Standard of Honor (10 page)

The man who lay there, face pillowed on the ground, was newly dead, but his rich clothing and fine armor made it plain he had been no common desert nomad, caught and overwhelmed by the storm. On the sand at his back was a folded pile of white cotton cloth that Sinclair recognized as a kufiya, the large, square scarf that the nomadic people of the Arab races used to shield their heads from the desert sun, and on it the man had carefully positioned a finely made Saracen helmet, its
tapering crown rising to a high spike. The edges of the headgear were trimmed with a light, intricately fashioned visor and a shoulder-length canopy of fine mail. Beside it rested a long, curved scimitar, its bone hilt polished by age and its scuffed scabbard attesting to years of use. Whoever he was, the man had bled to death. His entire lower body was blackened and encrusted by a seemingly solid casing of gore-clotted sand. Beneath one outstretched foot, the one Sinclair had noticed as being frozen in a kick, was the stick that had supported his shelter, and Sinclair had no difficulty in imagining what had happened. The dying man's last, agonized kick had brought the shelter down upon him, shutting off his life.

Moved by the solitary tragedy of such a death, Sinclair found himself searching for words to say over the body, before it came to him that anything he might say would be wasted. This was a Muslim warrior, an infidel who would have thanked no man for commending his soul to the Christian God of his enemies. Nevertheless, he bowed his head, looking down at the corpse, and muttered, “Rest in peace, whoever you were. Not even your Allah would object to my wish of that for you.”

He turned his head away and looked at the other objects that had been covered by the tent cloth, and the first thing he saw was a water bag, swollen and heavy. Nearby, its position suggesting that the dead man might have used it as a pillow, was a beautifully made saddle, the leather of its seat coated with dried blood, more
heavily on the left side than the right, as though the rider had been wounded in the groin. Reins and a bridle lay carefully coiled beside it, and beyond those, within reach of the supine man, lay the water skin and a set of solidly packed saddlebags.

Carefully cradling his injured arm, Sinclair nudged the heavy saddlebags with his foot, pushing and sliding them until they were close to the largest pile of sand he had swept up, and then he lowered himself to sit on the small pyramid and bent forward to seize the bags with his good hand and drag them to rest against his leg. They were heavy, and he sensed that whatever weighed them down might be useful to him.

Sinclair now went about the business of removing his own water bag from about his neck, securing the cup between his knees and settling the bag's sagging, untrustworthy bulk along his bent forearm before he removed the stopper with his teeth. It seemed to take hours, and his lips and mouth were parched and sore throughout, but eventually he was able to set down the bag and drink from the cup. He resisted the temptation to refill it when he had finished, and stuffed the cup firmly inside his leather jerkin. His eyes were fixed on the saddlebags.

Even with only one hand, he had the bags untied in mere moments. The one on the right contained food and the materials for preparing it: a substantial bag of flour, a tiny one of ground salt, and several pieces of dried, heavily spiced meat, all of which he assumed to be goat. There was also a selection of dates, both fresh and dried, along with a handful of olives carefully wrapped in a
muslin cloth. In another large square of cloth he found a hinged cooking tripod and a supple, oiled boiling bag of antelope skin to suspend from it, along with a small bowl and a plate, both of burnished metal. Another, smaller bundle held two spoons, one of horn and the other of wood, and a sharp knife.

The second bag contained a bag of grain and a folded nose bag for the horse, along with two packages, one much larger and heavier than the other and both wrapped in the same green-and-white-striped cloth that had formed the tent canopy. Sinclair opened the larger one first, to reveal a chain-mail tunic the likes of which he had never seen. The edges of its square-cut collar and sleeves were woven of some kind of flattened silver metal, too tough to be real silver, and its flat-sided links were of the finest, lightest steel mesh he had ever handled. The entire garment was lined throughout with a soft but immensely strong green fabric that showed no creases or wrinkles. He set the thing aside and opened the second packet to reveal a magnificently ornate sheathed dagger with a hooked blade, its hilt and scabbard chased with silver filigree and studded with polished precious stones in red, green, and blue. He picked the weapon up, conscious that he had never held such a valuable piece before, and hefted it in his hand as he turned to glance at the dead man beside him.

