Rafiq

The water-boy Zari cheated out of his caravan ticket — and could not shake

Rafiq is about fourteen, skinny as a reed, with a face like a question and a bonded water-boy’s leather ticket on a thong round his neck: a place on the caravan, water and a camel’s shade and a share of the pot, all the way east to the salt-cities. It is worth more than gold to a waystation child. Zari talked it off him in under a minute, with a dying grandmother she invented between one step and the next, and he lifted the thong over his own head and put it over hers with his own hands, and wished her grandmother well.

Then he walked. That is the whole of Rafiq. He did not curse her, or follow her to shame her, or ask for it back. He simply kept pace on his own two feet with the place he had given away — and when she finally returned the ticket, he took it, said thank you as though she had returned a dropped cup, put it back round his own neck, and went on walking beside her anyway, splitting his share of the water with her at every halt.

Why he matters

He is the fable’s conscience, and the fable is careful never to let him preach. He offers Zari no lectures and very few words; he is simply there, being decent within arm’s reach, while she is clever. The worst punishment in the book is not the desert — it is being watched, patiently, by somebody who is not going to help you cheat.

What he wants

Something of his own, east, that he has not yet told anybody about — least of all Zari, who has never once thought to ask.

Appears in

The Girl Who Sold the Wind novelette