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.
‘This danger that you claim to have come to warn us of.’ Mahood pushed back his plate. ‘What is it?’ He rested both hands on his stomach. As lean as his father, he was taller, sharp featured, pockmarked, as quick to shift from friendly to sinister with just the slightest movement of his face.
‘Bad.’ I took the opportunity to push back my own plate. To be unable to clear your plate is a compliment to a Liban host’s largesse. Mine simply constituted a bigger compliment than usual, I hoped. ‘I don’t know what form it will take. I only pray that we are far enough away to be safe.’
‘And God sent an infidel to deliver this warning?’
‘A divine message is holy whatever it may be written upon.’ I had Bishop James to thank for that gem. He beat the words, if not the sentiment, into me after I decorated the privy wall with that bible passage about who was cleaving to whom. ‘And of course the messenger is never to be blamed! That one’s older than civilization.’ I breathed a sigh of relief as my plate was removed without comment.
‘And now dessert!’ The sheik clapped his hands. ‘A true desert dessert!’
I looked up expectantly as the servers returned with smaller square platters stacked along their arms, half expecting to be presented with a plate of sand. I would have preferred a plate of sand.
‘It’s a scorpion,’ I said.
‘A keen eye you have, Prince Jalan.’ Mahood favoured me with a dark stare over the top of his water goblet.
‘Crystallized scorpion, Prince Jalan! Can you have spent time in Liba and not yet tried one?’ The sheik looked confounded.
‘It’s a great delicacy.’ Tarelle’s knee bumped mine.
‘I’m sure I’ll love it.’ I forced the words past gritted teeth. Teeth that had no intention of parting to admit the thing. I stared at the scorpion, a monster fully nine inches long from the curve of the tail arching over its back to the oversized twin claws. The arachnid had a slightly translucent hue to it, its carapace orange and glistening with some kind of sugary glaze. Any larger and it could be mistaken for a lobster.
‘Eating the scorpion is a delicate art, Prince Jalan,’ the sheik said, demanding our attention. ‘First, do not be tempted to eat the sting. For the rest customs vary, but in my homeland we begin with the lower section of the pincer, like so.’ He took hold of the upper part and set his knife between the two halves. ‘A slight twist will crack—’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the scorpion on my plate jitter toward me on stiff legs, six glazed feet scrabbling for purchase on the silver. I slammed my goblet down on the thing crushing its back, legs shattering, pieces flying in all directions, cloudy syrup leaking from its broken body.
All nine al’Hameeds stared at me in open-mouthed astonishment.
