Jack Whyte - Standard of Honour

He discovered that the bier or litter on which he had lain was made from a pair of spears lashed together to a short cross-piece that had supported his head and given the frail-looking device some rigidity, and he made short work of cutting away the lashings, along with the woven network of straps that had supported his body. Two spears were useless to him, one-armed as he was, but one would serve him well as a walking staff and provide him with a weapon of self-defense, since he had no idea what had happened to his sword. That concerned him for no more than a moment, aware as he was that he would have been incapable of using it to any effect.

Because his useless arm was rigidly splinted, it was utterly inflexible. He studied the ends of the steel shafts encircling his wrist and then, using his good hand and his teeth, he set about fashioning a sling from the longest of the straps from the bed of the litter. By dint of much knotting and adjustment, and muttering to himself as he worked, he eventually created a primitive harness that worked quite effectively, a large loop fitting around his neck while a smaller one was hooked firmly around the ends of two of the crossbow-bolt splints. The device was not comfortable—the strap cut sharply into his neck and shoulder muscles—but it kept the limb from hanging straight down from his shoulder like a leaden weight.

Sinclair could not believe how difficult it was to do even the smallest thing properly with only one hand. The simple effort of removing the belt from its peg and cinching it about his waist, weighted as it was with its sheathed dirk, became the most infuriating task he had ever undertaken, requiring eight attempts and a variety of outlandish contortions, and he achieved it only by clamping the belt in his teeth in the correct place and feeding the other end through the buckle with great care. Three times he lost his grip while transferring the weight, and had to restart each time. After that, seated and with the belt securely buckled, he tried unsuccessfully to shrug his massive shoulders through the loop of the belt, but he had to be content in the end with hanging it diagonally across his chest, and even then he had to undo the sling he had arranged so carefully a short time before, in order to hang the bags containing his food and water comfortably across his chest and beneath his left arm, because his earliest attempt, to make them hang comfortably over the rigid limb, quickly proved futile.

Finally, after one last look around the sand-filled cave, he took up his spear staff and carefully made his way to the cave’s mouth. He was forced to stoop lower and lower as he approached because the opening had filled up with blowing sand and was less than one third its former size. Beyond it, however, was where the surprise lay concealed, and Sinclair stood in the doorway, his eyes wrinkled to slits against the severity of the blazing sun as he tried to comprehend what he was seeing.

It had been dark when they arrived, but the moonlight had been strong enough to reveal the scoured earth of the boulder-littered bowl in which they had sheltered beneath the shadows of the giant dunes. He stood gazing now for a long time, feeling apprehension tightening his throat, for he could see nothing that he recognized. The silence was absolute, and the vast expanse of windblown sand before him bore no tracks of any living creature. The sun was halfway up the sky, but even so, he thought, it might be halfway down, because he had no means of identifying direction. He had paid no attention to such details as Lachlan dragged him into the cave, and for a moment the enormity of his own ignorance threatened to overwhelm him. Rather than give in to that feeling, however, he harangued himself in silence. Come on now , he thought. You’re alive, you’ve eaten and drunk, and you have both food and water to keep you going. You’re in no more pain than you might be with a bad toothache. You even have a weapon, by God, and it will double as a walking staff, so stop whining to yourself like a lost little boy and get on with it! But he had no clue which way to go and so he stood there, helpless.

The worst part of his helplessness sprang from not knowing where he could even begin to search for his friend Lachlan, who had done so much for him. Moray could be anywhere out there, sheltering miles away in some rocky hole or in the lee of a dune, or he could be lying dead within paces of this cave, smothered and buried by drifting sand. Frustrated beyond bearing, to the point of not caring who else might hear his shout, he cupped his good hand by the side of his mouth and called Lachlan’s name at the top of his voice, then listened carefully for an answer from the silent immensity of the desert. Four times he tried, facing a different direction each time, before accepting the futility of what he was doing. He inhaled deeply then, gritted his teeth, and set out strongly without looking back, trudging ankle deep in sand towards wherever the Fates directed him, and although aware that he was leaving deep and unmistakable tracks as he went, he consoled himself by almost believing that Lachlan Moray might stumble across his trail and follow him.

SINCLAIR SOON DISCOVERED that the sun had been halfway up the sky when he set out, because as he walked onward, taking great care over where he placed each foot, it climbed higher until it was directly overhead. He thought about stopping to eat and drink at that point, but he was on a long, level stretch and, remembering the difficulty he had had with the water bag, he decided to wait a little longer in the hope of finding something to sit on before making the attempt. And so he moved on, changing his direction slightly towards a low rise in the sand ahead of him and to his right. Soon after that, although he could see no incline, the increased strain on his legs told him that he had begun to climb, and some time later he crested the high point of a long, low ridge and stopped to stretch and work the kinks from his hips and shoulders.

Standing straight and eyeing the distant horizon, he caught a flicker of movement at the edge of his right eye and spun to face it. But there was nothing to be seen other than bare, smooth sand and the slowly rising edge of the ridge, curling away from him, back the way he had come, to form a large dune. He stared for a long time, his eyes narrowed to slits as he quartered every inch of rising ground up there, and it came again, a definite flicker of movement, low to the ground, just as he was about to turn away. But he lost it again immediately. He flexed his fingers on the shaft of his spear and set out determinedly, up the length of the low ridge, feeling the pull of the slope sapping the strength from his tiring legs, and straining for another sight of whatever it was up there that had moved. It was small, he knew, but he was also hoping it would be edible and sufficiently accommodating to allow itself to be caught and eaten.

Several minutes later he saw the movement again, but as soon as he focused on the spot where the movement had been, he also saw what had confused him: indistinguishable from the sand behind it, the edge of the spine that formed the ridge was curling back to his right just at that point, and the space behind it had been scooped clean by the wind. What he had seen was the twitching ear of a horse that was hidden by the edge of the spine. Now he could see the animal’s entire head, a pale and unusual golden color, almost the exact shade of the sand surrounding it, and as he saw it for what it was, the beast lowered its head out of sight again.

Sinclair had instantly frozen into a crouch, raising his spear defensively and fighting against the rush of tension in his chest, for where there was a horse, so far from any signs of life, there must also be a rider. It was several moments before he decided he was not in imminent danger of attack, and he moved forward slowly, inch by inch, until he could raise his head above the edge of the sandy spine and look down into the place below.