Yusuf encounters a wolf

The shadows cast by Raven Crag and the fells were advancing apace with the mare’s dawdling walk. The valley north of Acanweald was at its narrowest here, the hills steep on either side and the forests dark. Yusuf knew he had only minutes of sunlight remaining.

He kicked his mare’s flank, but if either of them deserved a kick it was he. It wasn’t the mare who had started too late from Thorn-​row. The mare would have been glad to spend the night, and wouldn’t have offered the feeble excuse that Lady Sophie and the children weren’t home. It wasn’t the mare whose heart beat faster at the thought of a leisurely supper and conversation lasting well into the night with the equine inhabitants of Acanweald.

But the mare balked and refused to trot. Her ears swiveled and turned, but aside from her puffing breath she was silent, even taking care not to jingle her tack as she walked. Yusuf’s sour mood of self-​reproach vanished, replaced by a scintillating alertness.

They were both half desert-​bred, he and she: the descendants of fearsome cavalrymen and their steeds—Yusuf on his mother’s side and the mare on her sire’s. They shared the same instincts and the same weaknesses. The same mistrust of narrow places, impenetrable thickets, and tall trees. And they were both afraid of wolves.

Yusuf prayed in a whisper, merely forming the words around his breath: “Allah: There is no god but He—the Living, the Self-​subsisting, the Eternal…”

The mare stopped and arched her neck, shrinking away from the path ahead.

“…No slumber can seize Him, nor sleep…”

Yusuf realized the birds had fallen silent. For the first time he could hear a creek flowing somewhere, rippling over rocks.

Then he heard the howl of a lone wolf.

It was over in minutes. The mare’s powerful body surged up beneath him, and he let her have her head. She half-​reared and twisted like a fish, trying to spin on her hind hooves and gallop back up the valley, but two horses burst out of the bracken behind them and converged on the path. By the time she’d spun back the other way, more horsemen had thundered down the slopes and were blocking the road ahead. The fiery colors of sunset flashed off the polished points of spears.

Yusuf clutched the mare’s mane with one hand and drew his sword with the other. She wheeled and stamped, seeking an opening between the horses who were cantering around her in a tightening circle. Yusuf saw bare knees and barbarian clothing and knew he was facing Scottish raiders. Even to Christians they did not always show mercy.

Yusuf raised his curved sword high enough to catch the sunlight. The mare bared her teeth and kicked out with her hooves. Their warrior instincts had been awoken, though both knew they only stood a chance if they could run.

Yusuf shouted, “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”—until a bolt of pain shot up his forearm, and his sword fell out of his stunned hand.

There was shouting, and stamping hooves—a horse thundered behind him and the shaft of a second spear whacked against his back, nearly knocking him from the saddle. The mare bolted, then squealed and scrabbled to a stop as a tall roan charged up in front of her, his chest as broad as a wall to her lowered head.

Then the man astride him lifted his arm and shouted at the other horsemen, warning them back. The rumble of hoofbeats quieted as their circling slowed, but the horses all stared menacingly in at the mare, the whites of their eyes showing and their nostrils flaring red, looking as barbaric as the men on their backs.

The mare stood stiff-​legged, trembling and panting. Aftershocks of pain blasted up Yusuf’s right arm. Blunt trauma to the ulna. The classic injury of the loser. He prayed there was no fracture.

“Are you the Saracen doctor?” the man on the tall horse shouted. Good English—Yusuf was surprised but unimpressed.

“Fortunately I am!” Yusuf shouted back. “Because I need one!”

The man laughed. He was wearing the shaggy skin of a wolf, and Yusuf remembered stories his nephew Cedric had told him about one of the men who had accompanied Young Aed… but then he remembered that Young Aed’s wolfskin-​clad companion famously spoke no English.

“Sorry about that,” the man said. “We weren’t expecting you to be armed. Aren’t you supposed to heal people instead of hacking them to bitty pieces?”

He leered. Even his horse leered. They were both ugly—both barbarians, bred for each other. Both of them with their big, ugly heads, their convex noses, their shaggy coats. The man was wearing the skin of a wolf, and the horse’s chest and legs were striped with the black scars of teeth and claws.

“Why don’t you come closer,” Yusuf shouted, “and find out which?”

The man laughed again, but his circling companions wore dull-​wittedly direful expressions. They did not speak English, Yusuf guessed. Or had no sense of humor. Or both.

“I like you!” the wolfskin man crooned. “I think we could even be partners. Here’s how it’s going to work. You heal people, I hack them to bitty pieces. You seem a little weak at that, and it happens to be my specialty. Got that, Mahomet? I tell, you do. I lead, you follow. Everybody sticks to what he’s good at.”

Yusuf tentatively extended his arm, checking for dislocation at the elbow. The bone ached, but the joint was smooth, praise God.

“Are you kidnapping me?” he asked.

“Strictly speaking? Yes. But that’s good news for you, my friend. I need you alive, to treat one of my kin.” The man lifted his head and grinned widely as a skull. “So: have no fear!”

The other horsemen had slowed to a walk, but each balanced a spear across the back of his arm. Yusuf did not trust them to remember their ailing kinsman if he provoked them by, say, trying to flee.

“I am not afraid,” Yusuf said sourly. “It’s not the first time I’ve been kidnapped by barbarians.”

The man pouted and shifted in his creaking saddle. “Isn’t it then? How did I do?”

Yusuf sighed and rubbed his arm. It was his own fault. God’s will, but his own fault for wanting to spend more time with Irene. Would he ever see her again? Was he living his last days?

“O God,” he said as the horsemen moved in to take hold of the mare’s bridle, “O Most Merciful, I seek refuge in Your grace.”

It was over in minutes, but the valley was already deep in shadow.