by Somaiya Daud
“Take care of Idris,” Maram said, and came around to face me.
My eyes widened. I hadn’t realized he was coming. I’d barely managed when we’d only spent a few hours together. Now I would have to manage him—fooling him—for weeks. “He … Gibra is often difficult for him.”
I frowned. “Difficult?”
For a moment, she stared at me, as if trying to discern a hidden truth. Then she shook her head. “He is—we are friends,” she said, as if it pained her to admit it. “But he gets bored easily and there’s nothing but sand and rocks on Gibra.”
My eyes widened further and I considered pushing. Idris seemed to have little difficulty, no matter what it was. I could not imagine that being on Gibra, free of the machinations of the Ziyaana, would prove difficult for him.
“Village girl,” she said, and gripped my arm. “Do you understand?”
I nodded, the warning in the back of my mind rising. “Yes, Your Highness.”
She nodded back. “Good.”
* * *
We were not departing from the main concourse, as we had when leaving for Atalasia. Our group was much smaller this time around; all of Maram’s ladies in waiting were staying behind, so that it was myself, Idris, Tala, and a handful of handmaidens. This landing zone looked more like a garden than a place to leave the planet. There were trees everywhere, heavy with out-of-season fruit. The cruiser we were taking off-world was smaller than the luxury liner we’d boarded only a month ago. Shaped like an ocean floor–dwelling creature with wide, curved wings, and a bulbous center, it was only two levels high, long enough that the serving girls and boys would remain separate from the handmaidens, and they separate from Idris and I.
Idris, for his part, stood on the other side of the concourse flanked by two droids. He’d not bothered to tie his hair back this morning, and there was something missing—as though he had not put on all his armor as he usually did. He looked tired, I realized. There were no bags under his eyes, and he stood up straight, as though there were a rod of steel in his spine, but he lacked his usual gloss.
I was used to quiet, so I thought little of Idris’s silence when he offered me a hand as we boarded. We were led to a sitting room, lushly carpeted, with a wide window at the far end. There was a low table in the Kushaila style, and several cushions for sitting. Idris and I settled ourselves into our seat, and waited while a droid put down a tea set and poured.
We were very quickly clearing the cloud cover on the surface of Andala. The only time I’d been so high up was my journey to the planet’s surface, and I remembered that only in bits and pieces. The sun was only just rising, and the air above the clouds was velvet blue and pink and violet. I could see Cadiz, pale green, threaded with gold lights of the dozen cities on its surface.
A soft pang twisted itself in my chest. I’d had few opportunities to look up at the sky in the last months and had not seen my home since leaving. Now I looked for it hungrily. I missed the image of the mountains painted against a sunrise, missed the sounds of my village, and the smell of snow just a few days away. I was determined to get back to it somehow, Dihya willing.
Of the two moons, Gibra was the larger, a round rusted red giant. Botanists had settled Cadiz, and I didn’t know who terraformed Gibra, but none of the verdant and lush life clear on Cadiz from millions of miles away showed on Gibra’s surface. There was no evidence of water, though I’d heard a large portion of it existed underground. The lights that twined around Cadiz were largely absent on its sister moon. Fewer cities, fewer citizens, and populated by an altogether harsher people.
I could not imagine what sort of life the Dowager Sultana lived on its surface. I knew that her continued survival depended on her removal from Andalaan politics, both physically and in spirit. But to go from queen of the free people, to their freedom fighter, to a prisoner on a faraway moon—it would have been a difficult, bitter pill to swallow. In her long life she’d battled would-be usurpers, civil war, traitorous family, and our Vathek conquerers. To be exiled after all that …
No one ever saw her in the public eye. The few times I’d glimpsed her face were in old holos from before the occupation. She lived a quiet life, away from her past, away from the present.
A prickling on my scalp prompted me to pull my gaze from the window. Idris was watching me. He was leaning away from the table just a little, one hand resting idle, the other playing with his signet ring. When my eyes landed on it he stopped and folded his fingers over it. I raised my eyes back to his face and found him just as focused as he’d been moments ago.
