Heart of Flame

by Janine Ashbless

  He lifted an eyebrow. “It doesn’t, in a sense. But we strive to complete our knowledge, and to have a book with all riddles but one answered…” He shook his head, pulling an expression of dismay.

  “Why haven’t you sent to this man before?” Taqla asked, more suspiciously.

  “Ah. Well, he has a reputation. Not a good one, you see. He lives in the ruins of Taysafun and things are said of him that mean most of my messengers wouldn’t care to find him. But you two…you are not frightened of such things, are you? You know how to protect yourselves.”

  “He’s a sorcerer,” concluded Rafiq grimly.

  “He is usually titled a Seer, though perhaps it’s the same thing in the end. It may all be nonsense of course. But it’s better not to talk about these things too openly, as you know.”

  “And…Taysafun? What’s that?” asked Taqla.

  Rafiq could answer that one. “It’s the old Persian capital. I’ve travelled past it on the road south—it was abandoned when Baghdad was built, wasn’t it?”

  Ibn-Ishaq inclined his head. “Much of the stonework used to build the City of Peace came from that place.”

  Rafiq looked at Taqla. “What do you think, Zahir—another few days? It won’t make that much difference, will it?”

  Taqla didn’t answer for a moment. She didn’t like the sound of this at all. Sorceress herself, she had never encountered another of her sort, other than her father, and had no great desire to cross swords with one. But, she reasoned, what would Rafiq do without her, if there was some magical danger? If she didn’t aid him then he might have to give up his quest. She sighed. “What’s this man’s name?” she asked. “And what else can you tell us about him?”

  Daylight showed Ahleme the glittering vertiginous extent of her prison, but brought no relief. No visitors either, and no fresh food or drink. She huddled in the centre of her bed where she felt least dizzy and wondered if she was being starved into submission or simply left to die. She hoped Zubaida might remember and have mercy, but those hopes bore no fruit. On the second day, after a night full of terrible dreams, she lost her temper and hurled a big silver ewer at a glass pillar, screaming her frustration and fear at the top of her lungs.

  “What do you want?”

  Ahleme turned swiftly. If her outburst had had any goal, it had certainly not been this—to summon Yazid. He stood with arms folded, his mouth a grim line. She drew herself up defiantly, licking her cracked lips. She’d knotted her torn clothing together into a semblance of propriety and she was determined he wouldn’t have the joy of seeing her intimidated. But she couldn’t bring any words to her lips.

  “Well? Did you have something to say to me? What do you want?”

  “Take me home,” she said through gritted teeth.

  He laughed without any pretense at humor. “Your conversation is repetitive, Flower of the Earth. You waste my time.” He lifted his hand.

  “Water,” she said quickly, suddenly scared that he was about to leave.

  “What?”

  “I’m thirsty,” she admitted.

  Yazid’s eyebrows lifted derisively, and in a flash of panic Ahleme’s voice broke free.

  “That’s your plan, is it—starve me until I’m too weak to resist?” She would have spat if she’d had enough moisture in her parched mouth. “And to think we are told the Djinn are a proud race! You stoop lower than a dog.”

  “Starve you?” he growled.

  She kicked an empty pitcher across the floor and said bitterly, “God curse you for your cruelty.” She fully expected the djinni to fly into another rage, and in all honesty didn’t care, but there was only silence in answer to her invective. Yazid’s mouth opened but no sound came out, and at that moment Ahleme was smitten by a horrible suspicion.

  “You do know that we die if we don’t drink?” she asked.

  Yazid’s eyes flickered. “Of course I do.” He made a hurried movement with his hand and a goblet carved of amber appeared at her feet, brimming with clear liquid. Ahleme couldn’t help the little whimper that slipped from her lips. When she stooped to pick it up, she could smell the faint sweet odour of roses. She hesitated, a part of her convinced that this was a trick and that he would steal the drink away as quickly as he had offered it, but as the cup touched her lips, she felt cool, clean water flavored with petals wash over her tongue and down her throat like a blessing. She buried her face in the cup and slithered to her knees, and even after she had drained it it was a while before she lifted her head again.

