A Wind in Cairo

by Judith Tarr

  She was aware, as she must be, of who nearby was friend, and who was enemy. The emirs who had been with the sultan throughout this war were together, apart from the Syrians and the half-wild Bedouin. The Egyptians flanked them all, riding and fighting too far away to matter.

  As she moved with the mounted archers to begin the charge, her eye’s edge marked the nearest banner. At first she did not know it except for ours, and then for not there when she had looked before. Recognition struck as she strung her bow; it nearly flew from her slackened hands.

  Pray God her father did not see who had come to flank him. Luck, fate, design, some failure of the sultan’s vigilance—no matter what it was. Hard upon the right hand of the Zamani cavalry rode the levies of Ali Mousa Sharif.

  Everything in battle was an omen. She fumbled with her bowstring, all skill deserting her, all courage reft away.

  Khamsin tossed his head and neighed. Her father’s voice rose strong and deep and much beloved. The drums quickened to the charge.

  Khamsin sprang forward. She lurched; he jibbed, offended; laughter tore itself from her. She found her balance with her strength. An arrow leaped from quiver to hand to string. With a high fierce cry she aimed it into the seething mass that was the enemy, and let it fly.

  Bow to lance to sword. That was the way of her people in war. For the sultan there would be order in it, and shape, and plan. For her there was only battle. Her father’s standard was beacon and guide. Her duty was to hold fast beneath it and to cut down any who hindered her. She felt in her skin the eunuch fighting like a tiger behind, and the Frankish woman close by him, mutely defiant, wielding sword with a man’s deadly strength. They were an army of their own, an arrow shot into the enemy’s heart.

  Khamsin lunged at a howling Turkoman, smote him down, trampled him. Her sword bit flesh beyond him. Her back quivered; she flattened. Steel sang over her, clashed on Wiborada’s sword.

  Her stallion bore her out of it. Nothing leaped to strike. She drew a breath, glanced quickly about, started. Her father’s banner was far to the left of her. Close, so close that she might have belonged to it, Ali Mousa’s green standard whipped in the wind.

  Khamsin squealed, kicked hard. The battle had found them again. Its course bore them steadily rightward.

  There—an opening; a path to al-Zaman.

  Khamsin bucked and balked. The path closed. The tide bore her toward her father’s enemy.

  23

  Khamsin hardly knew what he was doing until he had done it. Making choices when he thought they were all made. Being drawn to that banner as if he had no will of his own. God is great, said the letters upon it, and inscrutable are the ways of God.

  Green and gold. So too his trappings. It was too perfect for irony. It must be fate.

  His rider’s resistance was sharp, but steel was sharper yet. She wasted no strength in fighting him. There were enemies enough to hand.

  Two who belonged to al-Zaman were with them yet. The woman on her tall gelding; the eunuch on his mule that had the spirit of his dam. They fought well. He could notice that, slashing, twisting, standing taut and poised as Zamaniyah crossed swords with a glittering warrior.

  He was aware, always, of his father. Ali Mousa was sharif, sayyid, descendant of the Prophet. He could have chosen quiet: the life of the scholar, the saint, or even the prince. But the Prophet had spoken. War is ordained for you, he had said. And Ali Mousa, who hated killing, who abhorred the ugliness of violence, had chosen war.

  Yet, having chosen it, he had made it his element. He had the commander’s art: he could both defend himself and order his troops. He found weaknesses in the enemy’s line. He judged them for traps of for truth. He wielded his men as he wielded his sword, with honed and tireless skill.

  If he had marked the three who should not have been there, he betrayed no sign of it. They were driving back his enemies. They were heeding his commands because Khamsin was, and Khamsin carried Zamaniyah, and the others followed her.

  After the headlong rush of the charge, their advance had slowed. But not to a standstill. They moved forward step by step. That meant something. Khamsin had no time to remember what.

  Battles had eddies and shallows, pauses and sudden flurries. Ali Mousa seemed most often to be in the thick of it. Enemies aimed for his standard, for the glory and the profit of felling an emir. It would be very thick indeed in the center, where a trebled wall of fighters defended the sultan.

  Khamsin’s advance and his mistress’ valor had brought him almost to Ali Mousa’s side. She was a little heavier on his back. Tiring, and fighting it. And enemies innumerable before, about, behind.

