A Wind in Cairo

by Judith Tarr

  “I am a woman,” she said. “Half a man is worth all of me.”

  “Therefore we are equals: for half a man is what my rivals reckoned me.”

  “Foolishly.”

  “Just so,” said the sultan.

  He had made her smile. She tried to look away, but they were too close. She had not been thinking of him as a handsome man, or as a man at all. He was not handsome, she decided. Pleasing, rather. Good to look at, slender and quick, like a fine hunting hound.

  He sat back, oblivious as it seemed to her flaming cheeks. Of all the times there ever were, to wake to woman’s sight…

  “You will attend me on occasion,” he said. The words were formal, his voice raised slightly, but the tone was warm still. “By my given word, we are kin, and you have my favor.”

  He offered his hand. She had the wits to take it. “Allah go with you,” he said.

  oOo

  “Now that’s wise,” said Jaffar, “to grant you favor, to name you friend, but not to keep you by him.”

  “Wise for whom?” she asked. “For him or for me?”

  “For both of you. You have his full protection, but not so much that people can whisper.”

  “People always whisper.”

  She was unwontedly sharp tonight. He busied himself about her chamber, knowing that she scowled at him, not needing to wonder why. He knew. He wondered if the sultan did. Perhaps not. These Muslims were like their own stallions: they could not see past a woman’s rump. The sultan would no doubt have decided that Zamaniyah was a sort of exotic boy; and he was not, by all accounts, a lover of boys.

  Jaffar sighed gently. When the red stallion came back, he had had all he could do not to slit the beast’s throat; and his mood had been black in the days since. This lightened it a little. No harm to Zamaniyah if she cast eyes on her sultan who could not see; less likelihood then of her falling afoul of a man of less honor and more perception.

  She could not know that she was fortunate. She was new enough still to womanhood, and somewhat late come to it; she knew only that she did not want it. They seldom did, at first. Later, they learned to take both pride and pleasure in it.

  He grimaced at his own wisdom, smoothed his face, turned to her. She glared. “Why do you hover like that?”

  “Your father is waiting,” he reminded her gently.

  “Let him wait.”

  Her mouth snapped shut. She had alarmed herself. She snatched the coat he held for her, flung it on. But she let him belt it, standing stiffly erect, trembling with the effort of holding still.

  He settled on his heels and inspected her. “You’ll do,” he said.

  Her fists clenched, unclenched. “I’m not pretty,” she said abruptly. “Am I?”

  “Do you want to be?”

  She drew a deep breath.

  “It’s simple enough,” he said. “Paint, kohl, a touch of scent. If you want it.”

  “But I’m not—”

  “Prettiness is an art.”

  She shook her head hard enough to send her cap flying. He caught it, restored it. Without a word she turned on her heel and left him.

  “But beauty,” he finished, “is deeper.” The air was silent. She had gone before she could hear.

  oOo

  The saqla mare was in foal. Al’zan was beside himself; the stable was in uproar. She, whether sinner or sinned against, bore all of it with royal calm. “Who has done it?” Al’zan cried to her. “Who?”

  The stable lads were all babbling at once. No one could have done it. The stallions were locked away where they could not possibly have reached her. She herself had been guarded like a queen.

  “Like a queen!” Their master tore at his beard. “Like Messalina! O sweet Mother of God, when I find him I shall dine on his jewels.”

  Zamaniyah crept out of the storm. He had started on the boys; they cowered at his feet. She pitied the one who would inevitably bear the brunt of it.

  “Perhaps,” someone ventured, “the east wind—”

  Al’zan’s roar shook the rafters.

  oOo

  Khamsin was waiting under his portico. He eyed the saddle askance as always, and sidled as she tightened the girth. She stroked the satin softness behind his ear, gathering herself to cajole the bit between his teeth. Al’zan’s voice echoed through the half-open door, flaying some hapless fool alive.

  Zamaniyah’s eye slid. Door. Khamsin. His own eye rolled back. He looked—

  “Oh, no,” she said. “You didn’t. You couldn’t have.”

