"Eblees possess you!" cried one, holding up a lantern. "Back into the palace! Will you wander home to Aleppo at this hour? The city gates are barred long ago." But Mary's wits could work fast just now.
"Good brother," said she, jauntily, "I have stayed over-late, I know. But if I fail to return, my master makes my back pay with cold stripes. And I have a friend on the watch at the gate who will open when I call."
"Mashallah! you speak a strange Arabic!" protested the man. "Your hands are small as those of the Star of the Greeks that they say our lord loves better than El Halebah itself."
"And you too, friend," was her reply, "speak a tongue that makes me half believe you Christian! And no man living would liken your hands to any save ditcher's spades!"
"By Mohammed's beard!" exclaimed the fellow, good-naturedly, "you have a sharp tongue in your little body. Well, go; and let the kind jinns fly with you. Though almost I think you are girl, and would cry to you 'a kiss!'"
"Never to such as you!" the retort. The gate closed behind her. All was dark. The last lamps on the great domes were out. Mary stole on in silence. There was not the slightest sound of bird, beast, or stirring leaf; just light enough to see where amid the trees the avenue led away from El Halebah to the outer road. Along that roadway—sixty miles due east, so she had reckoned—lay the camp of the Christians—and Richard Longsword! She was alone, and free! For a while neither weariness nor fear smote her. The ground could not fly fast enough under her feet. Again and again she wandered against thicket or trunk in the dimness of the trees, but the way led on, and she did not lose it. There was a strange gladness in her heart. "To Richard! to Richard!" O had she but eagle's wings to lend speed to her going! Suddenly the trees stopped. She was at the edge of the palace groves. To one side under the starlight she could just see the untraced masses of something—Aleppo; to the other side, the east, the stars told her, the hill and plain country stretched out scarce discernible. Mary turned her face toward the east, and saw the grove sink out of sight in the darkness. Then she walked yet faster.
It was noon, and the Syrian sun beat down pitilessly. The spring foliage and buds seemed wilting under the fiery eye. The little brooks on the hillside had already dried to a trickling thread. Everywhere the eye lit on reddish sand; red sand-hills and plain country with here and there a tree. The road had faded to the merest trail, where a few horses had trodden the thin weeds a day or two before. Mary rose from the stone by this roadway, where she had been sitting beneath a solitary sumac. She had eaten her bread, had lifted the water in her hands out of the tiny pool. She was weary—utterly weary. Had she been told she had traversed a thousand leagues since setting forth the night before, she could well have believed it. Yet reason bespoke that she had come less than a score of miles. She was footsore, hungry, frightened. The caw of the distant crow bore terror; the whir of the wind over the sunny plain half seemed the howl of desert wolves. Already her feet trudged on painfully, while her unaccustomed dress was dusty and torn. Each moment the utter folly of her flight grew upon her. She was alone, a helpless maid in the midst of that often harried country which lay between Antioch and Aleppo. Only once had she met human kind. During the morning two swarthy-skinned peasants, flogging an obstinate ass toward Aleppo, had stopped, and gazed curiously at this solitary youth in page's dress, but with the face of one of Sultan Redouan's harem beauties.
"Brother," one of the peasants had cried, "do you know that from Antioch to Aleppo scarce one house is inhabited? The Christians—may Allah bring them to perdition!—have sacked Dana and Sermada, and left only the dogs alive. All honest folk have fled nearer to Aleppo or southward."
"I thank you, kind sheik," came the answer in an Arabic that made the peasant marvel, "but I know my road. Yet are there any Christians now at Dana?"