The Parched Sea

Nine

A bitter wind gusted over the hillside, sending dust devils of sulphurous grit scuttling across the volcano’s pale slopes. Lander sat in a ravine about a quarter of the way up the cinder cone, staring at the campfires three hundred feet below. Though he wore a jellaba given to him by Sheikh Sa’ar, the heavy camel’s wool robe did not prevent him from shivering.

Sa’ar lifted the battered pot off the steaming rock-fissure upon which it had been placed to keep the tea warm. He poured a generous helping of the black liquid into a wooden cup, then offered it to Lander. “Here, something to warm you,” the sheikh said.

The Harper accepted the tea with heartfelt gratitude, then wrapped his hands around the warm cup and sipped the rich drink. Though the steam vent kept the tea far from scalding, it was still hot enough to warm his insides. “Thank you,” Lander said, at last bringing his shivering to a halt.

Sa’ar put the pot back in the vent-hole, then shook his head in amusement and shrugged Lander’s thanks off without comment. It was a Bedine peculiarity, the Harper had noticed, that they did not express gratitude for food or water. From what he could tell, they regarded these two essentials as the property of whomever needed them at the time. It seemed a strangely charitable custom for a people who thought it praiseworthy to kill a man in order to steal his camel.

“You had better be right about the Zhentarim,” Sheikh Sa’ar commented, studying the black basin of emptiness lying beyond his tribes’ campsite. “I would not like to think I made my people abandon their khreimas for nothing.”

“I’m right.”

Lander’s answer was confident, but even he was beginning to doubt the Zhentarim would attack. Already, Mystra’s Star Circle was touching the western horizon, and by the constellation’s position, Lander knew dawn would come in less than three hours.

The Harper and the sheikh had been sitting in the ravine since nightfall, when the Mahwa had silently snuck out of their camps, leaving their khreimas standing behind them. Under the cover of the moonless night, the tribe had ridden for the far side of the caldera. Behind them, they had left only two sentries and a half-dozen warriors to tend the campfires so that it would appear that the camp remained occupied.

Tethering their camels two miles away, about a quarter of the way around the volcano’s cone, Lander and Sa’ar had come to watch the Zhentarim overrun the empty camp. Sa’ar had justified the adventure by claiming he wanted to study his enemies, but Lander suspected that the sheikh was more interested in witnessing the Black Robes’ reaction when they learned they had been duped.

Fortunately for Lander’s nerves, they had to wait only twenty minutes longer. A familiar, shrill note wafted across the black emptiness, and then a tiny bolt of bright light flared in the distance.

“What was that?” Sa’ar demanded, rising to his feet.

“Lightning bolt,” Lander explained.

“Magic?”

“Yes,” the Harper replied, also standing.

The sheikh groaned. “My warriors won’t like that.”

“The Zhentarim try to eliminate the sentries, then overrun the camps quickly,” Lander explained. “They won’t tolerate survivors.”

“With good reason,” Sa’ar responded, pointing at Lander. “You, Ruha, and the boy have certainly caused them enough trouble. If you hadn’t told me of their atrocities to the Mtair Dhafir, I might well have allied with them. From what Kadumi told me, the Mtair Dhafir would have also joined them—if you hadn’t cut their envoy’s throat.”

“Kadumi told you that?” Lander asked, surprised.

The sheikh turned and watched the dark shapes of two warriors ride their camels out of camp. “No,” he replied. “Kadumi claimed it was someone named Al’Aif, but I think you had more reasons than this Al’Aif.”

Lander did not bother to deny the conclusion. At the moment, who had killed Zarud did not matter, and he did not wish to offend Sa’ar. Instead of arguing with the sheikh, the Harper reached for the tea pot. “May I?”

“Why do you have to ask?”

Lander filled his cup, then sipped the warm drink while they waited for the Zhentarim to reach the camp. The Harper barely finished his tea before dark shapes began skulking through the golden grass around the lakes.

“Weren’t the sentries stationed at the edge of the basin?” Lander asked.

“They were supposed to be,” the sheikh responded, already thinking along the same lines as Lander. “But that seems impossible. It should have taken the Zhentarim twice this long to reach the camp.”

