But all the guards in the world could not protect them from the desert itself. In the day it was hot, hot—searing hot inside the caparisoned tents, and frigid at night when they traveled. She was thirsty all the time, though even the water she drank smelled of camels. Food was rice with rancid butter and fried camel meat coated in grease, cooked by Abyssinian servant girls with exceedingly dirty fingers.
Amid the dust and rock, her tent was a colorful green blossom with a gilt crescent at the peak. When they traveled, she rode closed in a litter with scarlet and brass trappings, slung between two dromedaries. It was airless and cramped and swayed like Terrier in a heavy sea.
She complained of it to Sheridan when they brought him to her tent, which had been pitched just as the morning heat was rising on the third day of caravan. They always kept him near her, his guards escorting him reverently to the opening of the tent and backing quickly away, bowing with each step. He said little about it, except to remark dryly that there was a certain advantage to becoming somebody's tame madman. But even with no other interpreter Olympia could tell that superstition was building around him daily. The way a rumor would ferment at home in an English village, so Sheridan's reputation as a fighter and a prophet was growing without encouragement as they passed from hand to hand.
In brief answer to her complaints about the litter, he simply said, "Then get out and ride a camel."
She'd really only been trying to draw him into conversation. He'd walled himself up again, saying nothing to her beyond what was necessary, though he spoke Arabic and even laughed with the others congenially enough.
"They wouldn't allow that, would they?" Tugging self-consciously at the sarwal—the dark silken trousers she'd been given to wear beneath a light tunic—she curled her feet under her on the soft divan. The months of confinement aboard Terrier had filled out her figure to plumpness again, in spite of Francis's strictures. "Don't women have to stay hidden?"
"Respectable women. I'm sure you'd prefer to be eliminated from that category."
"Thank you," she said tartly, and turned away from him to sip at the tea the servant girl had brought, trying to hide the way her eyes burned from the casual cruelty of the remark.
After a few moments of heavy silence, he muttered a fired curse and said, "I didn't mean it that way."
She bit her lip, staring down into the tea. They were like strangers now; he came to the tent and lay down on the far side and slept without touching her, without speaking if she didn't put a question to him. It was worse even than the long months of polite pleasantries; they were thrown together in mutual isolation in this strange land, and she wanted to turn to him as she had on the island, in companionship and love—but she knew without trying that any move to reach out would be furiously rebuffed.
She needed him. She needed to talk to him. Questions and fears and regrets tumbled together on her tongue—Is there danger? What are you thinking? What are you feeling? Why can't I find you anymore? Do you hate me?…Do you love me? But even the least of them seemed beyond her courage to voice.
If only she were Julia.
"I meant," he said suddenly, "that if you act like a slave and a woman, they'll treat you like one. If you want to ride outside, just do it." His mouth curled a little and he drew on the chibouk the servant had lit for him, blowing fragrant smoke. "Bravado is everything here."
"I see," she said shortly.
She didn't bother to pursue the subject, though she would have liked to learn more of what he knew. But there was no hope of that now that the pipe had come. She sipped tea and watched him in bleak frustration, knowing that soon the tension would fade from his face under the influence of the sweet fumes. The wall she so badly wished to break down would dissolve and he would smile at her, his dark lashes would relax and lower…and he would ignore everything she said with benign patience, until she felt like a gnat trying to annoy a sleepy elephant.
She stared at the long-necked chibouk as he drew deeply on it. She hated the pipe, hated that it could bring to his face the same expression of peace and pleasure he'd always worn after loving her.
She looked at him wistfully. In the green-and-gold light that filtered through the tent, he sat cross-legged in desert robes, his hair dark and tousled where he'd pulled the flowing red kufiyah off his head. The tasseled scarf lay like a pool of dark blood on the rug beside him.
She thought of other days, another place, when it had been different between them.
"Sheridan…" she whispered. "Oh, Sheridan…I wish we'd never left our island."
The spell of the smoke had not quite taken him. His eyes met hers. "Princess." He sounded so tired. Defeated. "Don't. Please don't."
