Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  Hayat laughed, a joyous sound very like bells ringing. Hayat meant “life,” which was certainly appropriate, because Hayat was bursting with it, sometimes so much so that Johanna thought privately she would one day break right through the imprisoning walls from sheer exuberance.

  Alma snorted, scraping busily at her vellum with a penknife. Alma meant “learned,” given probably because of her ability to read and write. So far as Johanna had been able to discover, Alma was the only other member of the harem besides herself and Hayat who could.

  “If the lady Alma is willing,” Johanna said, “I would like to continue my writing lessons.”

  Alma looked up and smiled, brushing a strand of hair back from her face and leaving a smear of ink behind. “Of course, Nazirah,” she said. “Especially as this pestilential poem has gotten hopelessly stuck.”

  Johanna did not ask how because Alma would have told her, at length. She curled up on a nearby cushion instead and Alma provided her with a sheet of parchment, almost transparent from being scraped and reused so many times. Spoken languages came easily to her, written ones less so, but Persian was infinitely less complicated than Mandarin and every bit as beautiful in written form. Every sentence looked like it should be framed and hung on a wall.

  Today, Alma had chosen a poem by her favorite poet for Johanna to translate, working from a Uighur translation, which language Johanna had learned young and well from Deshi the Scout. “That way,” Alma explained, “you can compare your translation to the poem as it was originally written in Persian.”

  Johanna surfaced hours later, hand cramped, shoulders stiff with the effort of concentration, to the sound of a distant bell, accompanied by the patter of bare feet on tile. She looked up to see that the sun had set and that while she was absorbed in her work, a servant must have come in to light the oil lamps hanging from brackets on the walls.

  “Let me see,” Alma said, extending an imperious hand. It was said in the harem that Alma was the daughter of a king, an incentive to a trade agreement between the two kingdoms, and at moments like these Johanna was inclined to believe the rumor. She handed over the parchment.

  “‘Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring,’” Alma said, “‘The Winter Garment of Repentance fling/The Bird of Time has but a little way/To fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.’” She lowered the paper and smiled at Johanna. “Well done, Nazirah. Wait, let me read out the same verse in the original.” She searched for and found a small book, parchment pages bound between covers, handprinted, a little faded but still legible. “Here, you read it.”

  Johanna read it slowly all the way through, the words in the original Persian lovely, graceful, as natural in flow as water moving downstream. The image of a bird on the wing worked powerfully on her in her present state of mind, and to distract herself she said, “This poet of yours? What did you say his name was?”

  “Umar al-Khayyam,” Alma said. “He was born not far from this very spot. He studied in Samarkand and then he went to Bukhara, where he lived out his life.”

  Johanna remembered seeing Bukhara in her father’s book. It was north of here, a little north and west of Samarkand. It was a major city on the Road, known for its fine carpets.

  “He was not only a poet, Nazirah, he was a philosopher who studied everything from the rocks on the ground to the stars in the sky.” Alma’s voice was reverential, and perhaps even a little envious.

  “You would like to study the stars in the sky yourself,” Johanna said.

  Alma raised her eyes, an eager expression on her face, only to have it fall again when the arcaded ceiling got in the way. “They move, you know,” she said in a low voice.

  “What moves?”

  “The stars.”

  Johanna looked at her, puzzled. “Of course they move, Alma,” she said. Any dark night on the Road proved it beyond doubt.

  “But some of them wander,” Alma said. “I have read that it is so.” Her face was the picture of yearning. She was a true scholar, a seeker after information for the sake of the information itself. “One must observe, over a period of time, to see them move. I had hoped to observe them for myself one day.”

  Johanna’s brow creased. “From the garden, at night—”

  Alma shook her head. “I asked. Kadar said no.”

  You shouldn’t have asked, Johanna thought, but was just—barely—smart enough not to say so out loud. Accustomed to a life of freedom, in the harem it was an ongoing difficulty to master her tongue. If Kadar couldn’t punish her, he could yet punish others in her place. “Perhaps the rooftop?” she said instead.

  “There is no access to the roof from the harem,” Alma said.

  Alma was still called to the sheik’s bed from time to time. It was the proximate cause of Johanna’s smuggling activities.

  Well. That was her excuse. Hayat had approached Johanna for help during Johanna’s first month in the harem. “You walk from the harem to the stables every day,” Hayat had said. “Halim’s cottage is hardly out of your way.”

  Hayat’s words, did she but know it, fell on fertile ground, as Johanna had lived that first month after her arrival in a state of bubbling rage. She was ripe for any act that directly or indirectly exacted revenge on her captor, even if it was only depriving him of children by at least one member of his harem, and she was utterly reckless of any consequences. It was another month before she gave any thought to what it was she was smuggling in, and another month after that before she asked. By then, Hayat and Alma were her firm friends, and she had seen with her own eyes how joylessly Alma responded to a summons from the sheik. Hayat had not been called to the sheik’s bed since Johanna’s arrival in the harem.

  Thinking of all of this now as she gathered her parchments together, Johanna said, her eyes on her task, “Your master the sheik is known to entertain and sponsor philosophers here at Talikan. Perhaps he could be, ah, persuaded to access the roof for you.” She quirked an eyebrow.

  Alma tucked her ink and pens into an exquisitely carved sandalwood box. “Perhaps,” she said slowly, her brow puckering. “It would have to be phrased in the right way…”

  Johanna left it at that, contenting herself with imagining the expression on Kadar’s face should such a thing be commanded of him by his lord and master. “Alma,” she said. “How long have you been in the harem?”

  “Eleven years,” Alma said. “And ten months.” She paused. “And sixteen days.”

  She stopped short of enumerating the hours and minutes. Almost twelve years, Johanna thought.

  It had been seven years ago that Jaufre’s caravan had been attacked on the Road, his father killed, his mother kidnapped and sold in the Kashgar slave market. She had not dared ask before, but the appearance of Firas that morning had woken her to the realization that her escape might be nearer than she had thought. And besides, she could trust these women. She dropped her voice. “At any time here in the harem, Alma, did you perhaps meet a Greek woman? She would have been older but lovely, dark hair and eyes. Her name was Agalia. She might have been called the Lycian Lotus.”

  Hayat’s loom slowed. Alma met Johanna’s eyes and said gently, “No, Nazirah. To my knowledge, there has been no one of that name in the harem during my time here.”

  Alma would not ask, Johanna knew, but she could feel Hayat’s curiosity burning from across the room.

  The distant bell sounded a second time, followed by another, larger patter of footsteps and many voices chattering. Hayat tidied away her bobbins and shuttles and racked her loom, and rose to stretch out her back. She checked the pot of dye. “Perfect,” she said in a satisfied tone, and dropped in two hanks of undyed spun silk and addressed it in stern accents. “A beautiful blue you will give me, the color of the sky at dawn.”

  Johanna laughed.

  Hayat looked around. “Hungry? I am famished!” She smiled at Alma, and Alma smiled back. Their gazes held, and Johanna, unnoticed, excused herself.

  She had to admit that the privies i
n the palace were lovely, raised above their humble function with more tile and smooth seats, each separated from the others by a half wall, and so well constructed and maintained that the smell never became noxious.

  She laughed silently to herself, sitting there alone in the dark. It was a measure of her dissatisfaction with her current position that the best thing she could find to say about it was that the necessaries were comfortable.

  She thought of Firas, and decided that she would enjoy such comfort while she could, because very soon it would be back behind a bush on the side of the Road. She couldn’t wait.

  Back in Hayat’s room someone had extinguished the lamps and the darkness of evening gathered in the corners. “Hello?” she said.

  There was a scrabbling sound and a rustle of clothing, and first Alma and then Hayat came forward. Alma looked panicked, Hayat rebellious, and both women were flushed and rumpled.

