by Melanie Rawn
Having successfully passed the gates and their protective hazziri, he was assumed by the rest of the guards to have legitimate business within. His body remembered the saunter appropriate to, and his face effortlessly arranged itself into the proper expression of, a casually arrogant al-Ma’aliq sheyqir. As he neared the Queen’s chambers, it was necessary to display his topaz ring once or twice more, but persuading the sentries to secrecy was so simple that it would have distressed him had he been the one these guards were guarding. Ayia, once they discovered what had happened tonight, they would be more cautious. They exclaimed at his presence, as the others had; they yielded to his authority, as the others had. It was a bitter amusement that these were the last orders he would ever give as a sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih. Tell no one I am here. No one.
This time of night, the family would be sleeping. He had no need of private chambers—though his bones whispered a plea to rest in a soft, silken bed again. The first whimperings of what would eventually become screams . . . had not the girl Solanna seen him old and scarred? It was in him: His own early decay and death were inside him. How long before the whimpers turned to gasps of pain, and then moans, and then—
A little of the wine-inspired recklessness seeped away. There was only one remedy for that, and the maqtabba was entirely adequate to his purpose. It took him very little time to denude the room of all the lesser gold and silver fittings—doorknobs, drawer-pulls, and the like. From one of those drawers he took a large drawstring pouch of money kept there for incidentals. He was al-Ma’aliq, and the Shagara working did not defend against him. There was no lock because none was needed. Others could not even slide this drawer open, but he could.
Praising his deceased cousin Rihana for being royal enough to scorn carrying money on her exalted person, he weighed the pouch in his hand. He untied the sash from his waist and spread it across the table, then quickly folded the coins and doorknobs and such into it, twisted it to secure his booty, and wrapped it once more around him. He paused to smile slightly, recalling that great-grandfather Azzad had carried the famous necklace of pearls this way, long ago, the only wealth he had saved of all the vast al-Ma’aliq fortunes.
At the maqtabba’s door he hesitated, then returned to the desk. In the drawer that had held the money he left behind his grandfather Alessid’s hazzir, the necklace that had kept him safe through dozens of battles. Whoever found it would know who had been here; what they might think about why he had left himself unprotected, he cared not.
He kept the two rings. He had promised himself he would never take them off. All the other hazziri—the earring, an armband, two silver discs sewn into the heels of his boots—these he had already sold. But the rings he would keep as long as he lived. They were reminders of who he had once been: al-Ma’aliq, al-Gallidh.
Qamar walked unchallenged out of the palace at Joharra. At just past midnight he was enjoying a tasty meal and a large jug of very good wine at a clean, refined tavern that specialized in traditional Tza’ab cooking. Tomorrow, he decided, on his way out of Joharra, he would take the time to find out exactly what had happened to Rihana and Ra’amon and who was in charge now. On reflection, he decided it was probably Allim, a seasoned war-leader who could take care of the incursions from Cazdeyya and—what had the guard called it? Taqit? Taqim? Qamar didn’t have it in him to care, not tonight. Tonight, he cared only about getting very, very drunk.
He stayed drunk all through the autumn and winter.
He found a congenial seaside town and called himself Assado, and said he was from the newly established Tza’ab town of Shagarra in the southeast, which his atrocious accent and somewhat limited vocabulary seemed to confirm. No one ever discovered much more about him than his name. He kept to himself and his wine jars. Indeed, he had chosen the town for the potency of the imported wines in its dockside taverns. Once or twice someone saw him ambling drunkenly down the pier or along the beach, and several of the tavern girls had graced him with their favors, for he was a handsome youth—at first, anyway. As autumn became winter, and the wine did its work on his body as well as his mind, all that remained of his beauty was the large dark eyes with their extravagant lashes and a certain withered sweetness to his smile.
At about the same time his money was running out, there arrived in the seaport an old man and a young girl. No one in the dockside taverns had ever seen them before, and no one ever saw them again. Nor did they ever see again the youth who called himself Assado.
Something smooth and gentle was beneath his back, cradling his relaxed body. The quiet soothed him. His skin and hair felt soft and clean, and his muscles were loose, as if he’d just had a hot bath and a shave and a long rubdown with expensive oils, the sort of thing one expected when one was a sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih. There was a scent of green grass, a tang of sandalwood, accented with a subtle hint of a woman’s perfume, and a taste on his lips of mint tea.
All in all, he felt quite blissful. He must remember to remember whatever tavern it was that served wine as good as this.
“Eiha, about time you woke up.”
Head turning lazily, he sought the voice above him. Her face was indistinct, a pale oval framed in wildly curling fair hair, backlit by white-gold sunlight. The eyes were brown, nearly as dark as his own. He wished she would lean closer so he could see her more clearly, hoping her face was as fascinating as her voice—low and soft, the oddities of a barbarian accent attractively negated by the lilting rise and fall of the syllables.“So what’s your name, qarassia?”
She sat on the bed beside his hip, facing him, hands folded and head cocked to one side. She wore something white with a dull sheen to it, no embroidery or decoration. He still couldn’t quite focus on her face, but her voice told him she disapproved of him. “You still look dreadful. Better than before, but still—”
Whenever before was a total blank, it usually meant he’d been very, very naughty. Father would glower, Mother would glare, and Ab’ya Alessid would shake his head and turn away to hide a smile.
