by Micah Yongo
“The second, she is an innkeeper. Rona, she is called. A Tresánite. She is on the straight street by the markets. Zaqeem stayed there most often when he came to the city. She will know what his comings and goings were.”
Yasmin bowed her head. “Thank you, uncle. I owe you.”
“No… The debt is mine for having told you, debt to your fathers.” The old man stared hard at the dead hawk on the ground; he could see the shape of its eyeless skull. From this angle it seemed as though it was looking at him. He looked at Yasmin. “And you will pray to them for me, that they may forgive this debt of mine. If they can.”
She went after sundown, quickstepping with Mulaam, the servant she’d had bring her here, through the narrow streets surrounding the market. There were people everywhere despite the hour, stallkeepers packing up their tables and wares and carrying them away in sacks. A shepherd went with an oil lamp, leading three ewes down the narrow road on one side and shielding the lamp with a curled hand like some precious jewel. Opposite, an old man tapped a feeble rhythm on his drum, croaking out an old and obscure song for coins from passersby whilst others leant against the walls, sipping from mugs of sourwine with bloodshot eyes. Yasmin and Mulaam hurried their way through with the hoods of their cloaks up over their heads, trying to avoid the passing glances of others on the street. With every step Yasmin found herself wondering if Zaqeem had walked here before them. Had he come by night? Did the dark narrow road with its departing vendors feel as fraught to him as it now did to her?
They reached the end of the road and turned into the alley Yaram had told her about. They found the door just where he said it would be, and then knocked and waited.
A woman opened, looked Yasmin up and down, and then glanced at Mulaam. “You are strangers,” she said. “There are other inns by the market road.”
“I was told this one is best,” Yasmin said.
The woman acknowledged that with silence. She stared at Yasmin for a few moments, and then up at Mulaam, and then shut the door. Yasmin looked at Mulaam. They stood there in the alley. Yasmin was about to knock again when the door reopened. The woman’s arm thrust through the gap, brandishing a purse. She held it out to Yasmin in her palm.
“I’ll give no more to beggars or thieves,” she said. “I’ve patrons I’d not have you disturb, but if you force me, I will. There’s plenty a man in here.”
It took Yasmin a moment to make sense of what the woman was saying. “Oh. No, no. That’s not why we’re here.” But when she stepped forward to explain, the woman moved back. Yasmin decided to do the same, give her space, let her see they were no threat. The woman was small. Her face was narrow and hungry, a certain hardiness to her; as angry as she was afraid. “It’s true we’re not seeking a room,” Yasmin said. She looked at the purse still clutched in the woman’s hand. “But neither are we after your money.”
“Then what do you want?”
“You are Rona?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want?”
“I need your help.”
Rona relaxed a little. “You’ve not the look of one in need of my help.”
“We came to ask about a man you perhaps once knew,” Yasmin said. “He came here often, I think. His name was Zaqeem?”
The woman’s wariness returned. “You’ve no business here with me,” she said. “And I’ve none with you. You find some other to trouble. Some other.”
“I just need some answers.”
“I’ve no answers for you.”
“A question or two, and then we’ll leave.”
“Leave now.”
“I will not,” Yasmin spoke quietly. “I cannot. Not until you answer our questions.” She glanced at Mulaam, who then reached into his cloak to fish out the purse. He bounced the small parcel of cloth in his palm. The silver jangled inside. “We will not be ungrateful for your help,” Yasmin said.
The woman’s eyes fixed on the parcel. It was a large purse. Mulaam pulled the drawstring and opened it. The silver inside glittered dully in the moonlight. “Just questions,” she said.
Mulaam stepped forward and handed her the purse.
“Only questions,” Yasmin said.
The woman took it quickly and opened it further to examine the contents.
Mulaam conjured a second purse from his pocket and jiggled it in his palm as he had the first.
“Should your answers prove helpful,” Yasmin explained.