  “What’s wrong with your eyes?” grumbled Yazid.

  “They’re trying to cry,” she whispered, “but I’ve wept so much that I can’t anymore.”

  He twitched his shoulders and turned to pace up and down the rug. “Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked. “Are you so arrogant that this is worth it?”

  “Arrogant?” She was confounded by the accusation.

  “Do you really think you’re too good for me?”

  “Too good?” Ahleme blinked. She could not have felt less arrogant. She felt like a piece of soiled laundry that had been beaten to rags on a riverbank.

  “Look at you—your red eyes, your grubby skin, your hair—” He grimaced. “What a mess you look! Is this the best Humankind has to offer?”

  She nearly smiled. “You’re not seeing me at my best.” Then, as he took a few steps toward her, she added warningly, “or my worst.” A seam appeared down the centre of her forehead, the skin drawing back to reveal the raw bone beneath. Yazid recoiled, and as he retreated to a safe distance, Ahleme relaxed, letting her skin repair itself. She tried to hide the trembling of her limbs.

  “You think you can beat me,” he growled.

  I’m sure I can’t, she thought bleakly, and shook her head. She’d had plenty of time to imagine how it was going to go. I am just putting it off—until the moment you really lose your temper.

  “You want to humiliate me.”

  She winced. “No.”

  “You want a Son of Fire to bow his head to a Daughter of Earth so that all the world may mock us once more.”

  “No! I don’t want to do anything to you. I just want to go home.”

  “Well, I will not let any mortal put their foot upon my neck!” He stooped to thrust his face closer to hers, his teeth bared.

  “Just listen—”

  He swept a hand toward her, and instantly they were both elsewhere. Outside. The sky yawed around her on all sides—above and below—and it was cold, so cold, colder than she had ever been in her whole life. Wind tore at her clothes. Her breath froze in her lungs as she drew it in, then fell in a glittering shower of ice as she exhaled. She looked down and saw a narrow curved bridge of pale blue glass beneath her feet, and below that, hundreds and hundreds of feet below, a savage mountain slope with reddish rock walls almost too steep for the snow that clung there. They were standing on the outside of the glass palace. Her bare feet skidded from beneath her and she fell flat with a shriek, spreading arms and legs, trying desperately to cling to the icy surface of the glass even though it was so frigid that it hurt to touch it. She screamed with terror.

  “Not so arrogant now, Daughter of Earth?”

  Twisting her head, Ahleme saw Yazid standing there as calmly as if in a garden, his bare feet firm on the glass. She stretched out her hand and seized his ankle. It felt warm and solid and she grabbed the other one too, sobbing with fear. Hauling herself across the treacherous glass, she clung to his knees, her mouth open and her tears freezing upon her cheeks.

  “That’s right.” He scooped her up beneath the arms to pull her upright against him, and she flung her arms around his waist. He didn’t have to hold her, in fact he put his fists on his hips to make this quite clear. “I’m quite good enough for you now, aren’t I? Suddenly you’re more than happy to embrace me, I see.”

  Ahleme mashed her face to his bare chest and drew her first breath that wasn’t a scream. He was solid and he was warm and that was all that mattered t
o her.

  “You think you are so brave, so grand, defying me? Look at you! You are a slave of terror, a mewling wingless thing that cannot fly, only fall. Pathetic! You are nothing! Even to me you are nothing, you know. Your beauty—hah!—there are Djinn women who burn like the sun compared to you. Listen to me, Daughter of Earth, you are nothing to me. Only the son you will bear me matters.”

  Ahleme managed to raise her head. She looked into his angry, triumphant face and weighed his words against her fear. Then she pushed herself to arm’s length, took two steps backward and, her eyes still locked on his, stepped off the edge of the glass and fell.

  She didn’t scream as she plunged through the thin mountain air. Not until Yazid, appearing out of nowhere, caught her in his arms hundreds of feet below, did she scream—and then she only let out one cry as all the breath left her lungs.

  In an instant they were back in her room, standing on her rumpled bed.

  “Why?” he shouted. “Why did you do that?”

