Sulema shrugged and stepped back from the door, then turned and walked back into the room. As Hafsa Azeina followed, she saw that what few furnishings there were had been pushed up against the walls, and a hoti had been drawn in red chalk on the floor. The girl walked to the center of this, bowed to an invisible opponent, and drew herself up into Crane Watches the Sun.
“Sulema. I need to speak with you.”
Crane Watches the Sun became Lotus Morning, and then a flurry of high kicks and a spinning short-strike with the staff brought Sulema to the very edge of the hoti. She met her mother’s eyes with an insolent stare, and then whirled away.
“So. Speak.”
Hafsa Azeina’s mouth tightened. She drew a breath deep, stepped forward and erased a hand’s width of chalk. Then she stepped into the circle and banged her cat’s-head staff down thrice.
“Het het het!”
Sulema was a warrior now, and no warrior could refuse a challenge.
Cat Stalking the Moon flowed into Halving the Wind. Sulema’s braids whipped about as she whirled, front kick flying and staff slicing downward so quickly that the air whistled as it passed. But her opponent was not there.
Hafsa Azeina grasped her sa effortlessly and floated between one heartbeat and the next as a feather between gusts of wind. Holding the moment, she extended her staff and struck lightly, contemptuously, at the side of Sulema’s head.
Time released her and she stood facing the girl, leaning easily against her staff. Sulema was sprawled on the other side of the room. She raised a hand to her temple, lowered it again to stare first at the blood, and then open-mouthed at her mother.
Hafsa Azeina hardened her heart against the look on Sulema’s face, and the shock on Leviathus’s. She must learn, or she will die… the time for childhood has passed. The dragon is waking.
“You forget yourself, girl,” she said. “You may hold your mother in contempt, but never turn your back on a dreamshifter.”
Khurra’an rumbled approvingly, and sat with his back to the door. One look over his shoulder dispersed the audience their scuffle had drawn.
Hafsa Azeina stood and lowered the end of her staff to the floor. Blood splattered Sulema’s new trousers, but she resisted an urge to comfort the girl. Life is pain, she reminded herself harshly. Only death comes easy. The girl was no longer a child, and a child’s tantrums could get her killed.
She watched Sulema’s mouth harden. Those round eyes, so strange, so like her own, blazed with fury.
I have taken this bright child, Hafsa Azeina thought, and I have forged her into a weapon.
Better a weapon than a corpse.
Sulema sat up, folded her legs lotus-style, and clasped her hands loosely in her lap. “Sit,” she invited Leviathus. She ignored her mother, as she ignored the blood that dripped from a shallow cut by her eye. “Would you like tea?” She rapped at the wall beside her. Thin wood and linen were no barrier to snooping.
“Tea… would be welcome.” Leviathus sat, and crossed his legs somewhat less gracefully. He was trying to watch Sulema without looking at her chest.
Hafsa Azeina snatched up a pale blue tunic that had been discarded on the floor, and tossed it to the girl. Sulema wiped her face with the linen and moved as if to set it aside, but at her mother’s glare pulled it over her head. She looked at the rumpled linen, now smeared with blood, and then at her mother, as if adding one more bead to the string of hurts. Khurra’an grunted and moved away from the door as a young boy entered and bowed.
Sulema smiled at the boy, and her face was transformed. When she smiled, she was the very image of her father. Hafsa Azeina heard Leviathus’s sharp intake of breath.
“Tea, Talleh. And coffee. Maashukri. Oh, and something to eat.” She was still smiling when she turned to address Leviathus. “We just broke fast this morning, and I am starving. Yeh Atu, forgive my manners! I am Sulema.”
Hafsa Azeina sat upon the floor as well, so that the three of them formed a rough triangle. Khurra’an curled at her back and she leaned into his warmth, grateful for his support. Her daughter’s disdain did not hurt any less for being deserved.
“Leviathus ap Wyvernus ne Atu,” he replied. Now that Sulema was clothed, Leviathus watched her closely, waiting for a flicker of recognition. When he saw none, he turned to Hafsa Azeina, a look of puzzlement and accusation on his face.
“You are with the outlander delegation?” Sulema asked.
