Heart of Flame

by Janine Ashbless

  But what if the angel somehow—somehow—she had no comprehension of what the rules were of this political game—what if the angel stopped him coming back for her? How long could she last here? What would happen when she got too tired to stay awake? What if she fainted? Her island wasn’t big enough to lie flat upon. If she fell into the boiling flames would she burn or drown or simply sink forever?

  Imagining herself feeling faint, Ahleme sank to her haunches and clasped her arms around her knees. The pearls of her skirt looked orange in this light. She licked her lips then realized how dry her mouth was and how she was longing for a drink of sherbet, and wished the realization had never come into her mind.

  “Yazid,” she whispered miserably.

  Was he fighting the angel at this moment? She could imagine him fighting. With his great frame, he looked like he was born for battle. She was less able to imagine him tricking or talking his way out of the situation. Could you lie to an angel? Could you fight one? Angels had laid waste to whole cities in the past, she remembered. But then hadn’t the Patriarch Jacob wrestled with one once?

  Ahleme shook her head a little. She knew nothing of theology. The pearls strung from her hair brushed her forehead. She didn’t want Yazid to be punished. Yes, he’d stolen her from her father’s house and put her family honor to shame but… She struggled with the thought for a moment—he hadn’t hurt her.

  Was that what mattered to her above everything else? she asked herself, slightly shocked. Whether he hurt her? Not her honor or her family but only her flesh, her feelings? And her feelings were so muddled. He’d done less to her than many a mortal man might in the same situation. With all his power and pride and temper he had been restrained, somehow. Sometimes he was almost tender. And she had…

  Ahleme blushed to herself. He deserved divine retribution no more than she did, surely? It wasn’t true that he’d forced her to all the things she’d done. She’d made certain choices, even though they hadn’t felt like choices at the time. They had just felt instinctive. She didn’t feel guilty even now. She didn’t feel deserving of punishment. She felt almost angry.

  “Leave us alone,” she shaped with her lips.

  Far out upon the fiery ocean, something moved. Ahleme sat up with a jerk, frightened her defiance had been noted by angelic powers. But it was simply a spout of flame, rising from the seethe and arcing over to splash back down again. Molten splashes blazed against the dark sky like flowers of fire. As soon as the spout had fallen another rose a little way off. The rumble of the molten spume reached Ahleme’s ears some time after.

  Arc after arc of flame lit the darkness. It took Ahleme awhile to realize that there were two distinct spouts and never more at any time, though they moved around on the face of the deep, jumping over each other. They’re dancing, she realized with a start. They’re dancing together.

  Perhaps it wasn’t dancing, perhaps it was some strange form of battle or even conversation, but she grew more and more convinced that she was watching two beings, two giants of formless flame. She even thought she could hear in their rumble a kind of vocalisation, more like thunder than words. The sight was both beautiful and terrifying. She hunched down smaller, hoping that she couldn’t be noticed by such colossal entities, and she watched them with a mute awe as they moved across the sea of flame. She watched for a long time, too anxious to look away, too scared to think concretely of anything but how she wanted Yazid to come back for her.

  Be safe. Be on your way back to me, she begged over and over in her head.

  So mesmerised was she that she almost missed the sound behind her when it first came. It was a hiss, an exhalation so huge that it might have been the breath of a god. It made her loose hair dance about her face. Ahleme looked over her shoulder.

  Behind her the fiery lake was mounded up, white hot where it bulged. As she stared, from the liquid rock rose a column of yellow flame, many many times taller than a human, billowing and dancing. Strange shadows flitted in the pillar of light, lending it almost the semblance of a form, though it was a form that never stayed constant. Ahleme caught glimpses of a vast head on vast shoulders, incandescent hair, features molded from nothing but burning gas, a mouth like a furnace, eyes that were blank suns. And suddenly she thought she recognized that face.

  “Zubaida?” she squeaked.

  The huge lips curved in a smile. At that scale, there was something horrible about the expression, a lack of any kindliness. Then the face turned away.

