WE DID NOT CONTINUE on that day, so that we all might have some time to recover. We moved only just far enough from the bear to avoid any opportunistic scavengers that might take interest in so large a corpse. Saoud took some of the better meat, but we had no means to preserve the bulk of it, so he was forced to leave it on the forest floor. This rather galled all four of us: we had each known enough hunger to be reluctant to leave food behind to spoil.
The wound I sustained bled fiercely, forcing Tariq to scavenge for moss when Arwa’s spare veil became too soaked to be useful, but it seemed at first to be mostly superficial. The morning after, though, I had a terrible headache and any light at all only heightened the pain. When I tried to walk to the river to wash the blood out of my hair, I stumbled and could not keep my feet. Saoud took my arm and led me to the fire, where he was roasting bear meat for our morning meal.
“My father has told me of injuries like this,” he said, returning his attention to the spits. “They bleed a lot, and even though the mark they leave is small, they can rattle the inside of your head. We should not have let you sleep last night.”
“I don’t know if you could have stopped me,” I told him. “I slept longer than you did, and I’m still tired.”
“If you sleep, you may fall into a slumber from which you cannot be woken,” Saoud said. “I would rather poke you with a stick every ten minutes all night than risk that. I don’t want to have to carry you over the mountain pass.”
“Your concern is touching,” I said.
“Yashaa, I’m serious,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do to make you better except force you to rest.”
“You just said I couldn’t!” I protested. Rest was out of the question. We had too far to go.
“You can’t sleep,” he said. Arwa came to sit beside him, and Tariq took a bucket to the river because it was clear I was not going to make it on my own. “One of us will make sure you stay awake today, and tonight we will wake you every quarter mark. We’ll be able to travel again the day after that.”
“Saoud,” I began, but his face was his father’s: deadly serious and not to be gainsayed.
“Even that might not be enough,” he said. “That was not simply a bear, and you know it as much as I do. It fought with another’s strength, and it struck you directly on the head. It’s miracle enough that you are only mildly wounded.”
“Three days of travel lost, and that’s mild?” I wanted to sound angrier than I was, but the truth was that I was bone-weary and couldn’t muster the energy.
“For a bear and a demon, I think so,” Saoud said.
At the word “demon,” we all stilled. We had been brought up on stories of the wonderful creatures who had loved Kharuf-that-was, who had given gifts to its blasted princess, but sometimes we forgot what they had been made to do. We had come out of the desert, and so had they. Where we had brought sheep to pen up or herd on the heathered slopes, they had brought beings much darker, and the mountains were the prison they had used for the pen.
Arwa’s knife was in her hand, cutting the cooked meat into portions, and I saw that it was bronze, as most eating knives were. Saoud followed my gaze, and I knew he understood.
“Here,” he said, passing over his small iron dagger to her. “Keep this on your belt, even when you sleep.”
She nodded, and the knife disappeared under her long tunic. Saoud’s father had told her that unless she grew up to be a giant like him, her best defense was to convince others she was not a threat, and so she always concealed the weapons she carried under her clothes. That short a blade was a poor protection, but the iron in it would keep her from the worst.
“At least we’ll be able to use more of the bear,” Tariq said.
That was a comfort. Fresh meat was always a treat for us, regardless of how we came by it. I couldn’t help Saoud and Tariq dress the bear—too much walking, too much bending over, and Saoud said I wasn’t to carry anything heavier than a bowl of porridge—but I could wrap the cooked meat in the leaves that Arwa collected, so at least I wasn’t completely useless in my infirmity.