Suddenly her throat closed and her eyes went blurry. The silent tears spilled down her cheeks. Through the haze she saw Sheridan watching her. He slowly bent his face into his hands and stayed there, hidden, his feelings and his thoughts a mystery.
In late afternoon, the servants struck the tents. As usual, the Abyssinian girl covered Olympia from head to toe in a swath of dark cotton, with a white yashmak drawn across her face. The camels and litter awaited her.
Through the slit in her headdress she looked around at the caravan. Behind and ahead of her the Bedouins and traders milled, a barbaric splendor of colorful rags and glinting armor. Some of the horse-mounted warriors tilted at one another, wheeling and evading playfully, while hundreds of camels moaned and grunted under their renewed loads. All around, long afternoon shadows moved in alien shapes.
She squinted at Sheridan. He was waiting a few yards off, mounted on a camel and looking quite as wild as the Bedouins in his white robes and cloak and drifting crimson kufiyah, with a silver-handled dagger in a sash at his waist and a sword and a matchlock slung behind his back. In the desert, even a madman and prophet-slave was armed against bandit attack. No one worried much about attempted escape, apparently—the desert itself was wall and bar enough. He did not glance toward her, but talked casually to two of the contingent of fierce-looking tribesmen who seemed to be their particular guards.
Olympia watched him a moment. He'd not said another word to her in the tent, but lay back and closed his eyes and drank the smoke until she knew he had forgotten her and the guards and the desert—forgotten everything, until the pain passed from his face and he contemplated her with dreamy disinterest, his eyes unfocused and his hands relaxed on the silken divan.
It made her angry to recall it. How could she fight that? How could she ever hope to reach him when he could retreat behind that smoky stupor whenever he was with her? And now that he was awake and alert, here was this silly litter waiting to coop her up like a mummy in the few hours of coolness before they stopped again at midnight.
Julia wouldn't have stood for it.
One of the Bedouins waited with a servant by the litter. He spoke sharply to Olympia, gesturing toward the open door. Seized by a sudden passion, she flung up her chin in negation and strode over the rocky ground to the nearest camel.
She reached up to pull off the yashmak, shook out her hair over her shoulders and glared up at the shocked man on the dromedary.
"Get down," she ordered in English, and pointed to the ground.
"Allaah!" he muttered, staring at her.
Olympia heard a sudden quiet descend around them. She quelled her tremor with a vision of Julia facing down a bellicose groom in the stable at home. Instead of arguing, she grabbed the single rope rein attached to the camel's halter and yanked downward. "Nak'h! Nak'h!" She managed a decent rendition of the guttural command she'd heard the merchants use.
The camel gave a pathetic moan and went down to its knees with the Bedouin aboard. The man emitted a shriek of objection and kicked at the dromedary's shoulder. The camel hefted its hindquarters again, but before it could rise, she reached up and grabbed the pommel, got a foot on the beast's neck and let the momentum of the upward pitch put power behind the shove she gave the rider.
More from shock than from actual force,
he slipped off balance. With Olympia hanging onto the rope, the camel made a swift, sharp turn, and suddenly the Bedouin was on the ground and she was clinging to the caparisoned saddle. Without much grace, she scrambled over the pommel, settled into the saddle, crossed her legs, readjusted her yashmak to protect her face from the sun and turned toward Sheridan.
"Well?" she asked.
There was dead silence, except for the low moans of the camels and the sound of a distant quarrel in the rear of the caravan.
One of the Bedouins began to laugh.
No one else did—but then, no one came to pull her off the camel, either. The dismounted Arab glared at her as if the mere heat of his look could make her wither to ashes and disappear. She inclined her head politely and said, "La mu'axsa"—no resentment, I hope—which was a phrase she'd learned from Salaa'ideen.
The man looked around at his impassive companions as if he thought they ought to do something. No one moved. He took a step toward her, looked around again and stepped back. After a moment, he lifted his head and muttered, "Magh'liss," and then stalked off toward the horses.
