by Judith Tarr
“Nahar,” said Wiborada, both wise and circumspect.
“Zamaniyah,” said Zamaniyah, bowing as deeply as her hurts would allow. “We owe you our utmost gratitude. It was deadly, what we fled from.”
The lady waved it gracefully away. “You are safe with us for as long as there is need.”
“Not overlong, with all due respect,” Zamaniyah said. “My father will be distraught.”
Wiborada’s eye caught hers in profound agreement, and profound unease. Safiyah saw, and seemed to comprehend. “I think, perhaps, a message...a boy alone may pass where you could not. To whom shall I send him?”
“I shall go, madam,” said Jaffar, entering, bowing low. “If you will permit.”
“I do not!” snapped Zamaniyah.
His glance stopped her short. It was wild. It was trying to tell her something.
“You can’t go,” she sad. “You’ll die.”
He prostrated himself at her feet. “Mistress, I beg.” And under his breath in rapid, if abominable, Greek: “Stop it, little fool. Would you have them learn who you are?”
Her astonishment was complete. She had never known that he knew Greek. “But—” she began.
“This is your enemy. Her husband killed your brothers.”
She went cold. Her eyes darted before she could stop them. Wiborada was speaking to Safiyah—to Ali Mousa’s wife. Gracious, beautiful, hated; and hating, if she discovered what she harbored. What had not merely accepted her hospitality but demanded it: eaten her bread, drunk her sherbet, become guests before the eyes of God and man.
Zamaniyah’s chin set. “Pardon, madam. My eunuch stays with me. If your boy will go, he need only say that I have found sanctuary in the house of a friend.”
“And your father?”
Jaffar’s eyes burned. Zamaniyah stared them down. “Yakhuz al-Zaman.”
There was a brief but impenetrable silence. The lady broke it with a slow sigh, the merest shadow of a shrug. She bowed her head. “It shall be done,” she said.
Her courtesy abated not at all. Wiborada, who knew nothing, still had the wits not to include herself in the message. Her own tale was long since spun: an excursion to the baths, with maids well and, Zamaniyah could hope, thoroughly bribed.
It would have been pleasant here, had it not been the house of an enemy. Safiyah was a great lady; she seemed kind. There was a sadness on her as there had been on her husband in the sultan’s diwan. It deepened, perhaps, as she perceived who her younger guest was. A daughter, an heir. Zamaniyah found no blame in her, no hatred, though another might have laid on her husband’s great enemy the blame for her son’s loss. It would have been a just revenge.
This forbearance was, perhaps, worse. It took all of Zamaniyah’s strength to sit still, to maintain a quiet face, to listen as Wiborada told the tale of their riding. The Frank told the truth, of which she had no shame; Safiyah was not visibly shocked to hear it, although she was appalled that they had done it through a mob.
“The horse led us,” said Wiborada. “He brought us here.”
“Truly?” Safiyah was exquisitely polite. “A wise beast.”
Not so wise, if he had led them here of all houses in Cairo.
“He is most unusual,” Wiborada said. “Mad, people at home will tell you. He will accept no stall. He lives in a courtyard with an entourage of cats; he lets no one touch him but the young mistress.”
“He sounds like a tale in the bazaar,” said one of the women about Safiyah. “Like an enchanted prince.”
Zamaniyah glanced at Jaffar. His expression was utterly strange. Then it shifted; it was his own again, blankly placid.
The women were smiling. None but Safiyah seemed to have heard the name of al-Zaman. One said, “We know of enchantments. One night a Jinni broke down our gate and roared through the house; we held him at bay in the garden. Then our master came and blessed him, and he ran away.”
“Truly?” asked Wiborada.
“Most truly,” said another of the women.
“What did he look like?” Zamaniyah asked, to spin out the tale, to free her mind from its circling about the name and house and sins of Ali Mousa.
“Why, lady, he looked like a horse. A horse made of shadows, with a thunderbolt on his brow. But surely he was a Jinni. He opened our gate; he let no one touch him till the master came. He knew our master. He yielded to the blood of the Prophet, on whom are blessing and peace.”
