Chapter 24
The sleep of the dead, Lubna thought, raising her head from the hard ground. Sunrise gilded the graves of al-Bayyazin. If only.
Lying on her patch of dust by Ali’s grave, she wasn’t sure if she had slept at all. She was only aware of the cold in her marrow and the hunger that tugged and gnawed at her gut.
Would they have a search party out for her, the runaway slave? She’d kept away from the immediate area of the caves. Fear had told her they might come and look for her there. Why not here, too, little more than a furlong away? Yet something else told her that this spot, if anywhere, was a kind of asylum, a hallowed limbo between sleep and waking, life and death.
The trouble was, the cup of water that she’d begged from the gravediggers an hour or two before wouldn’t keep her
