Free Reave the Just and Other Tales by Stephen R. Donaldson

to be punished because she gave the invitation to me rather than to another? Selmet should not have married that heartless trollop. Yet his folly is inflicted upon me.
    “Has there ever been a man as unfortunate as I am?”
    “Actually,” I replied, “it seems to me your family and friends are considerably more unfortunate.” I spoke thus to provoke him. “You’re merely accursed. They’re all dead.”
    Apparently, he had believed himself alone. He gaped foolishly about him, as though I might be visible. “Who are you?” he asked.
    “Think about it. You’ll figure it out.”
    Who I was did not yet interest him, however. “You are wrong,” he said. “Their deaths were painful, perhaps, but swift. And I will be blamed for it, although I am blameless. Also, they are free from misery. I must die slowly, alone and lost. I have neither food nor water. I have no camel. I know not where to go. I am entirely pitiable, and my sorrows are greater than any man has ever suffered.”
    “If you keep talking like that,” I said, “I’m going to get bored in a real hurry.”
    “You cannot fault me! It was not I who pronounced the curse. It was Selmet Abulbul, punishing me for his own errors.”
    “‘His own errors,’ indeed. Do you want me to believe he forced you into his wife’s bed against your will?”
    “She invited me!”
    “You accepted.”
    “It is not my fault!”
    “So you keep saying.”
    Pretending to ignore me, Fetim of the now-defunct al-Hetal wept for a while to prove how miserable he was. Then, instead of dying, he slept.
    The next day, he continued down the road. After all, he was young and handsome. Surely the world loved him too well to prolong his travail. And, in fact, this seemed to be true. Before midmorning, an entire caravan caught up with him. By that time, he was dirty and tired, and in no good humor; but the caravan master chanced to like handsome young men with a thick sweat on them, and he offered Fetim a ride to the city of Niswan.
    If Fetim had bothered to think about his circumstances, he might have believed that I had arranged this fortuitous offer for him. He would have been mistaken, however.
    He did not find the caravan master’s attentions especially pleasant, but he endured them. On the one hand, he preferred women personally. On the other, he could not be surprised by the fact that he had been found attractive. And he had no money—as well as no taste for work. How else was he to travel in comfort? It was only a journey of some few days to Niswan, he had been assured. Then the unpleasantness would be over, and he would have the whole city before him in which to make his fortune. The prospect excited him boyishly.
    Unfortunately, some few days were all the caravan master required to conceive intentions of his own concerning Fetim. His name, when he chose to use it, was Rashid, and a number of years had passed since he had last shared a bed with a young man whom he considered as succulent as Fetim. Being neither shortsighted nor weak-minded, he grew jealous well in advance of Fetim’s opportunities to merit such a reaction. First he began to plot ways to keep the young man with him when Niswan was reached. Then he began to consider how he might keep other men away.
    The outcome was that, after the caravan had wound its dusty way past the gates and the guards of Niswan deep into the city’s teeming bazaar, and the camels were at last stopped for unloading and profit, Rashid knocked Fetim on the head and sequestered him.
    At first, this was a highly successful arrangement from Rashid’s point of view—less so from Fetim’s. The caravan master now had at his whim a handsome young man made even more tasty by the occasional savors of truculent resistance and abject beggary. Nevertheless, Fetim’s sequestration was not long. The multitudes who thronged the bazaar naturally included many men and women of dubious virtue, individuals who reflexively coveted anything which anyone