  He snorted with perfect equine vulgarity, and yawned. She clapped the bit into his open mouth, settled the headstall. He was very properly startled.

  “Do you know what he’ll do to you?”

  He shied. Probably it was her vehemence.

  “If he remembers,” she muttered. “If he even stops to think—”

  And she had to lead Khamsin past him to the practice ground. Khamsin whose door opened on the passage to the mares’ stable. Khamsin who was not kehailan. Khamsin who lived already under threat of gelding or death.

  If a horse could be said to creep, he crept beside her, head low, looking as meek as an Arab stallion could. He did not even call to the mares. He seemed to be trying to hide in her shadow.

  He carried her with something approaching grace. He hardly bucked at all, and he only tangled his feet once. She slid from the saddle and embraced him. He nibbled her hair.

  “If it was you,” she said, “if we have to—if it comes to that—”

  He pulled back, rearing. His forelegs smote her with shattering force. She reeled, clutched blindly, caught mane. He stood trembling; his eye rolled white. She pressed her hand to her side, to the pain that swelled, black-red, all-encompassing. She drew a very careful breath. It caught. She thrust words through it. Faint, breathless, but clear. “She was there and it was her time, and you’re no man, to care that she was never meant for you.”

  His head drooped. When she took the bridle, he plodded beside her, tail low, dejected. Al’zan never noticed. Even rage has its limits, and he was master of more than one erring mare. The air rumbled with thunder still, and the lads’ eyes rolled like their charges’, but the storm had passed, for a while.

  oOo

  Zamaniyah’s ribs were cracked. She strapped them tight and swore Jaffar to secrecy: a command which he did not suffer easily. No more could she ever persuade him to suffer Khamsin.

  That noon in the mosque, bowing beside her father, she prayed that the stallion’s secret might remain so. She knew her prayer was heard; she did not know that it was granted.

  Her head ached nearly as fiercely as her side. The barbed glances of the men about her, usual though they were, stung. She knew that the imams had protested her presence. She knew equally well that the sultan had overruled them. He held the foremost rank of prayer; he had mounted the pulpit, striking each step ceremonially with his scabbarded sword, to declaim a sermon which she had barely heard.

  When the Prophet forbade women to pray with the men, he had plainly been thinking of the latter. But she, aching, fretting for her idiot of a horse, could still notice a fine profile, a well-cut waist, a handsome rump adorning the line in front of her.

  She shut her eyes. It helped a little, but then she could not see to bow. She had lost the thread of the prayer.

  In the murmur and mingle of the aftermath, she made herself her father’s shadow, and fixed her eyes grimly on her feet. One was not supposed to think about one’s aches, but it was better than thinking about one’s treacherous eyes. Woman’s eyes. They were worse than blind. They saw beauty in every face that was young and male and not too badly made.

  Someone spoke her name. She had looked up before she thought, before her mind had named the voice. The sultan smiled and inclined his head to her. “When the day cools,” he said, “we ride to the hunt, my brothers and I. Your presence would honor us.”

  She set her teeth behind a smile, and bowed as low as she could without gasp
ing. “The honor is mine, my lord.”

  “And mine,” he answered, bowing in his turn, letting his followers herd him away.

  oOo

  Her father was delighted. He even lent her his own horse, since by her oath she had none but Khamsin: the bay mare who was swiftest in the chase. Her gaits, at least, were smooth, and Al’zan had trained her; there was no silliness in her.

  The same, as Jaffar had made eminently clear, was not true of her rider. He rode a great rawboned mule at her back, with disapproval in every line of his body. He carried her arrows and her bow; he would, if possible, have carried her.

  She would, if possible, have let him do it. Maybe men were born to ignore pain. She was a woman, and she hurt. And she would be triply damned if she betrayed herself to any of these gawping males. They gawped at her bow. They gawped when she strung it. They gawped when she brought down a brace of birds in a brace of shots. Easy shots, both. Any of them could have done the same, if any of them had had his mind on his own bow and not on hers.

