SYDNEY SUSPECTED THAT SHE WAS sleeping on her feet. She was tired and sore and worried, her thoughts circling endlessly, with no answers presenting themselves. If this had been L.A., she could have sorted things out in twenty minutes. A request to her directors would fix most things. Here, though, she was powerless. She didn’t know enough of the culture.
The other thing that was making her sleepy was the almost complete silence with which the caravan moved. Of course, there was no clopping of horse hooves, here in the desert. There was an occasional jingle of metal from their harnesses and that was all. Camels were also freakishly silent. Everyone who was on horseback probably was sleeping, while she had to keep putting one foot in front of the other. The pace was slow enough for everyone who was on foot to keep up, and so the horses and camels did not tire too quickly.
The night sky overhead was alive with stars. Out here, there were no city lights to ruin the view. Sydney could see the glow of nebulas and gas clouds and so many, many more stars than she had ever seen before. It made the night anything but dark. There was light all around them, bouncing off the white dunes.
She walked and possibly dozed, her mind foggy. No one spoke to her. There was just the gentle pull of the rope on her wrists and the whisper of a breeze somewhere overhead. It was not cold and it was not hot. In many ways, it was a beautiful night.
She just wanted to stop walking.
When the caravan did stop, she almost ran into Alim’s horse. Whispers passed back along the file.
“Storm! A storm is coming!”
Suddenly, everyone seemed to start rushing around. Camels trumpeted in protest and horses snickered and pranced sideways, made skittish by the panic in the air.
Sydney looked around, her heart thudding. The worry in everyone’s voices and hurried movements made her feel just as nervous as the horses.
Then she saw it. On the horizon, which was a long way away out here, a dun-colored band of cloud roiled. It glowed under the starlight and moonlight, stretched out before them with no edges. They were directly in its path.
Alim jumped from his horse and untied the rope from his harness and tossed it to her. “Hurry. Help me,” he said shortly.
Sydney struggled with the knot. It was too tight.
Impatiently, he untied it. “Take the covers.”
“Covers?” she repeated, pulling her wrists from the rope.
“Here!” The shout came from over her shoulder. She turned in time to get her free hands up to catch the bundle thrown in her direction and staggered backward under the impact. It was heavy.
Alim had pulled the saddle blanket off his horse. Now he took the bundle from her and unrolled it and shook out one of the layers, then tossed it over the horse’s back. It covered the gray from the neck down to his hooves. Alim tied the heavy cloth under the horse’s chin, then patted his nose, talking softly to him. He pointed to the pile of cloth at Sydney’s feet. “The gauze,” he said.
She picked up the light, sheer fabric. It looked like chiffon, but heavier and stiffer. Alim took it from her. He held the edge of it behind the gray’s head and dropped it over the horse’s face, then gathered it underneath and tied it off. It was a mask.
Others in the caravan were doing the same thing to their horses and the camels were being draped and covered, too.
Sydney watched, feeling useless and helpless. She didn’t fully understand what anyone was doing. The approaching wall of dust was driving them to hurry, hurry. Their haste made her own heart work hard.
Alim pulled a jar out of the pack attached to the saddle, where it laid in the sand. He took out the stopper and poured a sludgy oil onto his hand, put the pot down, then picked up one of the gray’s feet. He liberally coated the leg all the way up to the knee, so the hair looked black and glistened.
He moved to the next leg. Sydney jumped to pick up the pot still sitting in the sand and held it out. “Let me pour it. You’ll get sand on your hands if you do.”
He nodded and held out his hands. She poured another thick handful onto his palm.
They moved around the horse, thickly coating each leg. Then Alim stoppered the pot and shoved it back in the bag, lifted the saddle and put it back on the horse over the top of the covering and fastened it back into place. As he worked, three men hurried past, uncoiling a rope as they went and letting it lie on the ground beside the caravan. They carried more coils and when the current one ran out, they tied another to the end.
Alim picked up the rope and tied the horse’s reins to it. All along the length of rope, others were doing the same.
Then he jumped back onto the horse and settled himself. He pointed. “Give me that.”
