The Sheik Retold Page 15

  The sheik forced me to my knees, twined his hand in my curls, and thrust my head back. There was a mad light in his eyes and foam on his lips as he dragged the knife from his waistcloth and laid the keen edge against my throat where he turned it in his hand, caressing up and down my neck with the flat of the blade. I shut my eyes. The metal was cool and hard against my skin, but I did not flinch.

  He gave a horrible laugh. "You will do as I say, or I will slice your throat. You understand? Open your eyes, English whore. I want to watch them as you take me in your mouth."

  Keeping one fist in my hair, he raised his robes to expose a small pink, semi-flaccid penis. I gave it a long, contemptuous stare. "My mouth?" I met his gaze with another hysterical laugh. "I suppose there is not enough of it to go anywhere else."

  He struck me hard across the face, just as he had done to the Arab woman. But it was what I wanted, what I had sought. If I could only enrage him enough, I was certain he would cut my throat and end this horrific degradation. If he did not, I swore I would bite off his disgusting little phallus if he put it anywhere near my mouth. Yes, he would surely cut my throat then, but he would suffer an even worse fate.

  In the midst of my maniacal and homicidal thoughts came a sudden uproar and the sharp report of rifle fire. "Diane! Diane!" Ahmed's powerful voice reached me.

  "Ahmed!" I screamed before the chief's hand dashed once more against my mouth. I grabbed it, opened wide, and bit his hand clean to the bone. His blood mixed with mine. He gave a snarl of rage and wrenched it away.

  I shrieked again, "Ahmed! Ahmed!" But it seemed impossible that my voice could ever be heard above the deafening din outside the tent. I tried to call once more, but the chief caught me by the throat just as he had caught the Arab woman. Just as she had, my hands tore vainly at his gripping fingers.

  Ahmed had come. Ahmed would surely kill him. The reward for me meant nothing to a dead man, so he would seek his retaliation wherever he could find it —and I was close at hand.

  His fingers crushed my throat until the blood beat in my ears like the deafening roar of waves. He choked me with an agony that made my lungs feel as if they were bursting, and a grey film crept over my eyes. My hands fell away, powerless to my sides, and my knees gave out beneath me. The only thing keeping me upright was his hand clutched on my throat. The veins stood out in his neck, and sweat beaded his greasy face with the effort of squeezing the life out of me. The drumming in my ears grew louder. The room darkened. The tent was fading away into blackness. Omair's mouth moved, but his voice seemed as if it came from a great distance.

  "You will not languish long in Hawiyat without your lover. I will send him quickly to you." I was barely conscious when the sneering voice broke and the deadly pressure on my throat relaxed, but he still did not release me. Instead, he swung my limp, almost-lifeless body in front of him. Through a blurry haze, I discerned the outline of a tall figure in the ripped-back doorway. Ahmed!

  The silence within the tent dominated all the tumult without. I wondered numbly why my sheik did nothing, why he did not use the revolver that was clenched in his hand. Then slowly I understood that he dared not fire for fear of striking me.

  Holding me as a shield, Ibraheim Omair moved steadily backward in an attempt to escape. I could do nothing to hinder him beyond slumping in his arms, but that's all it took. With his attention on me, he misjudged the position of the divan and stumbled backward. Ahmed reacted instantly, leaping over the divan to press the cold cylinder of steel against the robber chief's forehead. For a moment the two men stared into each other's eyes until the certain knowledge of death leaped into Omair's eyes. With the fatalism of his creed, he made a gesture of surrender and released me.

  I slid, weak and trembling, to the ground, clasping my pulsating throat and moaning with the effort to breathe. I watched with a fierce sense of vindication as all the savagery in my sheik's nature rose uppermost. Ahmed reached out his hand with a slow, terrible smile and fastened it onto his enemy's throat. It would be quicker to shoot, but he intended to make this fiend experience what I had suffered. In like manner would my torturer die.

