by Micah Yongo
“What?”
“Your crown, Sharíf.”
Sidon lifted his hand to his head and felt its absence. “By my fathers…” he looked around. “I must have left it in the room…”
He looked at the guards and the chamberlain. Elias’s face was unreadable.
Sidon cleared his throat and straightened, trying to affect calm. “Go on ahead. Mother will want to be sure to reach the square in good time and make certain everything is in order. I will follow in the next carriage.”
The chamberlain seemed to hesitate, but then bowed and went. The din from outside spilled in through the main doors as they opened. Sidon blinked, glimpsing the crowd. People were heading toward the square in droves.
He turned and went back across the lobby, and then into the corridor to make his way to his chambers, walking briskly. It was good they hadn’t got all the way to the carriage where Mother was waiting before they’d noticed. The mood she was in. Nothing but blank stares and brooding silence since last night and what happened outside the banquet room. And with all the fussing she’d done that morning with Elias, seeing to the arrival of the betrothed and her family, ensuring the servants had all the–
He stopped abruptly at the doorway to his chamber.
“Iani? What are you still doing here? You should be in the caravan on the way to the square.”
The slavegirl was standing in the middle of the room with her back half-turned. She seemed to be fiddling with something, looking down at herself, her shoulders slightly hunched as though reading some tiny inscription pressed close to her chest. She grunted frustratedly and turned to face him.
“The hem has parted,” she said, holding a stitching needle. “I thought I’d be able to mend it before the ceremony but now I’m not so sure because… Are you alright, Sharíf?”
“What? Yes… no.” He tugged at his too-tight collar with a finger. “My crown. I left my crown.”
She glanced around, saw it on the cushion in the corner and picked it up. She walked across the room to hand it to him in the doorway. Sidon took it and placed it on his head, then glanced distractedly at the corners of the chamber, tugging again at his collar.
“All will be well, Sharíf.”
“Yes.” He nodded, still looking around vaguely. “Yes. All will go well.” He glanced at the open seam near Iani’s waist. “You can fix that?”
Iani looked down at the parting doubtfully. “I fear not very well, Sharíf.”
“But you will still be there, at the ceremony. You will still come.”
She heard the insistence in his voice and, smiling a little, decided. “Yes, Sharíf. I shall.”
Strange how comforting it was to hear her say that, and how worrisome the fleeting notion that she wouldn’t. He resisted smiling back nonetheless. The sharíf is like a cornerstone, Father always said. It wasn’t a sharíf’s place to appear too–
“Ah, my king. You have found it.”
Sidon’s gaze switched to the corridor to find Yassr approaching with Elias. He stepped back from the doorway. “Uh… yes.” He pointed needlessly to his head. “I did.”
Probably Mother had sent them back to find him and help him look, trying to hurry him along to the caravan. She was probably refusing to leave until he’d made his way back along the corridor and through the lobby’s tall doorway to sit in his seat opposite her. He turned back to the bedchamber. Iani had stepped out of the doorway. He reached for the door to close it on her and keep the chamberlain from seeing. He took the handle and leaned in.
“Wait for us to go,” he whispered. “And then join the caravan outside. You will sit by me at the ceremony.” He shut the door and moved away, walking swiftly to meet Yassr and Elias in the corridor and continue on to the waiting procession.
It took an hour for the carriage to move through the din. The streets were thick with people, cheering, jeering, it was hard to tell which. Countless arms stretched out to the royal carriage from behind the rows of armed cityguards. Horsemen flanked the caravan as it pushed toward the square. The sky was darkening. Streaks of orange, red and magenta spread out from the sun’s elliptic as it sank beneath the housetops. Sidon could just make out the shrill blare of the crier’s horn trumping above the clamour to announce his arrival as beneath it all the hammered rhythm of a drumbeat thumped on like the advance of an army. Mother remained ominously still throughout. She’d spoken not a word since Sidon entered the carriage and announced Iani would be seated by him on the platform.