  “You shoot well,” said the sultan as his huntsmen retrieved her kill.

  A flush crawled up her cheeks. “I have been taught well,” she said, clear and miraculously steady.

  “By your father?”

  She glanced at Jaffar, who was very carefully not listening. “By my father’s command, sire.”

  He nodded. “A very unusual man, your father.”

  “Very unusual,” she agreed, “sire.”

  He grinned, startling her. “Was it he who taught you to be so careful?”

  She looked down in confusion, but then up. “My father is not a careful man. He does as his heart moves him, and as his loyalty commands. I have his heart. You, sire, have his loyalty. Of that, you may be certain.”

  “I never doubted it,” said the sultan.

  They had paused on a hill, a low rise above the river. “Not so very long,” said one of those about the sultan, “until all this lies under the Nile.”

  “Allah willing,” said someone else.

  Zamaniyah shivered a little in spite of the sun. She knew what great blessings were in the river’s rising, in the great sea of it that swallowed the land and cast it up again with its strength renewed. But she had been born in a country that kept much the same face between summer and summer. This river was too strong; it ruled too absolutely.

  She turned her back on it, her face to the city. From here she could see the whole of it, the ruin of the Old City, the huddle of the royal city with the new walls rising to guard it, the gardens stretching wide and green between.

  “See,” said the sultan beside her. “There.” Her eyes followed the stretch of his arm, up beyond the city to the steep dun crag and the spur of its peak. A mosque stood there all alone; the Dome of the Air where the falcons wheeled. “There I shall set my citadel, in the high places where no enemy can fall upon it.”

  “You mean to endure,” said Zamaniyah.

  “I mean to matter.” His arm swept round. “I never chose this country. It chose me. It can break me; or I can break it to my will.”

  “Do you hate it so much?”

  The hiss of breath about her was louder than the wind. There were things one did not say.

  There were things one did not do. If one were a woman, one did not ride, one did not hunt, one did not speak to one’s sultan as if one were his equal.

  She was never careful when she had only herself to think of. She watched him ponder his answer, frowning, but not with temper. At length he said, “When I first saw it, I hated it. I hated anything that was not Syria. Then I hated it because it took my uncle, because it bade fair to take me. Now...I have no liking for it. I don’t know that I love it. Does the wood love the fire that consumes it? Does the camel love the burden she bears?”

  Zamaniyah was silent.

  Suddenly he laughed. “How grim I sound! This is the portion which God has allotted me. I accept it. And it has beauty. Look! Have you ever seen a sky so wide?”

  Wide beyond conceiving; and even the horizon had no end to it. One could almost believe what the old people whispered, that the gods dwelt beyond the shifting edges of the world.

  “Allahu akbar,” murmured Zamaniyah. “God is greater than they.”

  He sent a flock of geese wheeling and crying over them. Her hands flew, bracing, nocking, loosing. The arrow flew true. The quarry fell like a stone, plummeting to earth at the sultan’s feet.

  “Allah’s gift,” said Zamaniyah, “to the lord of Egypt.”

  But her eyes had shifted to the luminous line that was the horizon, and her mind, feckless creature, had dared—for an instant—to wonder.

  9

  “I think he likes to talk to me,” said Zamaniyah.

  Khamsin had not seen her in too long. He had betrayed it: he had run to her when she came, demanding with every line of his body where she had been, why she had not come, what had mattered so much that she could so heartlessly forsake him; and Al’zan coming all too often to set him on the long line, and he dreading endlessly, helplessly, that the man would take a knife to him for his transgression with the saqla mare. But he had recalled himself, and put on an air of nonchalance, which she was ignoring. Her scent had an ache in it; she moved more slowly than usual, and somewhat more stiffly.

  “He’s had me with him every day,” she said. “Riding. Talking. Keeping him company. Yesterday it was polo. He has a passion for it.”

  She, plainly, did not. She set to work unraveling the knot which always bedemoned his mane. “Jaffar is livid. I was starting to mend, and then I took that ridiculous fall, trying a shot I knew I couldn’t make.”

