The Sheik Retold(47)

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, and 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."