The caravan stopped at the head of the square on the east side by the stage to let Sidon and his mother out. The two Shedaím and several of the cityguard came alongside, surrounding them as they made their way up the shallow steps to the stone platform.
The governors were already seated in a row at the back. Sidon and Chalise took their seats at the centre. The footmen of the cityguard started to light the staves on the wall behind the rostrum and out along the side streets as the crowd continued to gather.
Sidon watched as Iani arrived with the rest of the attendants in the second carriage. She was led up the steps and across the platform as commanded and sat down after being ushered to a seat beside him. Meanwhile, Yassr, having moved to the front of the platform, was already beginning to address the crowd.
“…and our great forefather Karel who gave birth to this Sovereignty nearly three hundred years ago, conquering these lands of Sumeria and founding our crown city. He too was only a boy, as our beloved Sharíf Sidon now is, yet it was he who did away with the priesthoods, ending their wars and preserving our lands. And what of Arvan the Scribe, the great sharíf who himself established the First Laws. Or his son, Theron the Great, who took hold of Calapaar to the north. And then there is Sharíf Kaldan, who built the west wall of Calapaar, and Tsarúth who conquered the High East. And Kosyatin who…”
Sidon let the man drone on, waiting to see his future queen step out from the final carriage, draped in the traditional silk veil that would continue to cover her until they stood to speak the vows. He’d seen the girl once before, two years ago, but it was at a distance. He couldn’t remember what she’d looked like. They’d never spoken. Never met.
“She will be more nervous than you are, Sharíf.”
Sidon had been so lost in thought he almost flinched. He glanced at Iani beside him. “I doubt that.”
Which seemed to amuse her. “Do you?” She smiled, wagged her head. “How long have you been thinking of this day?”
“A year. Maybe longer.”
The slavegirl giggled.
Sidon looked at her. “This is not funny, Iani.”
She gave an apologetic nod but she was still smiling.
Usually it would have made him angry, but something about it all, the crowd, his forgetting his crown, the months of waiting anxiously for what this hour would or wouldn’t be, his mother’s cool silences and now this slavegirl just sitting there beside him and smiling at him like that, like there were no cares in the world at all, it somehow felt like a relief. He found himself smiling back. “You mock your king on his wedding day?”
“Sharíf. A bride, any bride, has thought of her wedding day three times a day since she was a child. And that’s just if she’s not an excitable kind. She will have played with her dolls, pretending she was one and her husband-to-be the other. She will have spoken the vows she is to say on that day a thousand times in her head, or out loud, or even in her sleep. If she is too poor for dolls she will have taken stones, or lumps of clay, or sprigs torn from switchbushes and pretended them to be dolls. One for her, one for her husband-to-be. And those sprigs will have danced together, and walked together in the cool of the day touching as though linked hand in hand, and they will have laughed and cried and perhaps even kissed. And the tall sprig, the husband, will have sung songs of his undying devotion to the shorter sprig, the bride.”
Sidon was looking at her dubiously, still smiling. “Perhaps not all girls are as given to imagination as you are, Iani.”
“Per
haps when it comes to this they are, Sharíf.”
“I can tell you now, my mother has never entertained these fictions. Neither when she was a child nor since.”
Iani seemed to think about it. “No,” she said. “I think you are wrong. I think even the sharífa will have thought on these things too.”
“And what about you? Do you think on them?”
She looked at him then. A timid half-smile hovered around her lips.
Sidon found himself smiling back as he watched her; the bashful dip of her head, her shy and simple gaze, the tidy way she cupped her hands together as she rested them in her lap. He glanced at those hands and thought of the doting way she’d fussed over his garments as she helped him dress, her palms smoothing across his shoulders and back, pressing the creases out.
“I used to, Sharíf,” she said eventually. “As a child I would think on such things often.”
“But not anymore?”
“My mother would say that kind of thing is for idle minds, Sharíf… Perhaps that’s why you had no time to think on weddings as a boy. Perhaps you were too busy thinking on other things.”