  Even behind.

  Khamsin slashed with his heels. Hands clutched his trappings. A sword thrust upward.

  With a panther-scream, death fell upon the swordsman. The eunuch’s mule half reared, flailing. Fighting.

  Falling. Its belly opened, spilling its secrets.

  The eunuch flung himself free. He had a spear, scarlet-headed. Even in the air he wielded it. It found flesh. As his flesh found steel: a hedge of blades. Khamsin saw his face with deathly clarity. There was no fear in it; only exaltation. His long hands closed about the yelling throat, circled it. The man hacked at him. He laughed, light and glad and free, though his life’s blood bubbled in it; and snapped his slayer’s neck. They went down together into the dark.

  Khamsin stilled. He had seen death enough to last a thousand years. But never anyone he knew. Never anyone his mistress loved.

  A cry smote his ears. It was low, raw. “Jaffar,” cried Zamaniyah. “Jaffar!”

  And she shifted. To dismount. Here. In the jaws of battle.

  He knew how to shed a rider: oh, perfectly. But never this. How to keep one if she would not stay.

  He lunged forward. Instinct ruled her, thrust her down into the saddle, tightened her hands upon the reins. His head snapped up with the sudden pain of it. His teeth clamped upon the bit. She hauled at it, wailing aloud, cursing, pummeling his sides, hacking at anything that came near her. “Jaffar! ”

  He would never hear her now.

  No?

  Wind in Khamsin’s ear. A shadow amid the seething shadows of the battle. And Zamaniyah had gone mad, and the Frank vanished, Allah knew where, for Allah knew how long; and Ali Mousa…

  Alone. Afoot. Ringed in death. His charger lost, his banner fallen, his warriors scattered, and everywhere the madmen of Mosul.

  Khamsin forgot his rider. He forgot his shock. He forgot even his bone-deep cowardice. He leaped into the worst of it.

  The weight on his back rocked and nearly fell. The wind in his ears keened in helpless rage. The weight steadied. The wind skirled away.

  A horse reared, wheeling. The man on its back whirled the black blur of a mace. Khamsin sprang.

  He stumbled to his knees. A body rolled underfoot, screaming. The mace swung keening down. Ali Mousa’s back opened wide for it, all undefended.

  Zamaniyah flung herself out, up. Her sword clove air. Her body caught the mace.

  In all the clamor, in all the whirling and plunging and shouting, Khamsin heard that one small sound. A ringing of metal on metal. A soft thick echo afterward: the meeting of mace and flesh and bone. And the thud of body on earth, abrupt and absolute.

  Khamsin stood like a true beast, mute and witless. His back was empty. It was not supposed to be empty.

  There was a great deal of noise. Men in green; horses. More men running away. They were nothing.

  The wind cursed him endlessly and with great eloquence. It almost had a shape, a long dark shadow-shape with eyes like faded moons. He walked through it.

  She was all disarrayed. Her helmet was gone. Her hair was a snake, coiling in blood. He touched nose to her shoulder. Blood, and breaking. She was broken.

  She could not be. She was his. She could not be broken.

  People were there. A mamluk whose scent was a woman’s, blood-tainted. A man whom he had known once. Whom he had loved. For whom—he�
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  He climbed the sky, screaming. He smote earth, battering its blind indifference.

  A hand held him. A voice spoke to the will beneath the madness, calming it. Ali Mousa looked down at the one who had fallen, and his shock was black, like ancient blood. “A woman?” he asked, a dry whisper. “A woman in war?”

  “A woman, yes!” This voice was patently no less, even raw with grief. “And one you know, if you know anything at all.”

  He did. He was refusing it. Even Iblis could not mock him so. Destroy him so, by making him the destroyer of all the house of al-Zaman.

  The Frank knelt with none of her trained and womanly grace. There were wounds on her. She took no notice of them. She bent her ear to the crushed and bleeding breast, held her had to the motionless lips. Her eyes opened wide. “She’s still alive!”

  Khamsin froze. Not so Ali Mousa. He bent. With strength that could startle the man locked deep in the beast’s body, he lifted Zamaniyah. He shook off the Frank, who was snatching, shouting, drawing sword.

  He came to Khamsin. “Kneel,” he said, expecting obedience.

