brother to my wife. He was sorely wounded when he left here. The bleeding had been stopped for hours by then, and the wound was packed and tightly bound, but it must have opened again while he was riding.”
“He took your horse and left you here?”
“There was no other choice. We were three men, with two horses. Arouf rode north in search of help, and Sayeed rode east. They left me here safely in the shade. None of us knew the storm would come.”
“So the other man, this Sayeed, may still be alive?”
“Aye, if Allah so wills. If it is written in the Angel’s book. If it is not, then it may be written therein that you and I will die here, together.” He looked about him. “But we will not die yet. I, too, have water, and a bag of food, buried somewhere here by the wind.”
Sinclair ignored that. “What happened to your leg, and who did this?” He waved towards the splinted limb.
“Sayeed saved both of us. He is learned in the healing arts.”
“A physician?”
“No, a warrior, but he was trained in youth by his father, who was a famed physician. Sayeed never followed his father’s craft, but he remembered his teachings on the care of wounds.”
“And he rode east?”
A dip of the head. “I have said.”
“In search of whom? How came you here? Were you at Hattin?”
“Hattin? Ah, you mean Hittin …” The Saracen’s brow wrinkled then, but he plainly resisted the impulse to ask what was in his mind and simply answered the question. “No, I was not. We were on our way to Tiberias, in obedience to the Sultan’s summons, when ill fortune befell us.”
Sinclair reached down and handed the water bag to the Saracen again. “Tell me about it, since we have nothing better to do, and then we will find your food and water. What happened to you?”
The dark-faced man sat thinking for a few moments, then began to speak.
HIS NAME WAS IBN AL-FAROUCH, he said, and he had been in the southwest, riding with a reconnaissance force near the town of Ibelin on the coast when a courier arrived to summon them to Tiberias, eighty miles away. They had set out immediately on receiving the command, and along the way had met a wounded man who had, mere hours before, escaped from a nearby village that was being attacked by bandits. The bandits, the fugitive told them, had numbered fewer than twenty, but the villagers, lacking their men of fighting age, had been unable to resist them. The name of the village, which meant nothing to Sinclair, had caught the attention of al-Farouch immediately, because he had an aged uncle, fond brother to his mother, who lived there. Angered at the thought of his uncle, who had always been kind to him and to his family, being molested and perhaps even killed by godless brigands, he had sent his men on their way, but had ridden with an escort of ten hand-picked companions to administer justice to the raiders.
Unfortunately, he said after a lengthy pause, in his anger and indignation he had underestimated his opponents, not merely their strength but their number, taking the word of the fugitive at face value. He and his party had ridden into a cleverly constructed ambush in a steep-walled wadi, and he had lost seven of his men, shot down from concealment, before he could even begin to collect himself. Only Sayeed, Arouf, himself and one other had managed to fight their way free, three of them, and two of their mounts, wounded. The fourth man had died of his wounds soon after their escape, as had his horse, and Sayeed had cut the throat of Arouf’s horse some time after that, when the deep slash in its belly had finally split and spread, spilling the beast’s entrails to tangle in its hooves. Arouf, pressing a cloth to his bleeding groin wound, had then mounted behind Sayeed, and the three had kept riding until they found this place, where they had stopped for the night. Sayeed, the only one unhurt among them, had stanched the bleeding in Arouf’s groin first, sprinkling it with some powder that stopped the flow of blood, after which he had strapped the wound up tightly. He had then tended to al-Farouch’s leg, the smaller bone of which had been snapped by a crossbow bolt. He cleaned the wound, set the bone as well as he was able, and then bandaged and splinted the limb, which he expected to heal completely.
They had spent the night here together, all three of them, and when the next day dawned they discussed what must be done. Their companions would be far ahead of them by now, and might even have stopped to wait for them, or turned back to search for them, but all three men knew that the odds against their being found without assistance left little hope. And so al-Farouch decided that Sayeed would ride out in search of the others. Arouf would have none of that, swearing he was sound enough to ride, now that the bleeding from his groin had stopped. He would ride out with Sayeed, overriding his brother’s wishes for the first time in all the years they had known each other. He would take the northern route while Sayeed searched farther to the east. Al-Farouch, whose splinted leg made it impossible for him to mount a horse, would remain where he was, with a supply of food and water sufficient to sustain him for seven to eight days, by which time one or both of the others would have returned with help. The two then rode off, leaving al-Farouch’s round shield hanging from his upended spear to serve as a sign on their way back.
“And now you know as much as I do,
Sinclair sat silent, mulling over what he had been told. If Sayeed had survived the storm and found his fellows, they would return here and that would be the end for him. He could still depart on the horse, he knew; one way or another he could contrive to mount it again, even without a mounting block, now that he knew its placid nature. He thought of looking out again to check that the horse was still nearby, but instead he leaned forward and spoke to the Saracen.
“How is it that you speak our tongue?”
“One of your tongues,” the other answered drily.
“When you spoke at first, in that first tongue you used, it fell upon my ears like the gibbering of
Sinclair grinned for the first time in days. “That was Gaelic, the language of my people in Scotland, where I was born.”
“You are not, then, a Frank?”
“No, I am what they call a Scot, but my family came there from France a hundred years ago. When the call went out for warriors to come here, I joined the army.”
“Are you a knight, then? I see no badges of rank on you.”
“I cast them off with my armor when I found myself afoot in the desert. There are too many ways to die out here without being foolish enough to seek one, weighed down with useless steel and heavy clothing.”
“Ah, I see. Plainly you have been here long enough to learn a smattering of Allah’s wisdom, praise His name … But you came here to kill Saracens, no?”
“No, not exactly. I came because my duty as a knight summoned me here, to Outremer. Killing or being killed is merely part of the knight’s code.”
“You are of the Temple, then?”
Something, some unidentifiable element of menace in the simple question, made Sinclair change the affirmative that sprang to his lips, but he managed to dissemble without either lying or, he thought, betraying himself. “I am a knight,” he drawled. “From Scotland, many days from France by sea. Not all the knights in Outremer are of the Temple or the Hospital.”
“No, but the Temple
Sinclair let that statement lie as it fell. “You did not answer my question, about how you came to speak the language of the Franks.”
“I learned it as a boy, in Ibelin, where I grew up. There was a Frankish lord who built a fortress there, after the capture of Jerusalem, long before I was born. He took the name of the town as his own. I worked there when I was a boy, in the stables, and I ran and played with his son, who was my age. I learned to speak their tongue, as the boy learned mine.”
Sinclair was frowning. “Ibelin … Mean you Sir Balian of Ibelin? I know him. I rode with him from Nazareth to …” He broke off, aware that he might be saying more than he ought, but al-Farouch was already nodding his head.
“It would be he. His name in our tongue is Balian ibn Barzan, and he is a powerful man among the
“Are you still friends, then?”