“Do you know why I told you the story of Massinia?” he said at last. “I wanted to see how much you would remember.”
“Remember?” If he’d been telling the stories to Maram, she’d failed to mention it to me. I was in dangerous territory here.
“From your childhood,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows. “You were testing me?”
He smiled. “Yes.”
“Did I pass?” I forced myself to say.
“You didn’t contribute,” he said.
“It is my understanding that it is rude to interrupt a storyteller,” I said. “No matter how poor the telling.”
His smile deepened. I’d amused him. Lovely.
“Did I not measure up?”
I looked away. I wouldn’t take the bait. I’d amused myself in the quiet hours by cataloguing his mistakes, both in the story and in its telling. Poor diction, no sentence variance, no interest—Idris didn’t care about the story of Massinia. Why should anyone care about her when her story was a series of dates and historical moments, devoid of passion or care?
“Silence is the most damning criticism,” he said with a laugh.
We were approaching the moon now, and I watched its rusty red resolve into something more complex. The surface was a shifting tapestry of orange, yellows, and reds, pushed this way and that by the currents of the wind. Sand everywhere, with few breaks in its surface for anything else.
A strange place, but home for the next three weeks.
the ouzdad estate
GIBRA,
A MOON OF ANDALA
15
It wasn’t long before we made the descent to Gibra’s surface. The blurry tapestry of sand didn’t resolve itself into anything as we approached our landing port. There were a few buildings, some lampposts, and the tarmac.
The cruiser hissed and bumped as it touched ground. For miles outside our window all I could see was desert, sand dunes, and an impossibly pale blue sky, unbroken by clouds.
There was a greeting party on the tarmac. I held back, still close to the ramp, as Maram would have, and watched as Idris grinned, and grabbed the leader of our greeting party in a hug.
“What’s happened to your face?” the man said, clapping Idris on the shoulder. It took me a moment to recognize him from the holoreader—Nabil, a lesser illegitimate son. Maram hated him, as she did Furat. Despite the status of their birth, they were favored by the Dowager and allowed to live with her.
“It’s what always happens,” Idris said, grinning. “I shaved.”
Nabil snorted in disbelief and shook his head. “One day, we’re going to get you to keep the beard, friend.”
For a moment I felt as if I were back on Cadiz listening to my brothers. Husnain had only just been able to grow a beard in recent months, and to call it that was to be generous. Aziz had teased him mercilessly over it. I’d not expected to find the same sort of ribbing here, and had to fight down a smile. Maram seldom found Nabil amusing on these visits.
His eyes drifted over Idris’s shoulder and settled on me. The smile broadened, though I had the sense he’d reminded himself where he was and what he was meant to do.
“Your Highness,” he said, polite and easy. “As always, we are delighted to welcome you back to Gibra.”
I said nothing, but held my hand out for Idris.
There was a slender transport, similar to the street carriages I’d seen
on Andala, with an open hood. The rest of the party was seated on horses instead of the desert bikes I would have expected.
For a long while there were only the sounds of the carriage cutting through the sand, and the soft thud of hooves cantering along beside us. The landscape was unchanging, and it was a wonder to me that our drivers knew where they were going. They seemed determined, even without landmarks or compasses.
And then the ground changed. The carriage jolted, and the soft thuds turned to clops. The land dipped smooth and easy, and led us down, away from the sand and its moveable mountains. Rock walls rose up on either side of us, impossibly high, peach colored and shadowed. From the entrance to the canyon, it looked as if some great hand had shoved itself into the ground and split the earth in two.
We rolled over the smooth path quickly, and it seemed that after no time at all, the scenery—and the air—changed yet again. I could feel water in the air, cool, thin, but there. It carried with it the smell of lemons and oranges, and the sound of a hundred trees, waving gently in the wind.
I did not gasp, because Maram had seen this before, but my body stiffened in wonder and awe all the same.
