Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  She faced forward and nudged North Wind into a walk. “Your father promised that I would be freed in his will.”

  “In his will,” Farhad said, his smile fading. “Not in mine. And when I am sheik of Talikan, my will rules.”

  She gave him a considering look, carefully maintaining her own mask of polite civility. He was a young man, strong, not ill-favored and, inescapably, would one day in the lamentably near future be the most powerful man in Talikan. It would be unwise to offend him too soon, and if it came to that—here she swallowed and set her teeth—she could tolerate his attentions long enough to find a way, both to exact revenge for his treacherous attack on Jaufre and to find a way out of this silken trap.

  Because if she didn’t, Johanna would never see the outside of the harem again. The mere thought of that great wooden door closing between her and the rest of the world for the last time made her throat close up. For a moment she couldn’t breathe.

  Farhad saw her distress and mistook the reason. “Come, Nazirah,” he said in a soothing voice, “surely the prospect isn’t so bad as that. You—”

  She turned North Wind and kicked him into a canter. Her guards scrambled to get out of the way and for the first time that morning she saw their faces. One of them was new.

  But not, she realized, first with a shock and then with a thrill of mounting excitement, new to her.

  The new guard was Firas.

  2

  Talikan, Spring, 1323

  JOHANNA SPENT AS LONG as she could in caring for North Wind after her ride, feeding him, watering him, grooming his coat, polishing his hooves, partly because his company was so much more acceptable than that of anyone behind the harem doors, and partly in hopes that the sheik’s son would be called away before she finished. In this she was successful, emerging at last to find Farhad gone and the two guards waiting with varying degrees of patience to escort her back to the harem.

  “Oh,” she said, looking at Firas as if she was seeing him for the first time. “Where is Mahmoud?” she said to Tarik.

  He addressed the area above and behind her left shoulder. In the entire city of Talikan it was by now well known that she did not share the sheik’s bed, but one never knew what might happen in the future. She resided in the sheik’s harem and she was subject to his will. At any moment the fancy could take him to sample this exotic, self-willed creature. She could end as his favorite, a wife, even. Thus no sensible man of the city of Talikan would dare trespass by addressing her with less than the utmost respect, but that didn’t mean that Tarik, a deeply religious man, had to look at her face as she flaunted it with no veil before men not of her family.

  Besides, she was the only person who could handle that very afreet of a horse, and Tarik had won a month’s salary on North Wind’s last race. He answered her with civility, familiar to a demon though she might be. “Alas, Mahmoud is dead, lady. Inshallah.”

  “Dead?” Johanna was all polite incredulity. “What happened to him?”

  A shoulder raised and fell. “He fell from his horse and broke his neck, lady.”

  “Now, how did he come to do that?” Johanna said, marveling. “I would have thought Mahmoud much too good a rider to be so careless as to fall from his own horse.”

  “Yes, lady, and so would we all.” A note of condemnation crept into Tarik’s voice. “Nevertheless, what is one to think when his horse returns riderless and a search discovers Mahmoud’s lifeless body at the bottom of a cliff?”

  “What else, indeed,” Johanna said gravely, and turned to Firas. “And this is?”

  “Firas, lady.”

  She nodded at him, schooling her features to courteous indifference while her heart beat so loudly it roared in her ears. “Well met, Firas,” she said, in a voice, no matter how hard she tried to control it, not quite her own. “Let us hope you manage to stay on your horse.”

  “Let us hope so indeed, lady,” Firas said, his face bland.

  Bland, but for the merest hint of a wink.

  A wave of relief and joy swept over her, so intense that her vision grayed a little. When it cleared she found his dark eyes still steady on hers, compelling her to composure. She could betray by neither word not deed that they were known to each other. It would be worth his life, and possibly even her own.

  Jaufre lived.

  He lived.

  It wasn’t safe to say any more in Tarik’s hearing, who already appeared quizzical at a courtesy she had never displayed to her other guards, but she could wait. She had absolutely no doubt Firas would find a way to speak to her again. She was even, now that her heartbeat had steadied, a little curious to see how he’d manage it. “Tarik, I am done here for the day,” she said, regaining her composure, with an effort she hoped she had masked. “I return to the harem by way of the dyers cottage.” She had not and she would never call the harem home.

