by Judith Tarr
Abruptly she was still. She breathed hard, sobbing. Very gently he began to stroke her hair.
For a long while she made no move. Then her arms crept about him. She shifted, coiling childlike, burying her face in his torn shirt. He rocked her, murmuring what came to him. A cradle song. His mother’s voice had crooned it long ago.
Long after, when she was deep asleep, he wondered that his cheeks were wet. He remembered nothing of tears.
oOo
Khamsin had forgotten how wide the world was. His courtyard had begun to suffice for all of it; and he had not even thought to care, until Zamaniyah led him out of it. Briefly in the beginning, testing. He danced at first for startlement and then for the exhilaration of a different air. He filled his lungs with it. He called to every horse he saw and heard and scented. Many called back. It was not words, precisely, and yet it was speech. A mare’s loneliness. A stallion’s challenge. A weanling’s piteous plaint.
Zamaniyah’s hand was small and warm on his neck, on his cheek, on his nose. Her scent had changed of late. Deepened, sweetened. It was almost like a mare’s: the same splendor, for all its tang of humanity. For it, and for her, he suffered the ignominy of halter and lead. When he danced, he danced within a finger’s breadth of the utmost end. She always grinned then, boyish-wide, understanding.
He would never have been as lenient with a horse as she was. He would have scorned her, had he been Hasan still. He would have hated her.
She led him everywhere a horse could go, though never beyond the walls of her father’s house. In the pool of its garden he saw for the first time what he had become.
Imperfect. Narrow before, weak behind. His tail lacked that perfect arch which marked the best stock of Arabia. He would have discarded himself as unworthy of his notice.
Alone in his prison, he brooded. Beautiful, but imperfect. Fiery, but imperfect. Beloved, but imperfect.
Hasan had had no flaw. Hasan had been unmatched in his beauty. His hair, thick and richly curling, red as cedarwood. His eyes, great and dark beneath the arches of his brows. His lips full, his teeth white and even, his chin cleft just so, his neck, his shoulders, his breast…
He pawed the sand, tossing his head. His mane swung, heavy, tangling on his neck. The Hajji had done this. Made him worse than beast. Made him unbeautiful.
Made him mute; reft him even of tears.
An itch pricked his side. His teeth tore viciously at it. He spun, cursing. His stallion-voice was shrill and hideous.
Abruptly he stopped. He could not weep; no more could he laugh. So much to suffer, for a few moments’ folly. He could not even remember her face. Her body, remembered, woke nothing of desire.
The boy came with water, barley, fodder. Khamsin ate because he could see no profit in hunger. His mood, he knew with perfect clarity, was vile. He did not care.
An oddity of the air, a whisper of scent, led him from the manger to the wall. The door was always barred. He butted it, aimlessly, for simple ill-temper.
And started, snorting. It yielded; it swung ajar. He thrust his nose against it. It opened, rebounded from the wall.
He froze.
No sound of feet; no cry of alarm.
Slowly, as softly as a hoofed creature could, he ventured into the passage. No one came to stop him. He sensed no humanity at all, anywhere within reach.
The stable was quiet. Its dwellers drowsed in their stalls. Now and then one would stamp, snort, shake off a fly. Jaws ground languidly, pondering the sweetness of fodder, the last hoarded grains of barley.
The stallions dwelt apart with their noise and their tempers. These were all mares, one or two with late foals beside them. His nostrils flared and quivered, drinking in so much beauty all at once, so rich and so varied. A deep rumble swelled in his throat.
They paid no heed to him. He was only a male, and they were not in season. He was beneath their queenly notice.
His neck ached, but pleasurably. It raised all of itself, arched, swelled. His tail lifted over his back. He trod lightly, proudly, drunk on mare-scent. He had forgotten that he was flawed. He was all male, and all beautiful.
One royal lady deigned to see him: a red queen with a star on her brow, breathing the perfumes of paradise. Her time was on her, and he was her heart’s desire. She summoned him with aching tenderness.
The stallion would have battered down her door. The man knew greater subtlety. The latch was simplicity itself, even to a horse’s lips and questing teeth. Disdainfully he flicked the door aside.
