A Wind in Cairo

by Judith Tarr

  Trapped, mute, helpless, he let himself be ridden, cooled, left alone. Zamaniyah barred the door behind her. The rattle of the bolts was eloquent, and inescapable.

  He gathered himself to kick down the damnable thing.

  Paused.

  Plodded slowly to the farthest shaded corner of his prison. Turned his back on temptation. Schooled himself, painfully, to patience.

  oOo

  Speechlessness had never been as bitter as it was now. He had fancied that he was resigned to it. Fancy indeed. He had never needed to speak.

  Zamaniyah doled out tales in tantalizing fragments. How the little one took to the halter, how she ran among the foals, how she was proving headstrong yet amenable to reason. None of it was enough.

  Of course he could not see her. What did a stallion care for his progeny? She was never in sight when he passed through the stable. Sometimes he thought he scented her: a hint of newness, the sweetness of milk, mingled with the remembered scent of her mother. Remembered more keenly as al-Saqla drew closer to her foal-heat.

  She was guarded unceasingly. Zamaniyah told Khamsin so. This time they were not to be thwarted. The mare of royal lineage would go to none but the royal stallion.

  Even she could say it, arrogant as every human was, recking nothing of what it did to him. His mare. His consort. And some brute beast would have her, some mindless animal, fit only for begetting animals.

  And what could he do? If he escaped again, took her again, they would cure him of his trespassing.

  When he was calmest, he could see irony in it. The horsedealer could have lied. Could have given him a proper lineage and spared him this humiliation. Any other would have done just that. The Hajji had been most careful, and most merciless: he had sold his victim to the only honest horsedealer in the world.

  But Allah, unlike the Hajji, had mercy. Khamsin, who had doubted it, was given time to rebuke himself for a blasphemous fool.

  He was on the practice ground. He had just completed a round of exercises, and been praised for excellence. Zamaniyah was trusting him: he stood unbound, reins on his neck, while she freed him of the itching bonds of the saddle. His mouth had readied itself for the sweetness of the fruit she always gave him once the saddle was disposed of.

  The gate was open. It always was; he never tried to escape. Where could he go?

  Swift hoofbeats startled him. Zamaniyah did not seem to hear them. They were very light. Their maker was very small, trotting through the gate, dancing, curvetting: red wickedness in infancy, escaped from her mother and cocky with it.

  His presence astonished her. She sprang into the air and came down stiff-legged, poised, staring with her whole body.

  He knew her. She was part of himself.

  His neck arched. He uttered the softest of sounds, a bare flutter of the nostrils.

  She raised her head, whickered back.

  Her bravery must be of her mother; Allah knew, he had none. She came to him, bold, fascinated. Surely she had never scented anything like him before.

  Zamaniyah snatched the bridle. He spun free. His daughter followed. Ah, her body said, delighted: this large one was a marvel. He liked to play.

  She was lighter, but he was surer of his feet. She danced in circles about him. She ventured an impudence: a flashing nip, a flick of heels. He laughed as he eluded them.

  A scream spun them both about; and a clamor beyond it, human noise, meaningless.

  The mare saw horror. Her daughter escaped, lost, abducted; and a stallion. Hooved death barring her way to her child. She hurtled upon him.

  He retreated rapidly. The little one, baffled, bleated a question. The mare examined her from nose to tail. Sighed. Glared at Khamsin. Paused.

  His skin quivered. Her scent was that most wondrous of all scents. Sweeter now, more enchanting, for that it was of the foal-heat: the foal he had begotten.

  Her daughter was patently unharmed, safe at her side, nuzzling a nipple. She was aware, all at once, of what a stallion was good for.

  She remembered him. He saw it in her eyes. She knew her lover who had come to her in the night, who had taken her maidenhood.

  She did not soften as a woman might. She was al-Saqla, the swift one, the fierce one, the one who endured no taming. But she ceased to glare. She tilted an ear. She bade him court her.

  Humans circled, baying. She showed them her heels. They crowded back. “Allah,” someone was praying, or cursing. “Ya Allah!”

  Khamsin courted as she commanded, arming all his beauty, laying it at her feet.