“Well, Infidel,” he murmured, “I have no way of knowing who you were, but you took pride in your possessions, so I promise you I will take good care of them and use them gratefully if ever I escape from here.”

He repacked the saddlebags and rose to his feet again, then folded the tent that had covered the dead man until he could pick it up and lay it beside the saddle and bags, aware that he would have more need of it in the times ahead than its former owner would. He collected the two supporting sticks and placed them between the folds of the cloth. He buried the Saracen as well as he could then, wrapping him in his blood-drenched cloak and laying his helmet by his head and his scimitar by his side, then dragging sand into place with one foot until he could shape it into a mound over the shallow grave, leaving no trace of the body beneath. The signs of his digging, he knew, would vanish within days, and there was a strong probability that the grave would remain undisturbed thereafter, its occupant safe from the vultures and vulnerable only to the possibility of some wandering beast smelling the decay and unearthing the meat that caused it. His task complete, he wrapped the dead man's kufiya about his head, scrubbed the dried blood off the saddle as well as he could, using handfuls of sand, and set about capturing the horse.

Within the hour he was walking again, leading the animal by the bridle. The effort of saddling it one-handed had almost exhausted him. Luckily, the horse, once captured, had submitted to the procedure and stood patiently as Sinclair struggled to hoist the heavy saddle and wrestle it into place on its back, and then to tighten the girths and extend the stirrup leathers, for its former owner had been a hand's width shorter in the legs than Sinclair. Now, with tent, saddlebags, and
water skins securely fastened to the beast's saddle, and the beast itself watered and fed with a handful of grain, he walked at its head, his eyes scanning the middle distance, the reins looped over his good shoulder and his only burden the tall, heavy spear in his hand.

He found what he was looking for within half an hour, a single boulder that thrust its crest above the sand in the lee of the dune that soared above it. He led the horse directly up to the outcrop and climbed up to the top of it. Using the summit as a mounting block and his long spear shaft as a counterbalance, he clambered awkwardly into the saddle, his left arm braced over the animal's shoulders in front of him. Once there, safely settled with his feet in the stirrups, he felt immensely better and permitted himself, for the first time since awakening alone in the cave, to think, even to hope, that he might yet survive this ordeal. Only the twitching of the horse's ears suggested that it was aware of having a new and very large rider on its back. Sinclair grimaced. What would happen if the horse were to rebel when he ordered it to move? One good, headdown heave and he'd be flat on his back on the ground.

And what was he to do, now, with his spear? It had become as useless as his former sword, since he could not hold it and ply the reins at the same time. He looked at the sturdy weapon regretfully, then stabbed the shaft point-first into the sand. He opened the left saddlebag and removed the jeweled dagger. He unwrapped its cloth binding and took a moment to admire it again before slipping the weapon into the
front of his jerkin. Then he gritted his teeth, took a firm grip on the reins, and dug in his heels, regretting not having checked the horse's former owner for spurs. The animal uttered a single grunt, then began to walk sedately, and Sinclair offered a silent prayer to whichever deity might be responsible. The gentle walk pleased him well, for he had no wish to do anything precipitate before he had time to judge the horse's mettle against his own, but now that he was riding, he was conscious that his traveling speed had increased at least threefold.

He reached down and patted the horse's neck gratefully, encouragingly.

“Well done, beast,” he whispered. “It looks as though it will be thee and me, together, from now on.”

FIVE

L
ulled by the steady, familiar rhythm of the horse's gait, Sinclair had no thought of falling asleep in the saddle, but when the horse halted suddenly, whickering softly, he snapped awake, excitement and fear flaring in his breast. He recognized instantly that he had been asleep, and he was already wondering what his folly might have condemned him to. But there was no danger that he could see, no one close by, and no threat that he could perceive. The only element of the scene that was extraordinary was that his horse was standing stock-still, its ears pointing straight ahead.