  Ahleme raised her stiff hands before her face, starting to gasp as she tasted the warm air, starting to shake as the terror flailed about within her. She lost all control of her limbs, trembling wildly and collapsing in his grasp. Yazid held her only briefly before shrinking away and laying her upon the coverlet where she curled up into a knot. His hand hovered over her hair but his face was a mask in which horror dominated. His rage collapsed in on itself.

  “You must never do that,” he whispered. “Never.” Then he reached under the bed, pulling out a great length of golden chain, arm after arm of it. It had a thick coil of gold at one end, and he prised this open with his fingers and clasped it about her ankle, bending the metal to tighten it again. Ahleme was incapable even of protesting. “You must not fall,” he told her.

  She shut her eyes. If he had chosen to ravish her at that moment, she wouldn’t have resisted because she was still looking her death in the face and the enormity of it made everything else unimportant. But he only sat and watched her, his mouth twisted and his eyes burning, until she finally stopped spasming with terror and merely shook with cold.

  “You should bathe,” he said then, standing to point out a sunken bath that had not previously been there. Its scented waters steamed. Beside it a low table was spread with a hot meal—cucumbers stuffed with lamb mince and rice, and a jug of heated wine.

  In the moment it took for Ahleme to look that way, he vanished.

  The chain was precisely judged, it turned out when she dragged herself to the waters. Long enough to let her bathe and move about the room, not long enough to let her approach the edges of her prison cell or throw herself off. Her one chance at escape, bleak as it was, had been lost.

  Chapter Seven

  In which one woman sees her future and another learns of the past.

  They had to leave Baghdad, through the Bab al-Basra and across the lower bridge, on foot so as not to excite comment, and for the same reason they spent most of the day walking southward along the road beside the eastern bank of the Tigris, through fields and over the bridges of irrigation canals, under the nodding heads of shaduf poles and the dusty fronds of date palms and the cloudless blue sky. A dry breeze blew steadily and made the heat bearable. There were many small villages visible on the flat plain, set among the green of the fields.

  “Have you noticed that as we get farther away from the city, the villages have become walled?” Rafiq pointed out in the afternoon. “There must be something out here they fear.” He was accustomed to walking alongside camel caravans and seemed tireless. Taqla, who was not used to marching far and whose feet were aching, merely grunted.

  Soon after that they came to the edge of the fields. The road continued across the plain with the mounded bank of the Tigris visible to their right as usual, but the canals they crossed were no longer maintained and were full only of cracked mud, and the flat silt beneath their feet played host only to long weeds and thorny bushes. The change to the landscape was quite abrupt. Soon afterward the road swung away in a great curve in order to avoid running into an area of mounded banks and crumbled walls that sat hard by the river. This, they had been told, was the remains of the ruined city of Taysafun.

  “Should we leave it till morning?” Taqla wondered as they gazed across at the blank-eyed windows and the broken domes visible even from here. It was late afternoon and the shadows were already lengthening.

  “Another day? What are you worried about?”

  “I don’t know. Bandits maybe. Evil things are drawn to deserted houses and old ruins.”

  Rafiq pulled a face. “Well, if we camp here, we’re very exposed. And bandits are likely to be keeping an eye on the road, if anything.”

  She worried that the normally fearless Zahir had lost face. They compromised by mounting the Horse Most Swift for the final approach to Taysafun’s most obvious gate. It was only as they drew close that Taqla realized the scale on which these remnants were built. This city must have been in its time almost as imposing as Baghdad, and when the shattered façade of the palace came into view over the lesser rooflines, the gaping barrel vault of its central chamber, as empty as a throat, yawned wide as if it wanted to swallow the rest of the city whole.

  Rafiq made an instinctive gesture to ward off evil and Taqla secretly reached into a pouch and slipped a couple of her rings onto her fingers, wedging them as far down as Zahir’s thick masculine knuckles would allow.

