“May the sun light your way,” Çeda said as she approached.
Saliah stared grimly. “I’ve no use for the sun. Who comes?”
“My name is Çeda. Çedamihn Ahyanesh’ala.”
Saliah had been about to speak, but then her mouth closed. “That’s a name I’ve not heard in many years.”
Çeda didn’t know what to say to that. “My mother died when I was eight,” she said lamely.
“Did she?” Saliah asked in a distant way, as if she were seeing the world as it had been long ago.
It was then, as Saliah stared past her, that Çeda realized she was blind. Çeda might have realized sooner, but the way her head had turned as Çeda approached, was as if she were watching. Now it was obvious, and she remembered thinking it strange when she’d been here as a child, how easily the woman moved around when she plainly couldn’t see.
Yet another memory she should have remembered.
Saliah touched fingers to forehead. “My tears for your loss, child, but why have you come here to the desert?”
“I come because of this.” She stepped forward and pressed the book into Saliah’s hand.
Saliah frowned. She set her staff against the wall of her home and ran her hands over the book in a tender way. It was as intimate a gesture as Çeda had ever seen, and it made Çeda uncomfortable. She’d been prepared to share the secrets of her book, but this felt as if Saliah were treading on the memory of her mother. Still, she managed to stop herself from reaching out and taking it back.
“I know this book,” Saliah said.
“You do?”
“I should. I gave it to your mother.”
Çeda paused. She knew her mother had come to Saliah, that they’d had business of some sort, but she’d never suspected any sort of friendship between the two.
“Why?” was all Çeda could think to ask.
“Is that what you wish to know? Why I gave this book to your mother?”
“We can begin there.”
Saliah returned the book and took up her staff. She walked not with the tentative steps of the blind but with clear confidence toward the wall of cut stone to Çeda’s right. Çeda followed. Just as when she was young, the garden looked much different on the other side of the arched entryway. A stone path threaded its way through a lush display of flowering herbs—valerian and veronica and Sweet Anna. Two small lemon trees bore bright yellow fruit, and fire-orange dates hung in three long bunches from a date palm. In one corner, a dozen birds bathed in a pool of clear water, or preened in the branches of a nearby oleander bush. Most were reed warblers, which was strange since they were rarely seen outside the spring rains that brought life to the River Haddah. One, though, was an amberlark, a bird with a long tail, a spotted brown coat, and a golden breast. When Saliah and Çeda approached, most of the birds flew away from the water but remained in the garden. The amberlark, however, released a call—a trilling rise and a mournful coo—and flew out, over the wall and into the desert.
In the center of the space was the strangest manifestation of the garden: an acacia that stood fifty feet tall if it was one. Its branches spread like a canopy, far and wide, but the leaves were small. As a result the sun cast bright and shifting patterns over the garden as the boughs swayed gently in the desert breeze. Pieces of crystal were suspended from the branches with golden thread—hundreds of them, thousands, all of them a different color. They swung as the branches did and chimed, soft as the burble of a mountain stream.
Saliah walked up to the tree, ran her fingers down the bark, perhaps finding her place, and as she did, the sound of the chimes above changed, became more active, as if they were telling a tale. Then she turned to face Çeda. “I gave that book to your mother because she asked for it.”
“Where did you come by it?”
“Come by it?” Saliah smiled a wide, genuine smile. “I wrote it.”
Çeda was taken aback. “But you’re . . .”
Saliah frowned. “I’m what? Blind? Do you think it was always so?”
“You seem comfortable enough with it.”
“Yes, but we learn, don’t we? We change, we learn how to live despite the mistakes we’ve made.”
Saliah’s eyes stared over Çeda’s shoulder, and it seemed as if she were looking beyond these walls, beyond these days. “I remember coming here with her,” Çeda said as the chimes settled.
“You ran about this garden often as a babe.”
“What business did my mother have with you?”
Again Saliah frowned, as Çeda often did when her students grew too bold. “The business we had shall remain between the two of us. I would ask instead what business you have with me.”
“We’ll start with the book. There was a poem my mother wrote at the back of it.”
“A poem.”
“Rest will he ’neath twisted tree ’til death by scion’s hand. By Nalamae’s tears and godly fears shall kindred reach dark land.”
Saliah’s brow had pinched momentarily when Çeda said Nalamae’s tears, but beyond that she remained silent, forcing Çeda to prompt her. “I must know what it means.”
A tiny red-winged bird flew between them, the buzz of its wings breaking the tension. “And what makes you think I know?”
“Because something as important as this wouldn’t have escaped your notice.”
“Would it not?”
Çeda pulled herself taller. “It would not.”
Saliah’s frame seemed to tighten at these words, as if she’d heard the words of an impudent child and was about to send her away, but when she spoke, there was no edge to her words. “Perhaps these are things you should leave alone.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You have no business meddling in the affairs of Kings.”
“They killed my mother. They hung her upside down and left her for all to see with foul carvings cut into her skin.”
“All the more reason to leave them on their hill. You are not your mother, Çedamihn, not by half.”
