“Why?”

Abdul shrugged. “Any number of reasons,” he said. “Tribal animosity. Vengeance for a real or imagined affront. A yen for a particular woman, or just some mess-maker with a bug up his ass. Although,” he went on, “you might have sparked the idea when you told my father—and we all heard you—‘Look at her,’ you said, ‘a gift a king would envy’—something like that.”

“I was talking about Daphne.”

“Daphne, Valerie, it makes no difference. My guess is, some chief figured if my father got one of them, he should have the other. A matter of power or prestige or Christ,” Abdul said. “What difference does it make when the important thing is to get to her before he does.”

“What happens if we don’t?”

“Well,” Abdul said carefully, “in the North they have certain practices before a chief takes a captive bride. Practices performed on her.”

“What?”

“Nothing unheard of around here, but something of a shock to those who are unfamiliar or unprepared for them.”

“What?”

“Take it easy, kid,” Grady said.

“What, goddamit!”

“Well,” Abdul said in a tight voice, “genital mutilation. What they do, they sew up the lips…” His handsome face reworked itself into a painful frown. He swallowed audibly. “…the lips of the vagina. Then a week later they snip the stitches and cut off the clitoris and take her into the forest, where she is, ah… covered by the warriors who captured her. And then she is presented to the chief. He shears her hair, braids it into a whip, and beats her…”

“That’s enough!” Grady said.

“Well,” Abdul said, “he wanted to know. And it can all be averted if we get there fast enough.” Impelled by his own words he started to run.

It took no more than a couple of minutes, interminable as they seemed, to enlist Qazwini and the rat-catcher. The four of us headed north into the desert, still a pale red flare in the dying sun. Yussuf carried a scimitar and my powerful flashlight. The General toted a horse pistol on each hip. For ballast fore and aft were a brace of knives. I had suggested that he conscript his entire constabulary to the cause, but Abdul rejected the idea. “The fewer the men, the faster we move,” he said, pumping shells into a rifle I didn’t know he owned. I also didn’t know that Grady carried a Navy .38 until the moment he slipped it from the waistband under his shirt and for some reason pressed it on me.