Read The Parched Sea for Free Online Page A

head. “I’ve made certain promises to Ajaman. We must wait here until we can take his body to the oasis,” she said. “Then we can warn the Mtair Dhafir.”
    Ruha was not anxious to return to her father’s tribe, but Kadumi was right to alert them to the danger traveling in their direction. Besides, even though she knew it would be impossible for her to stay with the Mtair Dhafir, there was no reason for them to turn out the young warrior, and the widow suspected that it would be easier to find a new tribe for herself if she left her young brotherin-law with the Mtair.
    Accepting Ruha’s plan with a respectful nod, Kadumi cast a wary eye toward the southern sky. “Let us hope the strangers leave soon;’ he said. “If that storm catches us in its path, we will have to wait it out:”
     

Three
     
    From beneath a fallen tent, Lander heard his guides approaching. Pitched on the southern end of the oasis pond, about a hundred feet from the camp, this tent was the first in which he had found no bodies. It was also a stark contrast to the clutter of the other tents, for there was nothing inside except a ground-loom, three cooking pots, a dozen shoulder bags of woven camel hair, and a few other household items. Apparently the inhabitants of this household had escaped the massacre. Lander wondered how.
    “Lord, there are camels out in the sands!” called Bhadla, the elder of his two guides.
    “I’m not a lord;’ Lander responded wearily, correcting the solicitous servant for the thousandth time. He found a twelve-inch tube made of a dried lizard skin and sniffed the greasy substance inside. It was foul-smelling butter.
    “Whatever it is you wish to be called;’ Bhadla said, “I
    hope you have finished whatever you are doing with those dead people. We must go:’
    “Go?” Lander asked, crawling toward the voice. “What for?”
    Like his guides, he had heard the camels roaring outside the oasis, but he had no intention of leaving. He had come to this wretched desert to find the Bedine; not flee from them.
    Lander reached the edge of the tent and pushed his head and shoulders out from beneath it. The blazing sunlight reflected off the golden sands and stabbed painfully at his one good eye. “What’s this about going?”
    “Someone is coming,” the short guide repeated. “We shouldn’t be here when they arrive:’
    “They’ll think we did this,” offered Musalim, Bhadla’s scrawny assistant.
    Like all D’tarig, Bhadla and Musalim stood barely four feet tall. Each kept himself swaddled in a white burnoose and turban from head to foot. Lander wondered what they looked like beneath their cloaks and masks, but knew he would probably never find out. He had met dozens of the diminutive humanoids over the last few months, and he had yet to glimpse anything more than a leathery brow set over a pair of dark eyes and a black, puggish nose.
    “I doubt anyone will think the three of us murdered an entire tribe;” Lander said.
    “The Bedine might,” Bhadla said. He brushed the back of his fingers against his forehead in a disparaging gesture Lander did not understand. “They have very bad tempers.
    “When I hired you, you assured me you were very popular with the people of the desert,” Lander said, crawling the rest of the way from beneath the tent.
    As he stood, he noticed that a gray haze was spreading northward from the southern horizon. In Sembia, his home, such a cloud signaled the approach of a storm. He hoped it meant the same thing in the desert, for a little rain might break the oppressive heat.
    Turning his attention back to his guide, he said, “Are you telling me you lied, Bhadla?”
    Bhadla shrugged and looked away. “No one can say what the Bedine will do:’
    “I can;” Lander countered.
    Musalim scoffed. “How could you? Bhadla cannot even tell which tribe this-“
    Bhadla cuffed his assistant for this indiscrete admission. In the language of his people, the D’tarig said, “Watch your