  His head swung up, round. Mend? What in Allah’s name had she been doing?

  “At least now no one can blame you. I cracked my ribs playing polo with the sultan. They all admired my fortitude. I didn’t tell them I’d been riding in bandages ever since you knocked me down.”

  A horse could gasp. He could also yearn with all that was in him for the power to answer her. To cry apology. To upbraid her for her stupidity. She was acting—damn her, she was acting like a man.

  “I’m not supposed to ride you today,” she said. “I’m supposed to be in bed, with the sultan’s doctor clucking over me. He won’t look at me directly, since he’s not a eunuch. He makes Jaffar look, and Jaffar doesn’t like him, which is fortunate for me and you. He’s gone to tell his master that I’ll live, but I’ll need a few days’ peace. It’s wise, that. I shouldn’t be with my lord too much. People are deciding that I’m not really a woman; I’m a sort of peculiar boy, like a eunuch, but braver.” She laughed, little more than a snort. “Brave. I. So much they know. I don’t want people to remember what I really am; and I don’t want to remind them.”

  Khamsin never needed to be reminded. He had wounded her again in his heedlessness; she had forgiven him again, as she breathed, because she could do no other. He could have hated her for that.

  She rubbed the tender place beneath his jaw, leaning lightly against his neck. “Do you know what I think? I think I’m carrying it off.”

  He did not know why she should be surprised. She was like no one else he had ever heard of.

  She walked with him from stable to practice ground to garden, idling in the heavy heat. He was bred to it, horse and man. She had no love for it. Her hair clung damply to her forehead; even in light loose clothing she suffered.

  They paused by the pool. Khamsin had schooled himself to endure what he saw there; if not, yet, to accept it. He drank, ruffling the image. Zamaniyah sat on the pool’s edge and trailed her hand in the water. She bent her head, laved her face. Khamsin nibbled grass beside her foot.

  She stood suddenly, startling him. She knotted his lead about his neck; and as he watched, astonished, she dropped her every garment. Shock held him rooted. Had she no modesty at all?

  She slid into the cool water. She was as supple as the bright fish that fled before her, and no more shamefast, never knowing what manner of creature stood
and stared and forgot the grass cloying upon his tongue.

  It hurt that she did not know. Even though, if she had, she would never in all the world have done as she did now, lain on her back in the water’s embrace, offering herself to the sky. He would have given kingdoms for a hand to touch her, there, where bruises marred the fine brown skin, and there, where bandages bound her poor wounded ribs; for a human tongue, to tell her—

  To tell her what? That he was her bitter enemy? That he had been the scourge of the women of Cairo? He might have sired a child, or two, or three. He could not remember. He had never cared enough to care.

  She rose, streaming water, enfolding him in a cool wet embrace. Her breasts burned against his neck. Her laughter rippled in his ear. “Oh, you marvel! You never moved.”

  He had had no power to.

  She wrung out her hair, drew on her garments one by one, reluctant, sighing. But no more reluctant than he. He wanted to count her bruises. To trace the thin lines of scars—such as he had never had, who had evaded all but the barest inescapable beginnings of the arts of war. He had set himself to master other arts. Drinking. Roistering. Whoring.

  Zamaniyah led him back to the place he had won for himself. She went away as she always did, free in her humanity. “Tomorrow,” she promised as she left him. She did not ask him if he was content with it. The world was not so ordered that a woman need respect the wishes of a beast.

  oOo

  The messenger was waiting when Zamaniyah came to the harem: a eunuch, old and august and redolent of ambergris, with a pair of languid pages. Even in the sultan’s livery they had a look of the caliph’s palace. They bore a gift for her, which they spread before her widening eyes: shimmering beauty, silk the color of a peacock’s fan, sewn into a robe for a queen.

  “My lord the sultan, Salah al-Din who is mighty in salvation, bids you accept this small token of his goodwill,” said the eunuch in a voice as high and fluting as a bird’s.