Chapter Text
They had let down their guard for but a moment and now they were prisoners. Yusuf tested the rope that bound his hands behind his back—tight, but not too tight. He could work with that. Nicolò had taken the brunt of the bandits’ anger, and his face was bloody. It had been bloody and swollen, but Yusuf, who knew what to look for, could tell that the swelling was gone. Nicolò was focused on assessing their situation, peering around the shack they had been thrown into. It was late in the winter afternoon, and the sun was already low in the sky.
Six months ago, Yusuf reflected, Nicolò had taken the brunt of his own anger when they met in combat, Yusuf defending Al-Quds against Nicolò and thousands of other Franks. Well, Franks, Normans, Genovese like Nicolò, Flemings, and even some Englishmen. At the time he had called them all Franks, not caring what they called themselves, and cursed them.
And now he and Nicolò were friends. At first they had traveled together out of necessity, but as Yusuf observed Nicolò’s painful transformation into one who saw the humanity of those he had been taught to despise, he found himself thinking that Nicolò was a good companion regardless of the reason they had been thrown together. Was it the hand of Allah? Yusuf wasn’t sure. Nicolò seemed to think it was their destiny, pointing to the strange dreams of two warrior women that they shared. However, since most of their shared language was concrete, not abstract, they hadn’t really been able to discuss the meaning of their situation.
When the bandits had attacked them earlier that day, Yusuf and Nicolò had been perhaps twenty miles from Isfahan, heading east, which they believed was the general direction of the women in their dreams. Yusuf suspected that the bandits were planning to sell them as slaves. They would need to escape before the bandits brought them to a place with buyers—and iron shackles.
“Nicolò, what do you see?” Yusuf asked in a low voice. Their communication in Sabir had improved rapidly over the past several months, and now, as long as Yusuf didn’t talk too fast, Nicolò could mostly understand him and reply.
Nicolò tilted his head toward the top of the shack. “What is the name of this thing? It is not strong.”
“Roof,” said Yusuf. “The roof is not strong. The roof is weak. We can break it?”
“If we can break rope, we can break weak roof.” He mimed wiggling out of the rope and through the ceiling. “Then we break bandits.” Nicolò smiled wolfishly.
As they worked on the ropes, they could hear the bandits eating and settling down for the night. They did not seem to be the sort of bandits who drank themselves into a stupor, unfortunately, unless it was a very quiet sort of drinking.
No food was forthcoming, but that just meant uninterrupted time for straining and scraping their way out of the ropes. After a while, Nicolò found a rock embedded in the floor of the shack which, while it wasn’t exactly sharp, was hard enough to help wear through the rope fibers.
“Bandits, how many?” Nicolò asked.
“Ten, I think.”
“I kill seven. Three for you.”
Yusuf frowned dramatically, even though Nicolò couldn’t see him in the dark. “No, five each. We share bandits, like food.”
“I do not eat bandits, Yusuf.”
“Five each. Do not be greedy.”
“Greedy, what is greedy?”
“Greedy is wanting too much. Taking too much, no sharing.”
“Ah, like avaritia or gula.”
“Hmm,” said Yusuf. He didn’t know more than a few words of Latin.
“I will not be greedy,” Nicolò said. “We will share the bandits.”
By the time they freed themselves, the bandits had been quiet for a couple of hours. Nicolò knelt and Yusuf, who was lighter, climbed onto his shoulders. He was just able to reach the rushes that covered the roof and exploit the weak spot to pull himself through.
Yusuf perched on the roof, waiting to see if any bandits would notice. None of them did. Nine of them lay sprawled in bedrolls. There was one leaning against a rock with a short sword on his knees who seemed to have been put on watch, but he too was asleep.
Yusuf jumped to the sand as lightly as he could. Still no movement from the bandits. He made his way to the door of the shack and unlocked it, freeing Nicolò. He pointed to the man with the sword and then to himself. Nicolò nodded, then pointed to the closest sleeper, whose own blade was close at hand. They charged.