Ages of Wonder

by Julie E. Czerneda

  Even so distant, the scent of myrrh made her sick. Nasrah struggled to rise and cried out, cramped legs sending her sprawling across the cushions. Breath hissing through her teeth, she crawled out of the tent to the clean air beyond.

  The air, and the dead.

  Though little time had passed, the sun had already taken its toll on the fallen: blood dried to flakes on skin turned ashy, open eyes clouding as the dry air stole their tears. Beside the tent, her father-in-law lay curled, his bloodied sword beside him, caked in sand. Turning away, Nasrah struggled to her feet. She shut her eyes as she passed the main tent, unable to face what lay behind the women’s shielding curtain where her sisters-in-law had hidden the smallest children.

  She staggered onward. There, by the communal cookfire, lay her husband’s aunt, face obscured by her favorite yellow scarf. There, the youngest of her husband’s brothers, the flesh of his belly opened onto the ground. And there, just where she had last seen him, lay Talib, her husband. First to raise a hand in greeting, and first to fall. Nasrah approached with unsteady steps.

  “Talib . . .” she whispered, dry voice cracking. If he hadn’t been the first, the hateful thought came, she would have fought. She would have been beside him.

  Her hand rose to clutch at her neck where her necklace had once hung, and she felt that she was choking on tears. “Talib, there wasn’t enough for—” She couldn’t say their names: his sisters, his baby nieces and nephews. Not enough smoke to fill the large tent, and not enough time to reach them safely. And the same hot afternoon breeze that tugged at her hair would have whisked the smoke away long before any could breathe it.

  Yet she bowed her head, heavy with sorrow and guilt. “Talib,” she whispered in confession. “I’m with child.” A son who would never know his father.

  And the one who had caused the slaughter of these people and her blood-kin alike hunted her, had writ his name clumsy and large in smoke that still trembled with cries of betrayal and death. She knew not what myrrh-puppet burned incense in the ruins of Irem, only that even a controlled mind could lead her closer to its true master. She would find the person responsible, be he the emperor himself; in body or smoke, he could not hide.

  So she vowed, hands covering her hidden pregnancy. She would not falter.

  And if she shuddered and collapsed, touched Talib’s cooling body and his blood splattered across the gravel—if she threw back her head and wailed into the empty sky—it was only the last of the woman called A’isha, dying in her husband’s arms.

  When the sun set and she rose from the rocky ground, only Nasrah bint Shahin, last daughter of Irem, remained.

  Nasrah left before dawn, whispering prayers of apology for leaving their bodies unburied. She had done what she could, but she was but one woman, and hunted. The attackers had stolen all but two thin, aged camels, and Nasrah took both: one to ride, and one to bear an extra burden of water. She left the familiar ground of the family’s trading route, leaving the shadows of the coastal mountains for the empty desert. Her face and lashes turned white as she crossed the flats, her camels’ feet churning up clouds of chalky powder. She navigated the dunes, hills of sand towering forty man-heights or more, and stumbled through rocky expanses that threatened even the camels’ feet.

  Even with all the water her camels could carry, she sought the wells she knew. Where they were guarded, she disguised her gender and paid, giving her bracelets, her red headscarf, Talib’s pipe. At last she had to trade her second camel for enough food and water to finish her journey.

  Soon, she guided her camel onto the old trading roads, wide trails pounded to rock firmness over centuries. Yet few traveled these routes now, choosing instead to forge more difficult paths to avoid fallen Irem, and she met no other travelers.

  As she rode, Nasrah thought of the camp as she’d left it, the row of bloating bodies and their hideous wounds. She thought of her birth family, the people of her blood destroyed as the earth shook, screaming as the walls fell, vanishing below the sand.

  Night and day she smelled myrrh, and her anger burned hotter than smoke.

  Eight days passed before Nasrah was jarred from her furious remembrances by sight of a familiar ridge of limestone. Turning her camel, she hurried to the site, then fell to her knees and dug. Few had known of these places, fewer still among women, yet Shahin al-Adi had shown each of his daughters. Any who worked the smoke, he said, needed to know these places.