Sydney picked up the last item in the cloth bundle. It was the heaviest and largest. In the moonlight it looked like one of the sheets they used for the tents. It was striped and thick. She handed it to him.
Alim took it and shook it out, then laid most of it on the horse’s back, so it spread out behind him like a giant cloak. He held out his right hand, leaning over the horse. “Give me your hand,” he said urgently.
“What?”
He looked up at the coming storm. “Now. Hand.”
Bewildered, Sydney reached up to take his hand. His touch was just as she remembered and it overwhelmed her for a split second with memories of Alex’s hand holding hers, stroking the back of it, kissing her palm, while looking up at her with liquid, smoldering eyes.
Then Alim hauled her off her feet, up into the air. Her butt was placed on the back of the horse and his other hand steadied her. “Leg over.”
She swung her leg over the horse’s head, which turned her to face forward. Hastily, she pulled at the voluminous over-tunic, so she was decently covered.
A cry rang out from the front of the caravan. She didn’t recognize the words in it, yet everyone else did, for at the same moment, everyone moved forward. The cry had been a direction to start.
The big tent sheet dragged on the ground behind them, hissing softly. Ahead of them, another horse was tied to the rope, its rider pulling a sheet just as Alim was. Behind, more horses and camels, all led by the central rope.
“I don’t understand,” Sydney said.
“You will,” Alim replied. His voice was grim. “Have you ever seen a sand storm?”
“No,” she said honestly. “I’ve heard a little about them.”
“A bad storm can tear flesh from bones. It can bury a man alive. Only a fool is caught in the open during a storm. We are very unlucky this night.”
She didn’t say what she thought, that it had been Rashid’s anger and impatience that had set them on the path into the storm.
Alim was not guiding the horse. The reins tied to the central rope were doing that. “Who is leading?” she asked. “Who holds the beginning of the rope?”
“Faruq, Rashid’s lieutenant, will guide us tonight.”
The air stirred and made her veil flutter.
“It comes,” Alim said. She could hear the tension in his voice. His thigh brushed hers as he moved behind her. She heard the cloth shift, then it passed over her and came down around her, enclosing her inside with Alim.
“Pull it down, so you are completely covered, then tuck it under your feet,” he instructed, his voice louder inside the enclosure.
She adjusted the cloth, then bent and tucked it around her feet and calves. The boots would also protect her. She straightened up carefully. The cloth was thick enough that it stood rigidly around them, reminding her of heavy canvas. It might have been stifling beneath it, except that the air could escape under the bottom edge of the cloth and fresh air could enter the same way.
Sydney grew aware of Alim behind her, close enough so she could feel his warmth. He was human and hot.
The wind made a soft whistling sound as it blew against the cloth, inches from her face. She drew back, startled. Sand pattered against it, pressing the cloth closer.
“Push it away if it bothers you,” Alim said.
She pushed experimentally at the cloth. It popped back out like a dent in a car panel. Through her fingers, she could feel the pepper of sand against it on the other side.
“It won’t stay there,” Alim warned her. “This is just the beginning.”
She shivered.
“You may take off your veil, if you wish. There is no one here to see you.”
True. “How long will the storm last?” she asked as she unhooked the veil and let it fall to one side.
“A while.”
“Why try to travel through it? Why not put up tents and shelter that way?”
“Out here in the open, a tent would soon be buried. We could not have built a tent secure enough to withstand a storm, before the storm reached us, anyway. It would not protect the animals, either.”
“Then why not…I don’t know, circle the camels? Huddle together?”
“To be buried together?”
“It seems pointless to try to keep going through this.”
“To stop would be more dangerous. As long as we keep moving, in any direction, the sand cannot build up around us. We must simply walk and keep walking, until it is over and it is safe to stop once more.”
“The leader, Faruq—he is not trying to head in any direction?”
“He will pick the safe path. Along ridges and high places, avoiding the depressions and valleys that may fill with sand. It will not matter where those places take us, not until we can look up at the stars and see where we are.”
Sydney considered that for a moment, as the sand rattled against the cloth. The wind was louder now, singing high notes and pressing at them through the protective covering.
