Gifting Fire

by Alina Boyden

  Hina stuffed a pair of ordinary slippers into the pockets of my shalwar. “I wouldn’t take anything else with you. If you’re caught it’s best that you can deny the worst accusations against you.”

  “If I’m caught, we’re all finished,” I replied, because I knew better than to believe I could ever win Karim’s trust if he discovered that the whole time we’d been talking on the veranda I’d been lying through my teeth. He’d never believe another word I said.

  “So don’t get caught,” Hina said, offering me a gentle pat on the shoulder.

  “I won’t,” I promised.

  “You’ll want to give my name to the man at the door to Sanghar Soomro’s haveli,” Hina said. “Tell him you’re one of my celas and that you have a message for Sanghar. That should earn you an audience. After that, it will be up to you to convince him to help you rather than kill you or take you hostage.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I muttered, hoping that this man was as loyal to Hina as she claimed he was. Otherwise he might well earn favor with Ahmed and Karim by handing me back to them. But I would worry over that when the time came. I had to try to send a message, and if Hina thought this was the best way, then this was what I would do.

  “May God watch over you,” Hina said.

  “And all of you,” I replied.

  “Oh, we’ll be having a restful night’s sleep in your bed,” she assured me, flashing me a grin that was confident enough to wrest a smile from my own lips in response.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” I warned. “I’ll be back soon.”

  She nodded, her jaw tensing. “You’d better be.”

  I decided that I could say good-bye all night, but that was just putting off the inevitable, so I turned and walked out onto my balcony, looking carefully into the darkness along the walls for any signs of guards or servants or curious palace women who might be able to see me from their own verandas or through their jali screens. I positioned myself in what I thought was something of a blind spot to the rest of the palace, but I’d be careful to move quickly and suddenly when the time came. That way, if someone was watching, they might think I’d simply gone back into my chambers. The less time they had to watch me climbing, the better.

  So I flung myself over the railing, grabbing at the bottom edge of the marble floor with my fingers, kicking my hooked toes into crevices in the decorations on the buttresses below, and I hung there, holding myself close to the stonework, listening for cries of alarm from guardsmen, or shouts of surprise from palace women. But all I heard was the gentle lapping of the lagoon’s waters against the sandstone bricks below me.

  CHAPTER 15

  Most people would have been afraid of descending a fifty-foot fortress wall in the dead of night, but it wasn’t the climb that was eating away at my mind. I’d scaled enough havelis on moonless nights in Bikampur to be comfortable feeling along the wall with my hands and feet, searching out solid holds before testing my weight on them, and easing myself down. It was methodical, almost meditative. I’d have found it relaxing if not for the worries weighing on my mind. If I were caught, or if someone discovered I wasn’t in my bed, the punishment would be swift and severe, and I knew that I wouldn’t be the one suffering it. It would fall on someone I loved.

  Hina would be first, I thought. Karim would kill her in front of me, and her celas too. He would know that he could do that and let the threat hang over my sisters, and that I would fall in line to preserve them. Just as I was sure that he knew if he touched one hair on my sisters’ heads, I would be his enemy for all eternity. He would save them for last. But Hina first. Nuri second. I saw it so clearly that my hands and feet froze in place on the wall, unwilling to move. If anyone discovered that I wasn’t in my bed . . .

  No, I couldn’t let my doubts control me. I forced myself to find another good toehold, to put my weight on it, to lower myself down. Maybe Karim would find out what I was doing. Maybe he would kill Hina and Nuri and my sisters and me too. That was possible. I wasn’t stupid; I knew the risk I was taking. But I would never forgive myself if I didn’t go through with this, if I sat there like a helpless princess from one of the storybooks, contenting myself with my lot in life. Karim thought he could enslave me? Because for all the talk of marriage, that’s what this was, enslavement. He wanted to use my mind to his advantage, to keep me under his power for the rest of my life. Well, I would show him what happened to men who tried to use me in that fashion, or I would die trying.

  I let my hands and my feet worry about finding holds, keeping my eyes on the palace guards. They were visible in their domed chhatris, the pavilion-capped towers standing one at each corner of the southern wall. Though there were hundreds of guards in the palace, there were just two who might have spotted me. In a way, I was lucky to be sequestered in the women’s quarters. It meant that there were no guards manning the walls on this side of the palace, because unrelated men weren’t allowed here. So this entire stretch of wall was protected by a pair of sleepy-eyed sentries in towers dozens of yards away, where their best views were of the eastern and western approaches. Still, if one of them happened to turn and look this way, my whole plan might be undone before it could begin.

  I tried to focus on the climb, to push thoughts of failure from my mind. I couldn’t control whether or not someone came into my bedchambers and realized that the girl in my bed wasn’t me but one of Hina’s celas. I couldn’t even really control whether or not a guard saw me. That was in God’s hands. What I could control was getting off this wall as quickly and silently as possible.

  It was tough to tell just how far away the water was below me. That was always a danger when climbing—jumping down only to find that you were twenty feet up, not five. With the darkness of the night, and the starlight playing across the rippling surface of the lagoon, it was even more difficult than usual. So the first sign I got that I had made it was when my foot got wet while it was trying to feel out another crack in the masonry.

