the presumption that no one else in the train was worth the kind of silver that had bought this raid. He believed it to be true.
Pantera nodded, absently. His gaze was fixed on the hostile desert.
Mergus bit back the question that jammed his tongue; no point now in asking how anyone knew they were there, and not safe, either. The tribesmen who owned the camels said that the ghûls who stalked the desert could take unspoken thoughts and give them shape. Mergus made the sign against evil behind his back, to ward them off. He risked another look round the rock lip that guarded his head. An arrow chased him back.
‘How many of them are there?’ Pantera asked it as he might have asked for the price of new arrows, and not cared the number of the answer.
‘Nine different voices,’ Mergus said. ‘Two different fletchings on the arrows, but there could be more than two archers.’
‘That’s what I thought: a dozen to begin and now nine. Let’s suppose they know who they’re after. If I attract their fire, will you mourn my death loudly?’
A shadow crossed Mergus’ heart. ‘Very loudly,’ he said, and tried to smile.
Pantera’s grip on his shoulder was quickly gone and then the man himself was gone, firing his arrows, killing some, angering the rest and making of himself a target when he could have been hidden. Mergus pressed his shoulder into the shelf of hard rock and breathed air that stank now of blood and sweat and split guts and his own fear.
‘Aaaaaaah!’ A high cry, not like Pantera at all, unless the wound were mortal—
‘Are you hit?’
‘No.’ Blood ran a river down Pantera’s left arm where an arrow had run too close. He slumped against the rock. ‘Mourn for me,’ he said. ‘Loudly.’
‘He’s dead! Sebastos is dead!’
Mergus howled fit to draw back the dawn-hunting jackals. He drew his palm up Pantera’s arm and smeared the blood along his hooked Saba knife and then across his lips and onecheek, as if he had cut the throat of a brother out of kindness, and, out of love, had kissed him.
He ran out into the gully, stabbing the air, as one mad with grief. The desert had become a charnel house. Three bodies lay where there had been one. Another horse lay dying, stiff-legged, choking on its own blood. But the death was all done by bowmen; no one had fought hand to hand yet. Mergus searched the line of the arrow-fall, saw a fissure not unlike the one he had just left and charged it, screaming.
They thought him mad, and so he was mad, and god-held, as some men are in battle, who can run into certain death and yet not die. Mergus sprinted towards the tip of an arrow that was sighted on his heart and the man holding it lost the will to loose, dropped his guard and turned and tried to scramble out of the back of a fissure. He died with Mergus’ curved knife slicing past his ribs to the pumping muscles of his heart.
Out of such courage are losing battles turned to victory. Two of the Saba brothers still lived – Ibrahim and Ilias. Of the remaining ten – nine – living outriders, eight were able to fight and two of those were armed with bows. They came together in the gully, battle-mad and ready to die.
‘We will avenge your brother, and ours.’
Ibrahim’s heavy hand fell on Mergus’ shoulder where Pantera’s had lately been. Mergus did not shake him off or point out that Pantera had never been his brother and was certainly not his lover, which is what they thought.
When they joined the camel train, Mergus and Pantera had been, to all outward appearance, strangers to each other. They had joined on different days, in different languages, with different past histories to tell. But enough of those histories had been in common for it to be natural that they formed a friendship on the course of the month’s journey from the Saba homelands and they had done so, until the brothers had begun to call them bedfellows, not sure if it were true or not, and Mergus had laid bets with himself
Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins