Heart of Flame

by Janine Ashbless

  Yazid tightened his lips, but she could see the satisfaction in his eyes. “Now I will sit with you on the bed,” he announced. His refusal even to pretend to ask her permission didn’t escape Ahleme’s notice.

  “Sit where you wish,” she said softly, rising to her feet. “And I will stand at the end of my chain.”

  Yazid paced past her to the bed and mounted it as if it were a throne, sitting cross-legged. Ahleme tried to walk away but nearly fell over. Her ankle chain had shortened to a single link, pinning her to the bed frame. For a second she nearly panicked. “Is this the next stage of my bondage?” she snapped over her shoulder.

  “It is a joke,” he replied silkily. “You said the end of your chain. You didn’t say how long that would be.”

  She pulled a face. Then it occurred to her that she had better sit down because, as she stood there, his face would be on a level with the twin cheeks of her silk-swathed bottom and there was nothing she could do to stop him looking. So she sat on the edge of the bed, thinking that at least he was only facing the back of her head now.

  “Shall we play chess?” A small table appeared by her knee with a chess set upon it. Ahleme jumped slightly. She found things blinking into existence profoundly unsettling. But Yazid just reclined on his elbow so that he could stretch out a hand to the board and set the pieces back to their starting positions. Of course, in doing so he had to reach past her hip and his forearm strayed dangerously near to her bare skin.

  “You are so powerful,” she said to distract him. “Is there anything you cannot do?”

  “Of course. There are limits.” He sounded unusually somber. His fingers set the ebony Shah upright. “No one is omnipotent but God. But by your standards the limits are few.”

  “Then why don’t you make yourself a golden Ahleme?” she asked, her voice wobbling a little. “She would do anything you wanted her to.”

  “And could she bear me a child?”

  “You could always marry a djinniya.”

  “Anyway,” he went on as if she hadn’t answered. “I don’t want your obedience.”

  “No?” She didn’t hide her disbelief.

  “No. You start.”

  Ahleme shifted a pawn into a standard opening move without thinking about it. “Yes, master,” she said sarcastically.

  Yazid was certainly in an unusual mood. He didn’t seem to notice her snippiness and he kept his voice low and even. “I want you to love me. Passionately. As your body was shaped to do.”

  Ahleme closed her eyes for a moment. “I can’t do that. I’ve told you.”

  He jumped a knight over the forward rank of pawns. “Would it help if I looked different?” he asked, his gaze drifting up from the chessboard, over the indent of her waist and the swell of her breast and the delicate angle of her cheek. “I can, you know. I can look like anyone you want.”

  “No,” said Ahleme quickly before she could dwell on this thought, “it wouldn’t make any difference.”

  “Not if I looked like the caliph?” His smile was a little wicked. “Would you not find it easy to love me then?” In a twinkling his body warped and shrank. Suddenly there lay on the bed next to her, not a brawny semi-naked djinni, but a middle-aged man in cloth-of-gold clothes, with a narrow foxy face and clever eyes, his long beard speckled with gray hairs.

  “No!” she squeaked, shocked. Then, unable to help herself, “Is that what he looks like?”

  “Caliph Al-Ma’mun, Commander of all the Faithful.” His voice was unchanged, and it sounded even deeper coming from that incongruous frame. “Doesn’t he inspire you with flames of passion?”

  “Stop it,” she said, twisting her hands together, before remembering to add, “please.”

  “What about this?” His next transformation was even more disconcerting. He became an amber-skinned youth, younger than she was, with black ringlets and full lips and poetic, indolent eyes. “Am I not beautiful?”

  “Please!” she gasped. “Go back to your own shape!”

  “You’d prefer that?”

  “Yes!”

  He switched back at once, his irises bleaching from black to white in a single heartbeat. His lips moved to a smirk, but those eyes were almost anxious. “I’m not so unpleasing to your eyes then?”