He realized that there was a lot of before that he couldn’t remember. The days all blurred together—or, rather, the nights did, for he spent the daylight hours sleeping. Ayia, to be honest, he spent them insensible, sometimes in his rented bed, sometimes on the street, sometimes on the beach, sometimes in a back corner of whatever tavern he’d honored with his noble presence that evening. Never yet, though, had he woken in a bed like this one. He was stretched out on a fine, soft mattress with sheer white curtains languidly swagged around carved wooden posts. White velvet was under his back, and his head rested on a white silk pillow. The whole of it was rather cloudlike and quite lovely.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“By Acuyib, yes!” He struggled to sit up; a light, insistent hand on his chest pushed him back down.
“Not just yet. Here.”
He slurped from the glass she held to his mouth, then spluttered. Water? “Take that goat piss away and bring me wine!”
“Look like a tavern maid, do I?”
“I can’t be sure if I can’t see you properly, can I?” He gave her his best big-melting-brown-eyes smile—the look was a good one on him, and he knew it. “Come closer, qarassia, so I can see your face. And if you’d be so kind, please tell me where I am.”
“Can you manage to take a single breath without trying to use it to seduce someone?”
“I’ve no idea,” he replied blithely.“Though I must admit I don’t usually find myself in bed with women like you.” Abruptly aware that he had been rude without meaning to be, he blinked up at her. He still couldn’t quite see her features.“Forgive me, I really didn’t intend that for an insult. I meant that it’s so rare to exchange more than a few words with a woman in these circumstances.”
“These are not those circumstances.”
He arranged his face into a sulk. “Why not?” Squinting up at the face that slowly came into focus, he gave a snort of disappointment, because she was really rather plain.
The dark eyes were lovely, and the masses of pale curling hair, but the rest . . . ayia, had he caught sight of her at a feast, he wouldn’t have troubled even to find out her name.
But it came to him that he already knew it.
“You truly don’t know where you are, do you? And before you begin worrying about it, you didn’t succeed.”
“At what?”
“Drinking yourself to death.”
“So much I had already realized,” he drawled. “For instance, this cannot be Acuyib’s Glory. Aside from the fact that it’s the last place I’d ever end up—again, forgive me—you aren’t my idea of the sarhafiya The Lessons so confidently promise.”
Solanna didn’t seem offended. “If I understand correctly, I would imagine such beings keep well clear of dangerous boys like you.”
“Dangerous! Me?”
A breath of breeze fluttered the white gauzy bed hangings. “Do you intend to stay a little boy for the rest of your life?”
“What fool wants to grow old?” And then he remembered what he had been drinking in order to forget. He remembered what he was.
“I can see where the prospect wouldn’t attract you. But not for the reasons you’re thinking.”
“How do you know what I’m thinking?’
“Simple. You found out that if you live, you’ll grow old. So will all the rest of us. What’s so special about you? That it will happen more quickly? You spent all autumn and winter encouraging it to happen very quickly indeed. You don’t want to grow old. You’re very good at being young, and you’ve enjoyed it very much. Eiha, of course you’re good at it—it’s all you’ve ever been. But isn’t that true of everyone?”
“I’m only twenty-three years old—and at forty I’ll be dying!”
“There are choices, you know. You can choose to grow old, and die. You can refuse to grow old, and choose to die. Or you can die, but choose not to grow old. Stop frowning as if you don’t understand me.”
“All I understand is that there is no choice. I’m going to die.” The misery of it was that he’d lost what it felt like to be young. He’d drunk and whored just as he’d always done, but the sensations of true youth were lost to him. Every time he thought they might have returned, he would remember the symbols and the name and the blood on the paper, and Zario’s voice saying he was entitled to the name Shagara.
“Everyone dies. That is a truth. Here’s another: You are what you are, and you will die sooner than you expected. But that’s true of everyone, as well.” She rose from the bed. “No one wants to, everyone does. King of Cazdeyya, peasant farmer in Ghillas, sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih. Whatever you were born, you will die just like everyone else. The only thing you can choose is how old you are when you die. There are people, you know, who are walking around with unlined faces and not a single gray hair who are already quite, quite dead inside.”
True enough, he had to admit. His grandmother had been one of them.
“If you want to be like them, I will send in the biggest jug of wine I can locate, and you can go back to killing yourself. And you will die having been a little boy and an old man, with nothing in between.”
“Dead is dead. Get out.”
She bent her knees and her head, mockingly, and her white skirts sighed across the stone floor.
He waited a long time. She sent no wine to his room. At length he slept, and woke to candlelight, wondering if he’d dreamed the whole thing.
A little boy, an old man . . . and nothing in between.
“I do not belong here,” he said aloud. “This country is not mine. These people are not mine.”
“Next you’ll be whining for your mother.”
His limbs were sluggish, but his mind was not; he recognized Zario Shagara’s voice. Struggling to prop himself on his elbows, he succeeded only in collapsing onto his back once more.
And he could not move his legs at all.