“My father, when he was well, would tell me to think on my brother’s ways. See how well Joram writes, he’d say. Or, look, see how Joram sits a horse, or how he holds a bow, or how he stands… My brother was always very able, you see. I’d try to think of how I could be as he was…” Sidon blinked. His gaze returned to her. “I’ve never told anyone that before,” he said.
Iani just looked back at him, that same attentive and uncomplicated gaze.
Sidon noticed he liked the shape of her eyes, the open set to her face, the careful way she listened. And then, suddenly, he found his thoughts straying to other things, imagining her as other than herself, no more a slavegirl, a princess perhaps, or a wealthy merchant’s daughter, draped in other clothes and with more jewels, and then imagining the ease he’d feel were she his betrothed in place of the veiled royal stranger who was to soon emerge from the carriage.
“Iani, I…”
But her smile had faded fractionally. She was looking away, staring out to the crowd.
“Iani?”
Her jaw danced as though to speak, but didn’t, as if she’d forgotten what to say, as though her thoughts had suddenly locked or lost themselves as she continued to gaze out to the growing multitude.
“Iani?”
But she didn’t move. Her eyes grew still. Then blinked. Staring.
Sidon frowned. “What is it, Iani?” He followed her gaze out to the square. “What are you looking at?”
Neythan didn’t move. He just stared. Even from this distance he could tell. The way she sat, the way she tipped her head as she spoke.
“Neythan, what is it? What’s the matter?”
Caleb’s words bounced off him, seemed far away. And then Neythan was moving, striding forward, pushing through the gaggles of others on the street as they filed into the square.
She rose from her seat, drifting slowly to her feet as though called. She could see him coming now, swatting, shoving and sidling through the crowd. She watched him toss aside his mantle as he started into the press. She was sure now. His gait, the way he moved.
He could see her standing – ornately dressed, dainty and jewelled. Bracelets around her arms. Bangles of gold in plaited hair beneath a scarf. And she was looking at him. Just standing there watching him come.
“By my fathers, Iani, what’s wrong?”
But she wasn’t listening. Just staring. She walked forward, moving to the platform’s edge, ignoring the cityguards telling her to step back, ignoring everything, transfixed by his approach.
And now he was certain, he could see her face, those eyes, her gaze, the flicker of recognition, the subtle shift in her stance, all of it so familiar. He could hear his chest hammering, Caleb’s voice calling from behind, then everything dissolving away, the crowds, the surroundings, the questions, why she was here, why she was so dressed, all of it shrinking to the still, small fact of her presence, here, now, real, before him. There was no Caleb, no sharíf, no past or future or dimming evening sky. There was only this. Only her. Removing her scarf, taking off her bracelets, waiting, just her. Here. Finally. Arianna.
Thirty-Two
A R I A N N A
They say there are moments, when they come, that you can expect to remember thereafter, moments that are made memory before they even arrive, through imagination, through daydreams, or what the elders call “foreshadows”. They are the reason for the meditations – they allow your sha to visit where you are yet to go, Master Johann once said, so that when you arrive, you are ready. For those experienced in the discipline the practice allowed their sha to even awaken there, in some yet to be encountered moment, an imagined future, and foresee. The skill required years of practice, as it had for Elder Safít, and even Uncle Sol, until his visions were deemed false by the elders and he, when he refused to recant, was judged a heretic and exiled from the Brotherhood.
Since finding Yannick’s hacked and bloody body Neythan had foreshadowed this moment almost every night, imagining over and over again what it would be like to finally find her. And now here she was, Arianna, a sibling of sorts, and yet an enemy, the two commingling in Neythan’s mind as the spectral image of Yannick’s corpse hung ghostlike over them both, vague as reflection, knitting sibling to enemy, friend to foe, like some crude and deranged seamstress.
She stood still at the edge of the rostrum above the gathering crowd and cordon of soldiers, watching Neythan approach. The sharíf had risen and was walking toward her, talking without being heard. Finally he placed a hand on her shoulder to try to get her attention, and it was then she moved, quick and sudden.