The Gates of Ouzdad were the stuff of legend. As high as the canyon walls were tall, made of bricks as tall and wide as men, its doors studded with gleaming silver pikes, they had withstood a hundred thousand assaults. No one had ever been able to tear them away from the canyon walls, nor breach the doors. Like the spikes on the door, the tiles overlaying the walls gleamed—orange, green, blue, and white, they were arranged to look like flowers with sharp petals. The Dowager Sultana’s flag flew from the top, merry in the weak breeze, and her soldiers marched along the walkway, keeping watch over those inside and out.
I followed its edge along the canyon wall, seamless, all the way to the top. It stopped several dozen meters shy of the ledge, but my eyes continued to climb. There was nothing like this in Walili, the capital city where the Ziyaana sat, or on Cadiz.
A dozen mounted horsewomen lined the left edge, robed in black. They were stark figures in a barren landscape, outlined against the blue of the sky. Several of the horses shook their heads, and the light bent off the silver on their bridles. The Tazalghit. The tribes of the Tazalghit were Massinia’s people, united under her mother, and powerful horsewomen who’d ruled the desert before the rise of the Ziyadis.
They looked as fierce and fearless as the stories made them sound. I knew it was still the custom of villages and cities alike in their lands to pay tithe to them. I tried not to stare too much—they couldn’t see me, but our escort could, and Maram had made clear nearly everything on Gibra bored her.
We pulled to a stop several meters shy of the gate, and waited as Nabil flashed identification and for the doors to groan open. A flash of birds burst into the air on the other side of the gate, shrieking angrily, their cries pierced every now and then by the sound of happy children.
* * *
I had not thought of the Ziyaana as a Vathek-washed version of the traditional Kushaila styles, but entering the Ouzdad estate made it strikingly clear. The sun shined down on a wide, two-story structure built against the left side of the canyon. A single tower rose on the far end, capped in gold, its walls inlaid with shining green stone. It was obvious the white walls were regularly cleaned—they had none of the Ziyaana’s rusted pallor and gleamed almost as brightly as the tiles weaving their way through them. The gates to the town were impressive, but Ouzdad itself, its many windows and turrets, its single, high gold doorway, was beautiful. Treetops peeked over the edges of terraces, birds roosted where they could, and the doors were ajar, letting in a steady flow of people.
The town itself spilled from the palace, instead of from the gates, a well-organized cluster of buildings, none more than two stories, all clean and well kept. The avenues were wide, the roads smooth and lined with lanterns. Beyond the town itself were yet more orchards, and beyond that another tower, which I knew was attached to the Dihyan temple at the outskirts.
The inside of the palace was equally beautiful. Gleaming white walkways, high carved arches, ornate pillars—everything the Ziyaana had but brighter, more real, as though the Ziyaana were attempting an imitation of something else. I’d found something real here.
There were orange trees, heavy with their fruit, inside the palace as well, fig trees waiting to bloom, thin, skeletal olive trees, their bright and glossy leaves waving slowly as we made our way further into the palace. Maram’s quarters—my quarters—shared a courtyard with Idris’s, a round, paved space, with a fountain babbling happily in the center. The fountain tile was inlaid at the bottom with orange and blue tiles, arranged to look like flowers sprouting from the ground. The entrances to our rooms were framed by pillars made from orange canyon stone, carved with the old Kushaila script.
I remained standing by the courtyard as Tala directed serving girls to unload our things. The collection of chambers was built like a small kasbah—all of the living spaces oriented around the courtyard, including an upper floor with a portico, its engraved shutters wide open to let in the breeze. I could see the sky from here, a novelty I didn’t know I’d been missing until I looked up.
For a moment I worried. I hadn’t thought they would put Idris and I so close together, though why they should house us apart I had no idea. He was engaged to Maram, and it made sense to be so close—to dine and break fast together, to be able to wander easily into each other’s spaces. But …
He’d retired almost immediately, claiming a headache. Perhaps we’d be able to go our separate ways, and I would not have to worry about keeping up pretenses with a prince.