Her ears flattened, warning; but her scent yearned for him. He bowed before her. She snorted lightly, pawing. He ventured to caress the silk of her cheek. Her ear flicked, exquisite. Very gently he nibbled her nape. She squealed, swung. Her hindleg threatened; her tail arched, welcoming.
He hesitated. His blood thundered; his loins throbbed. But his brain held him motionless. Man—he was a man. And this—
Hasten! all her body cried. Oh, hasten!
He mounted her.
It was mighty. It was passionate. It was eternal; and it was but a moment. He dropped down, spent. She sighed deeply; enchanted him with the lightest of love-bites; let fly with her heels.
Most eloquent, that lady, and most wise. Voices sounded without. He remembered to shut the door, to latch it. He was very proud of himself for that.
The voices swelled, faded. Safety was yonder, tailward: his courtyard, his bed, his entourage of cats. His nostrils drew in the scent of freedom.
His skin quivered. The mare nibbled the edge of her manger, sated, yet fretting. Almost—almost—he went back to her. His eyes rolled. This was a prison. All this. Doors and bars. Bit, bridle, no will in anything but to do as he was bidden.
He was Hasan. He was Ali Mousa’s son, Safiyah’s child. He was a prince: exiled, enchanted, but royal still. His blood was holy. He was no one’s chattel.
His feet bore him away from the mare who had forgotten his existence, from the path that was safety. Allah or Iblis, whoever guided him, he found a door through a narrow passage, a silent court, a door open upon the green solitude of the garden. It was not the garden it had been. The pomegranate tree was gone. Someone had broken the marble nymph who had stood in the heart of the fountain: most unorthodox, she had always been, but his mother had loved her. Only her feet remained, hacked and beaten amid the falling water.
His hooves tore the grass, trampled the flowers. He circled toward the wall and the gate which he remembered.
It was a very wide garden, this; Cairo’s pride, it had been once, ill-kempt now and overgrown. It had been a world within a world, a web of secret places, and most secret of all, the place where the women and the slaves would never go, because it was a haunt of spirits of the air. It was the sort of place they loved: walled in tangled greenery but open within, a long oval of sand and sparse grass, and at the edge of it a remnant that might have been a temple or a tomb.
He had never been afraid in daylight, and his eyes found nothing there. He picked his way through the thicket, mind on the gate that lay beyond the ruin, that had never been locked when he was small, that had never needed to be. Everyone knew of the gathering place of the Afarit.
Everyone had known, once. The bar was new and firm and would not yield to aught but hands. He snapped vainly at it. His teeth could find no purchase.
Desperation swelled. He spun, gathering strength, arming his heels.
Beyond the ruin a shadow moved. He stilled utterly. The shadow sped, silent, elongated, inhuman. It grew an arm: enormously long, enormously thin, tipped with steel. The shadow flowed to a halt, reared, cast.
The spear bit earth at Hasan’s feet, quivering with fury. He started back.
Man. He was a man. He cherished rage. He tore the thing free, tasting wood, salt, man-scent; tossed it clattering aside.
The spearman faced him. He snorted in anger, in startlement, in bitter mirth. Zamaniyah’s eunuch leaned on a second spear and regarded him with eyes that were most insolent, and mo
st unfrightened.
“Salaam,” said the eunuch, “O prince.”
Hasan’s teeth, slashing, jarred on the spearshaft. He recoiled, astonished. Strong, this one, for a gelding. He did not even sway against the blow.
The eunuch smiled, white in the dusk of his face. His eyes were on the gate. “Ah,” he said. “Wise, O prince. Most wise. If my prince will permit?”
He was behind Hasan, recking nothing of the heels that might have hammered him down. Hasan scrambled about. His ears were flat. They knew when he was hated.
The bolt slid. The eunuch paused. His scent was dark with irony and with something very like triumph. He bowed, beckoned.