The woman looked at the second purse and then again at the one in her hand. “Alright,” she said. “But this big one,” she jutted a finger in Mulaam’s direction. “He waits here.”
The woman let Yasmin in and led her through a second doorway, and then down into a narrow passage flanked with string-draped doorways on either side. Yasmin could hear the lulled heavy breaths of others behind each one, and in some the muffled murmur of voices. The small chamber Rona eventually brought her to closed with a wooden door. The woman lit a lamp and gestured for her to step all the way in.
“Just sit over there,” she said, pointing at a short upended stool between two tall clay pots and what looked like half a ladder tipped over.
Yasmin went over and righted the stool, brushing off the dust to sit. The woman locked the door and stood in the other corner. She turned and looked at Yasmin like what she was – a problem.
“I don’t want trouble,” she said.
“Why should there be any trouble?”
“I…” She took a deep breath. “What are you to Zaqeem anyway?”
“I want you to tell me why you’d think there’d be any trouble.”
“You know why.”
“No, I do not. I wish to know.”
The woman smiled bitterly. “No. If you don’t know, if you truly don’t, then you shouldn’t wish to.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s no good from it. Once you know a thing, you can’t unknow it. That’s the way it is for everyone. I’ll give you back your silver if you like, or maybe I’d ask to keep just a bit of it, for letting you in and all. But I’ll tell you, what would be best is to keep from knowing any of it.”
“I’m not here for what is best,” Yasmin said. “I’m here to know the truth. Tell me what trouble you fear.”
“What I fear?” The woman smiled again. “You think I don’t know he’s dead, what happened to him?”
“They say it was done by bandits.”
The woman laughed then. She placed her hand to her forehead. “You’d not be here if you believed that.”
“No, I wouldn’t. So why don’t you tell me how he did die?”
“I don’t know how he died. I just know how he didn’t. I know it wasn’t the way it’s said it was. It wasn’t bandits.”
“How do you know?”
“How can I not? He had debts… He had… He was a man of appetites, Zaqeem was. A nice man. A charmer. But he had appetites he never saw to taming.”
“He gambled?”
“Oh, yes. He gambled plenty, and drank, and any and everything else a man with means might do. He’d be here every second month it seemed like. Especially around the new moon, or harvest. Whenever there were going to be men and women making merry, Zaqeem would be there and not shy about it.”
“You knew him well?”
The woman shrugged, sadly. “Some. Never as well as I’d have liked. He came to me only sometimes, when he was drunk mostly, but even then he’d know how to charm, how to make you smile. And me, I… well…” she gestured feebly at the small cluttered space around them. “He was like summer to me, when he chose to be. So I’d never refuse him. Though I knew there’d be nothing to come of it. Zaqeem had many women. That was his problem.”
“Was it?”
“Well, let’s just say he wasn’t picky about who they belonged to, a husband, say. Sooner or later he was always going to come upon an angry husband.”
“So Zaqeem had enemies, then.”
“Oh. Zaqeem had as many enemies as he did fri
ends, and of all kinds and for all kinds of reasons. I always feared over that for him. He wasn’t a bad man. Just… he wasn’t a wise one either. But that’s not what I meant. What I meant was Zaqeem was never shy about what women he’d court, their station and so on.”
“And he would bring these women here?”
“Sometimes. He didn’t mean anything by it. Like I say, I don’t think he really remembered those times when he came to me alone. He was drunk mostly on those times. So it’s not like he was meaning anything by bringing them here. It was just his habit. And he knew I’d not tell. I wasn’t like how I’m being now.”
“Your not telling can neither help nor harm him now, Rona.”
The sound of her name seemed to jolt her. She glanced up at Yasmin. “No… I don’t suppose it can.” She stepped in from the corner. Her face straightened abruptly, tautened, as though all the feeling and sadness of before had been wilfully pressed from it. “There’s something I will tell you. Something I should tell you since we’re speaking this way. My mothers and fathers forgive me for saying it. But should I not say, it would be the greater sin.”