There had been no cliffs within sight in any direction the last time Sinclair had looked about him, but now, no more than fifteen paces in front of him, a rocky escarpment towered above him to a height more than four times his own. More wide-awake now than he had been in days, he stared at the rock ahead of him, at the diagonal black slash of the fissure facing him, and at a spear, not unlike the one he had abandoned earlier, that stood in front of it, its point buried in the sand. He knew that if it was similar in length to his own it must be half-buried. He knew, too, that there might well be someone waiting inside the cave mouth to attack him,
possibly someone with a bow, and that to remain where he was without moving was inviting attack.

He was on the point of wheeling away when his eyes returned to the upright spear shaft.

Lachlan Moray had found the litter made of two spears, one of which Sinclair had used as a staff; the other he had left behind in the cave where he had sheltered from the storm. What if there had been a third, he wondered now, and Lachlan had taken it with him? Unlikely, yes, but not impossible. He had been unconscious most of the time Lachlan had dragged him on the bier, and he had been behind him all the time. And if that were the case, the half-buried weapon in front of the fissure in the cliff might well be that same spear, thrust into the ground as a signal. Two paces behind it, the fissure rose stark and black from the sand that must surely have filled it, at least partially. Moray might be lying in there, asleep or injured.

Sinclair dismounted, lowering himself as gently as he could. He drew his long-bladed dirk and walked forward cautiously, squinting against the glare reflected from the rock face as he peered towards the black incision of the cave opening. But it took only two paces to reveal that he was looking at a shadow, not an opening in the wall. A bladelike protrusion in the surface jutted towards him; its sharp-edged facade blended perfectly into the stone face behind, and it formed a sheltered corner, its vertical edge casting the hard, dark shadow he had mistaken for an entrance to a cave. Annoyed with himself for having dismounted to
no good purpose, Sinclair straightened up from his crouch and was on the point of turning away when something, some nudging of curiosity, urged him to approach more closely and make sure that the sheltered nook was, in fact, as empty as it now appeared to be.

It was not. Wedged into the corner of the shallow cleft, the head and upper torso of a man were clearly discernible beneath a light covering of sand, slumped but apparently sitting upright in the angle made by the two walls. Sinclair's immediate reaction was elation that Moray had found shelter and survived, just as he had wished and hoped. He advanced quickly, dropping to his knees and brushing away the sand from the cloth-wrapped head. The head moved, jerking away in surprise or protest from the unexpected touch, but Sinclair's fingers had already hooked into the edge of one layer of cloth and the sudden movement pulled the covering free, exposing part of the face beneath. Within a heartbeat he was upright again. He brought up the point of his dirk, then stood there, swaying.

The inch or so of skin and hair that he had seen did not belong to Sir Lachlan Moray. Lachy's hair was blond, almost red gold, and his cheeks were fair, constantly burning and peeling and never tanning in the desert sun. Whoever was lying in front of Sinclair now was no friend. The skin of that face was a deep nut brown, and the hairs about the mouth were black and wiry. Sinclair backed away another step, his dirk poised to strike. He knew he was in no danger, because the man in the corner was even more deeply
buried than he himself had been, and he remembered how difficult it had been for him to struggle free. As he stood there, looking down at the recumbent form, his eye caught a small, peaked irregularity in the windblown surface of the shroud that masked the man, and without removing his eyes from the still concealed head in front of him, Sinclair sheathed his dirk, then stooped and groped at the protrusion with his fingers, finding the hilt of a sword.

He straightened up slowly, pulling the weapon with him, and found himself holding a Saracen scimitar, its curved, burnished blade worked in the intricate Syrian fashion known as Damascene. It was a fine blade, he knew, and that told him that its owner was a warrior, and therefore doubly dangerous. But Sinclair knew he had no need to kill him. All he need do was walk away, remount his horse and ride off, leaving the infidel to his fate. But even as he thought that, Sinclair knew he would not do it. He too was a warrior, and he lived by a warrior's code. He had never killed anyone who was not attempting, in one fashion or another, to kill him. Already cursing himself for a fool, he thrust the sword point-first into the sand, close to hand, and knelt by the slumped form. As he took hold of the wrapped cloth again, the figure in the sand stirred violently, but Sinclair merely lowered his splinted arm to the area of the man's sternum and pinned him with it while he unwound the multiple loops of cloth from about the head, then backed away to look at what he had uncovered.