In the Labyrinth of Drakes (15 page)

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.

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

Kidnapper, Brother, and Wife—Oddities in camp—The first attempt—Another breeze—A less dreadful journey—Suhail departs

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.

I did achieve one minor victory early on. Our kidnappers had dragged me out of my tent in my nightgown, and I was exceedingly aware of this fact at every turn. I soon hit upon the tactic of huddling under one of the carpets, demanding in a loud voice to be provided with suitable covering against the eyes of all these strange men. Before long Wife took up my cause; it was the one point upon which we were united. I do not think back on the woman with any fondness, and I doubt it was my well-being which motivated her to speak; but I am grateful to her for that small measure of support, whatever the reasoning behind it.

So I was given a proper robe and headscarf, and even a belt—which Wife threw at me with a comment whose words I could not understand, but whose tone implied that a woman who went unbelted might engage in any sort of impropriety. The items were tattered and less than clean, but I counted them as a trophy nonetheless.

We gained another minor respite from the steps they took to secure us. The Banu Safr moved camp the very next day, to a different area with fresh pasturage, and Tom and I were loaded into a howdah on the back of one of the camels. With the sides tied shut around us, we could neither see where we were going, nor be observed by any scouts; but we were also sheltered from the sun. As stuffy as it became in there, I preferred it to the alternative, which might have killed Tom outright.

We were two days in transit to the next site, and Tom predicted that the Banu Safr would attempt to hide their trail, making it difficult for our companions to find us. By then I was fairly certain we had been taken in a different direction from the stolen camels, increasing my suspicion that the raid had been a diversion from this, their true mission. But who were the Banu Safr waiting for?

If I could not escape, then I might at least hope to answer that question.

Escaping would not be easy, and I hesitated to rush into a poorly planned attempt, for fear that doing so would only make matters worse. No one ever left sharp objects within our reach, with which Tom and I might cut our tethers. Even once we were free of those bonds, we would have to leave the tent without anyone noticing, or else overpower our guards without a disturbance. We ought to steal two camels: we could ride double, as we had on the way here, but that would tire our mount and make it easier for pursuers to catch us. I had grand visions of sending the entire herd of camels stampeding off into the wilderness, forcing the Banu Safr to choose between their captives and their livelihoods; but I did not know if camels were prone to stampeding, and even if they were, it would be impossible to drive off enough of them at once.

Hunting for openings we might exploit, I found myself noticing other things. The rugs that carpeted the floor of the tent, for example, were clearly new: their nap was still thick, their colours unstained and undimmed. When Wife cooked meals, she used brass pots that lacked the scrapes and small dents of older tools. She wore quite a bit of gold jewelry as well—cheap stuff, as even I could tell, but she seemed very proud of it, and during our move to the new campsite I saw her displaying it to another woman, in the manner of one showing off a new acquisition.

All of it pointed toward wealth recently obtained. It might have been a reward to Husband and Brother for their valour; I rather thought most of it predated the kidnapping, but the Banu Safr had been causing trouble for a while, and sheikhs are supposed to be generous with their followers. But where had the sheikh gotten that wealth? This tribe lacked the city connections that helped enrich their brethren. They might have been extorting “brotherhood” from villages in settled areas; that is the term given to the protection money that was once common, before the current political arrangements came into being. (Indeed, one could argue that the tax money the city sheikhs now receive and distribute to their tribes is still “brotherhood,” just given a different name. But that is neither here nor there.) Their rebellious status meant the Banu Safr scraped by in marginal territory, however, and I could not imagine the villages within their reach had any great wealth to offer. Where, then, was the money coming from?