  She couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t seen, so Johanna bowed slightly. “Forgive me for disturbing you,” she said, and passed on down the hall to the common room.

  She had traveled the Road since birth and had learned at an early age that love came in many forms, and Shu Ming had been wise enough to instruct her daughter in the ways of the flesh. “Desire is a powerful thing, especially in the young,” she had told Johanna. “There is no stronger urge to satisfy, except, possibly, hunger.”

  “And this is how children come into the world?” Johanna said.

  Shu Ming had cupped Johanna’s cheek and smiled into her daughter’s curious eyes. “It is,” she said, “and it can be so much more.”

  What Johanna found so offensive in harem life was that it contradicted everything her mother had taught her. There were at a rough head count a hundred women in the sheik’s harem. For lack of anything better to do, Johanna had worked it out mathematically. Even if he distributed his favors equally, which he did not, even if to be fair he rotated each woman through his bed one at a time, the harem inmate would see his bed an average of three nights out of 365. If a harem woman was in need of a presence in her bed for purposes other than sleep, she would do best to cultivate a relationship with another member of the harem.

  Which it appeared that Hayat and Alma had done.

  Johanna remembered those three days at the summerhouse with Edyk the Portuguese, her last days in Cambaluc but one, and that one the day of her father’s funeral. So much joy, attended by so much sorrow, the both to send her down the Road and out of Cambaluc and by the carelessness of fate to her confinement here in the harem.

  She knew a sudden, fierce ache to feel again Edyk’s hands touching her, his lips on her own, the intoxicating escalation of pleasure that led to such a bright, exquisite culmination of feeling in body and mind. What she had had with Edyk bore no resemblance to what the members of any harem experienced with their owners.

  Shaken at how vivid those memories were, at the yearning they awoke in her own body, she went soberly into dinner, the sound of two pairs of slippers on tile close behind her.

  If Hayat and Alma were discovered, they would be killed. Three months into Johanna’s stay, one of the women had been caught with one of the eunuchs, who was found to be not so much a eunuch after all. The eunuch had been splayed like a fan in the courtyard, castrated, and disemboweled. The woman had been tied in a sack and thrown into the river. The screams of both lingered still in the thoughts of everyone in the harem for days afterward.

  Which was, Johanna thought now, part of their purpose. If Johanna had found them out, someone else would. Spies were rewarded in the harem.

  Perhaps they wouldn’t be discovered, she thought, her step slowing as an idea struck her.

  Perhaps Johanna would take them with her when she left.

  She woke early the next morning and was dressed to leave her silken prison at the appointed time. Kadar, silently disapproving as always, met her at the door. Tarik and Firas were waiting on the other side, North Wind in the yard, and moments later she was riding the wind, her guards faint but pursuing. The sheik’s son was not with them today and her spirit rose accordingly. She lay flat on North Wind’s neck and cried out, “Run, North Wind! Run!”

  North Wind needed no encouragement. He lengthened his stride and the almond trees and the date palms and the canal beside the track melted into a green and silver blur. The thunder of his hooves and the wind of their passage roared in her ears. She heard a voice crying behind her and ignored it for as long as she could. “Young miss! Young miss!” The voice changed. “Wu Li’s daughter, stop that monster this instant!”

  She sat up and North Wind’s stride slowed. Firas came galloping up and reined in beside her, out of breath and evidently out of temper as well. “Did you not hear me calling you, young miss? We don’t have much time, and we must speak!”

  “Where is Tarik?” she said, looking around.

  “His mount threw a shoe just outside the door to the stable yard,” Firas said, adding no explanation as to how such a thing might have happened.

  Johanna laughed. It was impossible not to.

  “Yes,” Firas said, “it is all very well for you to laugh, young miss, but we will be out of his sight for a very few moments only and if we are out of his sight for longer than that I will answer for it with my head! Please slow down!”

  North Wind slowed to a walk. “Jaufre,” she said. “He is alive?”

