Free The Tenth Saint by D. J. Niko

this place.
    It had. What had started as impatience and intolerance of a culture utterly unknown to him had evolved into a sort of compassion. The nomads let him be but never treated him as an outsider. He was always welcome to participate, or not, and tonight was no different.
    He felt a hand on his shoulder.
    Hairan gestured toward the fire circle as he spoke.
    Gabriel didn’t have to speak the language to understand the old man wanted him to join the festivities. He was reluctant. “Thank you,” he said, waving off the invitation. “I don’t think I am up to it. Perhaps another night.”
    Hairan nodded, but the children had no use for such courtesies. Encouraged by the invitation of the chief, they rose from the campfire and gathered round the stranger. Giggling, they examined his long, pale fingers, his ashen blond hair, knotted and wiry from dryness and neglect, the unruly reddish beard covering his face from the cheekbones down, hiding his milky skin and giving him the gruff cast of an old man. The boys kneeled around Gabriel and lifted up his robes to see what unusual features lurked beneath, whispering their curiosity to one another. One took Gabriel’s hand and pulled him toward the group. The other youngsters joined in, expressing their enthusiasm with laughter, until he had no choice but to accept the hospitality of his hosts.
    The children led Gabriel near the young men of the tribe, and he took his place among them, awkwardly nodding his greetings. He wrapped his woolen blanket around his body to ward off the chill and tried to get lost in the background. It was impossible. Everyone was aware of his presence. He knew he was as unfamiliar to these people as they were to him. They all stared, not in a threatening manner but in study, as if prolonged exposure to the subject would help them understand his nature.
    Gabriel avoided meeting their eyes, staring instead at the belly of the fire. Perhaps the Bedouins did not feel threatened by him, but he wasn’t sure he felt the same of them.
    How had he ended up amongst these people? He struggled to recall something about his life before, but he could not. Memory was a charlatan, cheating him of something so basic as his identity. It was as if his life had begun on the night he’d woken, tenuously clinging to life, in Hairan’s tent. All that came before was a mystery whose veil had yet to be lifted.
    He stared at the fire and tried to concentrate. What came to mind was the same jumble of nonsense: faces with no names, unfamiliar places, images ebbing and flowing like the tide of his dreams.
    The shrill voice of a woman singing a cappella interrupted his racing thoughts. She carried a tune admirably, her voice rising and falling and reverberating in her throat, floating dreamily in the space between reality and illusion. Everyone was still, transfixed by the chanteuse, as if nothing mattered but her song.
    Gabriel was surprised by the reverence for beauty displayed by the people he had dismissed as philistines. A wave of shame washed over him.
    The songbird’s anthem was the prelude for an entire evening of dance and song. The musicians played with a fervor usually reserved for big events, like the passage to spring or a birth, human or animal. The instruments wailed under the continuous pounding, plucking, and blowing.
    The women kneeled before the men and poured wine from goatskin bladders into small clay cups. Taneva, the eldest of the womenfolk, bowed before Gabriel and poured wine into his cup. The old woman looked at him with the tender eyes of a mother and smiled broadly, revealing the four teeth that clung like stalactites to her purple gums.
    Gabriel had no idea who she was, nor that it was she who had excavated him from the eternal sands. He drank. The liquid tasted like vinegar, sour and sharp, but he was parched, so he gulped. He was oblivious to the fact that he was being watched until the young men around him whooped their approval as he upended