on such a subject?" he said. "They'll think I'm saying that in order to try to keep Eiadh for myself. I happen to know that others have already looked with longing, expecting to court her when we've had our few years of marriage."
"So you must persuade them to accept the reasons for lifelong monogamous marriage - so they'll understand that it isn't a self-serving plan on your part."
"Persuade them?" Elemak hooted once, a single bitter laugh. "I doubt I could persuade Eiadh."
She could see that he regretted at once having said that last remark. It confessed too much. "Perhaps then persuasion isn't the term I want. They must be helped to understand that this is a law we must obey in order to keep this family from coming apart in an emotional and physical bloodbath, as surely as we must keep quiet during each traveling day."
Elemak sat up and leaned toward her, his eyes alight with - what, anger? Fear? Hurt? Is there something more to this than I understand? Rasa wondered.
"Lady Rasa," said Elemak, "is this law you want important enough to kill for?"
"Kill? Killing is the very thing that I most fear. It's what we must avoid. "
"This is the desert, and when we reach Father's encampment it will still be the desert, and in the desert there is only one punishment for crime of any kind. Death."
"Don't be absurd," said Rasa.
"Whether you cut off his head or abandon him in the desert, it's all the same - out here exile is death."
"But I wouldn't dream of having a penalty so severe as that."
"Think about it, Lady Rasa. Where would we imprison somebody as we journey day to day? Who could spare the time to keep someone under guard? There's always flogging, of course, but then we would have to deal with an injured person and we couldn't travel safely anymore."
"What about withdrawing a privilege? Taking something away? Like a fine, the way they did it in Basilica."
"What do you take away, Lady Rasa? What privileges do any of us have? If we take away something the lawbreaker really needs - his shoes? his camel? - when we injure him anyway, and have to travel slower and put the whole group at risk. And if it isn't something he needs, but merely treasures, then you fill him with resentment and you have one more person you have to deal with but can't trust. No, Lady Rasa, if shame isn't strong enough to keep a man from breaking a law, then the only punishment that means anything is death. The lawbreaker will never break the law again, and everybody else knows you're serious. And any punishment short of death has the opposite result - the lawbreaker will simply do it again, and no one else will respect the law. That's why I say, before you decide that this should be the law during our travels, perhaps you ought to consider, is it worth killing for?"
"But no one will believe you'd kill anyway, would they?" "You think not?" said Elemak. "I can tell you from experience that the hardest thing about punishing a man on a journey like that is telling his widow and his orphaned children why you didn't bring him home."
"Oh, Elemak, I never dreamed..."
"No one does. But the men of the desert know. And when you abandon a man instead of killing him outright, you don't give him any chance, either - no camel, no horse, not even any water. In fact, you tie him up so he can't even move, so the animals will get him quickly - because if he lives long enough, bandits might find him, and then he'll die far more cruelly, and in the process of dying he'll tell the bandits where you are, and how many you are, and how many you leave on watch, and where all your valuables are stored. He'll tell other things, too - the pet name he calls his woman, the nicknames of the guards, so the bandits'll know what to say in the darkness to confuse your party, to put them off their guard. He'll tell them - " "Stop it!" cried Rasa. "You're doing this on purpose." "You think that life in the desert is a matter of heat and cold, of camels and tents, of voiding your bowel in the sand and sleeping on rugs instead of on a bed. But I tell you that what Father and you and Nafai, bless