  “Lady—”

  Johanna turned her back on the protest Tarik felt obliged to make every time she deviated from a direct path back to the harem and strode off, letting them catch up to her or no, as they wished. Follow they did, Tarik’s whine degenerating into a grumble. Firas said nothing at all.

  The dyers’ shed was one of a row of artisans’ cottages built against the thick, continuous wall two stories high that formed first a barrier around the palace, which was then enclosed by the city itself and by the city wall, twice as thick and twice as high. These craftsmen, each deemed the best in the city at their individual trade, had been granted their places inside the royal enclosure by royal warrant. In return they received a rent-free workshop and handsome prices for their work wherever they sold it, although the sheik had first right of refusal on anything they made. There was a saddler, a weaver, a cabinetmaker, a glassblower, a goldsmith, a jeweler, and more. A tanner was off by himself in a location predetermined not to waft any noxious fumes in the direction of the royal nostrils.

  The dyer’s shop was between the weaver and the herbalist. Johanna knocked once, and went in. “Halim, well met the day.”

  “Salaam, Lady Nazirah!” Halim, sleeves rolled back and red to the wrists with the blood of cochineal bugs, bowed as best he could. “It is a joy to see you well and flourishing. And that great white monster you persist in riding at peril of your very life and limb?”

  Johanna, once more fully in command of herself, patted herself down ostentatiously, extracting Hayat’s scrap of paper from her sash as she did so. The guards remained outside, but she was never careless on the errands she ran for Hayat. “I survive, as you see, Halim, and North Wind, too, is in fine health. You may bet freely and with confidence on his next race.”

  “Hah!” Halim said, grinning. “And that I will do, my lady.” If Halim, like Tarik, thought it a scandal and an abomination for a woman to ride a horse at the public races—and that a stallion, no less!—he did not say so. Of course Tarik never said so, either, or not outright, nor did anyone else. The word of the sheik was law. Questioning that law had consequences, usually involving a whip, or even the edge of a sword.

  The dyer’s shop was sturdily built, and Halim was prosperous enough that his floor was tiled, but not so prosperous as to have his own fountain. Instead, a large urn glazed a deep blue was sunk into the floor up to the lip and filled daily by a small boy who came round with a donkey laden with sacks of water. The walls of the shop were white, with small, rectangular windows cut near the ceiling so as to let in the light and let out the heat. In spite of the messiness inherent in the craft of dyeing, it was scrupulously neat, with hanks of wool in various stages of drying looped over wooden trees as tall as Halim that surrounded vats of various sizes. The grate of a large brazier glowed with live coals beneath a large pot bubbling not quite over with a rich purple liquid.

  It was a scene that looked both industrious and efficient, and indeed Halim was both. He was also a skilled smuggler.

  “A lovely color, Halim,” she said of the cochineal.

  “Is it not, lady, is it not, indeed.” Halim sl
id the bowl across the table for her to examine more closely.

  Johanna tipped the bowl to admire the swirl of scarlet liquid, at the same time slipping the scrap of paper beneath it.

  Halim slid the bowl back to his side of the table, hand beneath the table to catch the paper when it fell from the edge. “Is it the cochineal the lady Hayat is in need of this day?”

  “It is not, Halim,” Johanna said. “She hopes you have indigo in stock, a small amount only.”

  Halim made a wry face. “The lady Hayat will soon be setting up her own dyers’ shed in competition with me.”

  “I think Lateef the weaver has more to fear,” Johanna said with a smile.

  They continued to pitch their voices to be heard beyond the cottage’s walls, demonstrating to anyone within listening distance that there was nothing untoward or conspiratorial going on therein. “Let me see,” Halim said, shifting boxes and jars and bags from the vast array on display. “Indigo, indigo, yes, I have some here.” The lid of a cedarwood box was raised to display its contents, small square cakes wrapped in bright scraps of fabric and tied with dyed jute in elaborately decorative knots. Halim knew a thing or two about presentation and marketing.

  “Excellent,” Johanna said. “Could you spare two, most worthy Halim?”

  “I believe I can,” Halim said, and conjured a small silk bag with a thick bottom, into which he ceremoniously placed two cakes of the indigo. “Did you know, lady, that the flowers of the indigo plant are pink in color?”

  Johanna, who had seen entire fields of indigo in bloom in Cipangu, widened her eyes. “No? Pink? Really? How curious, Halim, that a plant should camouflage its true nature in such a way.”

  “As you say, lady.” Halim produced a length of jute and tied the mouth of the little sack with an even more elaborate bow. “I have often wondered how the first dyer discovered indigo’s secret.”

  “Probably by accident,” Johanna said. “A cut branch leaking sap on the leg of someone’s trouser. Which then turns blue.”

  “But that would require the owner of the trousers to notice.” Halim presented the bag to her with a flourish.

  She accepted it, and felt the shape of the third item through the bottom of the bag. She beamed at him. “Thank you, Halim. Salaam.”

  “Salaam, Lady Nazirah.”

  There was no opportunity to speak further with Firas on the journey from the dyer’s shop to the harem, and Kadar was of course waiting for her at the door. “Until tomorrow morning, Tarik, Firas,” Johanna said to Tarik, meeting Firas’ eye with a very fleeting glance.

  “Lady.”

  “Lady.”

  The door closed on their bows.

  “Kadar,” Johanna said with a pleasant smile.

  No smile of any kind was returned to her, not that she had expected one. “You are late, lady.”

  “Am I?” She held out the little silk bag with a hand she was pleased to note was rock steady. “Would you care to examine the indigo Halim the dyer sends to the lady Hayat?”

  He gave the bag a perfunctory shake and dropped it back into her palm. “We would be pleased to see you in proper clothing as soon as possible, lady.”

  She smiled again without answering and strode down the tiled hallway, eschewing the seductive, hip-rolling stroll of the harem inmate for the vigorous, ground-eating stride of someone accustomed to wide open spaces, one with no limits placed on her activities. It was a rebuke of him and of the constraints of his realm, and they both knew it. Johanna reveled in it. Kadar, she was sure, marked it down in the column of her sins. By now, it had to be a very long column.

  She went to her room and changed into the hated harem clothing, the briefest of sleeveless vests and diaphanous trousers gathered at waist and ankle with, of all things, tiny bells. They tinkled as she walked. The sound was meant to be seductive, but all it meant to her was an easy alert to her location. Her feet might as well be bound.

  At least she got to remove the bells once a day.

  The veil she refused to put on. Instead she brushed her hair and reworked it into its single braid. She folded her riding clothes away, her hand involuntarily smoothing over the lumps in the hems of her trousers. She washed her own clothes herself, by her own hand, ignoring the scandalized looks of the other harem ladies and the reproving admonishments of the chief eunuch, saying only that they were made of a special kind of silk from her home and required a certain kind of care. She had no idea how long she would be able to continue to get away with such specious excuses.

  She thought of Firas. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to for very much longer.

  It was quiet and still in her room, the only movement the slight breeze stirring at her window, the only smell a slight scent of roses, the only sounds the calls of doves. She stood very still in the luxury of this brief moment of private peace to remember that tiniest of winks that Firas had given her.

  She had not grieved for Jaufre. She had refused to do so. If she had grieved him, then he would have been dead, and lost to her forever. She would not admit such a thing to be possible, and so it wasn’t. Jaufre was alive, had been alive all these months, even though the sheik’s son had stabbed him most treacherously in the back and left him laying in the middle of the trail, there to bleed to death.

  Stay with him! she had shouted at Shasha, who was preparing to follow Johanna as the sheik’s men crowded around North Wind, forcing him down the trail. In the ensuing mayhem created by one determined stallion, Johanna had managed to drop her belt and her pack. Stay with him! Heal him! Make him live! Promise me!

  And Shasha, eyes stormy with rebellion, had cried out, He will live. I give you my word.

