These women are not my harem; most of them are rescued slaves I'm taking to freedom.'
'Now, you. The only way I can hide you is to put you here with the women. Even when you're well enough to move about.' Faisal smiled. 'You see why I wouldn't let you ask questions? I like to talk, my Roman friend. I like to talk. And I cultivate the oddities in my personality so that I can continue to seem addled to the Arabs. He reached down and smoothed the bedcover under Casca's chin… as a father might an ill child. 'I leave you to the women.'
After Faisal's clear Latin, Miriam's Arabic at first sounded stilted in Casca's mind.
'Thou hast suffered much, O one with the scarred face,' she said softly as she bent over him to pull back the covers. He could feel her fingers on his wrist unloosing the knots of the cords that held him, but he was studying the profile of her face, so he was not looking at his own body… or clothes.
There was a gentleness in her face that drew him.
Then 'Damn!'
'What is it, O scarred one?'
The slave girl, Ruth, who had started to help Miriam, was also startled. Her brown eyes were wide.
'My clothes! What have you got on me?'
Now both women laughed.
'These look like women's clothes!'
'Ah, yes. But they are.'
'Women's clothes?'
'But, of course. How else would one be dressed in the birthing wagon?'
'Birthing wagon?'
'Look, Roman Nose, we had to hide you. The Sultan was wild with rage when he found his palace afire. His men searched every inch of Baghdad. We had what they were looking for — you — bloody, out-of-your-head, raving you. So Faisal said put you in the birthing wagon, strap you down, make it look like you were just about to give birth, but give you something to keep you unconscious. It worked in Baghdad, so we decided to keep it up. And after a couple of days, after you had healed up enough so we could move you a little, we dressed you. Just in case. Good thing, too. Just the other day we were stopped, and one of the Sultan's men even insisted on looking in the birthing wagon. When he saw what you looked like sleeping, he was satisfied. By the way, how do you like your hair?'
'Hair?' Casca jerked his hand up to his scalp. There was still hair there. Plenty of it. What in Hades was she talking about?
Ruth brought him a small brass mirror and stood back, grinning.
'Damn!'
The hair was red — even in one of the silver mirrors favored by Egyptians over the brass ones like the Hebrews liked, it would still be red — the same red as Miriam's had been when he first saw her in the Cafe of the Infidels.
But it wasn't just the hair that shocked Casca.
'By Mithra! What in Hades have you done to my face?'
'Oh, Roman Nose, you didn't really think we women were born with the smooth faces you see, did you? A little something here. A little something there. A little rice flour. A touch of kohl. And a few other things.' She smiled impishly. 'We're pretty good, aren't we? How do you like your new face, the one that's saved your neck so far?'
Well, she had a point there. He held the mirror up again and liked what he saw even less than he had the first time. They had shaved his face so smooth it was impossible to see where the hairs had been, and they had put something on it halfway between paint and oil, so that even his scar — in which Casca had a certain pride — was no longer visible. He couldn't tell what they had done to his eyebrows — cut them, trimmed them, something — but now they had a thin, even line. His eyelids were darkened. It was no longer his face; it was the face of a woman. Not, however, a beautiful young woman. They had known the limitations of the material they were working with, and they had made him up as a woman a little the worse for wear.
'We women are magicians, are we not?'
Hmpf!
We women… where did she get that shit? Sudden fear gripped Casca.
'Er…'
'What is it, Roman Nose?'
'Am I… er…'
'Are you what?'
'The women… did they-'
Miriam laughed uproariously. 'No! We got to you just in time. And I've never seen anybody heal as fast as you do. But it was a near thing.'
'Then I'm… all right?'
'I hope you are. Because I intend to test you just as soon as you're able… to perform at your best, that is. I've never had a man of my own choosing, one I 'put together myself,' so to speak. No, Roman Nose, I'm betting — and hoping — you'll be as good as new. Now, drink this. It will put you back to sleep again.'
So Casca lived with the women. Even when he was well enough to be up and about, Miriam insisted that he continue the charade. Something about 'inspiration.' Casca did not tell her that he had never needed 'inspiration' before. To tell the truth, though, he did dread moving back with the men, because he knew, the first smartass who made a crack would get his grinning face smashed in. And that didn't seem quite fair, considering all the risks these men had run for him. Besides, at least three more times the caravan was stopped by groups of the Sultan's men, and each time it was the disguise as a woman that saved Casca. Miriam and Ruth had it easier. Ruth was dressed as a young boy — the Sultan's men probably thought 'eunuch' — and for Miriam, slovenly dress, a smear of dirt on her face, and black hair changed her completely. Casca thought the black hair was probably original, since, when he asked how she got his hair red, she answered, 'Henna. From Egypt.'
Miriam was unlike any whore Casca had ever known. She did have one failing though, religion. (After his own unfortunate experience with the religious, Casca tended to see danger signals in the piousness of others.) Yet he had to admit that Miriam, like Faisal, saw religion as something that made life better rather than the other way around, which was what Casca had so often seen. She delighted in reading to him stories from the religious scrolls Faisal had stored in secret compartments in his own cart. One story in particular she came back to over and over — the story of Rahab the whore who had hidden two Israelites under the cane rush of her roof in order to save them from the king's men. Casca suspected Miriam saw in Rahab the whore a reflection of herself. It seemed that she had helped Faisal often before. There was a secret passageway into the seraglio.
'Then I wasn't dreaming?'
'The pain you must have been in, you might have been dreaming. Of death. But, no, we were there. It was the night agreed on for me to come for Ruth.'
'Lucky for me.'
'Luck? No, Roman Nose. The hand of God.'
There was no point in arguing with her. She had this faith in a God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob so deeply ingrained in her that Casca resisted the temptation to kid her about it. Hell, she even gave credit for his rapid healing to her 'prayers' for him. A nice twist, he thought. Here's a whore who's more religious than most 'respectable' women I have known. Yet, oddly, her religious feelings weren't obnoxious. Kinda nice, in a strange sort of way.
The primary thing about her was, of course, her body. Somewhere there probably were more beautiful bodies — nothing is ever so good it can't be bettered somewhere else, Casca had to remind himself. But this body here and now was damn, damn good, and increasingly he looked forward to bedding her.
There was one problem, though. This intimacy with women was too much. This eating with them, bathing with them, dressing with them — this living with them constantly did things to a man. Casca wondered if 'Tonight.'
'What?'
Casca had been hunkered down on the hard board seat at the front of the cart, watching the line of