  “Zu—!” she opened her lips to shriek, almost forgetting every warning. She clapped her hands over her mouth, stifling the sound.

  The smile broadened. Then the titanic figure slid back beneath the surface of the lake, leaving a seethe that spread out, becoming smooth and slick like oil on water. All around the molten surface continued to heave and bubble, but this great round patch grew mirrorlike in its gloss. What was the djinniyah doing, Ahleme wondered?—and startled as she saw the first picture form within its reflective pool.

  There, that was the Palace of Glass, clinging to a sheer wall of red rock like a wasps’ nest of spun blue sugar, its multiple spiralling petals looking as delicate as threads from this distance. She’d only ever seen it from within or close to, and its scale was daunting. Ahleme bit her lip, searching for any sign of movement in the vision, any sign of conflict. She braced her hands on her thighs, leaning forward—so that when the whole Palace shattered, noiselessly and in an instant, into fragments, she almost lost her balance in shock.

  “Yazid?” she gasped, gulping the word into her breast.

  The dust fell, glittering, into the valley below, where it rose for a moment in a billowing cloud. When that settled she saw a tiny, dark figure kneeling in the drift, head bowed. For a moment Ahleme thought that she was falling into the vision, as the figure grew and became recognizable as Yazid, then she thought that the djinni was enlarging himself, and only finally did she realize that the vision was moving closer to the naked figure. He was dark blue all over, as murky as the ocean under a gray sky, and she could not guess whether this was due to effort or to anger.

  Ahleme glanced anxiously about her, wondering if Zubaida was still there, longing for an explanation and for reassurance. But further movement in the mirror of fire drew back her attention as the angel slid into the scene, shimmering with light and surrounded by a rainbow halo of glass dust, its grace almost serpentine. It halted before Yazid, who lifted his head. A look of stoic resolve was stamped across the djinni’s face. For a moment the divine messenger grew still and a little more visible. It had several pairs of arms, Ahleme thought, perhaps feathered or spiked somehow. They were arms that were closer to fanned blades than to anything else. Its head was plumed too, or perhaps crowned, it was still too hard to tell. Light shifted within its complex, transparent form, a constant confusing shimmer like the glitter of sunlight on wavelets or the flicker of desert lightning.

  Yazid’s mouth moved. He was saying something. A pause and then he spoke again, shaking his head. Accusation and denial, thought Ahleme, her throat tightening. She clenched her hands against her thighs. Little blue flames licked about Yazid’s head and ran down his skin, dancing in the crystal powder about his knees. For some time the conversation went on, Yazid adamantly denying his interrogator. But it reached an abrupt conclusion when the angel reached out to pluck the djinni up and hold him by the throat, his bare feet kicking in the air.

  Somewhere deep inside Ahleme there built a squeal of outrage. Fight back! she wanted to urge him. Fight him, Yazid! You’re an amir of the Djinn! You can’t let him do this to you! His forbearance appalled her. He lifted curled hands but made no attempt to attack the limb pinning him. She struggled to understand. Where was his temper and his pride now? Where was her roaring, blustering abductor?

  It was with a sensation of sickening vertigo that she realized that his forbearance and endurance were for her sake. He was protecting her.

  That was almost too much to bear.

  Ther
e was no release from the fear. He refrained from defending himself at all, just hung there in the angel’s grip as its free hands passed back and forth over his body. Ahleme couldn’t make out what it was doing, the flame and the dust and the glitter too confusing. She could only see the fluid sweeps of its arms as the locked pair began to rotate in circles like a spinning dervish, and then for a moment the flame and the dust rose about them in a curtain. When that fell, so did Yazid. The angel flung him down on the rocks of the valley floor.

  Terror kicked in Ahleme’s belly. The djinni’s chest was split wide open, and within she could see a roaring furnace of golden fire. His heart was a burning flame. Yazid’s hands clawed at the rocks beneath him, his face locked in a rictus of pain, his eyes bulging. The sacrifice was complete—and she felt his wounds as if they were her own. In the merest sliver of a moment she knew all the horror of a woman seeing her lover torn and broken before her.