  “This isn’t a pleasant place,” said Rafiq in a low voice as they began their exploration on foot, passing the smoke-scorched doorway of a guardhouse. Under their feet, hardened silt from some past flood smothered the streets and thresholds, rendering most doorways so low they would have to stoop to enter. The scuffing of their sandals sounded hollow as it echoed from the silent walls. Although the sun hadn’t yet set, darkness had already invaded the interiors of the buildings and lurked in the depths of alleyways. It wasn’t hard to imagine that there were watchers hiding just out of sight in the shadows, and once imagined, the fancy was impossible to dismiss.

  They’d been told that Safan the Seer made his dwelling in the ruin of the Fire Temple, and since such things were usually built on mounds, they made for the highest areas of ground they could spot, as well as they could through the maze of unfamiliar streets. The ground plan of Taysafun was nearly as bad as that of Dimashq, so Taqla let her instincts lead her steps, trying to ignore the itch between her shoulder blades that insisted she turn around now and catch whoever—or whatever—it was spying upon them. It was a successful tactic, or at least when the sun finally dipped behind the western wall and the clamor of brass being struck over and over broke out from the top of an embankment, they found themselves quite close to the source of the noise.

  It was a man, as they’d hoped. A skinny man clad in tattered rags standing upon a mound of rubble, arms swinging over his head, banging a ladle against a brass serving dish. He didn’t seem to notice them as they toiled up the slope toward him, but he was making a great deal of noise, not just his percussion but his cries, “Come on! Come on, pets! Time to eat!” his face tilted to the sky all the time. Taqla squinted up, expecting to see pigeons, but the heavens were empty of all but the red-brown stain of dust hanging over the horizon. At last he fell silent, his arms dropping to his sides.

  “Peace be upon you, Grandfather. Who are you calling to?”

  Rafiq’s calm question took the old man rather by surprise. Taqla’s shock was a great deal worse however, when he dropped his face from the broad sky overhead and tilted it in their direction. “Who’s asking?” he rasped. “Who’s asking?”

  He was blind, but not just blind. His eyelids had been sewn shut with sinew, the stitches angled like bird tracks across the withered leather of his face. Taqla tried not to cringe. Rafiq’s expression merely stiffened. A travelled man, no doubt he was more used to life’s variform cruelties.

  “I apologise,” he said. “We didn’t mean to startle you. I’m—”

  Taqla laid a hand
on his arm and shook her head. He caught her meaning.

  “—hoping that you’re the famous seer Safan. We’ve come a long way to ask your advice.”

  “Famous, am I?” He scrambled down over the broken stones, homing in on Rafiq’s voice, feeling his way with cracked and yellowing feet that were missing several toes. Altogether he was the filthiest, boniest beggar Taqla had ever laid eyes on, almost an animate skeleton, but he moved quickly despite his blindness and the heavy pot in his off hand. He slithered up to Rafiq and lifted a hand to touch his chest and then his face. Taqla saw her companion steel himself not to recoil.

  “Come miles to see me,” Safan crooned, stroking his fingers across Rafiq’s features. “A travelling man, companion of the road.”

  Taqla felt the hairs on her neck prickle. Companion was the literal meaning of Rafiq’s name. He smiled uneasily.

  “The road is good for you, isn’t it?” Safan cackled. “Never the end, just the journey. You’d fuck without coming if you had the choice, wouldn’t you?”

  Taqla let out a hiss at the obscenity. Rafiq’s lips tightened to a hard line.

  “And who are you companion to?” Safan turned his attention to Taqla, groping toward her. She noticed the only point of color on his grimy form—a blue scarab beetle strung on a thong about his neck—before she shut her eyes as the filthy fingertips and the ragged nails swept her skin. The old man stank worse than a he-goat. “Oh no. He’s definitely the handsome one,” the seer announced, jerking his chin at Rafiq. “What a disappointment. Still, can’t expect two of a kind, can I?” He grinned widely at Taqla, revealing brown teeth and black gums. “Pestle or mortar, my little chick,” he mocked. “Have you made up your mind which you are yet?”

  Taqla went cold. The world seemed to lurch. This old man was a sorcerer for certain, and with instincts sharper than anything she herself could aspire to. She suddenly knew she was in real danger here of being revealed and she had to fight to conceal her fear. “Who were you calling, Grandfather?” she said with silky politeness.