Something hard formed in Çeda’s throat. Why was Saliah refusing to help? “I will avenge her death, with or without your help.”
“Is that why you’re here? For revenge?”
“Isn’t that reason enough?”
Saliah pursed her lips. “How little you know, child.”
Çeda knew she’d disappointed Saliah, but that only made her more angry, more desperate. “Tell me about the poem.”
“Tell me what you know,” the tall woman replied.
“Little enough. The twisted trees are clearly the adichara. Who rests beneath them I don’t know. One of the asirim, I presume. Perhaps the one who kissed me.” Çeda had withheld this information to gauge Saliah’s reaction, but even so, she hadn’t expected Saliah to shiver at these words.
“What did you say?” she asked softly.
“There is one who wears a crown. The King of the asirim?”
Her brows pinched, and for a moment she seemed as ancient as the desert itself. “Sehid-Alaz . . .”
Çeda waited for her to continue, but when she didn’t, said, “Is that his name? Sehid-Alaz?”
Saliah shook her head. “Never mind.”
Standing before this woman, Çeda felt eight years old all over again. She collected her thoughts, ordering them like pieces on an aban board, and tried again. “I’ve been thinking much on the last time I came, the day you turned me and my mother away. I had a vision. A vision I believe you saw.” Çeda didn’t wait for a response. “There was a rattlewing, a woman dancing along the dunes. A shaikh. And a sword that was handed to me.”
“An ebon sword,” Saliah said breathlessly.
And there it was. Another secret Çeda needed to unravel. Her lips trembled as she spoke. “How? How can it be so? I’m no Blade Maiden.”
“So many paths lie
before us.”
Somehow Çeda had the impression she was no longer talking about Çeda, but herself. “So help me choose mine!”
“I cannot.”
“Why not?”
“There are dangers, Çedamihn, things you’re blissfully unaware of. I cannot guide you at the cost of all else.”
“Were you my mother’s ally or her enemy?”
“You know better than to ask.”
“Then be mine as well. I saw myself receiving an ebon sword. Tell me how it can be so.”
“I don’t know if you’re ready for these things. Your mother would have told you in time.”
Suddenly Çeda’s heart was beating faster. She had no idea why. “My mother is dead. You must tell me.”
Saliah seemed to come to a decision. Her lips pressed into a thin line, and she nodded once. “Words will mean nothing to you.” She stepped aside and motioned to the acacia. “You must see for yourself.”
Çeda shook her head. “What shall I do?”
“Make the tree chime.”
“How?”
“The how of it is up to you.”
Çeda’s heart was now racing at full gallop. She stared up to the canopy formed by the clawing branches, to the twinkling crystals. The sound they made was like a daydream, but it was also a sound wholly ignorant of Çeda and her place in the world. She must give the tree a place to begin, but how?
She took in the garden anew. There were heavy stones she might pry up and use to strike the trunk of the acacia, but that seemed crude, as if it would draw the augury Saliah was about to perform too close to Çeda’s immediate future. She might climb the tree and shake it from the upper reaches, as she had the last time she’d come, but that felt desperate, childish. She might pray to Thaash to send wind through its branches, but the desert gods would not listen to her—Thaash least of all—and even if he did, she wouldn’t want the touch of a god to lay so heavily over her future.
And then her eyes fell upon Saliah’s staff, and she thought of the way the chimes had changed after Saliah had run her fingers down the acacia’s bark. They’d risen in complexity, like the bustle in Sharakhai in the days that followed the silent observance of Beht Zha’ir.
She walked to the tree and took up Saliah’s staff. She thought Saliah might object, but her only reaction was to release it and stand aside.
And now it was left only to determine where to strike. And how hard. There was a knot straight ahead, chest-high. It seemed good enough to her. She hefted the staff like a spear and thrust it forward into the center of the bole as if she were aiming for the acacia’s heart. She did not thrust hard, however. She struck it only hard enough for the tree to know of her presence.
As she lowered the staff and listened, Saliah did as well, eyes shut tight, head cocked to one side.
The chiming didn’t change at first, but then Çeda heard the sound tilting toward the lower branches, then move further up the tree, like a storm sweeping over the desert. The sound traveled through her. She felt it in her chest, at the tip of her spine, within her very soul. It made her feel as though she were standing at the center of a grand web, and that any move she made would affect the entirety of it—that, or tear it to shreds.
The crystals above glinted in the sun, creating a coruscating pattern, and Çeda found herself mesmerized by it. She saw herself in the lights, holding hands with her mother, saw Emre slipping something into the emaciated mouth of an opulently dressed man, saw a hundred ships sailing over the moonwashed sand.
She saw her mother, much younger than she remembered her, speaking with an older man wearing a richly embroidered thawb. The man had rings in his nose and tattoos around his eyes and a scar that traveled down his neck before it was lost in his thawb. They were angry, the two of them, but then the man took Ahya in a familial embrace and Ahya stepped onto the deck of a small sandship. Soon the ship departed, sailing over the desert with the man watching.
She saw the Amber City rising above the sands as the ship reached Sharakhai. A series of visions followed, her mother walking through the city, watching the Silver Spears and the Blade Maidens, learning their ways. Always in these visions Tauriyat was on display, in the background, ever-present.
She saw her mother wearing rich clothes, seductive without revealing too much. She saw her being smuggled from a horse-drawn araba into a grand palace. She saw her mother walking halls festooned in grand banners with the sign of the Kings: a shield with twelve swords fanned around it. Ahya tread lightly, alone, knowing where she was going and who she would see. She came to a tall set of doors, where two guards holding tall spears pulled them aside, bowing their heads to her as she stepped within the room. The doors shut behind her with an echoing boom.
A brilliant flash of light brought on a change. Ahya was now in Dardzada’s apothecary, her belly swollen with child. Dardzada stared at her, an expression of disbelief on his face. Send word, Ahya said. Tell my father the King’s child is coming. The look on her face was one of cold acceptance, as if her news was not glad tidings, but merely a fact to be relayed.
One last vision, of her mother squatting over a birthing mat, dripping in sweat, wailing as she gripped the hands of a woman standing before her. The woman helped Ahya to steady herself while begging her to try harder. As the child came at last, the midwife swathed her in cloths, offered the babe to her mother, but Ahya had lay down on a nearby pallet and looked away, refusing to set eyes on the child.
You must hold her, the woman said.
But Ahya would only stare at the wall, tears streaming down her cheeks, body heaving as she shed tears of bitter regret in place of joy.
“No!” Çeda screamed, breaking the spell. “No! It cannot be!”
She took up the staff and struck the tree again, but this time she struck it as hard as she could. Over and over again she struck it, and she felt the tree shudder.
A high, clear ringing caught her attention. She stared up through the branches and saw one of the crystals tumbling down. It was close enough to catch, but she let it fall, and it shattered against a rounded stone. The crystalline sound drew her fully back to the here and now. Saliah’s head jerked away, her hand flying to her cheek. The tall woman staggered back, but her heel caught on a root, and she fell among the flowering herbs behind her.
Çeda ran to her side and helped her to sit up. Saliah touched her fingers to the cut on her cheek, then rubbed her fingers together as if more curious than pained. She was staring directly at Çeda.
Çeda shivered; she knew Saliah was blind, but it felt as if the woman were staring straight into her, peeling away the layers to unearth her soul beneath.
As the chimes continued to ring in some rhythmic pattern that Çeda neither understood nor cared to, Saliah allowed herself to be helped up. And then, at last, the chaos waned and the chimes resumed their tranquil tones.
“Do you see now?” Saliah asked.
Ahya’s words echoed in her mind. Your father would kill you the moment he learned you were alive.
“Yes, I see.” Çeda stared at the rich growth of the garden. “Which one?” she asked. “Which one is my father?”
“I know as much as the chimes told you.”
“Yes,” Çeda replied, turning away. “Of course. And Sehid-Alaz? Tell me of him.”
“The tree has told you all it can for now.”
“I’m not asking the tree. I’m asking you.”
Saliah looked profoundly worried. “There is much to consider before I share more with you. Many paths to tread.”
“Of course,” Çeda repeated numbly. “Games within games.”
“These are not games.”
But Çeda could hardly hear her. Without another word, she walked from the garden.
“Çeda?” Saliah called. “Çedamihn! These are not games. All I do I do for a reason.”
Th
ere was a ringing in her ears and it was only growing stronger. She strode from the garden and returned to her skiff. Sailing back toward Sharakhai, she held the rudder and stared at the endless sand. Then she stood and spread her arms wide, tilted her head to the desert sky, and released a primal scream. “Why?” she raged, uncaring what gods might hear. “How could you have hidden this from me?”
She balled her hands into fists. Her body shivered as every muscle tightened.
“I cannot be the daughter of a King! I cannot!” And yet she was. She was one of them.
She collapsed onto the thwart, numb as she watched the golden dunes pass by. Why would her mother have had a child by one of the Kings? It was no mere chance; she knew this much. Her mother was too careful for it to be otherwise. Had she loved him? She might have given the thought credence if she hadn’t seen the meeting between Ahya and her father on the dunes, and heard the way she’d spoken to Dardzada. Tell my father the King’s child is coming.
Was she just a tool, then? A prop in a grand play her mother had been orchestrating? It was the only thing that made sense. Ahya had seduced a King and given birth to Çeda for some far greater purpose than wanting a child, though what it might be, Çeda had no idea.
Çeda’s grandfather might know. She remembered him now, a glimpse only, a remembrance from when she was very young. A man with the same scar had visited Ahya and Çeda when they lived in a bare hovel in the center of the Shallows. Ahya had never revealed that he was her grandfather. She hadn’t even revealed his name—not that she could recall, anyway. Çeda asked many times that night to see his scar, and Ahya had always said no, but when she’d went to fetch the man more araq, he’d loosened the strings around the neck of his kaftan and showed her. It went all the way down to the center of his chest. She’d marveled at it, wondering how he could have lived from such a wound, but before she could ask him more of it, her mother had returned and sent her to bed.
Twelve Kings in Sharakhai Page 23