  He was alive.

  Jaufre was alive. The wink could mean only that.

  For a moment, for one precious moment stolen from the unrelentingly public life of the harem, she let her proud head fall, let the hot tears fill her eyes, let her shoulder shake with silent sobs. All these horrible months, frozen in a state of unknowing despair, suffering the loss of her freedom and the absence and possibly the death of her family of friends, while at the same time aware of the absolute necessity of maintaining a facade of calm control in a place as competitive and potentially homicidal as a harem, she had allowed herself neither hope nor despair, only certainty, that Jaufre and Shasha were alive and on their way to Gaza. It had always been the plan, that if they became separated, to travel to Gaza and wait there for the others. It was all she had had to cling to.

  Just this once, she let the tears fall. Just this once, she let herself realize how frightened she had been.

  The tears stopped. She wiped her eyes carefully, raised her chin, and squared her shoulders.

  There was no perhaps about it. Firas was here, which meant that Johanna was not long for the harem. She would admit no other possibility for that, either.

  “Nazirah! Nazirah, you stand there daydreaming while the greatest weaving of my whole entire life sits waiting!”

  She looked around and saw Hayat standing in her doorway, a hand holding the gauzy curtains to one side. The other woman’s face changed when she saw Johanna’s expression. “What is it? What’s wrong?” She took a quick step forward and dropped her voice to a breath of sound. “Did Kadar—”

  Johanna summoned a smile and shook her head. “No,” she said, “no, nothing like that. I was missing—I was missing my family, that is all.”

  Hayat pounced on her hands and towed Johanna out of her room and down the hallway to her own room, larger than Johanna’s and much more crowded with belongings. “You spend too much time on your own, Nazirah,” she said. “It leads to brooding, which is unpleasant, unhealthy, and unattractive. Not this afternoon, however. This afternoon you will come and admire me as I weave.”

  “I’m not to admire the weaving?”

  Hayat laughed, and the other woman in the room looked up with an annoyed expression, which cleared when she saw who it was. She dipped a pen into ink and bent back over the sheet of vellum. The la
dy Alma was always in the throes of another poem. Some of them were quite good, in Johanna’s opinion, but she regretted the lady Alma’s need to read them out loud to whatever audience was present at the time. Although she could only approve of anyone in the harem who took up an activity other than gossip and quarreling while waiting to be called upon to service their lord and master.

  A corner of the room was dominated by a standing loom holding a half-finished tapestry three ells in width and at least that much in length. To one side of it, wooden stands were loaded with hanks of fine spun wools dyed in yellows and browns. A basin stood ready, filled with water, and Johanna handed over the little bag. Hayat opened it and took out one of the squares of dye and dropped it into the basin. She lit the brazier beneath and gave the dye an admonitory stir with a large wooden paddle. “There,” she said, “we will leave that to be getting on with itself.” She knotted the mouth of the bag again and tucked it into her belt, giving it to what all outward attention was an absent-minded pat. She smiled at Johanna and said teasingly, “Will you sit at my loom, Nazirah?”

  It was the custom of the harem to rename all of its inmates at the time of their incarceration (Johanna never thought of it any other way). The sheik himself had bestowed the name on her, which she later learned mean “like,” or “equal” and which she at first took as a joke at her expense. Later she realized he was sending a subtle signal to the other inmates and most especially to Kadar, that because she was not called to the sheik’s bed didn’t mean she was not entitled to the same rights and privileges as the rest of the harem. Such rights and privileges as they were. When the anger had subsided, and whenever Farhad had been especially caressing on their morning rides, she wondered if his father knew of his son’s interest in his “guest.” If he did, it was possible that he had done his best, within the strictures of Persian society, to protect Johanna from that interest.

  Although she resisted ascribing anything like benevolence to her kidnapper.

  “I will not, Hayat,” she said, as she had said every day since Hayat had first invited her to. Weaving was barely a step above embroidery, and Johanna had stringent opinions on learning anything to do with a needle and thread over and above the call of mending ripped out seams or darning tears.