“Calm yourself,” Zario told him. “Don’t fight against the medicine—you’ll only prolong your stay in bed. What all that wine did to your belly and bowels—it was days before the contamination cleared from your body. As for your brain . . .” He folded his arms across his chest, head tilting to one side. “You would know best about that, I suppose.”
Qamar lay back on the white bed, closing his eyes to the sight of the old man who was not truly old.“Now you will tell me she had another vision that led you to me again.”
“In fact, yes. Several of them. Including one that showed you in a palace of the al-Ma’aliq.”
He snorted. “Prove it.”
“She saw a table, and a drawer you opened without a key, and the bag you took from within. Green velvet, stamped in gold with the same leaf carved on your ring.”
“Nonsense.”
“And the necklace you left in its place. She was adamant that we find and retrieve you before you either killed yourself with wine or someone killed you for those rings. It amazes me that they’re still on your hands, considering where you were living.”
“She is the one who needs medication, something to cure outrageous fantasies. It remains, Zario, that I do not belong here. And I do want to go home.”
“It was not just her visions that prompted us to find you.” His eyes gleamed with malicious amusement. “It was the description that reached us of the young al-Ma’aliq sought by his frantic family—including mention of those rings.” He smirked. “Imagine our shock—and our shame that we had not treated a sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih with all due ceremony! We had to have you back, if only to remedy our earlier oversight.” But as Qamar opened his mouth to protest further, Zario pushed himself to his feet and said, “Enough for now. You do not belong here, that is true. But you will not be going home.” He left, and though it was not the austere third-floor room of Qamar’s previous guesting here, it did lock.
This did not particularly impress him. Reaching for his boots, he slipped a hand inside the left one and smiled. The Shagara were indeed honorable people—they had left him his possessions, such as were left of them anyway, and had not even searched them.
Over the next few days as he rested and recovered his full strength—it seemed he was always doing that, these days, and it came to him that he would be doing it more and more as the years went on—he formulated and began implementing his plan. The key he possessed, the key to that other door, was useless in this one, of course. But locks could be persuaded, if one knew the right talishann. From his year in the desert tents he recalled some of them, though too imperfectly to be of use. He remembered a few more from watching Haddiyat rework the protections around the palace. He did have a good brain, when not befuddled with liquor. Yet it seemed during those days, and especially during the nights, when he lay restless and frustrated, that all he really remembered with any clarity were symbols for things that were of absolutely no use to him whatsoever. Safety; clean water; the neverfall used on shelving; wash twice sewn into the corners of his clothes when he was a child because, as his father avowed, he was surely the first place dirt went when looking for a new home . . . After thinking this, he spent a whole hour musing on an entirely new means of employing Shagara talents: tapestries. It was another kind of artwork impractical in the desert, for, like the huge folios of drawings on paper, who would wish to lug such bulky things around? His father’s people were ruthlessly practical. The metals they worked all year, for instance, were made only in the winter camp, where the permanent forge was. Thinking of this, he saw in his mind the talishann for touch-not, which neatly discouraged both curious and careless hands and possible thieves. Yes, very practical, his ancestors.
But nothing was coming to him that he could use right now. He tried to recall the symbols for freedom, liberty, unlock, unbind, open, but none of them coalesced in his mind.
He remembered other talishann, though, the ones he had written on the corners of Ab’ya’s letter to Rihana and Ra’amon. He recognized it now as the first time he’d used his Shagara blood. He was the only one who could conn
ect the arrogant cruelty of Allim’s rule, about which he had heard much in the taverns during the autumn and winter whether he wanted to hear it or not, with that letter. Ab’ya had urged them to serve the land, and Qamar himself had added love and fertility and happiness and fidelity to the paper that had known the touch of his blood, however briefly. Binding on Rihana and Ra’amon, it was useless on Allim.
But none of those signs would help him now.
And then one morning when he woke he had it, and he muffled laughter in his pillow.
The key was brass—not the most potent of metals, but at least it wasn’t iron. First he honed the handle of a spoon by scraping it against the stone walls. When the end of it was thin enough, sharp enough, he used it like a pen to scratch the appropriate lines onto the grip of the key. It was flat, undecorated, and the relatively soft metal responded to the abrasion as iron would not have done. Blessing Acuyib for inspiring the Shagara to make this talishann a simple one of straight lines and no curves, he tried to remember how deeply the work ought to be carved into wind chimes or bowls or hazziri for maximum effect, but could not.
At length he told himself he would have to be satisfied. He used the end of the spoon to prick his little finger and smeared the blood on the sign engraved into the key and then all over the key itself. As he passed his finger over and over the brass, he was reminded of the days spent passing the spoon handle over and over the walls, and how the steady, rhythmic motion had formed a framework for his thoughts.
Or, more accurately, for certain words that he knew now truly had been spoken to him while he was awake, not while he was dreaming. He sucked gently on his finger to bring up just a bit more blood, and heard the words again.
You can choose to grow old, and die.
You can refuse to grow old, and choose to die.
Or you can die, but choose not to grow old.
Crossing the room from the white-draped bed to the door, he slid the key into the lock and began laughing softly to himself.