  “Khamsin!” A new voice, clear and desperate. “Khamsin!”

  The bit in his mouth, the rein on his neck, the will that dreamed it mastered his own.

  They meant her for a stranger. His mare. His consort. His body’s beloved.

  He shared the sweetness of her breath, tasted the sweet sharpness of teeth. Her threat was all love.

  “He’s still bridled.”

  “Pull them apart.”

  “Ropes—a whip—”

  “Catch the foal!”

  “Aiee!”

  The mare’s heels had caught that one. She was no human’s chattel. She was Khamsin’s. She turned, offering. Demanding.

  One did not refuse one’s queen.

  A stallion screamed. Khamsin wheeled. Rage flared, red as blood.

  A human wielded the enemy, the rival, the interloper. Great grey stormcloud of a beast, no mind in him, no wits, no will but lust and hate and battle.

  Khamsin would give him battle. Free as he was not, wise as he would never be, drinking death with the wind and the sun and the hot sweetness of desire. My mare! Khamsin shrilled. Mine!

  Mine! bellowed the grey.

  Take her, human wisdom cried. Take her now, before any of them moved to end it.

  Any of them.

  His body lunged, hating. His mind stood still, small and cold and passionless. Seeing a mare, a pair of stallions closing in war, humans milling, shouting, tangling in confusion.

  He could conquer the grey. He knew it with perfect certainty. He was smaller, but he was quicker, fiercer, wiser in battle. He could kill if he must. He could even elude the nets that waited for him. Fool, did they take him for, to be trapped twice alike?

  And then?

  The mare.

  And then?

  Implacable, this mind of his.

  And then, the price. He would have his mare; and they would geld him for it.

  He could not even bargain. Surrender the mare, if only he might keep his daughter.

  That was not a stallion’s bargain.

  He was not a stallion. He was Khamsin.

  He scrambled to a halt. The grey lunged against his bonds, mad with fury. The mare watched, coolly interested, awaiting the victor. The humans babbled like geese in a den of foxes.

  Every grain of blood and bone cried battle. His head snaked about, seeking. His mistress stood alone and silent in the tumult, clenched fists, set face, wide wounded eyes. His mare watched, guarding his daughter.

  His enemy screamed a challenge.

  He screamed back, mocking them all. He leaped, curvetted, flourished his heels. His daughter mirrored him; he laughed though only he could hear, with tenderness, with pride in what he had wrought. He sneered at the stallion. His body drew him toward the mare, helplessly, inescapably.

  He tore it away, shouting with the pain of it. Trotted, cantered, charged the knotted men. They scattered. Only one did not move. Only one mattered. He bowed his head before Zamaniyah, and nudged her, not too gently. Not as if he yielded to anything but will and—of all things—wisdom.

  For a deadly moment, he knew that she would fail him. The will was strong, but the body had not seen the end of it: a mare in heat, a stallion in rage, and battle beckoning.

  She freed him from it. She took his bridle, stroked his neck, filled his nostrils with scent that was nigh as sweet as any mare’s. Wisely, wordlessly, with wonder in her every move, wonder that was alarmingly like awe,
she led him away.

  13

  The old fox was dead.

  The sultan’s father had never had anything to do with Zamaniyah. His dignity was too great to trouble itself with a mere woman, particularly a woman who conducted herself as a man. Nor had she ever tried to win his notice. She had never had any skill in currying favor.

  But Ayyub had mattered.

  “I was more of my uncle’s making,” the sultan said. “He taught me what I know of war; he set me where I would become what I am. But my father was my father.”

  Zamaniyah did not know what to say. People were about, as they always were, but he had rejected them. One of his kinsmen grieved quietly by himself: the youngest brother, handsome al-Adil who acted now and then as if he knew that she was not a boy. She sat mute in all that grief, and listened because she could think of nothing else to do. She could not mourn a man whom she had hardly known. But she could share the sorrow, a little.

  The sultan seemed hardly to know that he wept. His coat was ragged where he had torn it in ritual grief. His beard, of which he had always been so fastidious, was frayed and torn. He looked as if he had forgotten sleep.

