The Tenth Saint
Table of Contents
Published 2012 by Medallion Press, Inc.
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If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment from this “stripped book.”
Copyright © 2012 by D. J. Niko
Cover design by James Tampa
Edited by Helen A Rosburg and Emily Steele
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN# 9781605422459
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
For Nicola
In memoriam
One
T
he camel trod tentatively on a patch of cracked earth. The upper crust shattered underfoot the heavily laden beast like unfired pottery broken into a thousand pieces. The camel driver, a gaunt man shrouded in indigo gauze from head to bare feet, made an urgent clicking sound and hit the animal on its hindquarters with a palm frond whip. The camel took two quick steps in reaction to the insult, then halted, groaning its displeasure. Despite repeated calls from its driver, it was going no farther and that was that.
The man peeled back his headdress to uncover his face. His skin was the color of antelope hide, with deep grooves carved into his forehead and cheek hollows. The sun had taken its toll on him over the fifty years he had walked the desert. He looked like an emaciated octogenarian, tired and beaten down by life, but his eyes, pools of liquid onyx, shone with a spirit full of vigor and wisdom, the kind needed to guide a tribe of nomads through this unforgiving country. He squinted to the sky to confirm the position of the sun. It was as he thought: directly overhead. He appraised the desert around him. All that he surveyed was arid and parched. Parched like the camels and his fellow riders. The midday sun scorched without remorse, and there was no salvation—no water, no shade—in sight.
With one hand, he drew circles in the air to summon the other men. “We will stop here,” he told them when they’d gathered round. “The animals are tired. They must have water.”
“But, Shaykh, there is no water,” said one of the younger men, his narrow eyes full of doubt. “There hasn’t been water in many moons.”
The leader put his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Then we shall find some, Abu. The desert is our mother. She always provides.”
The young man did not talk back to his elder. It was the Bedouin way: trust and obey. The elders had proven themselves as men of great character and honor and, as such, commanded the respect of the goums. Hairan was chief of the tribe, the Bedouins’ moral and spiritual leader.
The others stood by the old chief, waiting for direction. Hairan instructed them to make camp and start a fire. Then he summoned the old woman Taneva and asked her to gather some of the womenfolk and walk toward the east in search of water.
Taneva kneeled before the chief in reverence, shrinking into her black woolen robes, the standard dress of Bedouin widows. She was the eldest woman in the tribe and therefore the one who had witnessed the most, including the birth of two generations. Nothing remained of her youth but dignity. Her eyes, ringed in black kohl, smoldered like a half-spent fire. Her receding brown lips were taut with determination. The strands of hair escaping her black veil framed her face like threads of silver tinsel.
Hairan motioned to her to rise and stand as his equal. “There was rain in the east two days ago.” He pointed to a pair of high sand dunes. “Behind those dunes is a low valley. Look for the water there.”
Taneva bowed and backed away.
Three women accompanied Taneva eastward, the sand hot as a simmering cauldron beneath their bare feet. Balancing earthen jars on their heads, they did not complain but walked on, as their people had done for centuries before them.
For half an hour they endured the discomfort, and they were rewarded for it. Just as Hairan had predicted, a pool of water was inside a hollow in the sand. It wasn’t much—barely enough to last the day—and it swarmed with insects. But tomorrow was a new day, and it would bring as much hope as any other. The women kneeled to collect what little water there was, straining it through the gauze of their head veils to purify it.
Driven by a premonition that there was more to find, Taneva left the others and walked toward another depression in the sand. As she came to the edge of the hollow, her gaze fell upon a thing she had never before encountered. She squinted to get a clearer look.
In the sand was a bulge.
She hurried down, raising great plumes of dust with her bare feet. Something was there, indeed. Something unnatural.
She approached the mass and with a desert woman’s sense of duty began brushing the sand aside to reveal what lay beneath. Her hand swept over a coarse snarl like the heap of her woolen embroidery threads after a sandstorm. She jerked her hand away, her eyes wide and mouth trembling with dread. Instinctively she looked around for help, but no one was near. With a deep breath, she returned to her task. The women of the desert, like the men, did not turn away from what was put on their path. It was their fate. To walk away would be to defy the powers, which would lead to certain ruin.
Taneva’s hand came upon something hard, a protrusion, like bone. With both hands, she made a groove in the sand and dug with new resolve.
The head revealed itself first. The eyes were deep in their sockets, the skin around them purple from impact or pain. The hair was fair of color and short, so crusted with sand it resembled the fleece of a long-dead sheep.
Taneva pushed the rest of the sand aside to uncover the naked body of a man, curled in the fetal position and pale as death. She pressed both hands to her mouth to contain a shriek. Falling to her knees next to the body, she chanted the song of the dying as an offering for the soul of the victim.
That night, Hairan tended to the stranger inside his own tent. By all accounts, the man should have been dead. By some miracle, he wasn’t. Hairan himself doubted he would live, for his breathing was shallow, his body battered, and his unconscious state closer to death than slumber. But as a Bedouin, a shaykh, and a medicine man, he was bound to care for the stranger until he had either recovered or given up the fight.