“Your horse—”
“His name is Basel. It means ‘valiant’.” Alim’s voice was full of pride.
“Basel. Why did you coat his legs in oil?”
“It will protect them against the blowing sand, if the cover does not.”
Sydney realized she had relaxed completely. Alim was a stranger in Alex’s body, yet this was Alex and her body knew it more thoroughly than her mind. She was tired from the walking and she could feel herself slumping. Even the all-enveloping clothing that sat oddly and shifted in strange ways when she moved had stopped bothering her.
It seemed natural to lean against him, only Alim would resent that and probably consider it highly inappropriate. Instead, she stiffened her back and sought another topic. Talk was safe. While they were under this cover, Alim did not seem to mind talking. He had been easy in his speech inside the tent, too. Sydney took note of that. Appearance was a thing, for him.
Well, that was Alex through and through. Even in her time, he was conscious of what others would think, that his behavior or appearance did not cause offense or would not be considered inappropriate.
Yet he was Rashid’s number one fighter. It was one of the stranger juxtapositions in Alex’s life.
She recalled the frantic decamping, compared to the slow, measured walk of the caravan. It was another contrast.
It reminded her of the reason they were here. “Alim…if I may ask and not cause offense…would you mind telling me what happened with Gamala?”
“She died,” he said shortly. “Her child was female. Rashid was displeased.”
His tone suggested that was the end of the discussion as far as he was concerned. She could almost see him shrug, even though she had her back to him.
“What happened to the baby?” she asked. No one had spoken about the child. Sydney suspected—and feared—her mother’s fate had been hers, too.
Alim stiffened. She could feel his mental shields snap into place. “The baby?” Even his tone was stiff and proper.
“Yes. What happened to the child? Did Rashid…did she die, too?”
Alim didn’t answer at once. Sydney counted Basel’s steps, that she could feel by the motion of the horse’s withers under her. The wind was starting to shriek now. It was muffled by the cover, which was leaning toward her with the pressure of the wind.
“I know not what happened to the child,” Alim said at last. “It was a girl,” he added, as if that was all the explanation that was needed.
Sydney bowed her head. It did explain the silence about the child’s fate. Gamala’s murder had been brushed off as the outward indication of Rashid’s displeasure. A small, useless girl-child failed to register on their awareness at all.
Only, Sydney had noticed. She wondered if she was the only one to mourn the tragedies.
Alim stirred. “You have much to learn about our ways.” He raised his voice to be heard over the wind. “You will become accustomed to them by and by. Then you will understand the imperatives that drive them.”
“I know a girl is an economic drain,” she said tiredly.
“Women have their uses,” Alim replied. “Rashid knows that. He was angry because of the slur upon his manhood.” He paused. “My family is not poor. Another girl would cause no hardship. Economics would not have been in his mind when Rashid was presented with his child.”
Sydney could hear what Alim was not saying. Rashid does not think strategically. He killed Gamala because of pride, not cold logic.
Alim would never directly or openly disparage his brother, especially to her, an English woman and a stranger. Yet he was talking to her. Explaining. It was another huge concession, albeit one he was making where no one could see him do it.
“Was it Rashid’s pride that made him kill Etienne, the knight?” Sydney asked. “I am a woman and he thought I was telling him what to do, so he did the opposite to prove to his men he was not being directed by a woman and a whore?”
“You begin to understand my brother,” Alim said, his tone warm and approving. “You were not telling him what to do?” he added.
“You thought I was directing him, too?” she asked, startled.
“I did,” Alim said. “You spoke…like a man would speak in that situation. You spoke as an equal.”
Sydney sighed. “Perhaps I did,” she admitted. “Where I am from, women are considered the equal of men in all but physical strength. They vote—they can speak about political matters and they are listened to. Such habits of thought are hard to disperse quickly.”
“Your world seems as strange to me as mine must be to you. Where is your world?”
“A very long way from here,” Sydney assured him. “Yet my world is not the strangest world out there. You find Christians strange, or you did until you learned their ways.”
“I suspect I have only looked upon the surface of the Christian world. Books only reveal glimpses. There are stranger worlds?”