  He received it. He bestrode the saddle. At a word, Khamsin rose, balancing the doubled weight. As softly and yet as swiftly as he had ever moved, he bore it away from the roil of battle.

  Someday he would remember how it was. The enemy was driven in rout, its back broken, its brief flurries of resistance scattered. Such as the one from which he came. The one which had felled Zamaniyah.

  Ali Mousa’s men were quick enough to flock to their commander, now that he had no need of them. Most he sent away under the chief of his captains, to harry the enemy until the sultan should call them in. Some he kept. Of their spears and their cloaks he made a canopy; he laid Zamaniyah under it.

  Wiborada said, heatedly, what Khamsin could not. “Why here? She should go to the camp, to the doctors.”

  Ali Mousa sent a man to fetch one. Then he spoke to her, not looking directly at her, as a man should do with another man’s woman. “She would not survive the journey.”

  Wiborada dropped beside Zamaniyah. “She won’t survive the hour if you leave her here.” Even as she spoke, she struggled with coat and corselet. No one would help her. Khamsin could not. His heart ached for hands; for speech; for tears.

  The Frankish woman had no shame of stripping Zamaniyah to the skin, baring the great raw wound. Red blood, white bone; side and shoulder shattered, arm dangling broken. She breathed, rattle and catch, rattle and catch. Death had pitched camp in her face. It bubbled in her lungs. It rode her heart to foundering.

  Wiborada cursed in Frankish, softly and at length.

  That was not what Khamsin wanted to do. He wanted to howl like a dog.

  Wiborada tried to bind the worst of it, to stop the blood, to straighten shattered bone. Her hands were deft, although her tears must have blinded her.

  A cloak settled over the bared and helpless body. Wiborada regarded it without gratitude. She stroked the sweat-sodden hair, over and over, as if will and hand could mend what iron had broken.

  People came, stared. Some spoke to Ali Mousa. Most went away. Khamsin barely noticed. He watched the white linen—Zamaniyah’s own shirt, set to this last grim service—turn slowly scarlet. He felt the ebbing of her life. She was fighting, clinging against all hope, but her body was too badly broken. It could not house her.

  After an age a doctor came, reluctant, muttering, sparking with outrage when he saw that she was a woman. “Why did you drag me here? There are men yonder who need me. This is beyond need of anything but a shroud.”

  “She will not die,” said Ali Mousa.

  Even that irascible small man could perceive the iron in the sharif’s voice. It silenced his muttering. It brought him erect. “She cannot live.”

  “She must. That wound was meant for me.”

  “Sir,” said the doctor, “it was written that she should take it. It is certain that she will die of it.

  “She is only a woman,” he pointed out, meaning comfort by it.

  Ali Mousa stared him into silence. “She is a warrior, and valiant.” His voice rose a very little. “Go. Send me a man who knows some glimmer of healing. Send me a man who is not a fool!”

  The doctor drew himself up. “A fool I may be, sir, but I know death. This woman is his. No mortal man can alter it, nor any lord’s command.”

  “No,” said Ali Mousa.

  The doctor went away. Khamsin would have comforted his father if he could; but there was no comfort in him.

  A shadow had taken up residence under the canopy. It had eyes, and those eyes were Jaffar’s, implacable as death itself. Khamsin had no fear of him. Yes, I did this. Yes, I killed her. There is no pain in hell to match this that I will upon myself.

  A new shadow, eyeless, barred the sun. Mare-scent distracted dimly. A boy held her. A man stood staring at them all.

  “No,” said the sultan.

  The world had shrunk to a single word. The sultan bent as they all had, to see what they all could see. He spun upon Ali Mousa. “What have you done to her?”

  “Nothing.” Wiborada’s voice was sharp and cold and sane. “There’s nothing anyone can do. Except watch her die. Will you tarry with us, O my sultan? Maybe you can say a prayer for her.”

  He was weeping openly, without shame. “Ah God! This was to be my victory. I wanted to tell her—I wanted to hear her say—”

  Zamaniyah was past hearing him. Khamsin whose ears were bitterly keen could hear how her breathing faltered; how her heart battered itself against the walls of her body, desperate as a moth trapped within a lamp. His nose caught sparks of agony in endless, sour-sweet pain.

  Pray God she did not wake and know it. Pray god—pray God she went gently into Paradise.