The two men watched silently as a long line of dark silhouettes appeared outside the camp. Though Lander guessed the line to be less than four hundred yards away, the shapes remained indistinct and small. For several minutes, the army held its ground, awaiting the resistance that would not come. After a time it began to creep silently, cautiously forward.

“All right,” Sa’ar said. “Let us see what they think of our little ruse.”

As Lander had expected, the first ranks entered the fire-lit camp scurrying on all fours. Even from two hundred yards, the Harper could see their distinctive shapes, with four limbs protruding from sinewy bodies at right angles and a serpentine tail twitching behind. As they stopped and stood on their two rear legs, about half of the reptilian mercenaries drew sabers. The others pulled crossbows off their backs.

“It is as I feared,” Sa’ar whispered. “Asabis.”

“What?” Lander asked, turning to the sheikh.

“Come,” the sheikh said, grasping the Harper’s shoulder. “We must leave here at once.”

Lander did not move. “You know what those things are?”

Sa’ar nodded. “I suspected it when you and Ruha described what had happened to the Mtair Dhafir. My tribe and I are in your debt.”

The sheikh started to leave, but Lander did not follow. “Why are you so frightened of them?”

“There’s no time,” Sa’ar said. “I’ll explain after we rejoin the tribe … if we live that long.”

Because Sa’ar was not the type to be easily frightened, Lander found the man’s fear more than a little contagious. Still, the Harper was not ready to leave. He wanted to study the asabis for at least a few minutes. “I’ll catch up to you later.” Lander turned back toward the campsite, where the asabis had made torches and were setting khreimas afire. “I want to watch awhile. Maybe I’ll learn something useful.”

The sheikh sighed. “I cannot leave you here alone,” he said. “Can we go after I tell you about them?”

Lander nodded, then picked up the tea pot and poured the last of the black drink into a bakia. “I suppose that would be fine.” He handed the cup to the sheikh. To his embarrassment, he noticed that his hand was trembling.

The sheikh glanced at Lander’s trembling hand, then chuckled and took the tea. “Very well,” he said, his voice and manner now absolutely calm. “We’ll stay until you are ready to go.”

Sa’ar turned toward the campsite and squatted down on his haunches. “Once, after my brothers and cousins had raided too many other khowwans, my tribe was driven into the Quarter of Emptiness. Our enemies did not follow us, for they expected that our camels would starve and we would die of thirst.”

The sheikh’s eyes grew hard and his attention seemed focused on a distant land and time. “We would have perished, save that we stumbled across an ancient city. It was half-buried in a massive dune, but its walls were made of gray stone as thick as a camel is tall. Inside the walls, the buildings stood as they had stood a thousand years ago, and in the center of the city lay an abandoned fort as large as a mountain.”

Sa’ar sipped his tea absently. “That fortress was both our salvation and our damnation. In its courtyard, there was an ancient well. When some of the warriors climbed down to clean it out, they claimed that it descended five hundred feet and that it opened into a great labyrinth of underground grottos filled with rivers of cool water.

“Of course, we thought they were exaggerating—at least until we began drawing water. It was sweet as honey and cool as the night, and the well’s capacity seemed endless. We pulled hundreds of buckets of water, and the flow never slowed. Before dusk fell that day, the sheikh and the elders were already making plans to turn the fort into a secret oasis, to make it a stronghold from which to build our khowwan into the strongest tribe of Anauroch.”

“What happened?” Lander asked, intrigued by the story of the lost city.

Sa’ar nodded toward the burning campsites below. “The asabis,” he said. “They climbed from the well in the dead of the night, falling upon our warriors and our mothers in the tents. A few of us children, afraid of sleeping inside a city, had stayed outside with the herds. When we heard the screams of our parents, we went to investigate.”

The sheikh paused. “You saw what the asabis did to the Mtair Dhafir, so I hardly need to describe what we found.”

Recalling the sight of the corpse-filled wadi below Rahalat, Lander shook his head. “No. I can imagine.”

“We went back to our camels and fled,” Sa’ar began. “And that was when the horror truly began. The asabis heard our beasts roaring and came to the chase. We were already mounted and riding, but they ran across the sands on all fours. Though our mounts were strong and freshly watered, the asabis followed close behind, and our camels had to gallop to stay ahead.

“By dawn, there were only six of us left. Every time a camel stumbled or someone fell from the saddle, the asabis got him. Soon our tired camels could barely keep their footing. Three of the others gave up hope and drew their jambiyas, then turned to meet the beasts. They might as well have stopped and let the fiends take them.”

