Above him, leering down with mindless malice, the half-wit he called the Torturer was still holding the smoking twist of burning reeds that he had used to burn St.
Clair’s hand. The knight quickly looked around for any of the others, hoping for rescue, but the two of them were alone and St. Clair’s heart sank, knowing that his tormentor must have dragged him bodily to the edge of the fire, although neither reason nor logic could inform him why the sullen brute had stopped short of throwing him onto the fire itself. He might easily have done so, for 550
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there was no capacity to reason in whatever passed for the creature’s mind.
The others in the small band who were the knight’s captors, knowing their dim-witted companion’s love of inflicting pain on others, had thus far discouraged him from going too far, clearly hoping to win a ransom for their prisoner, and aware that he would be useless to them if they allowed the simpleton to kill him. None of them spoke any form of intelligible language that St. Clair understood. Their conversation was gibberish to him, lightning-fast and sibilant rather than throaty and gut-tural like most of the Arab tongues with which he was familiar. And so he had been unable to disabuse them of the notion that he was a Frankish knight and therefore must be wealthy and worthy of ransom, valuable to someone.
He had lost awareness of how long they had been holding him, but he knew he must have been close to death when they found him, raving with thirst and unable to defend himself. The fact that he was here at all at-tested to the utter helplessness that must have bound him at the time of his capture, but he had no knowledge of how much time had elapsed since then. He knew only that he had returned to consciousness one day, weak but clear headed, to discover that he was a captive, wearing only the soiled remnants of the tunic he had been wearing the night he left the stables in Jerusalem. He had no way of knowing whether days, weeks, or months had passed in the interim, although his reason, and his observations of his captors, told him that it was probably a 552
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matter of days. They would have made no effort to prolong his life, other than giving him water, and had he not improved noticeably in a short time, they would have killed him or left him to die.
He had no recollection of what had happened to his horse, or to his mail armor and weapons, but he had seen no signs of them since regaining his awareness, and so he assumed that he had rid himself of them before being found by these people. He remembered that he had ridden for days in the desert, looking for death, but had seen no single person with whom he might fight, and eventually he had arrived at a water hole that no longer contained water. Only slightly dismayed, he remembered, he had set out for the next water hole along the desert route. He had traveled it many times before and knew all the watering places, but on this occasion, long before he drew near the deep, ancient sump that sustained all the life for an enormous distance around it, he had seen vultures circling above the site and had arrived to find the place defiled, its water fouled and rendered undrinkable by bloated, stinking corpses so long dead that they were indistinguishable by sex and barely recognizable as human.
Appalled, he had fallen to his knees and cursed the abject folly and criminal irresponsibility of his fellow Franks, for he knew beyond question that no Muslim would have committed such a crime. It required all the posturing self-righteousness and unbridled stupidity of an arrogant, hatred-flushed Christian to murder defenseless nomads such as these—for the emaciated and Commitment
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pathetic condition of their slaughtered livestock left St.
Clair in no doubt as to the status of the people who had died—and then to throw their bodies into the only sweet water source for hundreds of miles around, condemning to death not only the people of the surrounding land but all the desert creatures who depended on the water hole for life. Unable to pray to a God who would condone such iniquity, he had saddled up and ridden onward, dangerously low on water now and fully aware that he would be hard-driven to reach the next hole he knew of before thirst drove him mad.
He had obviously failed to make the trek. He remembered riding through a series of windstorms that first confused and then confounded him, and the next time he became aware of himself or his surroundings, he was a prisoner.
Soon after regaining consciousness that first time, he had his first encounter with the mindless Torturer, who simply loved to cause pain, not merely to St. Clair but to any living creature that fell into his power and could not retaliate. He would push a sharpened sliver of bone into St. Clair’s flesh—he carried the thing tucked into his belt and St. Clair knew he was far from being the first person on whom it had been used—for the sheer pleasure of watching the way St. Clair reacted, and all the while he would grin that empty, evil grin, the stumps of his rotted teeth glistening wetly in the cavern of his drooling mouth.
Now the Torturer squatted, still grinning, and thrust his twist of reeds at St. Clair’s face, but the flames had 554
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already died out and what was left of the reeds was no more than warm. The charred ends broke off against St.
Clair’s skin, and he felt dribbles of powdery soot roll down towards his chin. As the Torturer sat back and began to fumble for the bone sliver at his belt, there came the sound of raised voices as the others in the band returned, and the half-wit lurched to his feet and shambled off to greet them.
Moments later, one of the others appeared, bent forward under the weight of a large goat that was slung across his shoulders. He dumped the eviscerated carcass on the ground by the fire, then looked at St. Clair, his eyes moving to the fire and seeing that the prisoner lay far too close to it. He muttered a curse and shuffled forward, calling for help as he began to pull the knight away from the heat. A second man joined him, and between them, none too gently, they picked the Frank up and carried him back to where he had previously been sitting. St.
Clair clacked his mouth open and shut noisily, making the sound they recognized as a request for water, and one of them returned with a small clay cup, which he held to the bound knight’s mouth.
St. Clair drank thirstily, rinsing his mouth thoroughly with the last drops before swallowing them, and as he did so he heard a curious but familiar sound that ended with a solid, jarring thump. It was the hissing strike of a hard-shot arrow. The missile struck the man kneeling over him, taking him somewhere high in the back and hurling him violently sideways, leaving St. Clair stiffening in shock. The sound was repeated four times after that, Commitment
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clearly audible each time above the rising clamor of frightened voices, and each time, the babble of voices lessened, punctuated by the noise of a body falling. And then the arrows stopped.
St. Clair knew there had been eight men in the band that had captured him. Five of them, he now suspected, were dead. It occurred to him, inanely, that they might simply have been severely wounded, but he doubted that even as the thought came to him. But where, then, were the other three?
