNT

I was shivering uncontrollably by the time we regained the comfort of our own camp, but the experience had been thrilling. During the course of our research I went out several more times to observe what I could of this nocturnal hunt, wishing that I, like a cat, could see in the dark. Even once I learned to watch the stars, I often missed the drake's initial approach, for it glides down on silent wings, lest it frighten off its prey.

It was a promising start to our work. But, unfortunately, it was all too soon disrupted—by those long-standing enemies of the Aritat, the Banu Safr.

 

NINE

Stolen camels—Suhail rides out—The trouble we bring—A breeze upon my cheek—Our dreadful journey—The Banu Safr

I missed the attack of the Banu Safr, as I had missed the drake taking its initial prey, because I was not out with the camels in their pasture. But even at a distance I heard them: the shrill yells, the bellowing of the camels, the crack of gunfire.

At the time I was sitting in front of our tent, with one of the scruffy guard dogs (so different from the graceful salukis) sniffing around my feet. I was attempting to sketch the night hunting of the drake, as much from imagination as from the few visual observations I had been able to make. At the sudden outburst of sound I twitched in my seat, nearly dropping my pencil. “What is that?” I asked no one in particular—for everyone who spoke Scirling was elsewhere.

Shahar came outside to stare in the direction of the noise, biting her lip. I repeated my question in Akhian, but did not understand what she said in reply until she mimed shooting a gun, grabbing something, and running away. The Akhian government has made great strides in curtailing the raiding ways of their nomadic tribes, but they have not stamped them out entirely; and the rebellious tribes are the most prone to breaking that edict.

I made an abortive move toward the camel tethered alongside our tent, but Shahar grabbed my sleeve to halt me. From her flood of words I understood that I was being an idiot—and she was right. What good could I do, riding unarmed toward a battle? But Suhail had gone out to view the herds, and Andrew had gone with him, for curiosity's sake.

Certainly I was not the only one lunging for an animal to ride. Virtually every man in camp was mounting up, with weapons in hand, and they quickly thundered out to join the fray. But a raid is, by its nature, over very quickly: before long men were flooding back into camp, the remaining camels in tow, minus the ones that had been taken.

Suhail and Andrew were among those who returned. My relief, however, was short-lived. “We're going after them,” Andrew said breathlessly as he dismounted. “If we can get the camels back before the thieves reach their own territory—”

“
We?
” I repeated, my voice sharp. “Andrew, you are not going with them.”

“Why not?”

My foremost reason was that I did not want to risk him, and did not trust him not to risk himself … but I did not say that. (I do, however, write it here, which I suppose means that now Andrew will know the truth.) “Do you think Colonel Pensyth will thank you for involving yourself in a matter of internal strife between two Akhian tribes?”

“Fine words, coming from you,” Andrew said with a snort.

I gave him a quelling look. “Besides which, you cannot keep up with them. On a horse, yes; but they are saddling camels, which you barely know how to ride. Do you know their tactics? The tricks raiders use to conceal their trail? Will you be anything more than one more gun, when they catch the thieves at last?” Softening, I added, “I know you are a soldier, Andrew. And it chafes, sitting idle while others deal with a problem. But look—they are not taking everyone, not even all of the fighting men.”

Indeed, the group that was collecting supplies and loading them onto their camels was quite small, barely a dozen riders. One of them, I saw, was Suhail.

I did not properly hear Andrew's first, muttered response. Only when he raised his voice and said, “Very well, Isabella—I won't go,” did I turn and take his hand in mine. “Thank you,” I said. “I have quite enough to worry about as it is.”

Tom appeared then, a rifle in his hands and two more slung under his arm. “Dear God, not you, too,” I said involuntarily.

He ignored me, going to where Suhail and the others were preparing. I drew close in time to hear him say, “These may be of use to you.”

Looking about, I saw that most of the pursuit party were armed only with bows and lances. Some had rifles, but less than half; and Suhail was not among them. He looked at the gun Tom was proffering and said, “Your colonel sent those with you for your own use.”

“And today my use is to give it to you,” Tom said. “You've bloody well got more need for it than I do at the moment. Just bring them back when you're done.” He extended the rifle further, almost forcing it into Suhail's hands, then leaned the other two against the side of Suhail's camel, which gave him a grumpy look.

“Your ammunition—”

The word was not even out of Suhail's mouth when Tom dug two cardboard boxes out of his back pockets and handed them over. Suhail grimaced. “I was going to say, you have a limited supply, and should conserve it. We don't need guns to deal with these Banu Safr dogs.”

“But they'll help,” Tom said. “Good hunting.”

Suhail did not argue further. I watched, hands knotted tightly about each other, as the retaliatory party mounted up. Of course he had to go: he represented his brother here, and would lose a great deal of face if he hung back from battle. But I worried all the same.

The camp was quiet after they left. Several men had been injured during the raid, but they bore it stoically as their wives cleaned and bandaged their wounds. I tried not to pace as I calculated how rapidly the party might return. There were too many variables I could not account for: it depended on how determined they were, and whether they caught the raiders before they passed into Banu Safr lands. Our group might turn back at that border—or they might not, carrying their counter-raid into enemy territory. It would be brave, but a good deal more dangerous.

Either way, they would not return by nightfall. Andrew offered to help stand watch over the camel herds, lest a second party of raiders strike while the best warriors were gone; this was apparently a tactic employed by the more cunning nomads, though no one thought it likely here. I dressed for bed on my side of the tent we shared with Tom—an arrangement I had thought would be decried as inappropriate, given the absence of any other woman. (Certainly it had attracted censure during our previous expeditions, even when we were
not
sharing a tent.) But so long as the tent was officially Andrew's, he had the right to give shelter to any guest he liked, even with his unmarried sister present.

Through the curtain that divided us, I addressed Tom. “Thank you for giving him the rifles.”

“You're welcome,” Tom said. After a moment he added, “I would have given my left arm to go with them. These raids have been causing no end of trouble for the Aritat, and I suspect it's because of us.”

The enmity between the two tribes went back a long way … but from what I could tell, it was not always so active as this. “I fear you may be correct.”

“I don't know what to do about it, either,” Tom said. “This is about more than just our scholarly curiosity; there are governments involved. The caliph is the one who told them to gather dragons and eggs for us.”

I nodded, even though Tom could not see me through the thick goat-hair fabric of the curtain. “All the more reason for us to reach a point where we no longer need supply from the desert.”

Then I paused, thinking. My thoughts were interrupted shortly thereafter by Tom saying, “I recognize that kind of silence. What are you thinking about?”

I smiled ruefully. “I am thinking that we ought to have had this conversation before I dressed for bed, so that I could come to the other side of the curtain without being completely scandalous. But I am also wondering why the Banu Safr should
care.
”

“About the dragons? I've been considering that myself. They supported the old caliphate, you know, before the Murasids came to power. They may just be eager to interfere with anything the caliph is trying to do.”

Unlovely though it is to admit, I hoped Tom was right. That would mean Scirland's involvement here was peripheral to this conflict, rather than central. We would merely be an excuse: the spark that lit the bonfire, not the fuel itself.

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?”