  Yet he smiled at her, sudden and warm. “You didn’t come here to hear me chant dirges. Did you bring your Khamsin?”

  “Always, my lord,” she said. And her eunuch, and her handful of mamluks, and one who was not a mamluk at all.

  “Ride with me,” said the sultan.

  He did not ask more of her than her company, and perhaps a tale of that oddity who was her stallion. She had told him of the day when Khamsin chose her over a mare and a rival; it had become one of his favorite tales. She had even heard him tell it to a gathering of emirs. They had been most polite, and most politely incredulous.

  “Ah well,” he always said. “We know truth when we tell it.”

  Now he was quiet. Sad, a little, but less than he had been. She made no effort to trouble his peace. This was her own peace, to ride her stallion, to be at the side of her sultan, with small attendance, and no walls to bind them. She watched his face ease, the farther they rode from Cairo. She won a shout of laughter in a swift mad gallop, a pounding halt, a flash of Khamsin-temper.

  They sat their snorting mounts and grinned at one another. They did not speak. There was no need.

  oOo

  The rider met them on the far side of the Old City. He came at a great pace, swaying astride a racing camel, flailing with the goad. Ill news, Zamaniyah knew, her lightness fading and dying. The sultan waited. He did not move to meet the messenger: dreading it, surely, as much as she. There was death in that urgency. But whose, if not Ayyub’s?

  “Nur al-Din,” the man gasped as his camel lurched roaring to a halt. “Syria—sultan—” He drew a deep gulping breath. “Nur al-Din is dead.”

  The sultan stiffened as if he had taken a blow in the vitals.

  “Nur al-Din,” said the messenger, hammering at him. “Dead in Syria of a sickness. His son claims the sultanate; or his regents claim it for him.”

  The sultan swayed. “Dead?” he asked, barely above a whisper. “The Light of the Faith? The one who was my overlord? Dead? But he was never going to die.”

  “No more was your father.”

  Zamaniyah had said that. Her brain had nothing to do with it.

  The messenger looked from one to the other, uncomprehending. The sultan’s voice snapped him about. “How did he die?”

  The man’s relief was palpable. This, he could answer. “There was a festival in Damascus, O my sultan, a great occasion: the circumcision of the lord’s only son, the Prince Ismail. On the day after it, the lord rode at polo as he was fond of doing. He rode as well as ever, until he missed a stroke. That cast him, my lord, into such a rage as none had ever seen in a lord so clement and so pious. He roared like a lion; he shattered his mallet; he fell down foaming on the ground.

  “His people were frozen in shock, until one or two dared to calm him, to help him up, to coax him from the field. His fury passed as inexplicably as it had come; but it left him weak and ill. The doctors would have bled him to release the evil humors; he would not let them. A man of his threescore years, he decreed, is not to be bled. Even in his sickness he awed them. They yielded: to their lasting sorrow. He lingered for two hands of days, sinking ever more swiftly. Then at last he died, commending his soul to Allah and his son to his loyal princes.”

  “May the peace of God be upon him.” The sultan was white under the weathering of cheek and brow. His hands clenched and unclenched upon the reins; his eyes burned, as if even tears were too little for his grief. “My uncle, my father, my sultan. All gone. All dead. And I...” His breath caught. A sob, perhaps. Or a gasp of laughter.

  Again he startled the messenger. “Who rules in Syria?”

  “No one, my lord. Or everyone. Ismail is a child. The nephews of the sultan are caught in disarray: Zangi makes no move, nor has he the power to make one. Saif al-Din mourns his uncle’s passing in a flood of wine and a fever of conquest; but he conquers in the east, and pays no heed to Syria. The emirs array themselves as they will, with one or another, or with none at all. The Franks, it is said, are closing in for the kill.”

  “Indeed they would,” said the sultan.

  “The lady,” said the messenger, “the sultana, some call her—she tries to act on behalf of her son. But she is a woman; she lacks the force of a man.”

  Perhaps the sultan glanced at Zamaniyah. He did not smile as he sometimes did when people spoke of woman-weakness in her presence. She could not read his face at all.

