by Judith Tarr
Zamaniyah shifted from foot to aching foot. There was a dull pain in her middle; her head wanted to throb, but she would not let it. She stifled a sigh. Nothing here had anything to do with her. She wanted the comfort of her own place: the practice ground, Khamsin’s courtyard, even her corner of the harem.
A voice spoke close to her, startling her. It was her father. Calling for the sultan’s ear. Receiving it. His hand was on her shoulder again, gripping hard.
He drew her with him from among the emirs, in a murmur that swelled and sank. She was not thinking, not daring to think. She followed him down in obeisance; she rose with him, but kept her eyes lowered. Chance fixed them on the sultan’s shoe. Its sole had been mended.
“My lord,” her father was saying, “O Malik al-Nasir, O king who is strong in salvation, defender of the purity of Islam, Lord Commander of Egypt, Light of the Faith, servant of God, Salah al-Din…”
Zamaniyah glanced up under her brows. The sultan heard his titles as he had heard the cloth merchant, with patient attention. He spared her a glance, a glimmer that might have been a smile; it made him look very young, and very human.
But she was growing afraid. She was here, and she was a lie. And her father…
Her father said, “O commander of my loyalty, I seek a favor of you.”
“It is granted,” said the sultan, “O best of servants.” His voice was pleasant, more deep than light, with an odd accent: half of his Kurdish kin, half of his youth in Damascus.
“Unheard, my lord?” asked al-Zaman.
“Unheard,” the sultan conceded, “but not unguessed. This youngling with you: he would, perhaps, be your heir?”
“My heir indeed,” said al-Zaman. “But not—”
A smooth voice cut him off. “Glad tidings, my good friend! A nephew, is it? A cousin? Even—can it be so?—a grandson?”
The man who spoke stood close by the dais. He was very young, though older than the sultan; in face they were very alike, but his was rounder, softer, more self-indulgent. His garb was richer than the sultan’s, and his belt was of gold. He smiled at al-Zaman; his joy seemed honest.
Al-Zaman mustered a smile in return, and a tone of respect which struck Zamaniyah even in the midst of her shock. “My thanks, my lord Turan-Shah.”
The young man waved them away. “No lord to you, my friend, whatever my brother here may be. Here, lad, stand up straight; show us a little of your mettle.”
Zamaniyah raised her head. Her mind whirled, trapped, beating against its walls. Her shoulder throbbed as her father’s fingers tightened.
“This is my heir,” he said. “This is the one who will inherit all that is mine. I declare it before you all; I bid my sultan be my witness.”
“It is witnessed,” the sultan said. His eyes had sharpened. As if—her heart leaped, stumbled. As if he suspected something.
He disappointed her. He said, “But that cannot be the favor which you ask for. Are you offering me a page for my household?”
“In all gratitude,” said al-Zaman, “I am not.”
That startled the sultan. His brother leaped into the breach. “What, then, old friend? A man may dispose of his property as he wishes; he need not proclaim himself before the diwan. Is there some impediment?”
“No impediment,” replied al-Zaman, “but perhaps a misunderstanding.” His voice rose a little. “This, O Egypt, is my heir and successor, the child of my body. My lords, my friends, my sultan whose favor is so freely given, I bid you acknowledge this my heir, my daughter, Zamaniyah.”
The silence was more mighty than any roar of outrage. Turan-Shah’s mouth was agape.
His brother moved slowly, straightening. Astonishing them all. Bowing his head. Smiling. Saying, “Lady.”
“Your pardon,” said al-Zaman with great gentleness, “but I think, my lord, that even yet you fail to understand. This is my heir. Entirely. My daughter in the body which Allah in His wisdom has given her. My son in all else. That is the favor which you have granted me. To accept my daughter as my son. To accord her the rights and privileges of a man. To regard her in all respects as you would regard a young nobleman of her age and training.”
Someone laughed, hurting-sharp. “Training!” said a voice without a face. “In what? The lute?”
Within Zamaniyah, something snapped. She spun. “The sword!” she shot back. “The bow, the lance, the arts of the hunt, of horse and hound and falcon.” Her voice sweetened dangerously. “And, yes, the lute and cittern; the poets; the law and the sciences. And first and most blessed of all, the heart of all learning, the wonder of Islam, the holy Koran.”
They stared at her, too shocked even to laugh. Struggling to see a woman under the turban, behind the pride and the temper and the high fierce words. She watched the scandal grow. Appalling, they whispered. Intolerable. Unnatural.
“But not,” she pointed out, sweetly still, “unprecedented. Yaquta the daughter of the Caliph al-Mahdi—upon them both be peace—wore the turban even as I do, and rode out with her father, armed and clad as a man. And if she does not suffice, what of those who fought with the Prophet, the blessing and peace of Allah be upon him: Umm Umarah who lost a hand in battle for the Faith, Safiyah who at threescore years and ten struck down an infidel in the siege of Medina—”
Men’s voices drowned her out. Drums rolled over them; and the sultan’s voice, pitched as for the battlefield. He was on his feet, and his sword was drawn, glittering over Zamaniyah’s head. She flung herself flat.
He spoke over her. “My favor is granted. My word is given. The heir of al-Zaman lies under my protection. Who threatens her, answers to me.”
oOo
She was proud of herself. Having broken once, and then into a fine fire of defiance, she did not break again. Not before her father, or before the clamor of the court, or before the eyes of the city as she rode home to haven. Not even in front of Jaffar, who blessed her with silence. She was—yes, she was taking it like a man.
She went in the proper hour to her training of Khamsin. When she had done it, she remembered none of it. The sun dazzled her eyes. She blinked fiercely. He nudged her hand. She started. She had forgotten. She fed him his bit of dried apple.
His mane was cool, his neck warm beneath, silken against her cheek. He was patient: he did not pull away.
She did not cry long. She never did. She stood still, breathing warm damp horse-scent.
He shifted, stamping lightly, startling a fly. She drew back. Her hand smoothed his wetted neck; she played with his mane. “My father is mad,” she told him calmly. “He always has been. But since my brothers died… He’s clever, Khamsin. He knows how to keep people from knowing that he doesn’t see the world as anyone else sees it. Today, he showed them. He named me both his daughter and his son. He made the sultan himself a witness to what he did; and more than a witness: a sharer in it. Oh, I wish—I wish—”
Her voice faded. She hardly knew what she wished. That he were dead? Mad, blind, unsparing of mercy, still he was her father; and she loved him. Which was a madness of its own.
That she were a man? She stiffened, contemplating it. Touching her cheek, her breast. As if the thought could make it so.
“No,” she said. “I want to be Zamaniyah. But what Zamaniyah is…”
There was always flight: the veil, the harem. Life forever within walls, with a lattice between herself and the sky, and no will in anything but her master’s bidding.
She laughed bitterly. “What will have I ever had? My father has always been strange. He had me raised almost as my brothers were. I learned to read, write—even to ride and shoot, because I showed a liking for it, and it amused him to see what I could do. Then they all rode away, he and my brothers, to drive the Franks from Egypt; and my brothers never came back. My father sent for me, all the way from Syria, and when I came, though I was staggering from days of riding at courier’s pace, thick with dust, reeking of the road, he had me brought to him. He looked at me as if I were a mare he ha
d a mind to buy. I remember his eyes, how strange they were, how keen and yet how blind. He looked, and after a while he nodded, and then he laughed. ‘God has robbed me of sons,’ he said, ‘but one child still He has left me. That one shall do for all the rest.’” She pulled off cap and turban, stared at them, flung them spinning across the sand. “He gave his orders then, and saw that they were obeyed. No veil for me; no womanly arts. I was to learn what a boy learns. Not only what I had been pleased to learn. All of it. But set apart. Not hidden, not secluded, but not made a public spectacle. He let people decide for themselves who I was, what I was, and what I signified.