The sheikh paused, then pointed at the campsite. “They’re about finished.”

Lander looked toward the camp and saw that all of the khreimas were engulfed in flames. In the center of the camp stood Yhekal, dressed as always in his purple robe. A hundred asabis had gathered around him, and he was gesturing at them wildly, waving his sword at both sides of the volcano. Lander suspected he was ordering the reptiles to sweep around the cone and destroy any living thing they encountered.

On the far side of the camp stood a line of black-robed Zhentarim and their camels, the eerie orange light of the fires reflecting off them, making them appear ghostly. The camels were frantically ripping at the lush grass, but the drivers had made no move to remove the baggage from their backs.

Now that he was finally ahead of the Zhentarim, Lander realized, he would have to ride hard to stay there. Without taking his eyes from the camp, Lander asked, “What happened to the rest of you?”

“We kept riding,” the sheikh said. “About two hours after dawn, the asabis stopped and burrowed into the sand. That was the last I ever saw of them—until tonight.”

“So that’s why they always attack at night!” Lander exclaimed, rising.

“What?” Sa’ar asked. He made no move to follow the Harper.

“All of the Zhentarim’s attacks have come at night. Until now, I thought they were just trying to take their enemies by surprise.”

Sa’ar smiled. “But it’s really because the asabis are creatures of the night,” he said. “During the day, they’re worthless.”

Lander nodded.

In the camp below, the asabis scattered, gesturing wildly at each other. The acrid smell of burning camel-hair began to waft up the slope. Realizing that he and the sheikh would be trapped on the cinder cone if they did not leave soon, the Harper climbed out of the ravine.

When Lander reached the lip of the gulch, he perceived a curious silence behind him. Alarmed that something had happened to Sa’ar, he turned and saw the sheikh still sitting in the ravine, sipping his tea.

“Are you coming?” Lander asked.

Sa’ar looked up with a roguish grin on his lined face. “You want to leave so soon?” he asked, rising to his feet and slowly stretching his arms. He sauntered to the steam vent and picked up his battered tea pot. “Mustn’t forget this. I paid two camels for it.”

Carefully working their way from one ravine to the next, they hurried across the cinder cone’s gritty slope and returned to their camels. By the time they untethered the beasts and mounted, they could hear the asabis barking orders to each other in a sharp, chattery language.

The two men reached their rendezvous point with the Mahwa at dawn. Without dismounting, the sheikh gave the order to ride for the Well of the Chasm. It was, he explained, the next waterhole in the Zhentarim’s path. The tribe camped there was allied with Mahwa, so he was obligated to warn them of the approaching hazard.

Sa’ar flattered Kadumi by asking him to scout ahead with the Mahwa’s best warriors. Lander and Ruha were assigned to ride with the sheikh’s party.

To Lander’s amazement, after Sa’ar issued all of his riding orders and the tribe began to move, the sheikh closed his eyes and fell asleep in the saddle. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the Harper found it increasingly difficult to keep his own eyes open, but did not dare imitate the dozing sheikh. Unlike Sa’ar, Lander was not so accustomed to camels that he could ride them in his sleep, and he did not fancy the idea of falling onto the hard desert floor from the height of a camel’s back.

Lander tried to keep alert by studying the Mahwa caravan. At first glance, it seemed a disorganized herd, but the Harper quickly realized that there was an order to the jumble. Riding far ahead and far behind the tribe, mounted on the fastest camels and well beyond sight, were the youngest and most daring warriors. Like Kadumi, they were scouts who would alert the khowwan to any dangers lurking ahead—or approaching from behind, Lander added silently, remembering the Zhentarim.

Ringing the tribe at a thousand yards were the rest of the warriors, accompanied by their eldest sons, sleek saluki hunting hounds, and falcons. As they traveled, they periodically unleashed a dog or bird, or broke into a spirited gallop themselves. At first Lander thought they were pointlessly wasting energy on high-spirited displays of riding and animal mastery, then he noticed that after these bursts of activity the sons returned to the center of the caravan with a hare, lizard, or some other meat for the evening’s pot. Once he even saw a proud boy riding with a small gazelle slung over his camel’s back.