Hasan eyed the spear. The eunuch saw; he laughed. Hasan lunged upon that laughter. The eunuch danced back undismayed, offering mockery with the prick of steel. Hasan spurned them all for the open gate.
oOo
A man alone at dusk was prey, but no prodigy. A horse alone, unbridled, was both. Hasan made himself as nondescript as he might. He kept to shadows. He tried to remember what he knew of hunting, and of cats. He astonished himself with patience.
The sunset prayer found him deep within the city’s mazes. He prayed with something like defiance, bowing as best he might, making what obeisance he could in a body never made for it.
He started, clattering. The shadows had bred people. Beggars, urchins, children of Egypt’s earth, reeking of it. They stared at a marvel: a horse who prayed like a Muslim.
He essayed a step. They drew back. None of them had spoken. Their eyes were wide. Ancient eyes, even in the babe on its mother’s back. Eyes that had seen ten thousand years.
They knew him, knew magic. As—he froze—the eunuch had known. And had let him go. Knowing. Seeing what he was. Hating him for it.
He broke into a trot. These ways he knew, dark though they were, labyrinthine. People scattered. Some shouted. None could catch him. He stretched his stride.
He had hastened to it, but it came too soon. Roses and citron. Walls that had been home. No gate opened there for him. It was all barred. Before, behind, all about, barred.
And what had he looked for?
He stood before that first implacable gate and cried aloud. He climbed it. He smote it with ringing hooves.
It gave way. He all but fell into the passage. People fled: shadows, all of them. He passed the court of welcomes, the court of the white fountain, the hall of honor, all full of shadows. Some had voices. They shrieked or shouted.
The chamber of the blue tiles was empty and cold. Winter had come, and he had not known it. But spring was waking in the garden, where men thought that they had trapped him, pursuing him with cries and halters, circling him, besieging him beneath the lemon tree. He broke their circle with ease that made him laugh, even through his pain.
And there before him, seeking the source of the tumult, stood Ali Mousa. Hasan plunged to a halt. Ali Mousa’s beard was as white as his robe; he was gaunt beneath it, leaning on the shoulder of his slave Mahaut, as if he were weary, or worn with age. He stood in the light of lamps and hasty torches, and stared as they all stared, at Hasan who bowed low at his feet.
Words struggled in the alien throat. Revelation. Confession. Profoundest humility. Father. O Father. See how I pay, how I am paid. Father, help me. Make me a man again!
He raised his head. Ali Mousa looked down. What the beggars of the street could see, he could not. Nor hear, nor know.
Hasan heaved himself up, graceless in this as in anything that a man could do. His father retreated a step, for prudence. It stung like a lash.
No, Hasan tried to say. No more. It was a snort, a strangled gasp. He tried to touch his father. His hoof was a weapon; his head was armed, and so they all saw, perceiving threat in what was only longing. Mahaut set himself between the beast and his master. The others closed in.
Hasan cried his despair. His father had drawn back from him, letting himself be defended, letting them say words that cut to the bone. “Rogue,” they decreed. “Demon-ridden.” Snare him, bind him, shut him in walls; for he was deadly, a beast gone mad, menacing their master whom they loved.
Whom he loved.
He had never known it. He had never thought of loving anything but Hasan.
The halter waited. The stable that was at least his own stable, in his own house, among his own people. Even if they never knew. They would handle him gently enough. No Alexander Hippias, his father’s horsemaster, but no fool either; and no Zamaniyah to vex his peace.
Ali Mousa was speaking. Commanding. “Set him among the stallions, in the barred stall. And in the morning, search. This is no stray: there is breeding in him. His master may be glad to have him back again.”
It was the tone of it that felled him. Gentle as always, calm, coolly wise. Disposing of an oddity, an inconvenience, an interruption of his rest.
When the hands fell on him, he chose. He flung them away. Once more he broke their feeble circle. Ali Mousa blurred past, wide eyes, astonished face, all a stranger.
As he was all a fool, for coming back, for dreaming that he could ever be Hasan again. Had not the magus said it? This shape he was bound to, till death should take him. Hasan al-Fahl ibn Ali Mousa was dead, had died for his sins. Most utterly, and most justly.
oOo
Khamsin plodded through a city of shadows. He did not care who saw him; but no one pursued him. Ali Mousa’s servants had surrendered almost before they began. They were well rid of him, and they knew it.