  Ahmed's smile deepened, and his fingers tightened, but under Ahmed's strangling clasp the love of life seemed to wake again in Ibraheim Omair. He struggled fiercely, wrestling for his very life, but with a wrestler's trick, Ahmed swept Omair's feet from under him, sending him sprawling onto the cushions. Ahmed pounced, ramming his knee onto his enemy's chest and crushing his weight into the chief's breast. He then closed both hands around his throat. With the terrible smile always on his lips, he choked Omair slowly to death, until the dying man's body arched and writhed in his last agony and the blood burst from his nose and mouth, pouring over the hands that still held him like a vice.

  My eyes had never left my sheik's. I had seen him in cruel, even savage, moods, but nothing had ever approached the look of horrible pleasure that washed over him as he strangled the life out of his hereditary enemy, the man he had been bred from the cradle to hate. In these last moments I saw the naked beast within him, the man stripped of his thin layer of civilization, to reveal a primitive savage, drunk with the lust of blood. And the sight chilled me to the bone.

  I stared with a shuddering horror at my lover's merciless crimson-stained hands, the same hands that had touched me so tenderly. I gazed at the cruel mouth that had pressed against mine, and then I fixed on the murderous light still shining in his fierce eyes. I was shocked, appalled, and terrified. Yet my sheik had been far more merciful to the robber chief than the brigand had been to others. With my own eyes, I had witnessed him wantonly murder a woman who loved him and knew what my own fate would have been if Ahmed had not come.

  No, in the end I found I could summon no pity at all for the wretch who paid so hideously for his crimes. But the incident still left me with a deep sense of disquiet in my soul.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The noise outside the tent grew louder and once or twice a bullet ripped through the hangings, but Ahmed was lost in the intoxication of bloodlust and caught off his guard. He didn't notice the three big Nubians and half-dozen Arabs who stole into the tent. I tried to cry out a warning, but no sound issued from my burning throat, so I scrambled across the floor to tug on the hem of his robe.

  He thrust the dead chief back onto the cushions just as Omair's men made a rush. He spun with his revolver, firing three times, and hitting his mark, but there were too many. Although I found the discarded jambiya that Omair had dropped, my strength was gone, and I could barely even breathe. Cold with dread, I watched in helpless horror as he fought the men who surrounded him. His strength seemed abnormal, but no single man could prevail over such numbers.

  A hoarse whisper of a shriek ripped through my tortured throat when one approached from behind, but my warning was too late. A club came down with crashing force on my sheik's head, dropping him like a stone. Once he was down, another of Omair's cowardly dogs sank his broad knife deep into Ahmed's back.

  I crawled on all fours to get to him but was flung here and there by the fighting men, until a strong hand caught my shoulder. I strained against the detaining arm and would have plunged my knife into his thigh, but I realized it was one of Ahmed's men. My sheik's followers had arrived only to watch him slump prostrate to the ground. Omair's men fled almost instantly upon the entrance of Ahmed's warriors.

  Through a hopeless haze, I watched another man I did not recognize clear a way to Ahmed's side. He went to his knees beside the senseless sheik, speaking a stream of rapid and flawless French. He was tall and thin with a natural air of authority. Although he donned a burnous like the other men, he wore European clothing beneath. I knew without asking that this must be Ahmed's friend the Vicomte Saint Hubert that he had gone to meet.

  While the melee of shots and shouts outside raged on, the tent was deadly quiet, as we all waited in stoical silence. Ahmed Ben Hassan's men cared only about their unconscious leader. I knelt by the Frenchman who had removed his burnous, an
d used it to staunch the blood. I silently handed him the jambiya to cut the cloak into more useful strips.

  The Frenchman glanced up, noticing me for the first time. "You are all right, mademoiselle?" he asked anxiously. I nodded dumbly. What did it matter about me when Ahmed perhaps lay dying?

  "Is he going to live?" I asked in a hoarse whisper.

  "I don't know. He is still breathing, but his pulse is alarmingly weak. I have slowed the bleeding. I see no issue of blood from his nose or mouth, which gives me hope the lung is not punctured, but the wound is deep. I have no way to gauge if there is internal damage, nor can I tell the severity of his head injury. Nevertheless, we must remove him from here at once."

  "But he cannot travel!" I gasped.