  I breathed a little sigh of relief. So far so good. No guards had spotted me yet, though I knew that my swim would be the dangerous part. If I splashed, the noise would draw the eyes of every guard in every watchtower. And I would have to keep low, my head just barely peeking out above the water’s surface, otherwise my silhouette might give me away.

  As I slowly lowered myself into the water, another thought occurred to me—were there crocodiles in this lagoon? I suddenly wished I’d asked Hina about that, though I supposed maybe it didn’t matter. I didn’t have any weapons with which to fight back, so if a crocodile attacked me, I’d get eaten. It was as simple as that. Or at least that was what I told myself, but as the waters of the lagoon swallowed up my knees, and then my hips, I imagined a crocodile the size of Sultana gobbling me up, and my heart started to pound.

  I forced myself to take a deep, calming breath, and then I let go of the wall and slid soundlessly into the water. It was shallow enough that if I stood on my tiptoes I could walk across the bottom and keep my chin just barely above the surface of the waves, but it was easier to just use the wall itself for propulsion. I put my hands on the stonework, letting my fingers dig into the cracks in the masonry, and glided along the base of the wall, toward the western guard tower.

  I’d spent hours planning my route, thinking over every eventuality, but staying so close to the palace was a calculated risk. If the guard in the southwestern tower looked in my direction, I was sure he would spot me. He seemed impossibly close, standing in the orange light cast by the bronze lanterns hanging from the chhatri’s sandstone pillars. I could make out the details of his face, the deep brown of his mustache, the lighter brown color of his eyes, the whites of them tinged yellow thanks to the lantern light. I knew I was moving in shadow, and I knew that few guards would look straight down when they had been trained to look for more distant threats, like enemy ships sailing into the harbor, but luck had always played an outsize role in these nightl
y escapades of mine, and I always feared that it would eventually run out.

  But this was safer than swimming in the middle of the channel. Here, at least none of the servants or palace women could spot me. Their jali screens prevented them from looking straight down. So long as I hugged the wall, I would be safe from the prying eyes of Asma and the other denizens of the palace zenana. But I still felt hopelessly exposed as I propelled myself closer and closer to the guard tower. Once I got to the base of it, I would be safe, but I wasn’t there yet, and moving without splashing was agonizingly slow. Though I knew it had only been a few minutes, I felt like I’d been in the water for hours.

  The guard shifted his weight and turned his head, and I stopped breathing, but I didn’t stop moving right away. I slowed down, letting myself drift to a gradual stop. Sudden changes draw a person’s attention. If you don’t want them to catch sight of you, you can’t do anything abruptly. The guard was looking right over my head, I thought, staring at his compatriot in the eastern tower behind me. He reached up his hand, and I braced myself for the cry of alarm, for the guards to come pouring out of their barracks, but he was just scratching his nose. He played with his mustache for a moment, sighed, and turned away.

  I waited a long moment before taking my first stroke with my arms, fighting down the urge to sigh, to breathe hard, to give the tension in my chest some audible release. I couldn’t risk his hearing me, not now, not when I was so close to escaping his notice. I pressed on, dragging myself right up to the base of the tower. My heart slowed a little, and I felt myself begin to relax. I was far enough away from the eastern tower that I didn’t think the man there could spot me, and unless the guard in this tower bent over and looked straight down, I was safely out of sight.

  I worked my way around the tower, fighting down the urge to rush. Impatience was always the biggest danger. Every fiber of my being was screaming at me to just go as fast as possible, to just get it all over with, but that was a surefire way to get caught. No, in spite of the fear that was surging through me, I had to take everything in a plodding, methodical fashion. I had to be sure of each grip with my hands, of each gentle pull to move me through the water. I had to time my movements with the waves so that I wouldn’t accidentally bump up against the tower, or cause one of the ripples to break early and create a splash.

  I paused as I reached the far southwestern corner of the palace. Once I rounded this bend, I would be on the western side. There would be more guards here, standing along the parapets, manning at least one more tower to my north. But once I got past them, I’d be able to swim straight toward Kadiro’s harbor.

  I shook my head. This was madness. After all this, I still had another wall to swim past, and then a half-mile swim through the lagoon, all while praying that not a single guard saw me. The waters were dark, it was true, and it would take sharp eyes to notice me, but I couldn’t help but feel completely and utterly exposed. There were no pillars or rosebushes or statues to hide behind here, like there had been in the wealthy havelis in Bikampur. There were no alleys I might vanish into. And if an alarm was raised, even if I could swim away and escape the musket balls they would surely shoot at me, Karim’s first move would be to check my bedchamber, and then everything would be undone.

  But it would be stupid to turn back now. I might well be caught climbing back into my bedchamber, without anything to show for it. That would be the worst outcome of all. So I steeled myself against the agony of uncertainty and turned the corner, pulling myself along the wall with slow, steady movements, gritting my teeth against the urge to turn around and go back to bed. If I didn’t get these messages out, then someday soon, Karim would be lying in that bed with me. When set beside that horrific prospect, getting shot by a guardsman’s toradar didn’t seem half-bad.