She shrugged the sharíf aside, bolted along the edge of the rostrum and leapt into the crowd, stumbling a little as she landed, and then scampered through the adjoining alley on the other side.
Neythan went after her, shoving his way through the scattered mob. Trying to keep sight of her over the bobbing heads as he worked his way through the crowded square. He could already hear the noise of alarm swelling in his wake as he pushed his way through. Soldiers shouting. People shrieking. Men and women jostled and panicked. Some of the cityguard starting to give chase.
He sprinted into the narrow passage on the other side and turned. Snap of scarlet dress beyond the corner, darting ahead through the throng. Neythan followed, flapping and ducking at the low-hanging laundry drooping from wall to wall along the gangway. Up ahead the passage was filled with more people. Baskets and bodies reeled as Arianna tugged them into his path.
He fought and stumbled his way out into the small market through a gap in the wall, nearly tripped over a goat, bleating its complaint as he pushed through.
Lighter here. More torches.
A dog on a rope barking.
The last vendors packing down their stalls.
Arianna’s fast pumping limbs receding beyond the corner. Neythan weaved, slammed into a passerby, kept running.
He was nearing the passage on the other side, waving people out of the way. Gawping faces turning toward him and trying to hurl themselves out of his path as he–
Glint of metal. A shadow in his periphery. Neythan swayed back from the swung blade before he’d had time to think. He turned on his attacker. Tall woman. Pale and sinewy. Shedaím. The bodyguard he’d spied when watching the sharíf back in Hanesda.
She swatted again with the shortsword, hampered by the crowd. Neythan pivoted into a flailing passerby, grabbed and thrust him into the Shedaím’s path, turned and kept running.
Arianna had lengthened the distance by the time he rounded the bend, skidding into the next street and on toward the gateroad.
Busier here. Sellers. Shepherds. Sheep and bullocks for the wedding. And the fishermen still coming in from the lake with their skiffs carried overhead. Neythan elbowed one, tugged the arm of another, spilling them into the path of the chasing Shedaím as he continued to chase Arianna.
He caught sight of her in the distance, veering toward the houses. She hopped onto a mule cart then onto another parked load next to it and leapt up to clasp the ledge at the top of the wall behind, scrambling like a cat onto the rooftop.
Neythan ran across the road and did the same, hauling himself up in time to see her scampering heels as she jumped across the gap of an alley and onto the roof of the adjacent house.
The city sprawled out beneath him as he ran along the roofs after her. He could see the watchmen at the northern wall, scurrying along its ledge in the distance to shut the main gate. Arianna was heading the other way, east along the jagged steps of the city’s roofs and gaps to the corner watchtower where the wall was lowest. She was looking for a way out.
Neythan gained as he cut across the staggered levels of the next house, striding ledge to ledge like bollards. He was less than two cart lengths behind when something hit her, thudding into her ribs in mid-air as she leapt over another alley.
She landed hard against the wall of the next house, holding on to the gable and roof ledge, trying to pull herself up, and then dropped and fell into the shadowed alleyway beneath.
Neythan skidded to the roof’s edge and peered down from the overhang.
Arianna was on the ground. The sinewy bodyguard was standing over her, sling in hand.
There were shouts coming from the street, a pair of cityguards closing in.
When Neythan looked back, the two women were already fighting.
He glanced back across the rooftops to the city gate. The watchmen were at the pulleys now. He could see the tall wooden slabs of the doors starting to hinge shut. Below, the two guards had arrived at the alley and were stepping in one by one, moving along the slim passage toward the fighting women.
Neythan went to the roof’s corner and hitched himself over the edge. He dropped down into the alley and landed with a roll to break his fall, bumping against the wall opposite.
The soldiers had joined the fight, attacking Arianna. Or at least trying to. They kept bouncing against the narrow walls and getting in the bodyguard’s way as Arianna parried them into each other.