  He replied gravely "I assure you, mademoiselle, I don't like this anymore than you do, but the war between tribes has only just begun, and we are too few to risk another attack if any more of Omair's clan show up. Now that blood has been shed, the Sahara will surely flow with it. We cannot expect reinforcements, as the rest of the men are already engaged with Omair's. If we stay here and the enemy prevails, we will all surely die. Besides," the vicomte added with an unmistakable urgency, "I can do almost nothing for him without medical appliances. We must go. There is no choice."

  "But—"

  He quelled my protest with a shake of his head. "You must understand these people. They have looked forward to this war their entire lives. This war means victory or death to them. There is nothing else."

  Ahmed's color was ashen, and his once-pristine robes were saturated with his blood. The vicomte had bandaged his wounds, but there was little else he could do. I swayed against the arm of one of the watchful tribesmen who gazed at his chief with a barely audible ejaculation of "Allah! Allah!" His words sent a whispered supplication to my own lips to the God we both worshipped so differently. Ahmed must not die. God would not be so cruel.

  I stayed with Ahmed as the men hastily constructed a litter from two tent poles and a large piece of tent canvas. They used horses to transport the litter with a man riding on either side. I followed directly behind, my heart jolting painfully in my chest with every jar to Ahmed's limp body.

  The journey back to Ahmed Ben Hassan's camp seemed as interminable as it was terrible. I remembered little other than the agony of dread and apprehension, of waiting for some dire word from Vicomte Saint Hubert, who kept a constant eye on his patient.

  The short twilight had gone, and a brilliant moon shone high in the heavens, illuminating the surrounding country with a clear white light. The summits stood out silver-white in the gleaming moonlight; the hollows filled with dark shadow, like black pools of deep, still water. At any other time, the beauty of the scene, the glamour of the Eastern night, and the company of this band of fierce fighters might have stirred me profoundly, but the reason for it all instilled a cold fear in my heart.

  We had left the level country and were amongst the long, successive ranges of undulating ground. My horse stumbled over a body and nearly fell, recovering himself with a wild scramble and the eerie echo of an iron hoof striking against a dead man's skull. The howling of jackals was close. The horses snorted and sidled at the fallen bodies that lay in our path. Two lean, slinking forms loped off into the night.

  "Damn Jackals!" the viscount muttered.

  It was the scene of our ambuscade. We continued past a semicircle of dead Arabs that proved the efficiency of Gaston's shooting. We were near the spot where he and I had made our last stand. At bottom of one of the slopes, the vicomte pulled up suddenly with a low, hissing exclamation. I looked first to Ahmed, but he seemed no better or worse than before. I then realized that something else had overset the vicomte—a sight that nearly stopped my own heart from beating.

  Just past the dead body of Silver Star, ghostly white in the moonlight and far apart from all the other bodies, was another white shape lying spread-eagled on the sand. The vicomte hastily dismounted, along with another man I had not noticed earlier, a man who looked almost identical to the fallen Gaston, my loyal servant and faithful protector. My throat clogged with emotion as the vicomte and his man, Henri, reached the still figure. I closed my eyes on a sob only to open them again at the sound of Gaston's choking voice.

  "Madam—Ibraheim Omair," he whispered before lapsing back into unconsciousness.

  He was still alive! It could not be! I fell from my horse and stumbled across the hard ground. Saint Hubert was already performing a hurried examination. There was an ugly gash in Gaston's forehead where the first bullet had stunned him and another had ploughed through his shoulder; a third wound still bled freely, but he briefly came to again under Saint Hubert's handling.

  Gaston's eyes fluttered open once more. I caught his hand. "I am here, mon ami," I murmured. "I am safe. Thank you for protecting my life."

  "Bon. It is good then, madam." His parched lips formed a faint smile. I offered him water from my pouch, but his head fell back after only a few sips. I was glad he'd not inquired after his master.

  ***

  We lingered only long enough to refill our skins, water our horses, and construct a second litter for Gaston. Once we set out again, we were soon met by a band of Ahmed's men who had been alerted by a vanguard the vicomte had sent out. They served as our escort the rest of the way back to camp.