“I let him rule me. How could I do otherwise? He was my father. I thought, somehow, he knew what he was doing.” Her face twisted. “Oh, he knew! He was wielding me like a weapon. Using me to mock all his enemies. Even—even to cast his defiance in the face of God.”
She stopped. Khamsin had not moved even yet. He watched her, ears pricked. As if he could understand.
She rubbed a stiffened patch where the sweat of his labors had dried, smoothing it, centering herself on it. “I love him, Khamsin. And I hate him. His will has set me between the worlds. Now they all know it; and where am I? Twisting in the emptiness. Neither man nor woman; neither flesh nor fowl.” Her teeth ground together. Temper gusted, hot and swift. “What will he make me do next? What will I have to face? How can he do this to me?”
Pain stabbed. He had nipped her. His glance was as clear as words. That, it said, is pure self-pity.
She hit him. But feebly, on the strong muscle of the shoulder, with flattened hand. It could have been a rough caress. It became one, as tears sprang again, lived out their season, passed.
She was hardly aware of them. “I never thought he’d do it. I really never thought… It was a whim of his, no more. It eased his grief. It gave me a freer world than I’d ever dared to hope for. If he did try to claim me in public, he’d claim me as a son. I was braced for that. I could have stopped him. But when he told the truth, all unexpected—”
She drew a quivering breath. It was almost laughter. “You should have seen their faces! All those fallen jaws. All those wagging beards. They looked like a herd of startled goats.”
Khamsin snorted. His eye was bright. Laughing.
Why not? She grinned at him. It was not too deadly difficult. “And there was I, tender little she-kid, telling them all what I thought of them. With the sultan looking on and thinking Allah knows what. He placed me under his protection.” She paused, struck. Her breathing quickened. She had had a thought. A thought of utmost wickedness. “He bound himself to accept me. And I—I think I’ll play this gave to its end. I’ll show my father what he’s done. I’ll be exactly what he says he wants me to be.”
The horse regarded her with great misgivings.
“You’ll see,” she promised him. She retrieved her cap and the tangled knot of her turban, tossed them in the air, caught them lightly. Lightly then she left him.
oOo
She was a very strange woman, this mistress of his. Khamsin rolled long and deliciously and settled in the shade. In a little while he had an entourage of cats. A small dust-devil amused itself in the trampled circle of his training. He watched it, interested. How odd that he had ever thought a horse’s sight less than a man’s. It was less garish-glittering, but it was deeper. It saw worlds within the mortal world.
It could not see into a woman’s heart, nor ever understand it. Her words when she left had been bright and bold. Her scent had been both angry and frightened. But determined. And strong.
A woman?
He fled the prospect. The devil snaked long dusty fingers into his mane, clambered onto his back. He bucked it hooting into the air.
7
“Jaffar?”
He started up from his mat, knife leaping into hand. Zamaniyah stood over him in her thin white nightrobe, her hair tumbling down her back, trembling with much more than the lamp’s flicker. Her voice was thin and high, like a child’s, not like her own at all. “Jaffar, I think—I’m afraid—”
Her eyes were strange, almost as if she dreamed; but wide and fixed on his face. Little as she could have seen of it there in the gloom, with him rising over her, gathering her in.
She was stiff and shaking. She let him hold her, but she contracted in the circle of his arms, shrinking from his touch.
He had never seen her so. It frightened him. He veiled it in soothing murmurs, in strokings that only knotted her tighter.
Fear had a way with him. It made his mind clearer. Carefully he unfolded his arms, stood back. She stared at him still. Her hands were fists. Her face was white.
“What is it?” he asked her with utmost gentleness. “A dream?”
She blinked. She shook her head, broadly, as a child will. Her lips were tight.
“A memory?” he asked. “A spirit of the night?”
She shivered, stumbling with the force of it. “I can’t—I don’t know—I woke, and felt—and there was—”
His eyes swept the room. Nothing, not even the shadow of a dream. A long stride brought him to her bed. A glance, and he knew.
And she—by all the gods that were, she did not.
