Suddenly, Sheikh Zaid came up and glanced at the two angry boys. He had noticed Bandar’s constant abuse of the boy. Yet the little dhimmi always kept his temper. Even though he was only a child, he seemed to know that revenge was a dish best tasted cold. It can come to no good. I’d hate to be Bandar when the boy has grown to manhood, Zaid thought. He murmured the old saying: “May Allah make the end better than the beginning.”

“Did you hurt the she-camel, my brother’s son?” Zaid asked.

Bandar’s face flushed and he looked away, his bad eye faintly twitching. Once again, the little dhimmi had caused him shame. Sheikh Zaid raised his hand as though surrendering, something he often did when quoting a hadith of the Prophet.

“The Messenger of God said: ‘While a man was walking on a road, his thirst grew strong. He found a well and descended into it and drank and was leaving, when he saw a dog with its tongue hanging out, licking the ground from thirst. And the man said, “This dog’s thirst is like the thirst I had,” and he went into the well again, filled his shoe with water and gave the dog to drink. And Allah approved of his act and pardoned his sins. They said, “What, Messenger of God, shall we be rewarded for what we do for animals?” He replied, “Yes. There is a reward on every living creature,” Zaid said.

Later, Zaid took Nick aside. They walked through a field of stone shingles outside the camp. “It is good you swallow your anger. Bandar is your father’s brother’s son. But beware how you nourish your revenge. The scorpion, after whom you are named, has a deadly sting. It is said that a trapped scorpion may sting itself rather than be defeated,” Zaid said.

“I don’t understand,” Nick said.

“Sometimes a man is slain by his own weapon, by the very thing he uses to protect himself,” Zaid explained.

“Tell that to Bandar,” Nick said.

Every Bedu loved stories, especially the tales of adventure. Often at night, after the recitation from the Koran, they would sit around the glowing coals in Sheikh Zaid’s tent and listen to old Mohammed tell the famous tales of the rawi storytellers. He told of the fabulous Omani sailor, Sinbad, who sailed from Muscat to the ends of the earth and of Khalid ibn al-Walid, the Moslem general who faced the fifty thousand Byzantine troops of the Emperor Heraclius at the battle of the Yarmuk. The Byzantines swore to stand or die and to prove it, they chained themselves together in ranks thirty deep. Shouting “Allah akbar!” the Arabs attacked the emperor’s soldiers, who fell like ripe wheat under the flashing swords of the Beduin. Heraclius, his army chopped to pieces in the narrow wadi, fled to Constantinople. The Moslems went on to conquer the Holy Land.