“You have heard of the Northmen?”
“The marauders who pillage wherever they go? Yes.”
“There is another strange world. Then there are Tartars.”
“I have also heard of Tartars. Very fierce. Good fighters.” His tone was one of approval.
“There are more worlds beyond the edges of the known worlds,” Sydney told him. “My world is one of them.”
“You come from a place that no one yet knows about?” Alim said.
“Yes.”
He fell silent, considering that. “If your world is so marvelous, why did you come here?”
He had accepted without question that unknown places existed. For people of this time and place, such hidden, mysterious worlds were commonplace—the stuff of fantasy. That would make it much easier for Sydney to explain away any gaffs she made.
She composed an answer to his question. “My world is a marvelous place, Alim, yet because we are merely human, our flaws cause problems. Jealousy and covetousness, greed and falsehoods…each of us works to eliminate these undesirable qualities in ourselves and in our world. People do not kill each other freely there,” she added and paused, her heart thudding.
“Nor do they here,” Alim said in agreement.
She sighed. What Rashid had done was not considered murder. That was the problem.
“These flaws you would rid yourself of…they are what sent you here?”
He was staying ahead of her explanation, anticipating her.
“Someone…an evil person…wanted to harm my sister. The evil woman couldn’t find her, so she came to me and threatened to harm me if I did not tell her where my sister was. So I left.”
“To protect your sister?”
“Yes.”
“You have travelled all this way just to evade the witch?”
“The…witch…would have found me again if I had not travelled this far.”
“You must love your sister greatly.”
“I do,” Sydney said truthfully. “I also hate what the witch was trying to do. She wanted to harm my sister only because my sister has a gift the witch wanted and couldn’t have. I jumped…I ran away, because it would stop the witch’s plans. Such evil must be prevented, or it breeds more evil.”
Alim was silent for a long moment and Sydney was happy to leave him to his thoughts while she listened to the wind climb higher and higher. Sometimes it would slow, the high note dropping a little, then it would surge again, even higher. She marveled that the animals were not freaking out. It seemed that with their humans riding them, they were reassured. The rope would guide them, for they were stepping as blindly through the storm as the humans.
“I had not considered before that evil could grow like that. Now I see how it might work. A man who watches another man steal his neighbor’s horse and not be stopped or punished for it would think about stealing a horse for himself, for he has seen there are no consequences.”
“That is why murder is one of the Christians’ Ten Commandments,” Sydney added, thinking of Etienne’s small leather bible.
“It is?”
“The sixth commandment,” Sydney said, although she wasn’t absolutely certain it was. She would look it up in Etienne’s bible when she had a chance. “Thou shall not kill.”
“That is all of it?”
“That is the full commandment, yes.”
“That is an inadequate commandment,” he said, sounding amused. “The Quran also abhors killing. It says ‘…do not kill a soul that God has made sacrosanct, save lawfully.’ It is a much more useful commandment.”
“Why is that more useful?” Sydney asked.
“It gives more detail,” Alim replied gravely. “It speaks of those consecrated in the eyes of Allah. It gives warriors permission to fight their enemies and kill them.”
Sydney almost laughed. “Qualifications! Exceptions!” she shot back. “It is the same thing as saying ‘you shouldn’t do this, but if you really have to, then it is permissible to kill heathens’.”
“Yes! Exactly!”
“It is elevating Muslims above everyone else in the world and saying they’re better than everyone else and should be treated differently.”
“Well…yes,” Alim said. He sounded doubtful, though.
“And what about enemies that are Muslim?” she asked. “What about this…this Naravas, who your brother slew, the day you found me? Is it suddenly all right to kill him because he’s been declared an enemy?”
Alim was silent.
“What if everyone who believed in a god other than Allah thought the same way, that their kind was superior and everyone else could be killed without consequences?”
“Do not the Christians and the Jews believe exactly that?” Alim replied.
Sydney hesitated. In the twenty-first century, religious wars were fought because of that thinking. She was stepping onto very dangerous ground. Alim had to be made to see the value of Christian morals, though. The problem was, she had no faith herself. She could not argue that God was great when she didn’t believe in God.