“I am…”
“The son of an old friend,” Hafsa Azeina interrupted.
Sulema looked from one to the other. “An old friend, hm.” Her eyes flashed. But the laws of hospitality were as old as the Zeera, and Sulema was Zeerani to the marrow of her stubborn bones, outland-born or not. She would not pry until they had shared bread and salt, meat and drink.
These came soon enough. Nobody went hungry in the Youths’ Quarter during Ayyam Binat. Talleh returned with a handful of brown and barefoot youngsters, most of whom Hafsa Azeina did not recognize. A simple meal was laid out before them. Loaves of heavy flat bread sprinkled with precious red salt, goat’s cheese and dried figs, still fat and sweet with last year’s summer. And, of course, there was tea. Sulema laughed openly at the look on Leviathus’s face.
“We Zeeranim may be savages,” she teased, “but we are well-fed savages.”
Hafsa Azeina poked at the food without much enthusiasm. She was not eager to speak the words which would bring nothing but pain to her daughter.
When the food had been pushed aside, they sipped at their tea. It was Riih Atu, Breath of the Dragon, grown by the Mothers along the banks of the Dibris. Leviathus inhaled the fragrant steam, took a small sip, and sighed appreciatively.
“Wonderful,” he said.
Then Sulema asked the question that broke a fragile peace.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “Surely you did not come all this way just to have tea with your father’s old… friend.”
Leviathus turned the horn cup round in his hands.
“Leviathus ap Wyvernus,” Hafsa Azeina prodded gently, “son of Ka Atu, tell her why you have come.”
Sulema choked. “Son of Ka Atu? The Dragon King? Then you are a… prince?”
Leviathus stared at her, and then turned to Hafsa Azeina, brows drawn together in a thunderous expression that reminded her painfully of his father.
“You have not told her? Zeina, how could you not tell her?”
“Son of Ka Atu?” Sulema repeated, and then, “Tell me what?”
Leviathus folded his arms across his chest and they both glared at her.
Hafsa Azeina folded her hands in her lap, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.
“He is your father.”
“My father?” Sulema stared at Leviathus, puzzlement writ across her face plain as sacred script. “My… what… but you are so young.”
“Not I.” Leviathus leaned forward to take one of her hands in both of his. The girl, in shock, did not resist. “My father. Our father. I am your brother, Sulema.” He laughed, a little breathless, waiting for her to react.
“My brother…?” She turned to Hafsa Azeina at last.
“Half brother,” she explained. “You share a father.”
“Ka Atu is my father.” Sulema repeated. The years seemed to melt from her face. She was a little girl again, eyes and mouth round with shock. “My father.”
Leviathus gathered her other hand and brought them both to his mouth. He kissed her fingertips tenderly, formally, and looked into her eyes. Sulema came back to herself and tugged away from his grip. She reached a tentative hand to his face, his cheekbones, and then his hair, red as her own.
“I have a father,” she whispered, and burst into tears.
Life is pain. Only death comes easy.
FIVE
“Love is a dream worth chasing.”
Ismai had been born under a red sky two moons too early, and six years too late. The awkward younger son in a family of strong women, it often seemed that the only time he was
noticed was when one of his female relations tripped over him.
The art and curse of being invisible often worked in his favor. When a tray of sweets was left unattended, for instance, or when heavier chores were being assigned to the younglings. As he walked along a low arched tunnel that led into the lower balconies overlooking the Madraj, laden with a pilfered cask of beer and a whole roast fish stuffed with rice and wrapped in fig leaves, it occurred to him that this might be one of those times.
The air was so ripe with wine and beer, spiced meats and fish stew that a boy could just about open his mouth and lick it. The hearthmothers and hearthmasters had been preparing for this feast as ardently as the Ja’Akari prepared for battle.
As if they could feed us back to the glory days, he thought. They think if they can fill our bellies, they will fill the Madraj once more with life. He was willing to eat his share, though, if it would make them feel better.
Although so few of the seats were occupied, what the people lacked in numbers they made up for in color. The modest sky-blue touar of the Ja’Sajani complimented the bright silks of the Mothers, and the Ja’Akari watched over them all, proud headdresses proclaiming their deeds for the world to see. Ismai shook his head at the impractical clothing worn by the outlanders. Their heavy layered robes dragged in the sand and made their faces drip with sweat. These unwanted visitors sat huddled together at the far end of the Madraj, disdaining the company and even the food of the people.