  The dawn was breaking upon our arrival. Through bleary, sleep-deprived eyes, I had an impression of rows of unusually silent men grouped beside the tent, but I paid little heed to anything besides the long, limp figure being lifted down almost reverently from between the lathered horses. The men carried their sheik into the tent and laid him on the divan.

  The vicomte's servant was already inside putting out the instruments that his master would need. The man's likeness to his twin was striking. Even their manner was identical—always perfect, silent, and quick. The only discernible difference seemed to be Gaston's clean-shaven visage versus Henri's neat, dark moustache.

  Saint Hubert cleared the tent of the sheik's men while I stood beside the divan looking down upon him. Ahmed's head and face were soaked in blood that had burst through the bandages, and his whole body bore evidence of the terrible struggle. One blood-covered hand hung down, almost touching the rug. I knelt and held it in my own. His skin was strangely cool and his fingers lay nerveless in mine. I laid his hand back down on the cushions, catching my lip between my teeth to stop the trembling. Saint Hubert came up behind me, rolling up his shirt sleeves.

  "Mademoiselle, you have been through enough," he said gently. "Go and rest while I do what I can for Ahmed. I will come to you as soon as I am finished."

  I regarded him fiercely. "It's no good telling me to go away, because I won't. I shall go mad if you don't let me do something. See! My hands are quite steady." I held them out and snatched them back again when the tremble of my fingers gave lie to my words.

  "It is not a pleasant sight, especially for a woman," Saint Hubert replied.

  "I am not squeamish. Let me hold that." I took the crimson-spattered basin from Henri.

  The vicomte made no further remonstrance, but set about his work quickly, suturing the knife wound that seemed like a puncture in my own heart. After bandaging Ahmed's body, he more closely examined his head.

  "You are a doctor?" I asked. I had observed the vicomte's skillful treatment. There was a precision in his movement and a deft touch that indicated both knowledge and practice.

  He checked Ahmed's pulse again and began changing the dressing on his head. "Yes," he replied without looking up. "I studied when I was a young man and passed all the examinations. Although I have never practiced professionally, the knowledge has proved invaluable over the years, especially traveling as I do."

  I winced as if the hurt was my own when Saint Hubert's gentle, dexterous fingers touched my sheik's bruised and battered scalp. He took up the clean dressing that Henri held ready for him, and I fetched another bowl of clean, hot water. When I returned, Saint Hubert flashed a look of
surprise. "Merci."

  I tried to read his expression, but outside of his lightly furrowed brow, he displayed a perfect impassivity. I looked again to Ahmed, who still showed not the least sign of consciousness.

  "Does he feel it very much, do you think?"

  "Not yet, but I fear the pain will beset him with a vengeance when he awakes." He gave a faint smile. "Even his hard head could not endure that blow unscathed."

  "You know him well," I remarked with a humorless laugh.

  "Yes. It is a longstanding friendship and one I will do all in my power to preserve." Saint Hubert finished with the bandages and stood, wiping the perspiration from his forehead. "I go to attend Gaston, although Henri is almost as good a doctor as I am, the incomparable Henri! Ahmed and I have always quarreled over the respective merits of our servants."

  When Saint Hubert left, I slipped to my knees beside Ahmed, gazing at the long limbs lying so terribly, suggestively still. My throat ached, but I could not cry. Oh, Ahmed! My abductor. My lover. My savior. My feelings were such a tangle for this fierce warrior who only a few hours ago had come to my rescue. Had I not tried to run away…had I only stayed within an hour of camp as instructed, none of this would have happened.

  I wondered about Gaston. The few muttered words from Henri had revealed nothing. There were a dozen men already dead because of me, and both Ahmed's and Gaston's lives were now in peril. The guilt weighed so heavily on me that I had been afraid even to ask after Gaston. I hope desperately that they would both live.

  I bent lower over the unconscious man whose slightly parted lips had relaxed the usual sternness of his mouth. "Ahmed, mon bel Arabe," I whispered and then kissed him, my lips quivering against the cool stillness of his. I watched the shallow movements of his chest with an overwhelming sense of weariness that was not all bodily. I dropped my head beside the bandaged one on the pillow, but then the vicomte returned and I resume my kneeling position with my hands clasped over the sheik's and my face hidden against the cushions.