  “Yazid!” she screamed, for that instant losing all sense of her own peril, as the anguish within her burst out in a shriek.

  And like a monstrous echo of her own cry, Ahleme heard behind her a thunderous yell. She jerked back round, nearly losing her footing on the plinth of rock. The two arches of flame had turned to towers of fire. For a moment they simply hovered. Then they both dove below the surface, headed straight for her.

  Half of her didn’t believe anything could be worse than witnessing Yazid being broken as she had just done. The other half recognized the threat with a surge of terror.

  “Have mercy! Please! Zubaida!” she screamed, calling her only ally left as the twin titans surged toward her, surfacing like dolphins in arcing leaps from the sea of fire. But Zubaida, if it was her she’d seen in the magma and she hadn’t just imagined it, was gone.

  In moments the giants were upon her, rising up about her tiny island like walls of flame. She half-glimpsed faces on them too, and arms and hands and rippling muscles, but they were too large and too brightly shining for her to focus upon. They laughed to see her, not a malicious sound but joyous and careless and terrible. Then one snatched her up. A hand bigger than she was curled around her, though she felt nothing solid, only an immense force that plucked her from her tiny sanctuary without effort. She screamed once, “Yazid!” It was a cry wrought of despair.

  That was her only opportunity for words. With her next breath she screamed again in simple terror, but after that she had no chance. It was all she could do to keep air in her lungs as they tossed her aloft and threw her between them like cats playing with a ball made of rags, or a captured mouse. That was all she was, she realized dimly, as she was buffeted back and forth—a novel plaything, a toy. She clenched her arms over her head to stop it being torn off, but she had no other control, no protection. She was hurled hundreds of feet into the air, heels over head, sent tumbling and spinning, legs flailing. She could see nothing but boiling clouds of flame. Their voices booming in her ears drowned all other sounds. I’m going to die, she thought.

  Her bodice of pearls was wrenched apart. They fell like hail, some striking her in the face. The first inkling of heat flared along the skin of her thighs and belly and pushed up between her legs.

  Oh merciful God, if they break the spell of protection I will burn like straw.

  They were laughing, laughing, laughing. Then there was a roar, a different note. Furious anger. A tone she recognized, dimly, through her terror and shock.

  A titan hand seized her with a wrench that nearly cracked her back, and suddenly she was rushing upward so fast she felt her cheeks pressing against her teeth. Seamlessly the hand became a great arm, and then that arm became two of normal size holding her to a broad chest. Then the fire went out and everything went black, nothing but blackness and a sensation of terrible speed, and then, although they didn’t change direction, they were no longer climbing, they were plunging headlong, through cloud.

  They flipped. Ahleme caught enough breath to let out a gasp. She was held in Yazid’s arms, naked against his bare torso, and he was standing in midair, thunderheads arrayed behind him like wings.

  “Ahleme!” he cried.

  She flung her arms around his neck and pressed her lips to his, wild with relief and delight.

  “You’re alive!” she shouted, but her voice was whipped away on the roaring air.

  Then the wind caught them and they were flung sideways and up, the purple clouds boiling below. Then they dropped, and the wind turned them end over end over end. It was like being played with by the fiery titans all over again—except that this time Yazid was holding her tight in his embrace, and he was keeping her safe from the elemental forces. This time there was no pain and no fear, just elation. Every buffeting blow of the winds struck through their tight-pressed forms with a thrilling shock. Any words would have been inaudible, but Ahleme shrieked with excitement and opened her thighs to wrap them about his hips. The ride was a glorious assault on all her senses and every inch of her body. She didn’t really register that she was pressing against Yazid with every lurch and swoop. She only knew that the winds had taken possession of her, that she felt as if she had wings. That she was flying, and that it was most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her, and she was on fire with joy. She threw wide her arms and let her head fall back in his hand and surrendered every particle of her body to the wind, to his strength, to the sensations thrilling through her.