The boys delivered the game to their mothers and sisters, who were riding in the security of the caravan center. The women of the wealthiest warriors rode in elaborately decorated haouadjejs, but most of the families could not afford the extra camel’s wool needed to make one of the box-shaped litters.

As Lander studied this part of the caravan, he realized that the Mahwa were moving at what must have been an extraordinary pace for the khowwan. Every camel was carrying at least one person, sometimes two. Even the baggage camels had small children perched atop their bundles, their little hands tightly gripping the leather thongs that held the cargo in place.

Lander turned to Ruha, who had been riding at his side all morning. “Do Bedine children usually ride the baggage camels?”

Ruha laughed. “No. The women and children usually walk to avoid tiring the camels. Sheikh Sa’ar is anxious to stay ahead of the Zhentarim, though, so everybody must ride. With luck, we will cover forty miles today.”

Lander glanced back over his shoulder. The ebony basin holding Colored Waters had already disappeared. For dozens of miles, all he could see was dun-colored barrenness. In the far distance, perhaps a hundred miles or more away, a low range of mountains rose out of the glassy heat waves drifting off the desert floor.

“I hope it will be enough,” he said.

“What makes you think it won’t be?” Ruha asked.

“Have you ever heard of asabis?” Lander asked, turning his attention to his riding companion’s sultry eyes.

She furrowed her brow. “No. The name means ‘eaters-of-parents’.”

“Maybe you haven’t heard of them, but you’ve seen them,” Lander replied. He repeated Sa’ar’s story to her, then added, “I have no idea how the Zhentarim made contact with them, but it appears our enemies already have one group of allies here in the desert.”

“That explains why they’re so quick to destroy the tribes who won’t cooperate,” she concluded. “They’re more concerned about eliminating potential enemies than about making allies.”

Lander nodded, impressed by the young woman’s grasp of the situation. “Their intentions are worse than I thought,” he said. “With the asabis, they have the allies they need to take military control of Anauroch. They only need the Bedine to use as slaves—in the worst sense of the word.”

“Did you ever doubt that?” Ruha asked.

The young widow rode unusually close to the Harper’s side for the rest of the day. She remained quiet and thoughtful, but Lander had the vague sensation that she enjoyed being next to him. The feeling was pleasant enough, but it also gave the Harper a giddy sense of excitement that discomforted him.

Late in the afternoon, Lander looked down and noticed that the ground had changed from barren, dun-colored dirt to a flat, endless mosaic of coin-sized stones. The pebbles were mostly red in color, varying in hue from blond to dark brown. All had been polished glass smooth, which gave the desert floor a fiery, pebbled appearance that seemed more appropriate to the caldera they had left behind than the open flats through which they were passing.

Leaning over to study the burnished stones, Lander asked, “Was there a lake here once?”

Ruha laughed. “Don’t be foolish. This is At’ar’s Looking Glass,” she said, glancing toward the sun. “Kozah hopes to win his wife’s heart back by keeping it swept clean with his wind so that she can admire her reflection in the pebbles.”

Lander looked at the heavens above. Though the sun was white and the earth red, he could see why the Bedine associated the fiery ground with their cruel sun goddess. “Yes, I see it now,” he said, sitting upright again.

Ruha chuckled at his ignorance as they moved onward. They rode across At’ar’s Looking Glass for the rest of the afternoon, and Lander was soon convinced that burnished sea of stones continued forever. At first, it had seemed eerily beautiful. Now it seemed infuriatingly uniform.

Two hours before dusk, the entire tribe turned ninety degrees north. Lander searched the horizon for some landmark he had missed, but there was nothing but the fiery rock flats. Shadowed closely by Ruha, he urged his camel forward until he rode abreast of Sa’ar.

The sheikh still appeared to be asleep, but when the Harper approached Sa’ar opened one eye. He glanced first at Lander, then at Ruha, and raised an eyebrow at the pair’s close proximity. “Yes? Is there something I can do for you?”

“Why are we turning?” Lander asked. “Are we close to the Well of the Chasm?”

Sa’ar shook his head. “No. We are turning so we are not in the Zhentarim’s path when they overtake us tonight.”

“What?” Lander nearly shrieked the question. He could not help thinking of how hard he had been trying to get ahead of them for the last few weeks.

