The Warrior King (Book 4) (18 page)

Sofiana obeyed everything he told her, but as soon as he was curled up and asleep, his breath emerging in a low rumble, she sprang silently to her paws and made for the gap in the wall. Once outside, she ran down the empty street and toward the highway. Along toward morning, she found herself a girl once again. Her dagger remained beneath her robe, together with the coin purse King Daniel had given her.

When the sun climbed into the sky, she found herself on foot trudging up an empty road, surrounded by the vast, sandy desert. There was no sign of Darik.

#

Late on the first morning after escaping Darik’s watchful eye, she entered a village where she passed off a few Balsalomian dinarii for waterskins and supplies. A few miles up the road, she came upon one of the fortress-like caravanserai that lodged and protected travelers on the Spice Road, and here she stole a camel from some Kratians. After that she thought it wise to stay off the highway and travel the desert alone.

That night when she slept in the open air, she woke to hear a desert owl hooting softly to the south. A moment later, another owl hooted to her east. Another hoot from the first owl, followed by a third owl. Sofiana reached into her robes to pull out her dagger and remained perfectly still while silently begging her camel to remain asleep. The hoots came too regularly for owls and sounded to her ears like a systematic search. Mufashe’s men, or the Kratians looking for the stolen camel? She remained in place until the owl hooted again further to the north.

The next morning she was more cautious, watching constantly and taking the camel along the windward sides of dunes. The blowing sand irritated the camel and worked its way underneath the edge of the turban wrapped around her mouth, but it would sweep away her tracks. Those precautions eventually faded to be replaced by boredom, hunger, and thirst.

Two days later, she was hungry and discouraged. She had seen no one since the caravanserai and had eaten nothing in the last two days but a monitor lizard she’d dug from its burrow, meat dried across her saddle. Her waterskins dangled limp and nearly empty from her camel’s pack. She resisted the urge to guzzle the last few mouthfuls. Her stolen camel plodded across the sand about two miles west of the Spice Road, with the mountains to her left and more than a hundred miles of desert and scrub ahead of her before she reached the safety of Balsalomian lands.

Sofiana glanced over her shoulder when the camel crested a sandy dune. Grass and a few thorny bushes pinned the dune in place, and the camel lowered its head to snuffle for something edible to munch on. Sofiana let it rest while she looked. Nothing behind her or ahead that she could see. No, just an endless, depressing waste that stretched in all directions. At least it wasn’t as hot as it had been.

After a heavy sigh, Sofiana pulled the reins and nudged the camel into action. The beast bellowed its irritation and turned its head to grab one last mouthful before moving. She frowned and jerked harder on the reins, and the camel bellowed again.

The sun sank slowly behind the mountains far to the west, and the day’s warmth bled from the air. Soon, she was cold for the first time in weeks. She had no riding cloak, but had been wise enough to buy an extra robe in the village, and she pulled it on over the other one. It stopped the shivers, but left her well short of warm. Sofiana began to watch for a place to spend the night. The first stars glimmered overhead, but their light was washed out by the comet that now spread nearly two hands wide across the sky.

A smaller hump of dry hills and mountains stretched to her east, the tan stone of a vast escarpment ending in field of boulders and rubble. Sofiana had heard hyenas last night and knew that desert lions lived here where the sandy waste began to give way to desert scrub. The boulders might make a good refuge from the cold and the wild beasts.

Sofiana was turning her camel toward them when she saw a fire.

It flickered between two dunes that had initially blocked her view. Four men squatted around the fire, while some forty or fifty camels milled about or sat on their knees a short distance from the camp. An animal of some kind roasted over the flames, and a delicious aroma wafted over the dunes.

Sofiana hesitated for a long moment, torn between her fear and her hunger and loneliness. In the end, it was the camels that decided it for her. Only traders would have so many camels and so few riders. They could not possibly be Marrabatti soldiers out looking for her, and the men she’d stolen the camel from had been traveling south. They wouldn’t have gone this far simply to search for one missing animal. She dismounted and picked her way across the sand toward the fire. She called out her arrival as she drew into view.