  When the buffeting finally ceased, she was laughing and weeping and breathless. She opened her eyes and realized they were hovering far above the storm, the clouds billowing beneath them like gray waves. Up here the air was thin and the light blinding. Yazid turned them both so that the sun wasn’t shining in her eyes.

  “Ahleme.” That soft-spoken word was a prayer, and it gentled her in an instant. She looked up with new wonder into his face. Somewhere between the fire and the wind she had been shorn, at last, of her fears and her defenses and her past. Up here above the clouds there was nothing and no one else but the two of them, together. His pale eyes were burning with an emotion that was both joy and pain, and she remembered her glimpse of his blazing heart.

  He’d defied an angel for her.

  With her thighs wrapped about his naked body, she was in no doubt as to his state of arousal. It didn’t frighten her. It hadn’t frightened her in many, many days. But now, for the first time, she fully acknowledged her own desire, and she knew that that no longer frightened her either.

  Wordlessly she nodded, and lifted her lips to his.

  Chapter Sixteen

  In which a message is delivered to a heartless tyrant.

  Tarampara-rampara-ram.

  The city of Bokhara lay in the land of the Turks, on the Silk Road west of Samarqand, in the lush Zerafshan valley that was counted one of the four famous Earthly Paradises. Rafiq had, in fact, been there once, years back. It was ruled, they ascertained at the caravanserai within an hour of arrival, by the Amir Mutamin al-Fayiz, who was a member of the Samanid royal family and thus a Persian, an elderly man of corpulent frame, impeccable religious orthodoxy and accredited ancestry.

  “Well,” said Rafiq, “he might rule in name. But perhaps he has a wife or a mother or a concubine who is the real power behind the throne.”

  So when Taqla went to the women’s bathhouse, she made enquiries too. But she learned nothing to their advantage. No one had heard of an Adhur-Anahid in Bokhara.

  “We need to get a look inside the palace,” said Rafiq. “The amir holds a public audience every week. We should attend tomorrow.”

  “It would be a start,” Taqla agreed.

  So they dressed in their best clothes and went to the palace gate, a domed and tiled building very much in the Persian style, the next morning. A queue was already forming, watched over by guards. Rafiq slipped coins to a succession of officials with the result that the two of them were moved up the line ahead of the local petitioners, through a number of rooms and into a chamber where everyone was well dressed. More guards stood at the double doo
rs beyond, checking everyone who passed through for weapons. Although they, like most of the local people, were Turks, the language of the court was Persian and that was what they were barking their orders in.

  “Do you carry a sword?” they demanded of Rafiq as he reached the head of the line.

  “Not today.” He’d left his weapon along with most of their belongings in the caravanserai. Their saddle and the desert shelter they’d had to stash behind a rock when they walked to the city gate, since the stuff was too bulky for the two of them to carry by hand. Taqla had the ball of silver wire in the deepest pocket of her outer robe. She refused to let that out of her possession.

  “What about you?” said a second guard, gesturing to Taqla. “Hey, what’s a woman doing in men’s clothes?”

  She opened her mouth, ready with an excuse—they’d travelled far and thought it safer that way. But she didn’t get the chance. He hooked his fingers over the fold of her headcloth and yanked it down to bare her face.

  Rafiq reacted with a speed that took everyone by surprise. Launching himself at the guard, he grabbed the man by the front of his jacket and slammed him against a wall so hard that his head bounced off the tiles. If he hadn’t been wearing a helmet, his skull would have been cracked. The guard went limp. Rafiq took a step back and dropped him, and then found himself surrounded by soldiers, four sword-points aimed at his throat.

  “She’s my wife,” he snarled.

  “Then maybe you should dress her like one,” said the guard captain with cold anger.

  Taqla, staring and holding her veil up in her hand, scrabbled wildly for a spell that would get them out of this. A deep darkness perhaps…or a stormwind…or a—

  “What is going on here?” A new voice had entered the fray. A tall man stood at the entrance to the inner courtyard of the amir. He was clearly not a soldier, being dressed in sumptuous silk robes of many colors, but he carried himself with immense authority. He had a neat beard striped in gray and black, and eyes like jet.