"Mercedes Lackey - Jihad" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

They would not, of course. He no longer trusted himself. His nerve was broken,
his will, his soul broken across that guardroom bench. There was nothing left
but despair. He literally had nothing left to live for; the Revolt had become
his life, and without it, he had no will to live. The best thing he could do
for the Revolt would be to die. Perhaps Feisal would take it upon himself to
avenge his strange English friend, Aurens; certainly Auda, that robber, would
use Aurens' death as an excuse to further raid the Turks. And Ali, Ali ibn el
Hussein; he would surely exact revenge. But could they hold the Revolt
together?

Inshallah. As God wills it. Here, in his extremity, he had at last come to the
fatalism of the Moslem. It was no longer his concern. Life was no longer his
concern. Only death, and the best way to meet it, without further torment, to
drown his shame in its dark waters where no one would guess what those waters
hid.

This would not be the place to die. Not here, where his beaten and brutalized
body would draw attentionтАФwhere his anxious followers might even come upon it
and guess the foulness into which he had fallen. Let him crawl away somewhere;
let him disappear into the waste and die where he would not be found, and let
his death become a mystery to be wondered at.

Then he would be a martyr, if the Revolt could have such a thing. It might
even be thought that he vanished, like one of the old prophets, into the
desert, to return at some vague future date. His death would become a clean
and shining thing. They would remember him as the confident leader, not the
battered, bloody rag of humanity he was now.

He lay in a sick stupor, his head and body aching and growing slowly numb with
cold. Finally a raging thirst brought him to lifeтАФand spurred him to rise.

He struggled to his feet, and rocked in place, moaning, his shaking hands
gathering his torn clothing about him. He might have thought that this was a
nightmare, save for the newly-wakened pain. Somewhere he heard someone
laughing, and the sound shocked him like cold water. Deraa felt inhuman with
vice and cruelty; he could not die here.

The desert. The desert was clean. The desert would purge him, as it had so
many times before.

He stopped at a trough by the wells; scooped a little water into his hands and
rubbed it over his face, then drank. He looked up at the stars, which would
not notice if there was one half-Arab Englishman less on the earth, and set
off, one stumbling step at a time, for the clean waste beyond this vile pit of
humanity. He walked for a long time, he thought. The sounds of humanity faded,
replaced by the howling of dogs or jackals, off in the middle distance. Tears
of pain blurred his sight; he hoped he could find some hole to hide himself
away before dawn, a grave that he might fall into, and falling, fall out of
life.