The sheikh shrugged. “We cannot move as fast as the invaders. The asabis, at least, could overtake us tonight. Our only choice is to be out of the way when they pass.”

“What about your allies at the Well of the Chasm?” Lander asked.

Sa’ar smiled. “Don’t worry about them. The Zhentarim will not arrive before the messenger I sent ahead,” the sheikh replied. “The Raz’hadi will stall the invaders until we arrive.”

“You’ll still be outnumbered. What will you do then?”

Sa’ar only shrugged. “I can’t speak for Utaiba and his people,” he said. “We’ll see what happens when we get there.”

“Sheikh Sa’ar is correct, Lander,” Ruha said. “The Bedine do not plan everything out in advance.”

The sheikh nodded, then pointed at Ruha. “You would do well to listen to this woman, my friend.” A moment later, he scowled thoughtfully, then eyed Ruha and added, “But from a discreet distance.”

Ruha’s eyes went wide, then she allowed her camel to fall behind. Confused by the exchange, Lander also allowed his mount to fall behind and brought it alongside the widow’s. When he came too close, she tactfully guided her camel away and opened the space between them.

“What was that all about?” the Harper asked, once again guiding his mount close to hers.

Ruha carefully moved her mount away. “Sa’ar thinks I’ve been brazen,” she replied.

“That’s ridiculous!”

The widow’s eyes sparkled with agreement, but she shook her head. “Not really. In his eyes, I’m still part of my husband’s family. Please don’t ride any closer.”

Sa’ar’s admonition irritated the Harper, for he saw nothing wrong with talking to a widow and did not think it was anyone’s business to tell a woman how close she could ride to a man. For the next hour, he tried to draw Ruha back into conversation, but she avoided his questions. The Harper felt hurt by the sudden distance between Ruha and himself, and he could not help silently cursing Sheikh Sa’ar for upsetting his friend.

When less than an hour of light remained in the day, Sa’ar called a halt to the caravan. Immediately the women began to unpack supplies and arrange them on the flat, rocky ground in tentless semblances of their normal camp.

Lander attempted to help Ruha unpack the supplies for herself, him, and Kadumi, but she curtly instructed him to go and sit with the sheikh. More confused than ever, the Harper went over to the area of ground that Sa’ar’s first wife had staked out as his tent, then sat on a kuerabiche and sipped the cold tea that a servant provided. Fortunately, the sheikh was occupied with the details of posting sentries and arranging the camp, so Lander felt no obligation to make small talk.

When Ruha had laid out the camp, he returned to the area that would serve as the trio’s khreima. Someone had provided her with a hare for the cooking pot. As she skinned the hare, the widow did not acknowledge Lander’s presence. That only made him want to talk with her that much more.

If he was going to succeed, Lander knew he would have to say something to overshadow the warning that had passed between Ruha and the sheikh. Remembering her inquiry about Sembia, the Harper decided to lure her into a discussion about his home.

“In Sembia, the rabbits are as juicy as sheep,” he began, eyeing the stringy hare she was skinning.

His tactic worked immediately. “What are sheep?” Ruha asked, nervously glancing in the direction of the sheikh’s family.

The question caught him by surprise, for he had never before had to describe one of the beasts. He held his hand two and a half feet off the ground. “They’re about this tall, they come in herds, and they’re covered with wool—”

“Like tiny camels?”

Lander shook his head. “Not even close. Their fleece is soft and white.”

“How much milk do they give?”

“They don’t give milk,” Lander corrected. “At least not that Sembians drink.”

“Then what good are these sheep?” Ruha demanded.

Lander laughed at her desert pragmatism. “They give wool. We make clothes from it.”

“That’s all?” The widow pulled the hide off the rabbit and threw it to a saluki lurking on the edge of their camp.

“They can be eaten, too,” he said. “My father and I used to eat mutton—sheep—every year when we went to Archendale.”

“Archendale? Tell me about that,” the widow demanded.

“It’s a beautiful place,” Lander said, closing his eyes. “The River Arkhen flows through a rocky gorge. The whole valley is filled with lilies and moss.”

“It sounds wonderful.”

Ruha’s eyes were fixed on the Harper’s face, and he could tell from their dreamy expression that she was trying to imagine the paradise he described.

“Archendale is a wonderful place,” Lander confirmed. “But it was almost destroyed. The Zhentarim tried to take it over, too.”