She thought again of the differences in the commandments. The Christian one was simple and straightforward. There were no exclusions or qualifications.
A discussion based on values and ethics was a safer one. She shifted her focus. “Even in my world, Alim, those of different faiths go to war against each other, convinced theirs is the better god. It is pointless and tragic. The Christian God says ‘don’t kill’. He meant ‘don’t kill anyone.’ Christ did not put those who believe in him above anyone else. All life is equal in his eyes.”
“A slave is the same as a Caliph?” Alim sounded amused again.
“Exactly the same. Killing is killing, Alim, no matter if it is a girl-child or a woman, or a slave. It is still taking a life, one that is just as precious and valuable as yours.”
“Yet Christians still slaughter anyone who will not believe in Christ.” His tone was withering.
Sydney sighed. “It is a difficult subject,” she admitted, “and I am not Plato. He would explain it much better.”
“Plato, the Philosopher?” Alim said sharply. “You have read his work?”
“Not all of it,” Sydney admitted. “I do know he valued justice and truth. He thought that humans should strive to live a virtuous life.”
“Yes, indeed. He promotes the strength of families. A great man. A clear thinker.” His voice was alive with interest.
Sydney turned to look at him over her shoulder. She should have remembered this from the start—intellectual debate could hook Alex faster than any appeal to his emotions, which would just make him mentally squirm. “You have Plato in your library at…home?”
“Also Socrates and Aristotle. And, of course, Hippocrates.” His eyes glowed “They are all original thinkers. Their ideas are revolutionary.”
“They are strangers to your world,” she pointed out. She faced the front again. It was awkward to stay twisted like that for very long.
“The scholars at the university consider the Greeks to be mentors of Islam. They have shaped our lives.”
Sydney’s lips parted. Alex had said almost exactly that, in the twenty-first century. “Funny,” she said, striving for a casual tone. “That’s what the Christians think, too.”
Silence. She couldn’t tell if he disapproved of Islam being compared to Christianity in that way or not.
He spoke softly. “The way you think…I have never met anyone like you before. Does everyone approach life as you do, in your world?”
“Not just my world, Alim. There are as many ways of thinking out there as there are worlds and people in them.”
“And you have seen many of them,” he finished. There was a note of yearning in his voice and Sydney’s heart jumped. He longed to see other worlds…
She could not change his mind about religion. Etienne would have convinced Alex through sheer passion, while she was too uncertain in her own arguments to rouse any curiosity in him to seek a different life. Strange cultures, though, she had firsthand experience with. If Alim hungered for strange new worlds, she could use that instead.
“I have seen many strange worlds in my travels,” she said in agreement.
“The lands beyond the Baḥr al-Rūm?” Alim asked.
Baḥr al-Rūm meant “Byzantine Sea”. Sydney realized he was talking about the Mediterranean, the sea he had never seen. “I have seen some of those lands,” she said. “I traveled to England a long time ago.” Two hundred years ago, from Alim’s perspective. “I have also seen a little of Palestine.” About three minutes of it, to be exact. However, if she could make the worlds beyond the sea sound exotic, romantic or enticing by stretching the truth, then she would lie her head off. “I know Iberia very well,” she added, even though her knowledge was from the twenty-first century. “Also, the Holy Roman Empire,” which was most of western Europe, “and Rome itself, which is a wonderland. Those are just the known lands. There are others, including my own.”
“Tell me about them,” Alim said. He made it sound like a command, yet she could hear the same hungry note in his voice.
Sydney was happy to comply. She only had to avoid details that would date her travels, or anything that would hint of future events. By concentrating on the people she had met and the way they lived and thought, she would be able to paint pictures of foreign lands without upsetting the timeline any further than she already had.
Alim was an active listener. He asked questions, prodding her onwards, while the wind roared around them.
Sydney didn’t know how long she spoke. Her sense of passing time was scrambled by the lack of external signs and the keening note of the wind, which blanketed her perceptions. She only knew she must keep speaking, keep weaving spells and drawing wonders in his mind.
Her future—everyone’s future—depended upon it.