He heard a sharp, sibilant whisper, answered promptly by two others. All three men were there, close by, crouching unseen for the time being, presumably safe from the arrows of the lurking enemy beyond the firelight. He turned his head as far as he could to his left, hoping to see where his remaining captors were, but all he could see was a single corpse, his erstwhile nemesis the Torturer, belly down in a lifeless sprawl, his eyes staring emptily at St. Clair, his ever-open mouth finally closed by the ground beneath his chin. A single arrow protruded from his back, its feathers daintily fletched and cunningly fashioned. St. Clair had seen many such missiles, all of them made in Syria by the Seljuk Turks. He was, he decided ruefully, about to exchange one batch of captors for another. The burn in the web of his hand began to throb again.
He sensed movement behind his right shoulder and turned back quickly to look beyond the fire, where he saw an apparition walk into the light. The newcomer was tall and slim, hawk faced and bearded, wearing a tall, 556
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conical helmet of shining steel from which hung a net, almost an open veil, of delicate, finely made chain mail.
The fellow shimmered as he moved, covered from neck to ankles in a long coat of the same supple mail. His right hand held a long, glittering scimitar and his left a curved dagger, while a small round Saracen shield was mounted on his left forearm, covering it from biceps to wrist when the elbow was bent. There came a cry and a scuffle from the three remaining men behind St. Clair’s shoulder, and then he heard running feet approaching him, and a smashing blow hammered him into oblivion.
“SANGLAHR.”
St. Clair had been awake for some time, but he had not yet opened his eyes, for he had known from the moment of his awakening that he was still a captive, feeling the bonds that yet confined his arms and legs. His head ached from the blow he had taken, but not as badly as he might have expected, and that surprised him. He was in no rush, however, to open his eyes to the light, and for two good reasons, both of them involving risk: the light might inflame whatever it was that caused his head pains, and someone might see that he was awake. And so he lay still and listened, trying to form a picture of what was happening around him.
He knew he had been brought back to awareness by the delicious smell of roasting meat, and one of the last things he remembered, just before the arrival of the enemy from beyond the firelight, was the sight and sound Commitment
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of the goat’s gutted carcass being dropped by the fire.
Since then, evidently, sufficient time had passed for someone to win the ensuing fight—it had been three against one, he remembered, and hand to hand, since the attacker had obviously set aside his bow and come forward with bared blades. Unless, of course, there had been more than one of them out there in the darkness.
He abandoned that train of thought and returned to where he had been going originally: someone had won the fight, and had then had time to spit and cook the goat over the fire of dried camel dung, which meant that St. Clair must have been unconscious for considerably more than an hour.
“Sanglahr.”
The voice spoke again, more clearly and emphatically this time, and St. Clair knew the outsider had won the fight, for none of his former captives, with their sibilant jabbering, had possessed that sonorous depth of voice.
“Sanglahr!” This time the voice was very close, and a hand grasped him by the shoulder and shook him hard.
He opened his eyes and found dark, flashing eyes with startling whites peering down into his own. He thought it must be the outsider in the high, conical helmet, but the play of light and shadows was too intense for him to be sure, and by the time he had gathered himself, the other man had moved away to sit across the fire from him, his back resting against a camel saddle. He sat with one knee raised, supporting his elbow, and he held a short, curved, sharp-looking dagger, dangling it by the hilt, between thumb and forefinger. In his other hand, lying on the 558
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ground by his left side, he held a set of light, rust-brown manacles.
“I do not own your
ferenghi
tongue, Sanglahr. Do you have me?”
The language was recognizably French, and
ferenghi
—an Arabic corruption of
Frankish
—was the term used by the local people to describe anything having to do with the Christian warriors who occupied their lands. St. Clair sat blinking for long moments, trying to decipher what he had heard. And then it came to him and he shrugged his shoulders, answering in Arabic. “Very little. I am newly come here, a few years only. I do not speak with your people very much … to learn the language.”
The hawk-faced man nodded, and his fine chain mail rattled gently as his helmet moved. “You speak my tongue better than I speak yours, so we will use mine.
How long have your legs been bound like that?”
St. Clair looked down at his legs and then shook his head. “I don’t know. Several days.”
“I will have to cut the ties. You will not enjoy the aftermath. But if Allah wills it, you may recover the full use of your legs. Your arms will be the same, but less severe, I think. Brace yourself.” He stood up and stepped back to where St. Clair lay looking up at him, and then he bent and quickly slashed the leather straps binding the knight’s legs together before returning to his seat by the fire, where he sat waiting, narrow eyed.
St. Clair took a deep breath and braced himself as instructed, waiting for the pain to come, but for a long time nothing happened and he saw, without understand-
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ing, a deepening frown beginning to form on the stranger’s face. But then the first stab of feeling pierced him as the returning blood forced its way back into veins that had been tied off for days on end. The pain was overwhelming, dementing, and finally unendurable, so that he lost consciousness again, albeit only briefly this time. When he reopened his eyes, the helmed man had not moved and the pain in St. Clair’s legs was slightly, and slowly, abating. He gritted his teeth and fought against the urge to moan aloud.
“Try moving them. Bend your knees.”
It seemed at first that his legs might never function again, for no matter how hard he tried to make them respond, nothing happened, and a great, surging fear began to rise in him. He had wanted to die when he left Jerusalem and rode out into the desert, but it was a quick death he had sought, an honorable death in battle against infidels like the man across from him now. This—this lingering death in life, unable to move and in constant pain—was not at all what he had had in mind.
“Stop, then. Stop. Think about your feet, your toes.
Try to flex your toes, even a little.”
St. Clair squeezed his eyes shut against the pain and the fear and concentrated all his mental powers on his right foot, willing the toes to stir, but he felt nothing and his stomach churned in despair.