_I will help the boy bury his father. If it does not endanger us._ This boy, too, was lost and lonely. As Daoud had been while training to be a Mameluke. As Nicetas had been. * * * * * It had been a chilly day, the day that Daoud and Nicetas became friends. Huge gray clouds billowed in the east, over the Sinai desert. In the lee of a cliff formed of giant blocks of red sandstone, a dozen small tents clustered. On a restless brown pony with a barrel-shaped body, Daoud waited in a line of nearly thirty julbans, Mamelukes in training, similarly mounted. Soon it would be his turn to ride past the wooden ring that a pair of slaves was swinging from side to side between the legs of a scaffold. In his hand Daoud grasped a rumh, a lightweight lance longer than a man's body, with a tip of sharpened bone. On a low rise of brown gravel, Mahmoud, the Circassian naqeeb in charge of their training troop, sat astride a sleek brown Arab half blood. He looked almost regal in his long scarlet kaftan and reddish-brown fur cap. His beard was full and gray, and a necklace of gold coins hung down to his waist. The boys wore round caps of undyed cotton cloth and striped robes, and they rode scrubby ponies. From atop a galloping horse, each boy was expected to hurl his rumh unerringly through the ring, whose diameter was two handspans. The ring was attached to three strong, slender ropes. One rope suspended it from the scaffold; the other two went out to either side, where the slaves held them. Pulling in turn on the ropes, the two slaves swung the ring from side to side. The boy just ahead of Daoud in line was a new member of the troop of young Mamelukes. His face was smooth and his skin pale, his hair and eyes very black. He turned to Daoud and said, "What if we hit one of those slaves by mistake?" Daoud had once seen a slave transfixed by a wild cast of the rumh. It hurt to remember his screams and thrashings. "Wound a slave and you will be beaten," he said. "Kill a slave, and you go without water for three days. In this desert that is a death sentence." The boy whistled and shrugged. "Hard punishments for us, but not much comfort to the slaves, I'd say." "It comforts them to know we have reason to be careful," Daoud answered. After a moment, the boy smiled hesitantly and said, "I am Nicetas. From Trebizond. Where are you from?" Daoud rubbed his pony's neck to settle it down. "Ascalon, not far from here. I am called Daoud." He saw the puzzlement in Nicetas's face and added, "My parents were Franks." "Oh," said Nicetas, and looked sympathetic, as if he had instantly grasped what had happened to Daoud's mother and father and how he came to be a Mameluke.