Men sprang to their feet and drew scimitars. They positioned themselves in a crescent moon shape in front of the fire. One man, older than the others, with a beard that dipped halfway down his chest, shouted instructions to the others in a language that sounded like Kratian. Then, when Sofiana drew within the light cast by the fire, the man laughed and resheathed his weapon. The others did likewise.

“Boy,” the man called to her. “Are you alone? This is a dangerous land.”

“I’m not a boy,” she said, feeling peevish.

The man laughed again. “Girl, then. But my question remains. There are lions and bearded snakes, and you would make a nice mouthful for any of them. Even a dragon, some say.”

“Who says that I’m alone?” She climbed down from the camel.

Two of the men turned their attentions to the meat over the fire while the others sat back on their haunches. The animal was a wild oryx, dressed and skewered.

The first man grinned at her, revealing a smile missing several teeth, the others stained red from khat chewing. “You are alone, but whether lost or simply foolhardy, I’m not sure. Care to share a meal?”

“Perhaps.”

“I can hear your stomach rumbling from here, friend. And your waterskins hang empty. Come, join us.” He gestured to one of the other men and jabbered a few words to him in Kratian.

This second man hurried forward to take the reins of her camel, but Sofiana didn’t let go. She was suddenly sure that she had made a mistake in approaching. She recognized the men now from their dark skin and desert-roughened features, as much as their language. These were no merchants, they were camel riders of the kind who had fought for King Toth at Arvada. They were notorious thieves and liars. What if they were slavers?

“It’s all right,” the bearded man said. “We won’t hurt your mount. Listen, we found the watering hole. Your camel needs it—he is weak and staggering.”

Reluctantly, she removed her hand from the reins, and the second man took her camel. As he passed the fire, the older man with the beard rubbed his hand over the camel’s head, and nodded for the other man to take him to the others. He said a few more words to the other man, then turned back to Sofiana. “You ride a fine Kratian beast. Does it carry you well?”

Sofiana shrugged. “He’s a fine enough mount. Somewhat foul-tempered and willful. But he’s not a Kratian camel, so far as I know. I bought him in Darnad,” she lied. “I don’t think the Kratians trade so far north.”

“Ah, we do trade in Darnad,” he said. “If indeed you purchased the camel in the khalifates.”

The man drew a dagger, and Sofiana staggered backwards, reaching for her own blade. But before she could draw it, he sliced a hunk of meat from the oryx and held it out to her on the tip of his blade. “You are our guest, so I would be honored if you would test it and tell me if it is done.”

She took the meat. It was so hot that it burned her fingers and her mouth, but she was hungry and didn’t care. She nodded between chews. “It’s delicious.”

The man broke into a smile. He shouted, “It is done! We eat.” He shouted again in Kratian.

Two more men appeared and came scrambling down the dune, and shortly the man who’d taken her camel reappeared as well. The six of them immediately set into the beast, cutting off huge slabs of meat and laying them in polished cedar bowls. Someone produced a jug of fermented camel milk and passed it around. Sofiana dared not refuse when offered the jug. It was sharp and bitter, yet had a cloying aftertaste at the same time.

“Tell me your name, girl,” the man said.

She hesitated. If they’d heard her name, Sofiana might find herself trussed up and thrown over the back of a camel to return to the sultan’s palace in Marrabat. But she was too proud to take on a false name, either.

“My name is Ninny.”

“Ninny.” The man rolled the word on his tongue like it was a strange and inedible berry. “My name is Abuda-Mallfallah-Bar-Julab. But they call me Abudallah.”

They sat and ate for a few minutes, the silence punctuated by grunts and belches. When they finished, one of the men passed out leaves of khat, which the men tucked into their cheeks. Sofiana took a leaf, sniffed it, and followed their lead. She wrinkled her face at the bitter flavor.