  “No,” she admitted, biting her full lower lip. Of course he wasn’t displeasing. He was handsome enough, in a brutish, overwhelming way. It just took some getting used to, that was all. And he wasn’t what she’d dreamed of in a man, all her fervent virginal years. Her shadowy ideal had always had fine features and a certain athletic suppleness—like that man Rafiq the Traveller, she thought distractedly, only younger. Closer to her own age. “Is it your real shape?” she asked, suddenly suspicious.

  “It’s my own shape when I’m here,” he said. “In other places I take forms appropriate.”

  “Other places?”

  “We’re not confined to the surface of the Earth as you are. I could take you to so many…” His voice sank. “I could show you sights you’ve never seen, lands you’ve never dreamed of treading.” He sounded almost wistful.

  “That wouldn’t require much,” she sighed.

  “Then let me.” He sat up sharply, looming in over her shoulder to put out his hand for hers. So close to begging permission of her, his discomfort revealed itself in the drawing back of his lips, a flash of fire in his eyes. The sharp points of his incisors served Ahleme as a belated reminder of the horror of her situation. She looked down at his open palm over her smooth thigh and noted the curved claws that tipped his fingers. If he gripped her hard, he could rip her open, she thought, her mouth drying. She shrank away minutely.

  “No. Please don’t. No more.”

  For a moment shadows chased across his skin and she thought he was going to explode, but he swallowed hard and held his temper. “Then let me touch you,” he said, drawing one finger across the small of her back.

  “No, not again—” she whispered.

  “Your beauty drives me mad with love.” His breath was hot on her bare shoulder. “I’ve watched you and watched you, and wanted so much to—” He sensed her flinching. “Are you still frightened? Don’t you want to be loved like this?”

  “Don’t,” she whimpered. It couldn’t be mistaken for a command. His lips brushed her shoulder, silk on silk.

  “Then play chess with me,” he whispered, the purr of his voice igniting little flashes of sensation across her skin, “and the moment you win, then I will leave you in peace. Hm?” When she made no answer, he reclined on his elbow again, so close to her that she could feel the radiant warmth of his body. “Your move.”

  It was a slim chance of a dignified way out of her situation, but it had to be seized. Ahleme knew she wasn’t bad at chess—often it was the only way to pass the long hours in the palace, even if she had no outstanding talent. She narrowed her eyes and considered the pieces, finally making a move.

  Unhurriedly, Yazid reached past her for his rook. But when he withdrew his hand, he placed it on the small of her back. Ahleme jumped a little.

  “Please don’t touch me,” she said in a small voice. “It’s distracting.”

  He chuckled, and his teasing fingertips withdrew. There was the faintest hiss of skin on silk, and a long exhalation of breath from behind her. Ahleme’s eyes widened. Recent experience was branded on her mind. “Please don’t do that either,” she whispered.

  “You said not to touch you. It’s hardly fair to stipulate what else I might touch. Your move.”

  They played in silence for a few moves—or near silence, anyway. Ahleme was torn between wanting to win and wanting to get her moves done quickly. The quicker the better, she told herself. Yazid was more leisurely. Of course, in every way it was in his interests to play for as long as possible. Her one advantage was that his chess moves were unfocused and grew more so as his breathing became irregular. She heard the click of his tongue as he moistened his dry lips.

  “Check,” she whispered. Without a
word he rose to press his face to her back, his lips to her skin. Ahleme stiffened, pulled away and half-turned to snap a warning, frightened glare at him, and at once Yazid fell back on the bed, his eyes fixed on her and aglow with need.

  She looked. She shouldn’t have done, but she did, the merest glance down to his groin. He was still clothed, for which she was profoundly grateful. His fingers rested over his lower belly, frozen in mid-caress. Quite visible under the silk was the bulk of his arousal, outlined by the sheen of the silk, flat against his belly, straight as a beam, and to Ahleme’s inexperienced eyes, improbably large. She clenched her jaw and tried to turn away, but somehow couldn’t stop looking.

  Yazid’s fingers strayed to the drawstring of his shalwar. He cleared his throat. “Take this,” he said huskily.

  She shook her head, pressing her lips together.

  “Oh, come on, my virgin princess. Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know what you do to me?” He traced his length reverently with his fingers, and it twitched beneath the silk, making the breath catch in Ahleme’s throat.