  Nasrah trembled with fatigue before she uncovered one of the great stone vats, forgotten beneath the sand. The harvest had been stored here, frankincense of the finest quality hidden safely until it went to market. She forced aside the lid and filled her dress with chunks of the pale resin, and something inside her eased: if not the anger, then the fear that had laced it. She would not return to her city—or find the ones who hid in its ruins—unarmed.

  Nasrah made a hasty camp, eating strips of dried fish before pitching a shelter of scarves and curling in their shade. Come nightfall, she would approach what was left of the city’s walls, shrouded by darkness and sleep. She tried clear her mind of all but the tasks to come, yet memories of her home intruded. For the first time in years, she thought of the date groves planted at the city’s heart by the Temple, kept green by water drawn from the great cavern below the city. There had been music and morning calls to market as the city’s gates were opened to let traders enter. As a child, she’d lived immersed in Irem’s riches: gold and cinnamon and cassia, silk and red Parthian pottery. Each day had smelled of frankincense, the resin’s sweetness so constant that she only noticed its lack.

  But for all those bright years, it was still the final days of Irem that remained vivid. Her father’s last words seemed to echo around her.

  Run, he’d screamed as he threw her over Irem’s outer wall. Hide! Nasrah had hit the hard ground and rolled as the earth shook beneath her. She’d looked back, expecting to see her sisters following, her father and brother climbing the wall; yet saw only the great spire of the Temple shudder and slowly fall. Nasrah hid her face in her dress from the cloud of dust and rock, but mere cloth could not shield her from the sounds: a city screaming, earth and golden stone breaking as the City of Pillars tumbled into the ground.

  Nasrah had hidden in the ruins of an outer tower as the few survivors pulled themselves from the ruins. But they were normal people, and Nasrah’s calls into the smoke went unanswered. Many of the caravans camped beyond the city’s walls fled after the earthquake, making signs against evil when the wounded begged for help or shelter. The very earth moved against the people of Ad, the traders said, their voices harsh; the lake in the vast cavern beneath the city had run dry in a day. Irem had been cursed and cast down; they would not bring that fate on their own.

  In the tower’s shadows, Nasrah had known that their words were true. Yet she alone smelled the evidence in the smoke, the scent that curled through the dust that choked the air and shadowed the sun: myrrh. Earth and water had turned against them, but only, she knew, at the hands of the Romans. Strange foreigners who wielded their smoke clumsily, the Romans were said to have other powers: mages who could control earth and water alike, gathered in their conquest of kingdoms and yoked to their empire’s will with myrrh.

  When at last she stumbled from the city, the sands around Irem were empty. With little food or water, she’d only managed a day’s travel down the trade roads before collapsing. It was only chance that the young son of a trader saw her huddled form, and the grace of the divine that brought his family to care for her, treat her, until she returned to health.

  Talib, she thought, and covered her growing belly with her hands.

  Nasrah awoke to the sudden press of a hand across her face. She started upwards, thrashing and disoriented, but a man pushed down on her shoulders while his hand silenced her cries. Chewing, the camel watched dispassionately. She fought wildly, cursing herself for falling asleep, yet even against her nails and flailing arms the man stood unmoving. At last, Nasrah still
ed, letting him haul her to her feet. At the sight of his weathered face, hope withered; she did not know him.

  Yet it was the man who waited some steps distant that made Nasrah freeze like prey. Neither tall nor imposing, he stood like royalty, watching her. His head was covered with a pale cloth bound with a brown band, and the trailing edges had been drawn across his face, leaving only his eyes exposed. Yet even so disguised, the man could not hide his heritage. Burned and peeling, his skin was too pale for a man of the desert; the nose that shaped the fabric too sharp and aquiline. Most startling was the color of his eyes: a brown so pale it rivaled the desert, flecked with green.

  Roman, she named him, and spat on the sand at his feet.

  The desert man struck her face with a closed fist and she fell, ears roaring.