Their rudeness seemed to know no bounds. Ismai saw one man in striped robes leer at a passing warrior and reach out a grasping hand. Fortunately for him, the man’s gold-masked companion grabbed his arm and the girl passed without insult. Apparently they had no warriors in the outlands.
Or perhaps the man had no need of his hand.
The mask glittered as it turned toward Ismai, and he stepped deeper into the shadows with a shiver. Bound neck-to-ankle in strips of black leather, faces hidden from the sun under smooth gold, those men made him feel as if spiders were crawling over his skin. If the man was suffering from the heat, he did not show it. None of them did. They stood in the sun with their blood-red cloaks gathered about them, staring out at the world through their heavy masks, strangers in a strange land. They never spoke, from what Ismai had heard, they never ate. And they were never far from the side of the outlander king’s son.
The tall red-haired man whose arrival had caused such a stir sat at Sulema’s side, laughing when she spoke, touching her shoulder with his. He wore a short, straight, brutal-looking sword at his waist, a heavy torc of enameled gold at his throat and a fancy golden circlet upon his brow. It was gross, the way he flexed and twitched a new set of muscles with every breath, but Sulema did not seem to mind. She touched the gilded stranger on his arm and laughed as if they had been friends forever.
Ismai had known Sulema his entire life, and she had never once looked at him like that.
Sometimes, being invisible was as much fun as having sand in your pants.
Ismai sighed and settled down cross-legged to enjoy his stolen feast. He was skinnier than a tarbok, as his mother reminded him constantly, and fish was good for building muscle. He would eat a whole river serpent, if that would help him gain favor in Sulema’s eyes.
It was the second day of Hajra-Khai, and the youngest would-be Ja’Akari were playing a perilously disorganized game of aklashi. The game was near its end. Several riders had lost their mounts, one was screaming at the top of her five-year-old lungs with outrage, and the sheep’s head was starting to fall apart. The horses were having as much fun as their small riders, snorting and blowing and flagging their tails like a bunch of silly yearlings.
If he craned his neck Ismai could just see the First Warden and First Warrior, a few elders, and the mistresses and masters of craft. They stood with the Mothers in grim-faced splendor beneath the feasting-tents. Above them, silk tassels danced in a breeze that did not reach Ismai, a thousand little hands waving gaily to their favorite contestants.
His own mother, Nurati, sat on high, draped in the many-colored silks of the First Mother of the Zeeranim. Glossy black curls were piled atop her head, braided and belled, with a few long ringlets left to curl disingenuously along her slender neck. Her formidable laugh rang out across the stones like a war-horn. He smiled to see her reclining like a queen upon a low divan, surrounded by a flock of little girls all trying to tempt her palate with fruits and sweets and horns of water sweetened with juice.
Umm Nurati was heavy with her sixth child, when so few women bore even one, and she was venerated by the people. She looked tired and thin, aside from her gourd-round belly. Paraja, the sleek vash’ai who called her kithren, stretched along the front of the divan and fixed her yellow eyes on any who ventured too near. No other vash’ai were in evidence on the high dais. Paraja was a jealous queen.
One of those who drew Paraja’s hot yellow glare was the cat-eyed girl from Atualon. She had the smoothest, darkest skin Ismai had ever seen, true-black like the night sky. She wore her hair in locks like Hafsa Azeina, but where the sorceress stared out from beneath an eagle’s nest of white-gold tangles, this girl had even, oiled locks drawn back from her exotic face and fastened with bands of hammered gold wide enough to circle his forearm. She wore gold at her wrists and ankles, and kept her fascinating curves swathed in jade silk the same color as her strange and beautiful eyes.
Those cat-slit eyes had looked straight through him earlier, as he stood near the mango vendor’s tent with juice dripping from his chin, feeling like a six-year-old child faced with a real Dae princess. She was not as flashy as Sulema, he decided, nor as beautiful as his mother, but it was hard to keep his eyes from her. He stared, the people stared—though they tried to do so discreetly—and Paraja stared, but the night-skinned girl ate figs from a clay bowl in tidy, neat bites, and ignored them all.