  He was right of course. She was horribly, shamefully curious. Like every other young woman of rank, she’d seen pictures in instructional books intended to prepare girls for their marriage duties, but those tiny painted miniatures with their garden settings and their sharp outlines and their convolutions of limbs seemed to bear no relation to this, here now, so simple and huge and solid. The suggestion that this was her doing, that this was some sort of power she had over him, squirmed deep in her belly. She felt too hot all of a sudden, despite her scanty clothes.

  “Have you seen this before?” His voice was husky.

  Her chin jerked to signify no.

  “You’re cruel, my princess. You torment me like this, then you do nothing to comfort me.” Despite his mass and his muscle, he seemed oddly vulnerable and exposed, lying down while she sat at his side, hip to hip. He was laid out for her scrutiny. She couldn’t help wondering what he would feel like under her hands if she ran them over that smooth torso. Were his muscles as hard as they looked? Would that rippled stomach resist the pressure of her fingers? Would his—?

  She caught the illegitimate thought and in a panic squashed it, flushing. But she didn’t look away.

  Slowly, watching her face for reaction, Yazid wrapped the end of the drawstring tie around two of his fingers, turn after turn. Then he began to pull. The silk string went taut then lengthened. Knots popped. Suddenly the generous gathered material about his waist was free, and loose enough for him to draw the cloth down, revealing himself.

  “There. That’s what you do to me, Flower of the Earth.”

  His fingers looked pale against the iron-gray flush of his flesh. Ahleme’s mouth had gone dry. He looked… Muscular was the only way she could put it. Like the neck of a proud stallion, it invited her touch. She curled her fingers into a fist. It fascinated her. She could feel somewhere deep in her mind things shifting about, pieces sliding into place, doors opening—a mystery had been revealed at last. She needed time to take this new knowledge into her soul.

  “Want to touch it?” Yazid’s hand moved as if he were caressing a small but strong animal. He shifted his shoulders and gray shadows flickered up his torso from his crotch to his ribs. “Do you want to find out how hard it is? How much it wants to be inside you?”

  The manifest impossibility of something that size fitting into any woman almost made her laugh—it seemed like another limb. She bit her lip. He reached out his left hand and trailed the back of his knuckles over her thigh. His right hand moved upon himself, up and down, up and down.

  “Then just let me look at you,” he rasped. She licked her lips. For some reason this made him groan. “Let me…let me…” His eyes looked dark and his throat was marbled with blue. “Oh God—touch me…” And that couldn’t be taken for anything other than a plea. Ahleme was moved almost to pity.

  Her hand was moved by something else though, a curiosity all of its own. Bewildered, she saw it steal out. She hadn’t meant to do it, she hadn’t consciously intended to lay her fingers on that hot, charged length. She hadn’t allowed herself to really think about what it would be like. And yet, there she was doing it. Her fingers must have felt icy cold to him because he was like burning silk under her touch, silk that moved over a mahogany hardness. She coiled her hand around its girth and squeezed, testing the obdurate mass. Squeezed again.

  With a cry, he erupted. Like quicksilver, she thought with the part of her mind that was watching in surprise everything that had happened, everything she was doing. Just exactly like alchemists’ quicksilver. It splashed on his belly and puddled in his navel and tricked down his sides to the bed as he heaved and arched. And then in moments it sublimed, vanishing from his skin into the air. Leaving him trembling and hot with fresh sweat and staring.

  And a voice inside her that she hardly recognized cried out in awe and triumph, I did that! I did that to him!

  Chapter Eleven

  In which keeping warm is what matters.

  Rafiq saw the water surge at Taqla’s back and the creature launch itself from the waters, but the attack was so quick that he didn’t manage to cry a warning. The monster—glistening gray with the mud of the swamp’s depths, its broad, piscine head all mouth and grasping barbels—flung its front half onto the shore of the island, struck Taqla hard from behind and, as she fell, engulfed her from the waist up in its maw. The Horse Most Swift was knocked aside and fell with legs sticking stiffly out. Then the fish twisted about, thrashing the water to spume with its tail as it tried to return to the marsh. Its tiny eyes, dark and soulless, were set wide at the sides of its head and the interior of its gills gaped as white as the briefly glimpsed inside of its mouth. The stiff feelers projecting from its jaw waved like the legs of an overturned crab.