  The western wall was crawling with guards. Every crenellation in the battlement above me was highlighted by the red glow of a toradar’s burning match cord. The tower in the distance had four men standing in it, each one looking in a different direction. God, did Karim know what I was doing? Had he been expecting me to try something like this? I should have scouted things out better, should have spent a night or two observing the guards’ routines before running off like an imbecile.

  None of the men was looking down; that was to my advantage, but I couldn’t imagine trusting it to chance. All it would take would be one random glance, one guard staring at his feet at the wrong moment, and then all would be lost. This wasn’t like breaking into a haveli with a couple of servants armed with clubs. This wasn’t even like our assault on Shikarpur. At least there the guards had all been half-trained peasant conscripts, the bulk of the army having already left to attack Bikampur. No, these men were Sultan Ahmed’s best, and they were all awake and alert. What had I got myself into?

  I clung to the wall for a moment, weighing my options. The men seemed so clear to me because they were standing in torchlight, or holding burning slow matches whose soft glow illuminated their faces. But the water was pitch black. I’d sneaked past guards before, trusting the darkness to shield me, but never so many, nor so well armed. I took a slow, quiet breath, inhaling as deeply as I dared, and then I lowered myself until only my eyes were above the water, and I moved.

  I could almost feel their eyes on me. My skin was tingling with anticipation, my chest was tight, and I had to fight the urge to shut my eyes, like that would somehow make me invisible. I paused every now and again for air, being careful to breathe normally, not to take great gasping gulps, in spite of the burning in my lungs. Noise was my greatest enemy. If the guards heard something moving at the base of the wall, they would all stare until one of them spotted me.

  I made it to the base of the northwestern tower and stopped for a moment to catch my breath. I was about to undertake the most dangerous part of the journey thus far. I was going to have to swim north, toward the harbor, moving away from the protective shadow of the palace walls. I wanted to do as much of it as I possibly could underwater, so I needed to make sure that I had enough air in my lungs to see me safely outside the range of the guards’ vision, though I didn’t really know how far that was.

  I moved with the utmost care around the circumference of the tower, hugging the stone wall with my body, my nose just a hairsbreadth above the surface of the water, the lapping waves washing completely over my face every few seconds. There was no way they would be able to make out my black hair against the darkness of the water. At least I hoped they wouldn’t.

  I stopped when the city of Kadiro came into view, its domed dargahs and tall havelis mere shadows illuminated by the orange glow of torches and bronze lanterns. I was separated from those pinpricks of light by a vast expanse of perfect, liquid blackness, like someone had spilled a pot of ink across the face of the world. It was now or never.

  I took a deep breath and pulled myself beneath the surface of the lagoon, fumbling along the alga-covered surface of the wall with my palms until I was certain I was low enough that I couldn’t be seen from above. I aimed myself at the city, and I kicked off the wall, scrambling with arms and legs, praying that I could get myself to a safe distance from the tower before I surfaced.

  My lungs burned like fire, creating an urgent pressure that demanded to be released. But I didn’t go up for air. I kept fighting for more distance, kept thrashing my feet behind me, keenly aware that the baggy shalwar I was wearing were slowing me down. I made long, powerful strokes with my arms. I fought for every last inch until there was no denying the need to breathe any longer.

  My head broke the surface of the water and I tried not to gasp, tried not to sputter, tried not to make too much noise, but my breath sounded impossibly loud in my own ears, like the roar of some great beast. I twisted to look behind me, back in the direction of the fortress, and was horrified by how close it seemed. I thought I could reach out and touch its sandstone walls, but there were no shouts of alarm from the men atop the towers, and after on
e or two terrifying moments, I realized that it was farther away than it seemed.

  I turned back around, intent on paddling for Kadiro’s distant harbor, but before I could move, something huge and black loomed out of the darkness and hit me like a giant fist. I felt pain first and then terror, as the only possible explanation surged to the forefront of my mind—crocodile.

  CHAPTER 16

  I twisted in the water, holding up my hands to ward off the beast’s jaws, when I realized that what I was facing was far worse than any mere crocodile. A riverboat bristling with small cannons and filled with armed men had plowed straight into me on its way toward the palace. Now I was looking up into the eyes of startled men who were rushing to bring their toradars to bear. I held up my hands helplessly as cannons swiveled on their mounts, orange match tips glowing brightly, poised to fall into touchholes primed with powder. I knew with a sick certainty that twisted my insides that I was going to be turned into so much mush by the volley that was surely coming.

  The men hissed to one another in a language that was like Daryastani, but not Daryastani. Was it Mahisagari? I strained my ears to find familiar words, but they were speaking too quietly and too rapidly for me to follow. I knew that if I wanted to live I had to say something before they decided what to do for themselves. There was only one thing I really could say.

  “I surrender. Please, you don’t have to kill me.”

  My voice was quiet, because we were still near enough to the guard tower, and I didn’t want to draw their attention. Maybe the men in this boat were Karim’s, but even if they were, the last thing I needed was a commotion from the guards on the walls making them panic. And if they weren’t Karim’s men, if they were Zindhis, then maybe I’d be able to strike a deal with them that would keep me alive and enable me to deliver my messages.