“How did you stop them?” Ruha asked.

“It wasn’t me. My father did it,” Lander replied, growing melancholy at this turn of the conversation.

“Was he a Harper, too?”

Lander shook his head. “No, he was a merchant, but he was a good man.”

Ruha’s eyes remained fixed on Lander’s face, and he realized she expected him to continue the story.

“Archendale’s farms were the best within riding distance of Sembia,” Lander began. “Every summer, my father and I would go there together to buy produce. One year, my mother wanted to come along.”

“Why should that bother you?” Ruha asked, studying him carefully.

Lander looked away, uneasy that the widow had read his feelings so easily. “My father married a beautiful, charming woman,” the Harper said. “What he didn’t know was that my mother was also a deceitful Cyric-worshiper. She had intentionally married a wealthy merchant in order to gather commercial information for the Zhentarim—information they used to fill their own pockets with gold at the expense of honest men like my father.”

Lander paused, a lump of anger growing in his breast as he recalled how his mother had used him to dupe his father. When he turned ten, she had started taking him to the house of a famous mercenary three times a week, presumably for lessons in swordsmanship. What neither the Harper nor his father had realized, however, was that while Lander was learning to fight, his mother was meeting with her Zhentarim masters in the back of the house.

“Go on,” Ruha urged.

“The time came when the Zhentarim decided to take over the rich farms and orchards of Archendale. They assigned my mother the task of gathering the names of all the farmers and landholders in the valley. That was when she insisted upon joining my father and me on our annual trip,” Lander continued. “Fortunately, my father was an observant man, and my mother, as usual, underestimated his intelligence. When she insisted upon meeting all of his business contacts and asked about men he did not even deal with, he decided to find out what she was doing.

“When we returned to Archenbridge, my father hired someone to follow my mother while he was out of town. The man was able to stalk her to a secret meeting of Cyric’s evil sect and to see her meeting with a known Zhentarim agent.”

“What a shock for your father,” Ruha said, absentmindedly holding her bloody jambiya in her hand. “What did he do? Kill her?”

Lander grimaced. “In Sembia, men don’t do that sort of thing to their wives,” he said. “My father set out for Archendale to warn the farmers about the Zhentarim plot. He sent me to another city with a message for a trusted friend.

“My mother saw me leaving town and came after me with two men. When she caught me, she tried to convince me to join the Zhentarim, but I couldn’t help remembering all the wonderful times my father and I had shared in Archendale. I told her to let me go and, when her guards tried to take me prisoner, I killed them.”

“And your mother?”

Lander shook his head. “I made the worst mistake of my life,” he said. “I let her go.”

Ruha gave him a exonerating nod. “A man shouldn’t—”

“My mother went straight to her Zhentarim masters,” the Harper interrupted, an intentionally sharp tone in his voice. “They sent their agents into Archendale.”

“What happened?” the widow asked, her concerned eyes showing that she had already guessed the answer.

“I don’t really know,” Lander replied, looking at the ground. “I passed my father’s message to his friend, then waited for him as he had made me promise. I didn’t hear anything until nearly a fortnight later, when a Harper came and told me that both my parents had died in Archendale.”

Ruha’s voice dropped to a shocked whisper. “How did it happen?”

Lander shook his head. “A Zhentarim assassin caught my father shortly after he entered the valley. The Harper wouldn’t tell me how my mother died.”

They sat in uneasy silence, both of them staring at the pebbled ground. After a time, Ruha cleaned her jambiya on a piece of cloth and sheathed it. She took some dried camel dung out of a kuerabiche, then reached into her aba and withdrew a flint and steel. She handed the dried dung and the flint and steel to Lander. “Will you please light a fire?”

Without speaking, the Harper pulled some shreds off the hem of his tattered aba to use for tinder.

Ruha withdrew a pot from another kuerabiche and half-filled it with water. “I see mirages from the future,” she said, avoiding the Harper’s eyes. “When I was a little girl, I was not wise enough to hide this.”

Lander piled the tinder on a dung-patty. “So? Seeing the future is a gift.”

“Not among the Bedine,” Ruha replied. “I was shunned.”

“As a child?” Lander exclaimed.

The widow nodded. “It was my father’s decision, but he had no choice, of course. The elders demanded it.”

