“Fearless fighters, though,” said the woman to my left, perhaps my age. “Without them, crossing the barrens would be a great ordeal. Even in the desert there are dangers.”
Across from us the other two sisters shared an observation, glancing my way. The older of the pair laughed, full-throated. I stared desperately at her kohl-darkened eyes, struggling to keep my gaze from dipping to the jiggle of full breasts beneath silk gauze strewn with sequins. I knew by reputation that Liban royalty, be it the ubiquitous princes, the rarer sheiks, or the singular caliph, all guarded their womenfolk with legendary zeal and would pursue vendettas across the centuries over as little as a covetous glance. What they might do over a despoiled maiden they left to the horrors of imagination.
I wondered if the sheik saw me as a marriage opportunity, having seated me amid his daughters. “I’m very grateful that the Ha’tari found me,” I said, keeping my eyes firmly on the meal.
“My daughters Lila, Mina, Tarelle, and Danelle.” The sheik smiled indulgently as he pointed to each in turn.
“Delightful.” I imagined ways in which they might be delightful.
As if reading my mind the sheik raised his goblet. “We are not so strict in our faith as the Ha’tari but the laws we do keep are iron. You are a welcome guest, prince. But, unless you become betrothed to one of my daughters, lay no finger on them that you would rather keep.”
I reddened and started to bluster. “Sir! A prince of Red March would never—”
“Lay more than a finger upon her and I will make her a gift of your testicles, gold-plated, to be worn as earrings.” He smiled as if we’d been discussing the weather. “Time to eat!”
Food! At least there was the food. I would gorge to the point I was too full for even the smallest of lustful thoughts. And I’d enjoy it too. In the deadlands you starved. From the first moment you stepped into that deadlight until the moment you left it, you starved.
The sheik led us in their heathen prayers, spoken in the desert tongue. It took a damnable long time, my belly rumbling the while, mouth watering at the display set out before me. At last the lot of them joined in with a line or two and we were done. All heads turned to the tent flaps, expectant.
Two elderly male servants walked in with the main course on silver plates, square in the Araby style. Sitting on the floor I could just see a mound of food rising above the dishes, roast mutton no doubt, given the slaughtering earlier. God yes! My stomach growled like a lion, attracting nods of approval from Sheik Malik and his eldest son.
The server set my plate before me and moved on. A skinned sheep’s head stared at me, steaming gently, boiled eyes regarding me with an amused expression, or perhaps that was just the grin on its lipless mouth. A dark tongue coiled beneath a row of surprisingly even teeth.
“Ah.” I closed my own mouth with a click and looked to Tarelle on my left who had just received her own severed head.
She favoured me with a sweet smile. “Marvellous, is it not, Prince Jalan? A feast like this in the desert. A taste of home after so many hard miles.”
I’d heard that the Libans could get almost as stabby if you didn’t touch their food as they would if you did touch their women. I returned my gaze to the steaming head, its juices pooling around it, and considered how far I was from Hamada and how few yards I would get without water.
I reached for the nearest rice and started to heap my plate. Perhaps I could give the poor creature a decent burial and nobody would notice. Sadly I was the curiosity at this family feast and most eyes were turned my way. Even the dozen sheep seemed interested.
“You’re hungry, my prince!” Danelle to my right, her knee brushing mine each time she reached forward to add a date or olive to her plate.
“Very,” I said, grimly shovelling rice onto the monstrosity on my own. The thing had so little flesh that it was practically a grinning skull. The presence of a distinctly scooped spoon amid the flatware arranged by my plate suggested that a goodly amount of delving was expected. I wondered whether it was etiquette to use the same spoon for eyeballs as for brain . . .
“Father says the Ha’tari think you fell from the sky.” Lila from across the feast.
“With a devil-woman giving chase!” Mina giggled. The youngest of them, silenced by a sharp look from elder brother Mahood.
“Well,” I said. “I—”
Something moved beneath my rice heap.
“Yes?” Tarelle by my side, knee touching mine, naked beneath thin silks.
“I certainly—”
Goddamn! There it was again, something writhing like a serpent beneath mud. “I . . . the sheik said your man fell from his camel.”
Mina was a slight thing, but unreasonably beautiful, perhaps not yet sixteen. “The Ha’tari are not ours. We are theirs now they have Father’s coin. Theirs until we are discharged into Hamada.”
“But it’s true,” Danelle, her voice seductively husky at my ear. “The Ha’tari would rather say the moon swung too low and knocked them from their steed than admit they fell.”
General laughter. The sheep’s purple tongue broke through my burial, coiling amid the fragrant yellow rice. I stabbed it with my fork, pinning it to the plate.
The sudden movement drew attention. “The tongue is my favourite,” Mina said.
“The brain is divine,” Sheik al’Hameed declared from the head of the feast. “My girls puree it with dates, parsley and pepper then return it to the skull.” He kissed his fingertips.
Whilst he held his children’s attention I quickly severed the tongue and with some frantic sawing reduced it to six or more sections.
“Fine cooking skills are a great bonus in a wife, are they not, Prince Jalan? Even if she never has to cook it is well that she knows enough to instruct her staff.” The sheik turned the focus back onto me.
“Yes.” I stirred the tongue pieces into the rice and heaped more atop them. “Absolutely.”
The sheik seemed pleased at that. “Let the poor man eat! The desert has given him an appetite.”
For a few minutes we ate in near silence, each traveller dedicated to their meal after weeks of poor fare. I worked at the rice around the edge of my burial, unwilling to put tainted mutton anywhere near my mouth. Beside me the delicious Tarelle inverted her own sheep’s head and started scooping out brains into her suddenly far less desirable mouth. The spoon made unpleasant scraping sounds along the inside of the skull.
I knew what had happened. Whilst in the deadlands Loki’s key had been invisible to the Dead King. Perhaps a jest of Loki’s, to have the thing become apparent only when out of reach. Whatever the reason, we had been able to travel the deadlands with less danger from the Dead King than we’d had during the previous year in the living world. Of course we had far more danger from every other damned thing, but that was a different matter. Now that the key was back among the living any dead thing could hunt it for the Dead King.
I was pretty sure Tarelle and Danelle’s sheep had turned their puffy eyeballs my way and I didn’t dare scrape away the rice from my own for fear of finding the thing staring back at me. I managed, by dint of continuously sampling from the dishes in the centre, to eat a vast amount of food whilst continuing to increase the mound on my own plate. After months in the deadlands it would take more than a severed head on my plate to kill my appetite. I drank at least a gallon from my goblet, constantly refilling it from a nearby ewer, only water sadly, but the deadlands had given me a thirst that required a small river to quench and the desert had only added to it.