“What is it?”
Again she licked her lips. “Some of the women, when he brought them, I’d know their faces. Only sometimes. Rarely, really. Just one or two. I’ve an eye for faces, you see. They’d come in hoods and all what else but I’d still know them. There was one, when I looked I knew who she was straight away. Took all my strength to keep from showing that I knew her.”
“Why? Who was she?”
“She…” The woman’s lips quivered. She leaned forward and whispered. “I know what you see sometimes, it can’t be certain. I know that. But if who I saw wasn’t her it was the very likeness of her. A good likeness.”
“Who?”
“I saw the sovereign queen mother,” Rona said. “Chalise of Caphás… I saw the sharífa.”
Thirty-Seven
H U N T E R
Neythan blew on his broth. He puffed the steam from the lip of the wooden cup as he sat watching Caleb haggle with the gypsies from across the bonfire. It was close to midnight. They’d arrived here from the rivertowns along the Swift only an hour before. The town had been lively and busy as noon and remained so even now; local custom; people lingering around a blazing pyre into the small hours, eating and drinking to the sound of strings in the light and warmth cast by the flames.
Neythan turned to watch a troupe of older women opposite, stamping and strutting to the minstrel’s tune as men clapped in time to their steps. The hot ashy smell of cooking spices drifted in from behind where others were roasting goatmeat atop barrelled cookfires as they all sat, hemmed in by the housing, facing the fire at the centre of the square. It was like Hanesda at new moon, that same sly festive hum, as though all had awaited the sun’s turned back before venturing out to play.
“Do you remember this song?”
He glanced at Arianna beside him. They were sitting together on a little patch of grass that lined the square’s south side. Others sat similarly within view of the bonfire, chatting idly, playing games, doing chores as though it was still daytime.
She was nodding at the minstrel away to their left, a small bird-boned man with narrow wrists and nimble fingers that danced over the strings like a scrambling crab. His eyes were closed. His mouth open. Neythan could see his throat trilling like a hungry chick’s as he sang.
“…and the moon said on to the stretching sky, if you’ll be my home I’ll be your eye, and the sky said back on to the glowing moon, I need but one and I have the sun…”
“Yulaan used to sing it,” Arianna said. “When we were children. Remember?”
“Seems you’ve a better memory than me.”
Arianna shrugged. “Should be no surprise. I’m better than you at most things. Always was.”
“Rich words.”
“True ones.” She lifted a fist, began to count them off with her fingers. “I’m better than you with the sword…”
“Debatable.”
“Crossbow.”
“Perhaps.”
“Longbow.”
“Definitely not. When we began maybe, but we were children. The tale has changed a fair way since then.”
“I ride faster than you.”
“You’re smaller than me.”
“So you’ll take the aid it grants your longbow, but not the speed it grants my horse?”
Neythan smiled, shrugged concedingly. He looked back to the bonfire. “I’m still the better cook.”
“Oh, speak truth, Neythan.”
“I am. You have forgotten those flatcakes Yulaan had you make that time? With the spiced honey? The day after Josef returned from his witnessing–”
“It was my first time at the dish.”
“Daneel was sick for a week, I think. Even now I cannot lose the taste–”
“Yet your plate was clean.”
“–Like turned milk.”
Arianna laughed, incredulous.
“Salty turned milk.”
She thumped his shoulder, smiling, and then sat back.
Neythan laughed and did the same, resting his elbows on the grass as they watched the bonfire and the minstrel. The man was standing now, stomping his foot as the older women danced and flounced like peacocks, fistfuls of skirt and elbows out, ankles flashing beneath the lifted hems as dust skidded up from their steps.
“…and when the moon came offering jewels, the sky just laughed and called him fool, I dwell on high and need no keep, no food to live or bed to sleep…”
“You miss it?” Neythan said. “Ilysia?”