It was not despair that slowed his pace. That had burned away in the light of his father’s face. Mahaut had said it often enough: Mahaut who had looked at him and seen only a maddened beast. A wise man knew himself before he acted. A sensible man knew himself as he acted. But for a fool, it was always and endlessly too late.
So very much, he had had, and he had never known it. He had taken it as no more than his due; he who had never done more to earn it than to be born.
If this was sense, it was appallingly like pain. He did not flatter himself that it was wisdom. He was not wise. He was merely a fool who had, through Allah’s infinite and implacable mercy, been suffered to see the truth.
The house of al-Zaman rose before him. All of its gates were barred. He laid his weary body beneath the garden wall and waited for the dawn.
8
They never learned how Khamsin had vanished from his courtyard and appeared outside a locked gate. One unbarred door, for which the culprit paid the due price, hardly sufficed to explain the rest of it. It was a mystery, like the mind of Allah.
To be sure, Zamaniyah reflected, Khamsin’s behavior had been exemplary since. He seemed almost chastened: as if freedom had taught him the value of obedience. His temper was no sweeter, but he heeded her more perfectly; he fought more seldom. Even when she set the saddle on his back. Even when, at last, with beating heart, she bade him carry her.
Mincing, hunching, ears now flat and now flicking nervously, he learned to bear her weight. It was little enough; but what it signified, she knew well. As, she suspected, did he. Obedience; acceptance. The slow fading of rebellion.
And his door was always, meticulously, double-barred.
oOo
She could envy him that. Her father’s command and her own defiance had cast her in the world’s eye; she held herself there by sheer force of will. An emir could not in courtesy refuse to dine at al-Zaman’s table if, having sat to it, he found himself compelled to share it with al-Zaman’s heir. No more could a man of standing turn away the sultan’s favored prince for that the prince had his daughter at his side. She was, at least, quiet, and modest under the outrageousness of the turban. Sometimes, for a novelty, they even spoke to her, and smiled when she answered, as one smiles at a clever beast.
The sultan’s smile was sudden, and warm, and not condescending at all. Zamaniyah, summoned before him on a bare hour’s notice, brought in growing dread to what could only be a private chamber, was barely comforted. Even though Jaffar was with her. Even th
ough the eunuch who had brought her took station at his lord’s back. Even though there were half a dozen men about, and eunuchs, and slaves both male and female: protection enough, surely, and defense against impropriety. As if the Rectifier of the Faith could be improper.
And what was she?
He accepted her obeisance, but he would not let her stand or kneel. He offered cushions. A silent slave brought sweets, sherbet, a bowl of honeyed nuts.
She sat stiffly on a cushion, pretended to sip from the cup. The men murmured together, a little apart. She caught a word or two. At least one of them was a secretary, scribbling busily as a companion read from what looked like a sheaf of dispatches. None of them seemed to see her. They would not, she suspected, unless the sultan gave them leave.
He, however, saw her very well indeed. He studied her—shamelessly, she would have said, if he had not been who he was.
“You are under my protection,” he said. “You may regard me as your kinsman.”
That startled her, brought her eyes to his face. He smiled as if he had intended exactly that. “Do I frighten you so much?” he asked her.
“You are the sultan,” she answered. Her voice was faint but steady.
“Do you know why that is?”
He wanted an answer. She swallowed. She could say what was wise. Or she could tell the truth.
“Because you were the youngest,” she said. “The one they thought weakest.”
No blade swept down to take her life. No one even gasped in horror. The sultan grinned like a boy. “Just so! And still you fear me?”
“What they thought you is not what they made you.”
“You understand,” he said. It was not a question.
She blinked. Because she did understand; and because he did. A man was not supposed to understand. Least of all the sultan.
He beckoned her closer. She was shocked enough to come. He spoke softly, almost in her ear. “We have a secret, you and I. We know what we are.”
