The Diviner (golden key)

by Melanie Rawn

  “Leave it be,” Alessid told him. “I’ll call for a healer.”

  “No, it’s nothing. I want to hear more.” He didn’t wince as he smoothed out the page, then folded it neatly so that the four corners met in the middle. He ran a singed and slightly bloody fingertip over the matrix of Alessid’s personal seal, making sure there was no lingering wax to disfigure the impression. Green wax was poured, the seal was set, and the letter set aside.

  Rihana and Ra’amon pleased each other very much. The people of Joharra were equally pleased. The man they considered their rightful ruler had returned. The woman he married had openly declared her love for their land and had all the power of the Empire of Tza’ab Rih behind her to keep them safe. His conversion to the Glory of Acuyib troubled them but little, for they saw it as an expediency. Joharra was worth a change in liturgy.

  A few months after the marriage, Alessid received a letter from his granddaughter that confirmed everyone’s wisdom, including his own. Love there was between Rihana and Ra’amon, and great joy; as far as each was concerned, no other man and no other woman existed in all the wide world; and she was already pregnant with their first child and hoping for a girl. Rihana praised everything from her new husband to her new Joharran-style clothes (their women dressed even more oddly than their men, imprisoning themselves in tight bodices and voluminous skirts). Alessid decided Mirzah ought to read it as well, and accordingly made his way to her apartments.

  “ With regret, al-Ma’aliq, the Empress is indisposed.”

  Alessid regarded his wife’s maidservant, his eyes narrow and his lips taut. He had heard this same sentence a hundred times and more. He saw Mirzah only at official functions nowadays. She never even sat down to dinner with the family, preferring to stay in her rooms. He had indulged her even more disgracefully than he ever had Mairid or Qamar.

  “Open the door.”

  “With regret, al-Ma’aliq—”

  “Open it.”

  The woman’s hands twisted. “I cannot,” she whispered. “She has ordered whippings if—”

  “Open the door or I will order your tongue cut out and your eyes burned blind,” he snarled. He would never have done so, of course—not only was he disinclined to physical cruelty but terror was no way to rule an Empire. But the servant was already in such a state of nerves that she believed him. With a shiver, she opened the door she guarded, and he was admitted to the rooms of the Empress.

  He had not been inside for years. This entrance was not the one that led to the fountain room with its tile garden; instead, he came in another way, by the portal from which she emerged in all her finery to receive ambassadors. There were servants here, too, and fear in their eyes at the sight of him. Alessid was more determined than ever to discover what was in his wife’s rooms, that she so seldom and so unwillingly left them.

  When he finally saw, he wished he had not.

  Mirzah sat in the center of her bedchamber, on a priceless rug from Dayira Azreyq that had been a gift from the late Sheyqa Sayyida. She was filthy, her graying hair lank and unwashed, her body reeking, her robe stained with food. She was rocking slowly from side to side, humming as she stroked the yarn hair of seven dolls in their cradles, lulling them to sleep.

  “She believes they are her babies,” said a familiar voice behind Alessid. He turned to find Leyliah, suddenly bent and old, sorrow thickening her voice. “She calls them by their names . . .” She hesitated, then murmured, “And sometimes, the one that is usually Kemmal, she calls Qamar.”

  Alessid refused to feel. “How long has she been like this?”

  “Until recently, it came rarely and went swiftly.”

  “How long this time? How long will she be like this?”

  Leyliah shrugged. “Another day, or forever.”

  “Do something for her.”

  “There is nothing to be done.”

  “There must be!”

  “Nothing, Alessid. It is not a thing a Shagara can heal—or the al-Ma’aliq can command.”

  He could not bear Mirzah’s humming. He drew Leyliah into the outer chamber and kicked the door shut. “What happens when the people discover this?”

  “They will not discover it. Her servants are few, loyal, and silent.” She paused. “Qamar sits with her each day for a little while—she thinks sometimes that he is Azzad, when your father would visit the Shagara tents.”

  “But—you said that sometimes she—the doll—”

  “Yes. Sometimes, when Qamar sits with her, she uses his name when she sings her children to sleep. He is very good about not being shocked by his grandmother’s madness.” She trembled briefly. “There, I have said it at last. My daughter is mad.” And she covered her face with her hands and wept.

  Alessid left his wife’s rooms. He sat alone in his maqtabba for several days, and emerged at last to declare that the Empress, as befit a pious woman, had decided to spend the rest of her days in solitary devotion to Acuyib, praying for the happiness of the people of Tza’ab Rih. They revered her for this, sending tribute of the land’s bounty: oranges, wine, silks and woolens, gems, candlesticks wrought of iron. Alessid thanked them in Mirzah’s name and quietly distributed the gifts among the poor.

  When Mirzah died, the whole Empire mourned. And when Leyliah followed her daughter into death a few months later, Abb Shagara himself came to take her body home to the desert.

  He also came to speak his piece to Alessid. In the privacy of the great tent in the gardens, he confronted the al-Ma’aliq.

  “It is you who drove Mirzah mad—your use of her sons and grandsons and the magic she gave them—you used them to make war.”

  Alessid said nothing.

  “Be advised, al-Ma’aliq, that there are those among the Shagara who oppose you. While Leyliah lived, they kept silent. I kept silent. But now—”

  “Now you will rebel?” He laughed without humor. “Look around you, Abb Shagara. The Za’aba Izim, the Qayshi, the Ibranyanzans, the Joharrans, the Granidiyans—half a million people look to me for law, protection, governance. Your handful of rebellious Shagara are nothing to me—magic or no magic.”

  “They are angry,” he warned. “So am I.”

  “And so am I! You accuse me of misusing the Haddiyat—and yet they supported me like everyone else when I made Tza’ab Rih into a nation. No one denounced me then! Not when I was making the Shagara into the most powerful and revered tribe in all the country! And now you say it was I who caused the madness of my wife. Do you know, Abb Shagara, that many years ago she refused me her bed—me, her husband, father of her children—she denied me any more children, because she did not want any more Haddiyat sons. A Shagara woman bears Haddiyat proudly and rejoices in them. Mirzah did not. And because of it, she went mad. How can I be held responsible for this? I cannot. And you and your dissident Shagara know it.”

  “She—”

  “Silence! Take your anger to the most obscure corner of my Empire and trouble me no more with it. Be assured that if I hear anything about dissension, I will treat the Shagara as I would treat any traitors to Tza’ab Rih.”

  Abb Shagara sucked in a breath. “You would not dare!”

  “Would I not? Get out!”

  A year or so later, he heard that Abb Shagara had died. Not that he was Abb Shagara when it happened, He had renounced the honor, a thing that had never been done before, and with a score of like-minded cousins, both male and female, set out to find a new home. He died along the way. The rest of the group established a small community, no one knew exactly where. They sent word back to the Shagara tents that they were safe, and anyone who wished to join them could come back with the messenger. Some did, finding the prospect of solitude and study appealing.

  The men among them, some Haddiyat and some not, were dedicated to the preservation of the ancient traditions. The women, all of whom had Haddiyat in their lines, declared themselves unwilling to see their sons ride off to war—or their gifted sons craft hazziri for death and destruction ra
ther than to help people.

  “And how,” Alessid mocked, “can they possibly help anyone, living no one knows where?”

  Qamar made a face. “One suspects they intend to help only themselves. Who cares about them, anyway? Come, Ab’ya, Shayir has sired a new foal, and you must tell me what you think.”

  That was how it was between them: Alessid spending himself as always in the work of ruling until Qamar beguiled him from the maqtabba or the audience chamber or the now threadbare tent in the garden. They were wellnigh inseparable, the man in his seventies and the boy not yet twenty. He could not help but recall what Leyliah had said: that Qamar had soothed his grandmother Mirzah with his resemblance to Azzad. And then he invariably recalled also that Mirzah had believed Qamar to be Haddiyat.

  Nonsense. The woman had been mad.

  Qamar was a scapegrace of the first order, with a hundred broken maidenheads and broken hearts already to his credit. If he had any sense of duty, it was well hidden. As for dedication—only in pursuit of pleasure. Even aware that he was a copy of Azzad, Alessid loved the boy. Perhaps, he thought, because Qamar was so like Azzad, the father Alessid had once adored.

  It came Alessid’s time to die, peacefully and without too much pain. There was time to finalize certain arrangements—to further endow the hospitals that had been Mirzah’s pride, to distribute money among the poor, to order the planting of yet another small forest of trees. For each of his descendants he chose a small memento: a ring, a bracelet, a necklace, something to remember him by. In looking through the jewels given to him over a lifetime, he found the armbands given him the day he had wed Mirzah. Love and fidelity , fertility and happiness. His lip curled at the sight of the talishann carved into the metal, and he was about to toss both armbands from him when he remembered slim fingers drawing the same symbols on the corners of a letter. And a burning feather. And a thin smearing of blood.

  “No,” he whispered to himself. “No. Not Qamar.”

  “Al-Ma’aliq?” asked the servant who was helping him sort the jewels. “Is anything wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said, and heard his voice quiver, and said more strongly, “Nothing.”

  To Qamar, who was the only one with him when he died—by Alessid’s own order, as he felt death approach—he gave the chadarang service of carnelian and jasper long ago rescued from the ashes of the house in Sihabbah, and the topaz that had belonged to Azzad, and the pearl of Bazir al-Gallidh, and the hazzir from his own breast.

  He watched through dimming eyes as the boy slipped the chain over his head. If Acuyib had been so cruel as to make Qamar what Alessid was terrified to admit he might be—

  No. He would not die in uncertainty. He would believe, and it would be as he believed, for had not his belief created an Empire?

  And thus was extinguished the light that was Alessid al-Ma’aliq, ruler of Tza’ab Rih. His daughter Mairid ruled wisely and well for many years. After her came her Khalila, and then Numah, and Qabileh, and Yazminia, in an unbroken line of succession, mother to daughter. The Empire flourished.

  So too the Shagara—both those who remained with the tribe, and those who had splintered from it to dwell in their mountain fastness, no one quite knew where.

  And so did Qamar flourish as well, although in the year after his grandfather’s death it seemed to him that his life had been made a deliberate misery by his mother, who decreed that at twenty-one years old, it was time and past time for her wastrel son to learn the responsibilities of being a Sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih.

  In brief, and to his horrified indignation, she made him join the army.

  —RAFFIQ MURAH, Deeds of Il-Nazzari, 701

  Il-Ma’anzuri

  698-716

  Let me tell you of him.

  He was his mother’s last child and third son, indulged by all from infancy. He knew his grandfather Alessid for the first twenty-one years of his life, and was much favored by him. Handsome and spendthrift, witty and aimless, he was the image, it was said, of his great-grandfather Azzad in that great man’s youth.

  No one could ever have guessed what he would become.

  By Acuyib, the Wonderful and Strange, that which follows is the truth.

  —HAZZIN AL-JOHARRA, Deeds of Il-Ma’anzuri, 813

  18

  Qamar al-Ma’aliq had never been so tired, hot, thirsty, and saddle sore in his entire life. In point of fact, he had never been any of those things before in the twenty-one pampered, privileged years of his existence. Choked by dust, wilted by heat, aching in every bone from a solid month in the saddle, he did not go to far as to curse his mother, but he did enquire forlornly of Acuyib as to why, of all the ideas for his future the Empress Mairid might have entertained, He had seen fit to put the army into her exalted head.

  Qamar felt it keenly that he should have been back in Hazganni, dallying with a lissome beauty, sipping cool wine as she sang for him or told him how wonderful he was. The most wearying thing in his life should have been the choice of which robe to wear of the hundreds in his closets.

  Instead, his Shagara-gold skin was sun-blistered, and his clothes were rank with sweat, and his last woman had been over a month ago, and he was convinced that life was no longer worth living.