"Excellent choice," Sheridan said. He guided his mount up beside her as the straggling group began to move. To her surprise, he was grinning. "They all think the fellow's gotten above himself ever since he robbed the Damascus caravan and made off with an emir's camel."
She looked down at the animal's braided and tasseled harness and realized belatedly that it was far richer than any of the others. As the camel took up its rolling gait, jerking her painfully backward against the high cantle, she had a feeling that she might regret commandeering an open-air seat. But Sheridan rode beside her, the air was dry and sweet and pure, the sun was just setting behind a range of mountains across the vast, empty distance of blue-and-purple hues—and for the moment, though her heart was hammering with belated reaction, she was glad to be alive and where she was.
Hours later, the moon rose, silvering the white washes of mineral salts that covered the barren ground. The huge body of men and animals moved along in eerie, shuffling silence, broken only by the occasional quiet conversation between the Bedouins as they scouted up and down along the column. Olympia had drifted in and out of light sleep, kept in place by the tall back of the camel's saddle. She woke up once to find that Sheridan held the braided rope attached to her mount's halter, leading the dromedary beside his own.
"Sorry," she muttered, embarrassed to think she must have dropped it in her sleep.
"It's all right." He spoke softly, more easily than he'd spoken to her for a long time. Olympia glanced at him. The moonlight washed his figure, turning his white cloak to a dim glow, lighting only his mouth and jaw beneath the shadow of the kufiyah.
They rode in silence for a while, bathed in the sterile moonlight and the warm, sharp scent of sweat and camels. On the horizon, the distant black mountains seemed to float above a faint halo of mist.
"Do you feel different," he asked suddenly, "now that you've killed a man?"
She looked toward him. The question ought to have seemed brutal and abrupt, but the tone wasn't. It was odd—almost hesitant.
She let the camel rock her along for a few steps and then answered honestly, "I just try not to think about it."
"Yeah," he said, and sounded strangely melancholy. "Yeah."
She was close enough to touch him. She wanted to, but she was afraid. She tried once again to think of what Julia would do, but imagination failed her. She felt stupid and helpless, paralyzed in her chubby ineptitude.
"I wish I were dead," he said hollowly.
The despair in his voice touched a place in her that responded instantly, without thought or logic; it simply went past all the longing and hesitation and fear of rejection into the action. She put out her hand and rested it on his arm—one moment of contact—and then the motion of the camels broke it. "Sheridan," she said gently, "tell me what's wrong."
"I'd like to." His head was lowered, his face completely hidden from her.
"Tell me."
His words were almost a whisper. "I'm afraid to tell you. You'll despise me. You won't understand." He raised his face to the sky and said in a painful rush, "How could you understand?"
She said nothing. She wanted to argue, to claim that she would understand anything. But life had humbled her lately, and she kept the declaration to herself.
The wooden saddles creaked in awkward rhythm. She watched the silvery, shadowy ground move past beneath the camel's feet.
"I'm not real," he said suddenly. "I mean—I don't feel…I don't know; I can't explain it…I'm not alive. I walk around and I talk and I eat and I'm dead. I'm not here." He took a deep, ragged breath. "I'm not here."
She looked at him, confused by the words, torn by the anguish in his voice.
"I never could go home," he said, speaking faster, as if a dam had fractured and the words were pouring from the break. "I wanted to go home, I wanted out of it so much—God, I despise the navy; what's the point? We haven't got a war, we haven't got an enemy worth the name, and still we have to—" He made a peculiar noise, halfway between a breath and a sob. "Damn 'em all; they sit up there at Whitehall smoking their pipes and getting fat and tell me to stop the slavers—so I chase slavers, and I catch 'em, and the bastards abandon ship and set fire to it to destroy the evidence."
He stopped. Silence reigned.
Then he whispered, "Those people chained in there…I can still hear it; I can still hear it; I can still hear it…"
Olympia held onto the saddle. There was a shivering in the pit of her stomach. She waited without speaking.