This place felt loved, airy—the opposite of everything my quarters in the Ziyaana were. In the very back of the quarters was a small door, unobtrusive, made of dark wood. A lit lantern hung beside it, which I took, and after a glance around I pulled the door open. A breeze puffed out, and when I shone my lantern in I saw a series of stone steps leading down.
I knew they had to lead down to the catacombs. Ouzdad was famous for them, miles of passageways linking different wells beneath the surface, that led out of the palace. Hundreds of stories about royals in peril ended with them escaping into the catacombs, and coming out far away in the desert. For the first time in months I would be alone for a few hours, with no demands on my time. I could explore. I could wander the catacombs, masterless for the first time in ages.
I heard water before I reached the bottom. I’d expected an enormous cavern, wide open space with stalagmites jutting up from the ground. Instead the stairway led down to a passage lit with flickering sconces. On one side lay a waterway, waves sloshing up against the sides of pillars, and on the other side a mural of Massinia that seemed to roll forward, endlessly, into the gloom.
From the staircase I’d descended and onward the mural depicted Massinia throughout her life. Her childhood in the desert, her kidnapping and escape, her encounter with the tesleet, her adolescence, and on and on. I was transfixed by the image of her on a horse, her black robes whipping in an unseen wind. It was her face, dark and austere, her eyes furious and piercing, that held me. I didn’t know how to describe Massinia—she was beautiful, as if a piece of night sky had come down to us. Her skin was dark, her forehead high, and her cheeks looked as if they’d been chiseled from stone. Always, her wiry hair was bound into a single braid from the crown of her head, threaded with silver pieces.
Her horse reared back and yet she kept her seat, unafraid of falling. Etched in gold across her forehead was the crown of Dihya. Instead of the desert sky, the tesleet was spread behind her, its wings outstretched, its head held high.
At every turn in her life, Massinia took control of the narrative. She escaped her slavers, she found her love even if she couldn’t save him, she united the tribes. And at the end of her life, when she’d had enough, she’d simply stepped out of the story and up into the sky.
My life had been a series of events happening to me, and I wanted so desperately t
o be able to exert the control Massinia managed on my own life. To see my family, to see Husnain, again. To have her power, her determination, her faith.
“There you are,” Idris said from behind me, and I spun around, startled.
“What are you doing here?” My heart was racing and my voice trembled. The question came out as a demand, and an angry one at that.
He raised an eyebrow and took the lantern from me. “Your maidservant said you were down here. You’ve never liked the catacombs before, so I wanted to see what you found so fascinating,” he replied. His gaze narrowed at me. “I did not peg you for a Massinite, cousin.”
I frowned. “A what?” Maram wouldn’t know that word, even if I did.
He gestured to the mural. “An acolyte of Massinia.”
I shook my head and turned back to the wall. “I don’t pray to her, if that’s what you mean. She’s dead—she can’t hear me.”
“Then why do you look as if you love her?”
Even my mother had commented that how I felt about Massinia was stronger than what most of the faithful felt, and I chided myself for showing it.
“I’m not,” I said at last, and picked up my lantern.
As far as I could gather, Maram had no faith. Her mother died before she could teach her, and her Vathek family had not bothered.
He caught my wrist, and raised an eyebrow at me. “We’ve never kept secrets.”
I hardened myself against his smile and shook my head.
“I’m not keeping a secret,” I said. “The murals are beautiful and I came down to look.”
He wandered a little way down the mural and traced a finger over the lines of Kushaila. It depicted her first revelation—hidden away in a cave with a blank book open in her lap, and the first lines of our Book swirling around her.
Hear and recite, the words read, for We know things you do not.
“One day you shall return to the stronghold. That’s how her poem ends,” Idris said.
I paused, confused, then realized what he was referring to—the poem we’d talked about during the ball. Massinia’s flight.