“Blessing,” they all murmured devoutly, “and peace.”
Jaffar was fixed like a hound at gaze. Zamaniyah could not see why. It was only a story, even if Safiyah seemed inclined to indulge it. “My horse is quite mortal,” she said, “if somewhat odd. He had no training till I bought him, and he was no colt then. He does,” she conceded, “have a great deal of intelligence. Too much, I sometimes think, for his own good.”
“One might say the same of children,” Safiyah said, sighing.
“I had,” answered Safiyah, “one.”
Zamaniyah leaped before Wiborada could worsen it. “Maybe the streets will have cleared a little. We should go, truly we should. My father—”
“Please,” Safiyah said. “Linger yet a while. I would not wish you to be lost, when you could have been safe here.”
Trained hate drew taut the skin between Zamaniyah’s shoulderblades, cried Treachery! behind her burning eyes. But her heart regarded this woman and knew no ill of her but her name and her husband. It was a great pity, Zamaniyah’s deeper self observed, that Safiyah had had none but the single worthless fool of a son. Her beauty and her dignity deserved better.
“A woman does not of necessity choose her husband.”
“Nor need she choose to be the enemy of his enemies,” Safiyah said.
Zamaniyah started, blushed. She had not known that she spoke aloud. Safiyah’s smile was gentle. “We are women,” she said, as if that explained everything.
It was hard to hate a woman for what her man had done, when she was so perfectly, royally kind. Having given hospitality before she knew her guests’ names, she did not stint it after. Her conversation was much less dull than Zamaniyah might have feared. She was educated. She knew the poets; she knew music, and philosophy.
She was also tactful. She did not mention her husband’s name. No more did she speak of al-Zaman.
And yet the servant’s coming was a rescue. “Lady,” he said. “The horse—”
Zamaniyah barely paused to excuse herself. In silks and slippers and forbidden veil, she bolted in the eunuch’s wake.
Khamsin had done nothing visibly perilous. He had simply eluded confinement to take up station in the courtyard. His head flew up when she came; he trotted to her, sniffed her arm, lipped it with utmost gentleness. He had wounds himself. Cuts, cleaned and tended; the swellings of bruises. He sighed. “Did you fret for me?” she asked him.
People had followed her. They were staring. Safiyah came through them.
Khamsin saw her. He whickered softly, softly. He had never whickered for Zamaniyah. Very gently he stepped toward Safiyah, setting each foot down with meticulous care, as if he feared to frighten her. His ears were erect, quivering.
She was not, it was apparent, a woman for horses. She lacked the touch; yet she lacked also the fear that so often went with inexperience. When he laid his head against her breast, she neither shrieked nor fled, but stroked it, smiling a smile of remarkable beauty. “Is he your strange one?”
“Isn’t it clear to see?” asked Zamaniyah. She should have been pleased and proud. She was unendurably jealous. She had to fight hard to keep it out of her voice.
Safiyah did not hear it. “He is beautiful. So long a mane, and so thick; so silken a coat. And so docile.”
“He likes you,” Zamaniyah said. “Very much.”
He looked fair to swoon at the lady’s feet. She, for all her queenliness, was doting on him. Had she spoiled her son with such blind tenderness? Small wonder then that he had come to a bad end.
A
s would Zamaniyah, if her father discovered where she had waited out the city’s storm. With perseverance and the armor of a servant’s foray into a much quieted street, she won her proper clothing and her host’s leave to go. She offered due, and deep, respect, and thanks that were heartfelt. She was not at all sorry to see the last of that house and its inhabitants.
10
Khamsin was almost at peace. He had sought his father’s house of his own will, for the sanctuary he knew he would find there, and despite the pain that had gone with the finding. His mother had not known him, and he had endured it. He was stronger than he had ever known he could be.
But before Allah, he would not, could not, do it again.
Zamaniyah did not let that first terrible riding deter her from taking him into the city, even beyond it. They had ample escort: a troop of her father’s mamluks, armed and watchful. Sometimes one of them was a little smaller than the rest, riding a bay gelding and exchanging no speech with the others. Nor did they try to speak to her. Khamsin knew an understanding when he scented it; it interested him. He wondered how long either woman thought she could hide this trickery from al-Zaman.
