Excerpt:

Charlemagne and Mekhmet were riding south across the desert.  With them were an escort of fifty cavalry and a baggage train of twenty camels, and as Sharley turned in his saddle to look back over the twin lines of the column he felt a swelling pride.  To his inexperienced eyes the glittering cavalcade and stately pacing camels looked like an army.  But best of all, actually riding away from the city and its intrigues had brought with it an invigorating sense of freedom.  With every mile they put between themselves and the complicated politics and plottings of the Sultan’s court, both princes felt like a weight was being lifted from their shoulders.  Soon they were chatting and giggling like a couple of schoolboys with no more worries than how much homework they had to hand in the next day.
            Suleiman, completely adapted to the heat, trotted along in the blazing light as easily as if he had been strolling through an oasis, and beside him, Mekhmet’s beautiful gray arched its neck proudly.  Close behind them a cohort of cavalry that bore the name of the Crown Prince gleamed and glittered in the sun.  These were the elite of the elite, the bodyguard of the heir to the throne.  Riding the finest horses of the Desert Kingdom, they wore chain-mail hauberks that flowed over each trooper’s body like the finest silk, and highly polished conical helmets not unlike the headgear of the northern housecarls but topped by a vicious spike that rose six inches or so from the crown.  In the fiercest heat of the day, these soldiers also wore loose surcoats of fine white linen over their armor, to prevent the steel of their panoplies from becoming too hot.  And when the sun grew really fierce, they’d even remove their helmets and cover their heads with a deep hood.