  A trap, she thought, struggling to think through the furious sound, struggling to breathe. A trap, all of it—the murders a ploy designed to make her seek the power and protection of the smoke. This Roman would have seen her frankincense burn through the smoke as surely as she’d seen his plume of myrrh—he had been watching, waiting. And, armed only with incense and a knife, she had run straight to him.

  He killed them, she thought, tasting bile. He had killed them all.

  She looked up in time to see the Roman flick a dismissive hand, and speak. His words might have been unintelligible, but his meaning was not; she had a moment to steel herself before the other man’s hands were upon her, dragging her upright and searching her clothes. Her face flushed hot, and she turned her head away from the men, jaw tight. He was efficient, finding the chunks of frankincense hidden inside the layered fabric of her dress and rolled into her sleeves, and tossing them into the Roman’s outstretched hands.

  Nasrah whimpered, reaching unbidden for the incense. The Roman snorted and turned, trusting the other man to bring her. Still reeling, Nasrah staggered behind as they traveled across the sand. The sun had all but vanished before they crested a last rise and Nasrah’s ruined city lay before them.

  There were no towers now to mark Irem’s presence, only empty space where the spires and pillared buildings had once risen above the desert like a sultan’s palace. The city’s great wall was but a tumbled-down ring of yellow stones; and where the caravans had gathered, tents and camels spread out from the city like a sea, there was only sand.

  Nasrah stumbled, staring at the hole where once stood her home. Though sand had covered most of the city’s surviving walls, the empty space still gaped wide as the day she’d first seen it, as if having devoured all of Irem it struggled to swallow more. The Roman laughed at Nasrah’s expression, and gestured widely towards the city as if towards strange riches. Still laughing, he led the way across ground pounded flat by untold centuries of tents, traders, and camels’ feet, to a small camp hidden just inside the ruins of the great wall.

  “Sit,” the desert man commanded her, pushing her to the ground. Traitor, she named him in the depths of her mind. She could smell no myrrh on him, and yet he worked as the Roman’s guide, had allowed this enemy to cross the sands where no foreign foot had before stepped. He knelt, and carefully lit a small fire, already set, to help stave off the desert’s creeping cold.

  Yet it was not only against the cold that the fire burned, Nasrah saw, watching as the Roman locked away her frankincense in a wooden box, and filled his hands with deep amber pieces of myrrh. He placed the largest piece in a stone dish lined with wood chips that he lit from the open flame. Smoke curled upwards and he quickly blew it across her face. As myrrh filled her lungs, the Roman attacked through the smoke.

  Nasrah pulled back in surprise. She had heard of the crudeness of control gained with myrrh-smoke and the fumbling skill with which the Romans employed it, but never had she imagined anything so primitive. The pressure of the smoke against her mind had power, yes, but no smoothness, no subtlety. Mere noise where she’d expected song.

  She looked up at this man, the creases of concentration between his pale eyes, the rawness of his sunburned skin. It took no blood-talent to wield myrrh, she remembered; only practice. And it seemed clear that this Roman had never been submitted to the daily tests she had endured, the constant smoke-borne struggle of wills between sisters to decide who would sweep the hearth and who would steep tea, which one of them would mend the clothing while another got first use of the washwater.

  If he wanted her to submit, she thought, he would be better served to bind her with rope. Yet she let her eyes go wide and pushed back through the smoke, pitiful struggles, while in truth she held his invasion at bay. She fought briefly, in body and smoke, and then sagged in the traitor’s arms. The Roman’s smoke enveloped her, bitter myrrh in every breath.

  “You stay,” the Roman commanded in his halting attempt at her language. “You listen only to me. Only.”

  “Yes,” Nasrah said, nodding weakly.

  With this, the questioning began. Though the traitor was forced to translate, the Roman seemed to follow her responses, watching intently. Where she could, Nasrah told the truth or feigned ignorance of matters usually kept from women. She spoke of frankincense groves and trading routes, the resin’s price at market. She spoke of the talent of smoke, the exercises and tests to hone the inborn skill—practiced by her father and brother, she said, but never herself. Never her sisters.