The city was quiet again. The sultan’s men had quelled the uprising swiftly and ruthlessly, but once it was quelled, they had withdrawn to simple vigilance. It was well done, people opined in Khamsin’s hearing. Egypt had never lain content under Islam; the exchange of Turk for Arab had reminded its people of all their grievances. He had lowered their taxes. He had been forceful with the Christians and the Jews, but that sat well with Muslims of all sides. He was showing signs of great canniness and no little subtlety.
“That’s his father,” a mamluk said as they rode beyond the walls. “Ayyub is a king of foxes, and his son has the wits to listen to him. Do you know, he’s the only emir who has the right to sit in the presence of the sultan of Syria?”
Zamaniyah, in Khamsin’s mind, was much too tolerant of loose tongues among her slaves. She not only forbore to reprimand this one; she circled Khamsin round to fall in beside him. His mare was distractingly lovely. For all of that, Khamsin heard his mistress say, “That right has been revoked, I think. Nur al-Din is hardly pleased to find his young servant made sultan of Egypt, and avoiding a return to him with constant and convenient excuses, and never quite sending him the tribute he asks for. My lord lost his fiefs in Syria when he won Egypt; his family fares no better there, though more than well enough here.”
“That’s economy,” said the mamluk. Like all of al-Zaman’s soldier-slaves, he treated Zamaniyah as if she had been a boy; free as his tongue was, it managed, somehow, to be respectful. “They’re carving a kingdom, those Kurdish foxes. What will you wager that Yusuf stretches out his hand for Syria?”
“I won’t wager anything,” she said, but not as if he had angered her. “My lord loves his lord in Syria. He tries to live as Nur al-Din lives, because he finds it admirable. It’s only...Egypt is his now. He has to rule it as best he can.”
“And if Syria sets out to drain Egypt dry—what then?”
“Then,” answered Zamaniyah, “my lord does as he must.”
Khamsin did not know why he listened. He had too much else to fret him. The mare; and the woman in mamluk’s clothing, riding just ahead. The stallion in him snorted and preened before the great-eyed grey. The man remembered beauty unveiled, a mouth like a flower, skin like milk and roses.
He was beginning to suspect that something in his enchantment was subtly, cruelly awry. All that was native to this body, he had. Hasan would have scorned the barley which he ate with such relish, which was given only to beggars and to beasts. Hasan would have recoiled in horror from the thought of taking pleasure with a mare. And yet this creature that he was could gaze with longing at both the mare and the woman, and yearn equally for both.
His mistress gave him something blessedly, cursedly new to divert his mind. He hated new lessons: they were difficult, and sometimes he could not understand, and always he raged that he could not learn them perfectly, absolutely, all at once.
Hasan had been nothing short of lazy, body and mind. Khamsin, in body, was anything but that. But his temper had not changed at all, his utter impatience with anything that did not bend at once to his will.
Cajoled and often frankly seduced into doing as Zamaniyah commanded, he gave obedience, but he made her pay for it. Her patience was not infinite. Yet it stretched beyond belief, and it almost never broke. She could even laugh when he fought her, light upon his back as he bucked and plunged, clinging it seemed by sheer will.
This time he did not fight. They had come to a wide level plain between the river and the hills, empty even of birds though it was early yet, the heavy heat of day in Cairo’s spring barely begun. The mamluks unburdened their horses of odd bundles which Khamsin had barely noticed, and raised them: targets. He shied more from what they meant than from what they were.
Zamaniyah rode him round and about them, gentling him, explaining considerably more than he wanted to know. “Everything you do,” she said as he snorted and sidled, and she stroked his neck and urged him relentlessly on, “is to make you, in the end, a warhorse.” She was speaking Greek. He cursed himself for understanding it. “You have a gift, though your temper mars it; you have fire, and you have intelligence.”
He bucked, angry. He did not. A dim-witted beauty he had been born, and a dim-witted beauty he would quite happily die. And he most emphatically did not want to carry her while she shot at targets. Targets, it was true, could not shoot back. Men could.
