Free The Exile Kiss by George Alec Effinger

something, and all six of them broke up with laughter. I just waited.
The leader looked into my face and frowned. He slapped his chest. "Muhammad Musallim bin Ali bin as-Sultan," he announced. As if I was supposed to recognize his name.
I pretended to be impressed. I slapped my own chest. "Marid al-Amin," I said, using the epithet I'd been given by the poor fellahin of the city. It meant "the Trustwor-thy."
Muhammad's eyes grew wide. He turned to his bud-dies again. "Al-Amin," he said in a reverent tone. Then he doubled over with laughter again.
A second Bayt Tahiti went over to Friedlander Bey and stood looking down at the old man. "Ash-shaykh," I said, letting the stinking nomads know that Papa was a man of importance. Muhammad flicked his eyes from me to Papa, then back again. He spoke some rapid words in their puzzling dialect, and the second man left Papa alone and went back to his camel.
Muhammad and I spent some time trying to get an-swers to our questions, but their rough Arabic slowed down our communication. After a while, though, we could understand each other well enough. It turned out that the Bayt Tahiti had received orders from their tribal shaykh to come find us. Muhammad didn't know how his shaykh knew about us in the first place, but we were where they expected us to be, and they'd seen and heard the military chopper from a long way off.
I watched as two of the filthy rogues pulled Fried-lander Bey roughly to his feet and led him to one of the camels. The camel's owner prodded the knees of the beast's forelegs with a stick, and made a sound like "khirr, khirr!" The camel roared its displeasure and didn't seem willing to kneel down. Papa said something to the Bayt Tahiti, who grabbed the animal's head rope and pulled it down. Papa placed a foot on the camel's neck, and it lifted him up where he could scramble into the saddle.
It was obvious that he'd done this before. I, on the other hand, had never ridden a camel in my life, and I didn't feel the need to start now. "I'll walk," I said.
"Please, young shaykh," said Muhammad, grinning through his sparse dentition, "Allah will think we are be-ing inhospitable."
I didn't think Allah had any misconceptions at all about the Bayt Tahiti. "I'll walk," I said again.
Muhammad shrugged and mounted his own camel. Everyone started off around the dune, with me and the Bedu who'd given his camel to Papa walking alongside.
"Come with us!" cried the leader of the party. "We have food, we have water! We take you to our camp!"
I had no doubt that they were heading back to their camp, but I had serious misgivings that Papa and I would arrive there alive.
The man walking beside me must have sensed my thoughts, because he turned to me and winked slowly. "Trust us," he said with a cunning expression. "You are safe now."
You bet, I thought. There was -nothing to do but go along with them. What would happen to us after we ar-rived at the main camp of the Bayt Tahiti was in the hands of God.
We traveled in a southerly direction for several hours. Finally, as I was reaching exhaustion—and about the time my canteen ran out of water—Muhammad called a halt. "We sleep here tonight," he said, indicating a narrow gap between two linked chains of sand dunes.
I was glad that the day's exertions were over; but as I sat beside Papa and watched the Bedu tend to their ani-mals, it occurred to me that it was strange they didn't push on to rejoin the rest of their tribe before dark. Their shaykh had sent them out to find us, and they arrived only a few hours after we'd been dumped out of the chopper. Surely, the main camp of the Bayt Tabiti couldn't have been far away.
They went about their chores, whispering to each other and pointing at us when they thought we weren't watching. I started toward them, offering to help unload their camels. "No, no," said Muhammad, blocking me off from the animals, "please, just rest! We can see to the packs ourselves." Something was wrong here. And Fried-lander