  She grew confused when he spoke of spies, frightened when he pressed for details of the men of Ad, disguised as merchants and traders, scattered across his empire. He tested her truthfulness and the smoke’s control, and Nasrah danced on blade’s edge to hide her deception. The questions seemed endless, yet at last the Roman was satisfied. He sighed, then asked, “Do you have children?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Are you with child?”

  “No.”

  At this, the Roman muttered something and leaned back, shaking his head.

  “She lies,” the desert man said, once more a traitor. Nasrah flushed, suddenly remembering the feel of his hands searching her dress and her body beneath.

  “A lie?” the Roman asked haltingly in her tongue, his accent mangling the words. A hint of a smile touched his face. “You fight the smoke. Your blood is strong. Powerful.”

  “I don’t—” she began, but he brushed the words away.

  “Frankincense. The empire needs this power.” As he spoke, he placed another chip of myrrh in the dish.

  Pretenses dropping, Nasrah’s voice twisted with scorn. “You can’t learn it, Roman, and you can’t steal it from blood.”

  “No?” the Roman asked, and gestured to her midsection.

  “No! Not my son—” Nasrah choked into silence as the Roman lit the resin and it burst into flame, smoke billowing into her face.

  She pulled back, blinking, as the men’s faces, Irem’s crumbling walls, seemed suddenly to spin and sway around her. She did not fight but reached out, fingers grasping empty air.

  “You are young,” the Roman said, smiling as he wafted more smoke towards her. “Your first child, yes? You will have more.”

  Again, the Roman blew bitter myrrh in her face, drowning her senses, stinging her eyes and her throat. Nasrah coughed and inhaled. She could feel the Roman’s sudden press upon her mind, his presence closer than the smoke that swirled between them. The sickening scent surrounded her, sharp and spicy, and her body began to shake as it filled her.

  Eyes wide, Nasrah opened her mouth to scream, to cry—

  But there was only myrrh.

  It was full dark before the Roman at last settled down to sleep, gesturing for the desert man to keep watch. Nasrah listened as the traitor’s steps receded, listened as the Roman’s breathing slowed, listened to the fire popping in the silence of the desert night.

  Then slowly, Nasrah pushed herself upright and rolled her shoulders to loosen them of the tension from her feigned tremors. Only myrrh, she thought; and the Roman was not the only one to lay traps. She looked down at his naked face, then reached into her clothing, fingers seeking hidden se
ams while the fire before her crackled and burned.

  “You know little of frankincense, Roman,” Nasrah said at last, her voice quiet enough to be the play of wind across sand. “We of Irem, we were born of it: we inhale it in our first breath and our spirits ride its smoke after death. The first harvest of the resin—it comes as a shock. A blade from nowhere, a gash in smooth bark, sap dripping like tears.”

  With a flick of her wrist, she cast a handful of what seemed to be small stones towards the fire. They pattered to the desert sand like rain. “The second cut opens that old wound. The resin runs stronger, faster, more plentifully during the second harvest—but its quality is not the same.”

  She barely moved, and yet again there came a sound of something falling to the ground—larger pieces, this time, and more of them. “But the third . . . the tree’s third harvest needs not cut long nor deep, and yet from that slice comes the finest resin. Smoke fit for the sultan, the smallest piece worth more than gold.”

  And again her hand flashed from the shadows of her sleeve, and tossed something into the stones ringing the fire. As she watched, it began to smoke. “You killed my family,” Nasrah bint Shahin said. “You turned your mages against us, cast our city into the sand, then hunted the gift of our blood nearly to extinction.”

  She looked up and stared into the Roman’s slumbering face, his features made harsh in the fire’s light. “You killed my husband. You killed his family down to the smallest child, and they knew nothing of our war. You ruined what joy I’d found.”

  From all around the fire, tiny shapes that had seemed to be stone suddenly smoldered red, wisps of white rising from their pale surfaces.

  “But now, Roman, you threaten my son.” Nasrah shook her head slowly, one steady hand resting across her belly. “I will not let you take him.”