If the girl with jade eyes was a moons-lit night, the man at her side was the shadows between stars. A mountain of a man, bald and shiny as if he had been carved of a single piece of obsidian and set with gemstones. His oiled skin was bound from scalp to waist with a symmetrical pattern of delicate scars, as if a spider’s web had been draped over him and had burned itself into his skin. This web was studded with tiny gemstones, so that the man glittered like a starlit night every time he moved. Eyes like a pale blue morning, cat-slit like the girl’s, curved into half-moons as he bared his big white teeth and laughed at the children playing aklashi. He was clad in a brief garment of bright red, and his broad feet were bare. He wore no jewels besides his skin, bore no weapons that Ismai could see.
Several steps higher and not far from Sulema sat Ismai’s elder brother, Tammas. He was, as usual, surrounded by a colorful flock of women and girls. Tammas was the one who had inherited their father’s dimpled face and powerful build. Worse, he was bouncing their youngest sister, four-year-old Rudya, on his knees. The females in his immediate vicinity were all mentally braiding stud-right beads into his hair. Many of them had petitioned Nurati for the chance to bear his child, and none of them bothered to hide it.
Ismai sighed to the soles of his feet, wondering whether there were enough fish in the river to pack that kind of muscle onto his light frame. He had gotten their mother’s fine-boned and delicate looks, and that paired awkwardly with Father’s enormous hands and feet. When he was a small boy, he had thought it a fine thing to be fussed over by all the Mothers for his thick lashes and pretty looks.
At fifteen, it was nearly unbearable.
Their far-cousin Hannei, sword-sister to Sulema, was one of Tammas’s admirers. Her shorn scalp was still paler than the skin of her face and shone with sisli oil. She wore a warrior’s vest hung with small brass bells, and trousers rolled up almost to her knees. Bells flashed at her wrists and bare ankles as well, and upon the dainty chain that dangled from nose-ring to earring, caressing her soft cheek. She was a poet’s vision of saghaani, pure desert beauty on the hunt for her first lover. It seemed to Ismai that, although his b
rother handed out smiles to the women like flowers, his eyes loved her best. It was known that Tammas Ja’Sajani had never surrendered his dignity to a girl during Ayyam Binat. Perhaps this would be the year.
Ismai sighed again, and ate a mouthful of fish. The skin was perfectly crisp, lemony and salty and spicy all at once. He told himself that he was not envious of his brother’s horde of admirers. In truth, he would be content with one.
The sheep’s head split in two and both halves went sailing into the stands, much to the delight of everyone who was not sprayed with gore.
First Warrior Sareta was up on the high dais near Ismai’s mother, smiling as if the two of them had never been rivals. She stood beside the dreamshifter and Istaza Ani, and the three of them watched the younglings’ game. The pride’s highest-ranking warrior stood head-and-shoulders taller than the sorceress and was more finely muscled than the youthmistress. Her temples were smooth as old leather, and a hundred braids fell behind her magnificent lionsnake-plume headdress in a black-and-gray waterfall nearly to her knees. She wore the traditional trousers and bead-and-bone vest of the warrior, and a graceful golden shamsi, prized sunblade of the desert, gleamed at her side.
She was old, older even than Istaza Ani, and her face had been tempered by time and sun, by blade and wind. Her laughing hawk’s eyes were fixed upon the field. Judging the prospects, he was sure, tallying every strength and weakness of tomorrow’s little warriors.
See me, he urged her with all his might. Find me worthy. Ismai dreamed not of tallying herds and taking census and keeping the borders secure, but of riding a proud war mare across the golden sands with his face bared to the glory of Akari Sun Dragon. In the old stories, Iftallan had ridden at the side of Zula Din, a warrior in his own right. He had not covered his head with the blue touar and stayed home to father babies and tend sheep.
Every spring, girls who would be warriors dropped little clay tablets inscribed with their names into a clay pot set before the First Warrior’s tent. This year, his had been among them. It was a foolish dream. But as Theotara herself had said, “Where there is life, there is room for foolishness.” His heart, young and strong, urged him to folly.
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