  His expression softened. “He is alive, young miss,” he said. “Jaufre is alive.”

  She turned her face away from him, battling once again for control. North Wind, always sensitive to her moods, moved uneasily beneath her, and she drew in a deep breath and sat up straight. “I saw you wink at me. I was sure that was what you meant, but—”

  “He is alive, young miss, my hand on my heart,” Firas said. “He lives. I wouldn’t call him well, but I believe in time he will be.”

  “Where?”

  “I left them in Kabul, but it was Shasha’s intent to join the first caravan going to Gaza. She said that was the plan, if you became separated.”

  “It was,” she said. “But Kabul is so near, and Gaza so far. We should go there.” She looked hungrily at the rolling hills on the western horizon. They beckoned her even more strongly now than they had every morning she had ridden out. “We could go now.”

  “They would be after us in minutes,” Firas said.

  “We should go, Firas!” she said. It was agony, to feel the taste of freedom on her tongue and not be allowed to swallow. “We may never have a better chance! This isn’t a tale of the Genjii, I’m not a princess and a magic carpet isn’t going to appear to whisk us out of here! We should go! Now!”

  “The sheik’s men would be after us, and would catch us, in minutes,” Firas said, his own voice rising in turn. He looked over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “We need some kind of distraction, something to draw their attention while we escape.”

  North Wind whinnied and tossed his head. Almost Johanna could believe that he agreed with what Firas was saying.

  “Besides,” Firas said, “they may have already left Kabul. Indeed, it would be best if they had.”

  “Why?”

  “Ogodei is coming, young miss,” Firas said. “And Gokudo is alive, and he is with him.”

  Ogodei was the Mongol baron, the head of a force of a hundred thousand men assigned by the Khan in Cambaluc to patrol the western reaches of Everything Under the Heavens. Gokudo had been the mercenary soldier from Cipangu who had been her step-mother’s lover and her father’s murderer.

  Johanna stared at Firas, shocked. “Gokudo! But he’s is dead, Firas, we all saw him put to death at Ogodei’s word!”

  “He lives, and he is now Ogodei’s favorite captain.”

  “That cannot be true,” she said hotly. “Ogodei was my father’s good friend! He would not dishonor his memory so!”

  “Gently, young miss, gently,” Firas said. “I merely report what I hear on the Road.”

  Her brow cleared. “Then it
is only rumor.”

  He looked at her, and her heart sank at the pity in his eyes. “I have also met refugees on the Road, young miss, from the cities and oasis towns that Ogodei and his army have attacked and destroyed.” He pressed his lips together for a moment. “They are few in number, admittedly, but they almost all speak of one of the Mongol captains who wears black armor, who wields a tall staff with a curved blade. He is the fiercest of the captains, they say, with no mercy for anyone, men, women, children, the aged. He slaughters them all, at his master’s bidding.”

  She stared at him, white to the lips.

  “I believe Ogodei has determined to carve his own empire out of this part of Persia,” Firas said. “And a ronin samurai from Cipangu would be a valuable asset to him in this endeavor.”

  But she was no long looking at him. “Young miss?” Something in her expression must have alerted him, and he pulled his horse around.

  Tarik found them there when he came galloping up, staring numbly at the bodies of all twelve of the scouts sent out by Farhad the previous morning.

  They lay side by side in a neat row. Each one of them had been expertly flayed, castrated, and had had their genitals stuffed into their mouths.

  3

  Kabul, spring, 1323

  IT HAD BEEN A COLD WINTER, one snowstorm after another, followed by thaws and rain, followed by freezing temperatures that turned everything to ice, followed by more snowstorms. The people of Kabul emerged from their homes like pale, thin ghosts of themselves, blinking dazedly in the sunlight of longer days, not quite trusting in the warmer temperatures. Shutters and doors opened and remained so. Neighbors greeted each other with no memory of past quarrels and vied with one another in the clearing of communal toilets and fountains and streets, and in the cultivation of garden plots barely thawed.