Arianna shrugged and made a wry face; half-squint, half-pout. It was to be expected. Since they were children he could scarce recall a day she’d not hint at leaving. Whenever they were beyond earshot of the others she’d prod him with her theories – They say Tirash is full of merchants. What would it be to see the snows of the Reach? Do you think it’s true what’s said of the Narrow Sea? – her thoughts always trending waywards, like bees in summer, dancing busily from one thing to the next.
“Suppose I can’t say I blame you,” Neythan said. “Eleven years, just a handful of days away from the mount throughout… By the time we were to be sworn I doubted I’d miss it myself.”
“And have you?”
He nodded. “Took less than a week for me to think of being back there.”
Arianna glanced aside, weighed him with her gaze. “No,” she decided, and turned back to the bonfire. “You do not think of being back there. You think of things being back the way they were.”
Old habit, her speaking that way, recognizing his mind as though it were her own. He turned toward her as she stared into the flames, the down of her cheek bronzed by the firelight.
“Were he here, Master Johann would call it the beggar’s mind, you know,” she said. “An ill way to think. He said as much to me once.”
“Why?”
“I’d asked him – halfway through our sharím – what a girl like me might be, were I not there, in Ilysia.”
Neythan grimaced a little. “Bold thing to ask.”
“Yes. Well. I don’t suppose I thought so at the time.”
“What did he say?”
“He said there was no fruit in thinking on it. He said…” She frowned, trying to recall the words, then enunciated them precisely. “He said each owes their shape to the road that’s made them, and to wish for another road is to be brother to him who wishes for death. You cannot have one without the other.”
“Well… He was never one for light words.”
Arianna remained silent.
Neythan turned to look at her. She was still frowning as she eyed the flames. “You dislike the saying,” he said.
Sour smile, like a dinner guest before food they’ve no taste for. “What does it matter if I do? In the end he’s right, isn’t he? We are what we are. You. Me. We’ve spent our lives being taught to be so. When I sleep I dream of blood. When I start from sleep a
blade is ready in my hand. All that I am has been shaped for but one purpose. I cannot make it otherwise. Neither can you. So suppose there comes a day when the Brotherhood is no more, Neythan. Suppose we are the ones who bring that day to pass. What will that make us? What will we be without the Shedaím? What can we be?”
Neythan thought about it, looked back across the square. Caleb and the gypsies were laughing now. Neythan laughed a little himself.
“It amuses you?” Arianna said.
Neythan just smiled and shook his head. “I was just thinking… I seem to remember one telling me not to mind those teachings; that the creeds do not make us what we are. With all that’s happened… well… Let’s just say I’m starting to finally think she may have had a point. So, wouldn’t that be a thing, for me to sit here and give to her the counsel she once gave to me. To say the Brotherhood has not made us, and that we can be whatever we want. Who’d have ever thought that I’d be the one to speak such things, and you’d be the one to doubt them?”
Arianna turned and looked at him. That same wondering look he remembered from the Dry Lake those years ago in Ilysia. The same look she’d given him in Qadesh when he’d believed her, as though there was some needful answer he’d given, without having even known there was a question.
Neythan just looked back, watching the silence in her eyes, the amber glint of the bonfire lodged in her gaze like a still spark.
“Neythan…” she paused, leaned in. “You and I… Perhaps we…”
He saw something on the periphery, beyond her shoulder, and glanced up. A man, hooded, watching them from by the bonfire. Something about the way he was standing. Something familiar.
“Neythan?”
Neythan’s gaze returned to her – lying on her flank beside him, her smile uncertain now – then back to where he’d seen the watching man. The man was no longer there, a pair of giggling girls in his place, chasing each other, rolling damp rags in their fists as they tried to swat at each other’s arms. Neythan sat up, began to search the crowd.
Arianna turned, following his gaze. “What is it? What’s the matter?”
“We need to go.”
“Go?”