She would not go to war. Even al-Zaman was not that perfect a madman.
He had calmed in spite of himself. He trotted, then cantered, through the staggered circle of targets. He was almost disappointed when she did no more than that. Why did she drag it out? Could she not smite him with it all at once?
That was not the way of this Greek mummery. Slowly, slowly: Al’zan lived by that wisdom. It was the wisdom of seduction. Gentle degrees, lulling him into peace; and then, all at once, he was won. It humiliated him. He was a man, not a beast; and he had done his own fair share of seducing. He should have known what was being done to him.
Perhaps he did know. Perhaps he wanted it.
They went back to the plain. Not every day. Some days Zamaniyah did not come at all. Often there were exercises on the familiar practice ground, exercises ever more like a dance of horse and rider, precise, cadenced, captivating. At first they came close to hurting. They were hard, and Zamaniyah relentless, pressing him always to his utmost.
Then the truth struck. She never pressed him harder than he could bear, whatever he might have thought before he did it. And it grew easier. He was lighter. He was stronger. He was wonderfully, joyfully supple. He who had always only watched the dancers, he was one of them, one with them, on his four feet with music beating in his brain. His own music, but not his alone. She shared it. She as much as he set its cadence. She was part of him. One mind, one will, one dawning delight.
oOo
Ramadan passed in fasting and prayer. He fasted, he prayed as best he could. The river flooded amid rejoicing; the land shifted as it had since days began, and begot anew the riches of Egypt.
In the lessening heat of autumn, Zamaniyah rode her stallion among the targets. Her bow was strung, her quiver full. He was eager, dancing and snorting.
Her hand on his neck quieted him a little. He felt her gather herself, heard her draw a breath. She drew up the reins in her right hand. Her escort watched, her father’s concubine among them, more interested than perhaps she knew. Some of the mamluks had wagers riding on her marksmanship.
His duty was to run as smoothly, dart as swiftly, obey as perfectly as he could. When he was minded to oblige, she shot very well indeed. She could bend a stronger bow than her slightness might have hinted at; her eye was straight, her judgment sound. Her mamluks, who did not bestow praise easily, called her an archer.
Her heels touched his sides. He bunched, resisting because it was h
is habit to resist. “Now,” she said. He sprang forward.
She spoke to him: a subtle speech of leg, hand, shifting weight. She called the steps of the swift complex dance. Arrows sang from the string, over his head, his neck, his croup; to right, to left, as he wheeled, as he swerved, as he galloped headlong from target to target.
It was sweeter than wine, headier than the smoke of hashish. She commanded, he obeyed; he the body, she the brain. His feet spurned the earth. His lungs drank the wind.
It ended too soon. He protested her hand that halted him. She flung her arms around his neck. “O marvelous! O splendid! You have it now—you have it!”
oOo
“He does indeed.”
Caught up in the joy of the dance, she had never seen the swelling of her escort, nor felt the doubled and trebled weight of watching eyes. She started like a deer. The sultan leaned on his pommel and gave her his best grin, somewhat to the shock of his companions. Who were many. Who were princely.
He swept a bow before she could gather wits to move. “A fine morning, cousin, and a fine horse to do it honor.”
“My lord,” she said stupidly. “You were riding in the wars.”
“I was,” he said. “Now Cairo has me again.” He urged his mare closer. Khamsin was duly fascinated: he arched his neck and rumbled in his throat. Zamaniyah smiled in spite of herself. The sultan smiled back. “Once or twice, while we raided, we paused to hunt. We would have welcomed your archery.”
Her face was on fire. She mumbled something. He had not been away so very long, but it had been quite long enough. She was heart-glad to see him again; she wished that he had never come back. It had been quiet without him. Peaceful. She had let herself sink into her old solitude.
Now he would end it. He was beckoning, wanting her with him, admiring her stallion. By that art of his which was princely, he won from her the whole tale, even to her father’s unbending disapproval. “And now,” her tongue babbled on its own, “it’s a year exactly since I bought Khamsin, and you see what a warrior he is already; but Father remembers that once, when he was frightened, he nearly trampled me. Fathers are unreasonable.”