“A curious thing happened to my brother a few days ago outside of Marrabat,” Abudallah said. “He woke one morning to find his best camel missing.”

Sofiana’s heart jumped. “Oh?” The others watched her, no longer eating.

“Yes, most strange. ‘A djinn,’ I told him, ‘came in the night and worked his mischief.’ But now I am not so sure. I only asked you about your camel because it has three notches in its right ear, which is how my tribe marks its beasts.” He shrugged. “But if you say the camel came from Darnad . . . ”

Sofiana kicked herself for not being more observant. Had she noticed the notches, she could have added an extra. “That is strange. Maybe it was resold.”

Abudallah took another swig from the jug of fermented milk. “I told my brother not to worry about his loss. Whoever took it must have needed the camel badly to cross the desert. Perhaps the thief was running from the sultan of Marrabat, who has many enemies. I even hear that he is looking for a young Eriscoban girl.”

Sofiana tensed. She had stumbled down here so blindly, and now that she had filled her stomach, some sense started to return. As soon as they reached for her, she would run. If a man grabbed her, she would cut him. No camel, no waterskins—it didn’t matter, because she wouldn’t let them take her.

Abudallah started to laugh suddenly, and the other five men joined in with him.

“Why are you laughing?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, “only that I shouldn’t be so open with you, Ninny. We have run afoul of Mufashe’s wrath ourselves, and the sultan would be very interested in hearing why a bunch of Kratians ride so far from the Spice Road.”

Relief washed over her as she realized they didn’t intend to take her back to Marrabat after all. “Why
are
you so far from the road?” 

Abudallah smiled again, but this time he looked predatory instead of friendly. “Mufashe has doubled taxes on the Spice Road three times in the last two years. We can no longer pay such tolls. Indeed, that is why we sided with Veyre, because Cragyn promised to free us from the Marrabatti tax collectors. But the dark wizard collects his own tolls, these paid in blood. We keep our own trade now.”

“And what is that, selling camels?”

“Yes, in part. Every Kratian is a camel trader in the right marketplace. But that isn’t our most valuable trade good.” He reached into his robe and removed a small urn, which he passed to Sofiana.

She took the lid off the urn and sniffed at the darkened interior. “Frankincense?”

“Yes. As valuable as gold.”

“How do you harvest frankincense?” Her lips felt funny from the khat juice in her mouth.

“Ah, the girl wonders how.” Abudallah took back the urn, replaced the stopper, and disappeared it into the folds of his robe. “It comes from a special berry that we feed to the camels. The bushes of this berry are so very thorny, and the berries themselves so bitter, that the camels won’t eat them plain. We feed it to them in a mixture with honey and oats.” He showed a snaggly smile. “You don’t want to be around when the berries work their magic. The camels grow irritable. But the next morning we collect the camel shit and boil it in a pot over the fire. When all the water boils off, the residue at the bottom is frankincense. It takes a thousand weight of camel shit to make one measure of frankincense.”

Sofiana snorted at this ridiculous story and wondered how many credulous listeners had tried to boil their own camel dung. “I always heard it came from a tree. I just wondered how you got it from the tree. Cut off the branches? The bark?”

He laughed. “Then you know our secret already? Fah, girl! I should kill you now.” Abudallah shrugged and looked at his companions. “This is a smart one. But since she knows that much, what is the harm in telling her?” The other men returned blank looks. No, they could not speak or understand the common tongue.

Abudallah turned back to Sofiana. “If you cut gashes along the branches of the tree, a sweet-smelling sap bubbles to the surface. When it dries, we scrape it off.”

Sofiana didn’t know if this was true or not, but it sounded more likely. “And you will sell this particular shipment where?”

“We ride north to Balsalom. It was our gateway to the khalifates before the war. Now, they are somewhat more hostile, but we will try.”

“Kratians attacked Balsalom with King Toth and Pasha Mol Khah. Some of them occupied the city and carried away slaves.”