  Yet live it he did, every miserable hour of the ride, every rock-prodded minute of the nights in rough camp on this quick advance through the dry summer brownness of Ga’af Shammal, northward to Joharra. He was part of an expeditionary force sent in haste to the aid of his sister Rihana and her husband, Ra’amon al-Joharra—whose former Cazdeyyan hosts had belatedly decided to take exception to the marriage.

  This circumstance was prompted by two women. One was an obscure peasant girl who had visions and heard voices that told her the Tza’ab must be evicted from all lands that believed in the Mother and Son. The holy men in the mountains of Cazdeyya, calling loudly upon their captive brethren in the south, had spread her vile spewings like a disease. But no attention would have been paid to the peasant if not for the princess. Cazdeyyan royalty had a turn for religious extremes; Princess Baetrizia’s grandfather had ended his days in a cave with a cat that spoke to him, or so he avowed, in the very voice of the Blessed Mother. In a quest for similar sanctity, Baetrizia had taken this peasant girl, Solanna Grijalva, into her household, where they prayed and fasted, sang and meditated, and emerged to exhort the King every hour of the day and night until he finally agreed to march against the Tza’ab.

  Qamar found much to curse about the King of Cazdeyya, his fanatical daughter, and the simple-minded child who were all causing him so much misery. Why couldn’t they practice their silly religion in their great gray mountains, and leave the peaceful south alone? Consensus was that Chaydann Il-Mamnoua’a had instilled in them these evil notions, and it was the duty of the Believers in Acuyib’s glory to defend the green land against the invader. It was all yet another move in the vast game of chadarang that went on throughout eternity, for Chaydann forever refused to concede defeat in the conflict between death and life, darkness and light. Empress Mirzah’s pious prayers were said to have kept the Empire at peace for years even after her death; now her grandson Qamar was one of the pawns in the renewed game.

  Qamar did not hold to this view of life in general and the Cazdeyyan threat in particular. But when others expounded upon it, more or less lyrically as their rhetorical gifts allowed, he did not mention the days he had spent sitting with his grandmother in her room of seven cradles, answering to the name “Azzad” instead of his own.

  Ayia, he did acknowledge, reluctantly, that he was nothing more than a pawn. An exalted one, to be sure, mounted on a fine horse and jingling with hazziri. But a pawn all the same, and in no way enjoying it.

  His father, Jefar Shagara, was not too old to command the army in the field, but he had given over the position to Khalila’s husband, Allil Azwadh. Someday, when Khalila was Empress, Allil would have authority over the Riders on the Golden Wind, and this was as good a time as any to get them used to him
. Ten years Qamar’s senior, and a cousin of the famous Black Rose, Allil was as ill-favored as Ka’arli had been beautiful—but he knew how to lead troops. He inspired them with his steely will, underwent the same privations as they did, and had not even brought with him the silken tent that was his right as commander. Had he done so, Qamar could at least have claimed a portion of its floor and a few of its pillows and slept in comfort. But Allil was tough-minded, wilderness-raised, and had no use for even the simplest luxury. Still less had he time for the complaints of his wife’s little brother.

  “I weary of listening to you, Qamar,” growled Allil one evening. “Today you have plagued me. Tomorrow I want you out of my sight.”

  Qamar clapped his hands together with delight. “Excellent! You’re sending me home!”

  “No, I am sending you forward with the scouts. Do exactly as they say, cause no trouble, make no mistakes, and perhaps I will consider giving you back your horse.”

  “What?”

  “Do you think a scout can gallop along, raising clouds of dust for the enemy to see? You go on foot, my fine Sheyqir.”

  The twelve scouts left before dawn, ranging in a wide arc ahead of the army. The positions of farms and villages were reported back to Allim, who then guided his troops in maneuvers that skirted any habitation. Qamar thought this ridiculous. If they happened upon anyone, they should simply kill him so he wouldn’t be able to warn of the oncoming Tza’ab. Qamar supposed his sister’s husband was attempting to live up to his name: Allim meant “gentle and patient.” But as Qamar followed the experienced scouts into hills covered with scrub oak and dry brush, he wondered irritably why Allim couldn’t have chosen to exercise gentleness and patience on Qamar instead of the enemy.