“The elders were fools!”

When Ruha did not meet his gaze, Lander leaned over the dung patties and began striking sparks. The third one caught, and he gently blew on it until it produced a small flame in the tinder.

“Who are fools?” asked a youth’s familiar voice.

Lander looked up and saw that Kadumi had returned from his duty as a scout. The boy was standing at the edge of their campsite, his bow and quiver in one hand and the reins of his camel in the other.

“Er—nobody,” Lander said.

The color rose to the visible part of Ruha’s cheeks, and Lander looked uncomfortably back to the flame.

Kadumi scowled, then turned to unsaddle his camel. After a moment of tense silence, he asked again, “Who are fools?”

“Nobody,” Lander replied, looking up from his fire. “Ruha and I were just talking about the differences in our cultures.”

Though he wasn’t sure why he should be embarrassed, Lander could sense from the attitudes of both Kadumi and Ruha that he and the young widow had violated an unspoken rule.

The Harper’s explanation did not satisfy the youth. Tossing his bow and quiver aside, Kadumi advanced angrily. “Ruha is my brother’s wife,” he said. “You may not have secrets with her!”

Lander stood. “We don’t have any secrets—”

Kadumi reached for his jambiya.

“Kadumi, no!” Ruha cried.

The Harper was so shocked by the action that the boy actually had the blade halfway out of the scabbard before Lander caught his arm. Grasping Kadumi’s wrist tightly, he helped him pull the dagger the rest of the way out of the sheath, then quickly used his free hand to press inward against the joint. Kadumi cried out in pain and dropped the dagger.

“Don’t draw a weapon on a man you can’t kill,” Lander said. His heart was pounding hard, but he kept his voice even.

Kadumi’s response was direct and heated. “Blood!” he yelled.

The word resounded across the rocky plain, bringing the camp to sudden silence.

Ruha shook her head violently. “Kadumi, don’t do this.”

Lander released the youth and pushed him away. Before the Harper could kick the boy’s jambiya back to him, Sa’ar and several warriors arrived.

“What’s happening here?” the sheikh demanded.

Kadumi pointed at Lander. “He’s courting Ruha,” the boy accused. “I have challenged him.”

Sa’ar looked from the boy to Lander, then back to the boy again. “You’re sure?” he asked. “We could have misunderstood you.”

“You did not misunderstand,” Kadumi snapped. “It is my family’s honor.”

The sheikh sighed, then gave Ruha an accusatory glance. “We had better do this according to tradition,” he said. “Give the boy his jambiya, Lander.”

The Harper did not move to obey. “Why?”

Sa’ar frowned. “He challenged you,” the sheikh responded. “Kill him, and Ruha is yours.”

The Harper looked from the sheikh to Kadumi. The boy was trembling, though Lander could not be sure whether it was with fear or anger. Regardless, he was standing tall and staring at Lander with an unwavering gaze.

“He’s just a boy!” Lander objected.

“He’s a Bedine warrior,” Sa’ar corrected. “Don’t worry. We’ll witness the fight. Nobody will doubt your honor if you win.”

Lander snorted his disbelief, then shook his head. “I won’t do it. I refuse the challenge.”

The warriors gasped, and Sa’ar looked confused. “What?”

“Kadumi can try to kill me if he wishes,” Lander explained. “But I won’t kill him. I refuse his challenge.”

“You can’t do that!” the youth yelled.

“I can, and I have,” Lander replied calmly.

The Bedine stood, looking confused. Several moments later, Ruha burst out laughing. “Kadumi, if you must, try to kill him. I doubt that any harm will come of it.”

The warriors could not restrain a few chuckles, but Sa’ar did not seem amused. He pondered the situation for what seemed like an hour, then turned to Lander and pronounced his judgment.

“Very well. Since you are not a Bedine, it is your privilege to refuse Kadumi’s challenge,” he said. “But being a berrani does not entitle you to ignore all of our traditions. Ruha is still the widow of Kadumi’s brother, and it is a matter of family honor that he defend her reputation, whether she wishes it or not.”

The sheikh glanced at the Harper meaningfully, then continued, “Therefore, you will not speak to Ruha except in Kadumi’s presence. In return, he will not challenge—or attack—you again. This is my decision, and be it known that any who ignore it violate my hospitality.”