"Anyway," she continued, "life with Besma was pretty good. If you don't count her stepmother who used me to control her. And then her stepbrother and two friends decided I was just the thing for a dull afternoon—"
And then the tears came forth. The force with which they gushed took Hamilton completely by surprise.
"I never talk about it," Petra sobbed, "I never talk about—"
After which she couldn't say anything, as Hamilton was kneeling beside her chair, holding her in his arms, and pressing her head into his shoulder. "Shhh," he said soothingly. "It's all right. You don't have to talk about it and I am a complete ass for even asking. I'm really sorry."
* * *
"Hans, I need you to listen carefully to me," Ling said. "This is important and the answer means everything. Why did you attack that man last night?"
Hans drew in a deep breath and then exhaled forcefully. "He's a slave trader, and I saw his cargo. They were just children, Ling, even younger than Petra was when they took her away. He's a stinking slave trader."
Ling chewed on her lower lip, wracked with indecision. Finally, she asked, "What if he wasn't?"
Hans just shook his head in confusion. "What if he wasn't what?"
"What if he wasn't a slave trader, but was something else?"
"Something else? Like what?"
"I can't tell you. Not won't;
"I saw what I saw," Hans insisted.
"Yes . . . but you didn't necessarily
"I'm a dead man," he said, "dead before I can do any good, if I can't trust you. Everything I've told you so far would get me nailed up to a wooden cross. How much more can I do?"
She insisted, "I need more, Hans."
He thought about that for a minute. Then he went to his overnight bag, dropped off in her quarters by a servant the previous night. From the bag he pulled out a Koran. He opened in to a random page and spit on it. "That's one," he said. "Now follow me."
There were, after all, reasons why Abdul Rahman had thought Hans had a future. If he had flaws, lack of decisiveness wasn't among them.
Ling followed Hans to her bathroom. There he thumbed through the book, apparently looking for a choice passage. When he'd found it, he tore that page from the Koran, bent over, and wiped his rear end with it. "That's two." He dropped the page in the toilet, spit again, and flushed.
Hans walked back to the bedroom and picked up his bag again, feeling inside for a small box. This he withdrew from the bag and opened. From the box he pulled out a crucifix, kissed it and said, "This was given to me by a man, a priest, I helped murder . . ."
* * *
"These mountains are murder, I know," Hamilton said in sympathy, as he helped Petra over a rock lying across their path.
Feeling like an absolute rat, Hamilton had offered anything to make up to her his—"stupid, insensitive, moronic, unfeeling, idiotic"—question.
Shyly, she'd asked, "I don't get to go out much. If I dress properly, could you, maybe . . . take me for a walk?"
He'd had to leave a six hundred dinar deposit, but that was within his means. (Why six hundred when her purchase price had been three? The cost of her training had been added to her value.) Other than that, the management had had no objections whatsoever. Since Hamilton had "hospitality of the house," they'd sent for a picnic lunch for the two from the kitchen. The two had left by the main gate to the castle, before the mosque and between the minarets.
From the castle they walked down to the town, and then to the lakeshore.
"I have a place," she confessed, still full of shyness, "up in a tower where I can see this. I dream sometimes of being free to walk the lake. Sometimes—yes, I know it sounds foolish—but sometimes I dream I'm a princess up there and a hero will cross the lake and take me away. Silly, no?"
"Maybe not so silly. Anything's possible."
"Not in the Caliphate," she said. "Not in the Caliphate for a woman . . . or a Christian . . . or a slave . . . or a whore."
"Stop it," he said. "What you have to do is not the same thing as what you are."
"Thank you, Johann," she said, quietly. "But even if that's true there are many things that I can never do that also define what I am." She stood facing the lake, wind blowing through the few loose strands of her hair, and continued, "I don't know how to cook. I can't sew or weave. Unless they decide to breed me they'll keep me from ever getting pregnant until it's too late for me to be a mother. If they did breed me it would be to produce a slave. I'd strangle the baby with my own hands, before I let that happen. No respectable man would ever marry me, not now. Independence for a woman is simply not possible here, except as a freelance whore.