He kept his head down. "I wanted to go home after that." His voice wavered. "So I went on half pay. I thought—what the devil, even being destitute would be an improvement on this nonsense. And I went back, but you know, hell, I don't have a home; I don't know what made me think—"
He broke off. In the moonlight, the camels rocked relentlessly forward in their long-limbed gait. He paused for a long time, and then when the words came, they came in a gush again, as if he'd tried to hold them back but could not.
"I hated 'em all!" he exclaimed. "I hated their starched collars and their beaver hats and their stupid smart-ass aristocratic assistants who came in at noon because they'd been waltzing half the night with Lord Somebody's daughter and whoring like billy-o the rest. I found out the facts. I found out medals don't buy the time of day, not when it comes to getting a position you can live on. I found out you don't tell a duke's son that he doesn't know a halyard from a hole in the ground, even if he doesn't and it's going to drown a ship full of decent sailors. I found out the only paying post I was fit for was kept lover to any ladylike trollop who'd birthed enough little barons to earn her diamonds. So I did that, because it seemed better than sleeping in a gin palace. Those stupid sluts; I hated them, too—the way they'd try to tell all their friends what a hero I was…and they'd ask me what it was like—they'd ask me if I was ever afraid—and did it hurt very much to be shot—" He laughed bitterly. "God, they were idiots. They'd ask how many ships I'd sunk and how many men I'd killed hand to hand…as if I kept a damned running account. They always wanted to know how it felt…" His voice had begun to shake. "But I never told them. They didn't want to know the truth. Not really."
Olympia twisted one of the saddle's silken tassels between her fingers, wondering how many of those same questions she'd asked him herself. She knew a little of what the truth was like now—she remembered that white robe crumpling, splotched with crimson. She wondered if the man she'd shot had been a father, if he'd been cruel or kind—and then quickly retreated from the thought. She was glad she'd never seen his face.
But to save Sheridan's life, she would have done it again.
In the dim light, she saw him gaze out over the stark landscape. He shook his head and muttered, "I'm a friggin' failure at civilization. I spend half my life trying to get there, and when I do, I just walk around wanting to strangle somebody."
She thought of
how he'd seemed to change when they left the island and boarded Terrier. "Is that what's wrong?" she asked softly. "Civilization?"
"No. It's me. I'm what's wrong." He sounded tense. "I shouldn't hate them; I've got no reason to be angry. They're just…normal. It's normal to live the way they do. They don't feel strange; they don't have dreams or see things. They don't—" His voice took on a peculiar note. "They don't…want to do the things I want to do."
She bit her lip, sensing the strain in him nearing a break. "What things?" she murmured.
After a hesitation, he whispered, "You won't understand."
She saw him turn his face away from her. "What things?" she asked again, as gently as she could.
For a long time he didn't answer. Then, low and rapid, he said, "I want to fight. I wish we'd be attacked, so I could fight. I'd feel better if I could kill somebody." He made a queer, anxious moan. "Maybe they'd kill me. That would be better…that would be good."
"Sheridan—" Olympia put her fist to her mouth. "Why?"
"I knew you wouldn't understand."
Her heart Was heating so hard it made her voice quiver. "Explain it to me."
Again a silence, so long that she feared she'd lost him.
"I feel so strange!" he burst out. "I should have died. It's not right that I'm alive. They all died—all my men. All my friends." That low moan escaped him, a wordless sound of agony. "Oh, God, I'm going to hurt someone. That's the only time I'm real now. I want to kill somebody."
The words drifted in the still desert air—so simple, and so terrible to comprehend.
"I knew it was here," he said. "It got out—I let it out, there at Aden…"
She remembered the way he'd looked up at her over the bodies of dead men, his eyes a ghostlike calm amid the violence. No fear, no disgust, no reason—only the bright gray flame of destruction.
He whispered furtively, "That's me; that's what's real—I want that back, but I can't have it. I can't have it, can I? No—I can't; I don't want to hurt anyone. But I'm dead, I'm dead…I don't know what to do…"