  Rafiq threw himself forward. He didn’t try to draw his sword. This was not the right situation for a scimitar. He just threw himself onto the creature and rammed his arm up to the shoulder in its gill slit, grabbing on to the interior ridges as it surged forward and yanked him off his feet. The water struck him hard in the face and he closed his eyes, holding his breath as they crashed beneath the surface. It was rare for any man of Dimashq to be able to swim—as boys they had no more than the shallow and less-than-fragrant Barada river to splash about in—but Rafiq had sailed from Basra and Ayla and Tyre, and he’d learned to be competent in water. He even opened his eyes as his free hand found, at his belt, the straight knife he’d carried since the day he was attacked by the Al-Hava family.

  From beneath, the water was yellow and clouded with silt, and he could see little but the gray flank of the monstrous fish he clung to and a churning of silvery bubbles. His knife hand looked as pallid as a corpse’s. Clenching his teeth, Rafiq reached forward to stab the blade into what he hoped was the beast’s right eye. A small, dark cloud stained the water as he twisted the blade, yanked it out, and then plunged it in again. The monster twitched from head to tail, clamping its gill shut bruisingly tight on Rafiq’s left arm. A great, dark plume of murk billowed over them both as it plunged toward the bottom of the swamp. But it couldn’t go deep; there wasn’t enough water for that. After plowing the thick mud of the bottom, it burst upward again as Rafiq gouged at its slimy skin for the third and fourth time. He had every intention of cutting the creature until he passed out from lack of breath, but there was a muscular thrashing, and suddenly through the piss-colored water, Taqla’s limp form swirled into view, her clothes billowing about her. Rafiq let go of the gill and kicked away from the fish, reaching out to catch her as she sank past him. His lungs were desperate now. He pulled her to his side and cast one last look around for the fish. Seeing nothing through the hailstorm of swirling dirt, he kicked for the surface.

  The air he gasped undoubtedly stank of rotted pondweed, but to him it was sweet and pure. He cupped Taqla’s chin in one hand, keeping her face above water as he sculled back toward the island of the Tree. He didn’t dare r
esheath his knife, so progress was even slower, but eventually he approached the slope of the foreshore and found enough resistance beneath his feet to try to stand. Thick goo squidged up between his toes, and when he tried to walk it sucked at his legs. He staggered painfully slowly through the shallows, Taqla’s body cradled in his arms, and even when there was grass beneath his filthy feet, he kept walking away from the water. Only when he was under the shelter of the outermost branches did he drop the knife and sink to his knees, laboring for breath. Gently he laid her on the ground.

  She didn’t move, though there was no sign of any wound on her body. The clothes plastered to her form and the wet headcloth draped over her face were horribly reminiscent of the tight winding-sheet of a corpse. With clumsy fingers he pulled the veil unceremoniously from about her head. Her face looked gray, and the whites of her eyes showed under half-closed lids.

  Rafiq swore. Then he called her name, shaking her face. When she didn’t react, he picked her up and rolled her over so she was sagging from his arms. Balling his fist under her ribs, he tipped her forward and squeezed her torso hard. Water vomited from her mouth as her stomach emptied, but it wasn’t accompanied by coughing. He tried again, deliberately squashing her chest cavity. More water, and this time blood too. He felt like he’d been kicked when he saw that. “No,” he said over and over again as he laid her down. He tried to find a pulse at her throat but his hands were numb with cold and he could feel nothing. He even opened her mouth and blew his own breath in, as shepherds did with stillborn lambs. Her chest moved but deflated as he released her and didn’t rise again. When he lifted his head, there was blood on his lips.

  “Taqla,” he groaned. “Oh God. Oh God.” Sitting down hard, he covered his face with his hands. Given the choice, he would have fled even further from reality.