  The sultan had fled. Wise man. Let him try to remember her as she had been. Not as she was now, shrunken, broken, mere crushed clay.

  As the sun sank, her life sank with it. Wiborada tried to pour water into her, as if she were a flower that could rouse again for so simple a remedy. Ali Mousa sat and swayed gently and prayed in a soft and ceaseless murmur. He wept stone-faced as he did it. His mamluks hovered, helpless.

  All helpless.

  Khamsin flung up his head and screamed. They started like deer. Swords leaped into hands. He scorned them with tossing head, snapping teeth. He broke the bridle and cast it at their feet. He wheeled and bolted.

  oOo

  He hunted as the beast of prey hunts, by scent and sound and instinct. He was swifter than any but the swiftest; and his mind was a man’s, fixed with human purpose, immovable. No shadow sped beside him. The eunuch’s spirit has sworn to haunt him, but before him there had been Zamaniyah. When she died she would find him waiting, faithful as ever he had been.

  Perhaps, dead, he could be a man for her. Allah was the Merciful, the Compassionate. Allah would reward such love as he had given her.

  Khamsin shook himself even in his running. His own recompense would, and must, be only sorrow.

  The camp swirled about him. The sultan’s tent was an eddy in it. The sultan was there, newly come, harried by his servants. At sight of Khamsin he forgot them. His cry of grief rose sudden and piercing.

  Khamsin snorted at it. He had not come for the sultan. He had come for the one with whom the sultan spoke; to whom the sultan spoke the name of Zamaniyah.

  Cold horror congealed in Khamsin’s heart. Only for Zamaniyah could he have done this. Only for her.

  He barely saw the Hajji. Green turban. Silvered beard. Great roaring flame of power, banked in mortal flesh. He bowed before it.

  “Too late,” the sultan mourned. “Dear God, for my people I tarried; and for that—”

  “Not yet, my lord,” said the Hajji. He laid his hand on Khamsin’s brow. It burned; it froze him where he knelt. “Take me to her,” the Hajji said.

  His weight was the weight of worlds. Khamsin bore it as if it had been air. He knew that he had escort, and it ran valiantly, but it struggled far behind
. By himself he was swift, as swift as he was beautiful. Beneath the Hajji he outran the wind.

  24

  Thicker than death beneath the makeshift tent was the reek of hate. Al-Zaman at last had found his daughter, and his enemy. They both bore marks of struggle. Their mamluks were ruffled, baleful. Wiborada stood between them. “Yes,” she sneered at them. “Kill one another over her. She’ll love you for it, I’m sure. She’ll reckon her life well lost.”

  One of them had struck her: she had a bruise rising. Khamsin would have wagered on al-Zaman. She was, after all, his chattel.

  Khamsin would happily have trampled the man for daring it. He, blind and deaf in enmity, spat at Ali Mousa’s feet. “Are you content, O my nemesis? Have you drunk your fill of my children’s blood?”

  Ali Mousa met hot hate with hate both cold and haughty. “How could such a swine have sired such a pearl?”

  Al-Zaman lunged, snarling. His dagger glittered in his hand.

  His mamluks were ready for him. And Khamsin. His teeth closed on the emir’s wrist. Gently; but his jaws were strong. Al-Zaman struggled. Khamsin tightened his grip. If he must gnaw that hand from its mooring, by Allah he would.

  The Hajji’s hand seared his neck, slackened his jaws. “It is grief,” he said, soft and cool. And barely louder: “My lords. May I pass?”

  Wise man, to pretend that they could stop him. They fell back before him. The sultan’s swift coming absorbed them: they bowed, sundered by his presence, reduced to warring with glances.

  The Hajji knelt by Zamaniyah. His hand was gentle on her brow. His face was ineffably sad.

  It was Khamsin to whom he spoke. “She is dead,” he said.

  The words fell like stones, empty of meaning. Of course she was not dead. Khamsin had brought the Hajji to make her whole again. She was supposed to be alive, so that he could mend her. How dared she die before he could begin?

  “It is said,” said the sultan, “that in Ramadan, when the night has come, the angel of God passes over the earth, and whoever shall see him clearly may ask a boon of him; and if the seeker’s heart be pure, it shall be granted. It is also said that if a mage has the strength and the courage, he may command the angel’s will, and even raise the dead.