“I’m afraid,” she said in that soft strange voice. “I don’t want to die. Not like this.”
“Who ever told you—” It had escaped him before he thought. He bit his tongue.
“Is it Allah, do you think? Because Father—”
Because her father, indeed. There were curses fit for him. And for the women who had never told her that one, simple, inescapable fact. And for Jaffar himself and most of all, because he had not thought to tell her. He had thought she knew. All women knew.
Jaffar found the laughter that sparked when he began to understand. He mingled it with love and set it in his voice. “Little bird,” he said. “Little fool. You’re not going to die.”
“My mother did!” The air rang with the force of it.
He stilled the echoes, softly, calmly. “You are not your mother. But a woman, you most certainly are. Now your body knows it. It’s telling you in the surest way it can.”
Her hand reached, tore at the sheet. “It’s blood.”
“It is life. And womanhood. And pride.”
Her head was shaking. “My mother bled. She bled and she bled, and she screamed, and they all said there was no hope for her. I watched. She screamed for a day and a night. Then she had no strength left to scream. And then she died. And they cut her, and something was alive inside her, but it died. And it was all blood. All—all—”
He seized her. he shook her until her head rattled on her neck. “Zamaniyah!”
She stared. He glared back. “Listen to me,” he commanded her, setting in it all the force of his will. “There is something that happens to every woman. It happens with every turning of the moon. It means no more than that she is a woman. That you are a woman, little idiot; but I am a worse idiot by far, for thinking that you knew. Of course you didn’t. Your mother dead before you were eight years old, you raised half-wild with no one to look after you, and then your father’s spate of madness…how could you?”
He stopped. She was shaking. Laughing, weeping. He set his teeth and let her fight the battle for herself.
At last she stilled. Her face was streaming; she hiccoughed and nearly went off again. He had to hold her up. She clung and trembled and wept, and said, “But can’t you see? The very day my father unmasks me in front of the whole world—that very night—”
“The gods speak as they will,” he said.
He could not have said it so to anyone but her. She accepted it for what it was: truth, and trust. “I knew there was something,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was growing breasts. Or finding hair in odd places, or needing more time in the baths.”
“That, too,” he said steadily.
Her eyes narrowed; she paled a little, for all her bravery. “There is more?”
He shaped a careful
smile. “Little more, O my mistress,” he said, “but enough. Your eyes will change. They’ll see differently in some respects. Particularly when they come to rest on a man.”
Her hand flew to her face, flew away. Her cheeks were scarlet. “Do you mean like a—a mare in heat? I won’t!”
“So they always say,” he said, “in the beginning.”
She opened her mouth, closed it with a snap. Her glare was as fierce as a falcon’s.
He refused to see it, though it comforted him. “You,” he said, “will bathe, and put on a clean gown, and look after yourself as I tell you. Then you will go back to sleep.”
She was obedient. Suspiciously so. He watched her warily, but she was quiet, bathing, changing her robe, doing as he bade her. When she lay clean and fresh-scented in her clean bed, she looked up into Jaffar’s face. He bent to kiss her as he always did; she caught his cheeks between her palms and held him. “You’re beautiful,” she said.
He straightened with dignity. “Woman’s sight,” he said, “takes time to grow.”
Her fingers knotted in the bedclothes, but her face was calm. Her voice was calmer still. “I never asked for it. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.”
He looked at her who was entirely a woman: he who would never be a man. He considered wisdom and gentleness. He said, “You have a choice.”
She gasped. He throttled guilt, the lash of sudden pain. Her eyes were huge, like bruises. The tears that filled them refused stubbornly to fall.
He wanted to touch her, to comfort her. He clenched his fists at his sides.
“Go away,” she said.
He did not move.
Her voice rose. “Go away!” And when he would not: “Go away!” She flung herself at him. He caught her, let her strike him, reckless, furious, but skilled enough, and strong. He set his teeth and suffered it.
Her weight, struggling, overbalanced him. He twisted as he fell. The bed caught most of him. His body caught all of her.