  She heard his sigh even over the wind. “Back,” he said. “Back to Cairo.”

  oOo

  He would not let her go. Her mamluks, yes, not all of them willingly. Jaffar was escort enough: better than any man knew.

  She was not needed for anything that had to do with governing. There were men and to spare for that; and they flocked to grief like vultures to carrion. Nor did he want a servant. He had slaves in plenty, and wellborn pages, and the mamluks of his guard in their sun-colored coats. It seemed that he simply wanted her there, sitting in a corner, saying nothing, watching everything. Her father came with the rest of the emirs, greeted her with affection if with some little surprise, gave her the gift of forgetting her. The others were slower; but what brought them here was both new and mighty. Her presence dwindled to nothing beside it.

  Sometimes, in the long hours, the sultan wept. “I loved him,” he said more than once. “I admired him more than any man I ever knew. He was all that was admirable. A true Muslim, a true king: strong, and just, and merciful; obedient to the laws of the Prophet, whom God has blessed and granted peace, and to the will of God. All that I strive to be, he was.”

  But then he would harden. His eyes would glitter. He would say through gritted teeth, “He was my lord and my curse. He bade me rule, and then he forbade me; he acknowledged me his equal, and demanded that I pay him tribute. From his palaces in Syria he dreamed that he knew how best to rule in Egypt: he who had never set foot in Cairo. He pricked me with needles; he cut me with knives. He tormented me beyond endurance.

  “And if he had not died by the mercy of Allah—if he had lived—he would have come to cast me down. His armies were gathered. His war was readied. First the lord of Egypt, then the King of Jerusalem: so did he intend to conquer all, and be emperor in truth.

  “And yet,” he said, as if the words were torn from him, “I loved him.”

  Love, Zamaniyah thought as she listened, and enmity. Both together; both the lot of kings.

  This king mourned his master, and yet he was glad. At last, all in a stroke, he was free.

  Free for what?

  “Wait,” said his counselors. “See. The jackals in Syria will quarrel over the lion’s leavings, and wear themselves down in doing it; and perhaps some of them will die.”

  “They will come!” a third party shot back. “Unless Egypt moves first. Even now the Lord Turan-Shah seizes the wealth of the Yemen
and gathers to advance upon Arabia. Why waste his victories? Crown them. Take Syria swiftly, before another Nur al-Din can rise and grow strong and set us under his heel.”

  “There is another Nur al-Din,” one of the emirs pointed out. “He named his son his heir.”

  Lips curled; heads shook. “A child. Eleven summers old, subject still to the care of eunuchs and women. He counts for nothing.”

  “Who holds him, holds the right to rule in his father’s stead.”

  Eyes narrowed. Men murmured, speculating.

  “And what of Egypt?” a sudden clear voice demanded. Zamaniyah heard it with a small shiver. Her father’s enemy stood as far from her father as his own will and the sultan’s stewards could set him; that they shared these walls at all measured the magnitude of the council.

  Ali Mousa repeated his question. “What of Egypt? The prince plays at soldiers in Arabia, and well for us that he does, for his extravagances have drained the treasury dry. Byzantine hounds sniff even yet at our gates in the north; Nubians snarl in the south. In Egypt itself the people are barely reconciled to the rule of the Turk. Are your memories so short? Have you forgotten the conspiracy so lately broken, the rebels who would restore the old rule of the caliph? The ravens barely picked the bones of those who dared it. Would you abandon all for yet another realm in turmoil?”

  “A fine sermon,” drawled a voice she knew as well as her own, al-Zaman settled at his ease among the emirs. “Preached most knowledgeably, and most loyally. Are you frightened, revered sharif? Do you dread the uncovering of a new conspiracy?”

  Ali Mousa’s response was silent: a thinning of the nostrils, a narrowing of the eyes. “O my sultan,” he said with exquisite dignity, “perhaps Allah has willed that you rule in Syria as in Egypt. If that is so, then that is well. Yet now is not the time to move. Syria will settle itself, or it will shatter. Whichever befalls, you are here, with Egypt’s strength behind you, strength which can only grow as you wait upon events. When their passage is clear to you, then may you strike, whether to fell a new and feeble sultan or to proclaim yourself lord of a lordless country.”