pulled taut with grim anticipation.
The raider licked his chapped lips. His mouth was parched and dry, but the desert’s searing
heat showed no sign of relenting. One of the men found his waterskin empty and, without
thinking, reached for his companion’s. He almost made it. His companion turned, drew his blade,
and casually removed the outstretched limb. The rest of the group wordlessly turned on the
wounded man, their daggers rising and falling in eerie silence.
The raider returned his attention to the merchants. By now they had reached the dune’s crest.
From afar the knobbly ridge running along the dune’s top almost resembled a gargantuan beast’s
spine and the traders were fly-specks atop it. His men had finished stripping the dead body of
possessions and it now lay forgotten where it had fallen. It was time. With practiced ease, the
raider drew his chipped blade from a strangely ornate scabbard and began slowly unwinding the
protective wrapping around it.
The Trader’s Wife
Screams. Desperate shouts. The thick air was punctured by unanswered cries for help. Merchants
fumbled for blades with clumsy hands and hurriedly attempted to notch arrows. Pale shadows
flitted among them like shades. A sharp, quick thrust. Another scream. Camels wheeled in terror
as riders were unhorsed and thrown to the ground. Heavy casks were torn from their sides,
landing with dull thumps. A man attempted to crawl away from the carnage. Two arrows caught
him in the back and he let out a shuddering gasp.
The trader’s wife jerked awake with a start. Her eyes snapped open and she sat bolt upright,
drenched in sweat. She could feel her heart pounding against her ribs. What had that been? The
wife gathered her blankets around herself protectively. A dream, nothing more. And yet...
Her husband was six weeks overdue on his trading expedition. He had been following the
northern route, the shorter path but fraught with danger. She shivered. What now? The wife tried
to tell herself that it was nothing, a silly dream. The tea by her bed had long gone cold but she
downed it anyway. It did little to extinguish the acidic burning of worry and regret in her chest.
She should not have let him become a trader. Perhaps a herder, or a hunter. But the pay had been
irresistible and their marriage had been young.
The shouts came back to her. The doomed man, crawling away from the inevitable. The wife
slumped back but refused to close her eyes for fear that the scene might appear again. So she sat
and watched the glowing embers of the fire flicker and die as the night dragged on.
The Hunter
The hunter pulled his pony to a sudden stop. Just ahead, dusk was falling over the dark silhouettes
of the mountains. The mix of pink-red hues in the distance resembled a bloody streak across
the sky. The hunter’s mount pawed at the black rocky gravel beneath it impatiently as its rider
dismounted, dropped to one knee, and studied the pile of ash on the ground. Then the hunter
stood and faced the road ahead. Undulating grey hills stretched off into infinity. As he watched,
darkness began to fall on the furthest of them, creeping inexorably across the land.
He turned to his companions. “We are close. They stopped here not two nights ago. Let us
make camp here for the night.”
The hunter was no stranger to the ways of predator and prey. His worn, callused hands and
weather-beaten face were testament to that. In reality, he was too old for this work. But predators
are never truly too weak to hunt. The moment they are no longer able to, they fall to sickness or
