by Melanie Rawn
“Aloof, as always,” Miqelo said firmly.
Qamar exchanged a glance with his wife. “More wine?” he asked their guest, and poured from the chilled flagon. He would have liked a taste of it himself, but since that last tavern night in the seaport—so long ago now!—he had not touched a drop. He had promised Solanna.
So much to learn. So much to codify. So much to organize into useful, useless, and possibilities to be investigated further.
Berries, for example. Mulberry for peace and protection, raspberry for protection and love, strawberry for love and luck. Blackberry brambles prevented the dead from rising as ghosts, but in combination with rowan and ivy warded off all other sorts of evil.
The plants and trees that grew here gave fascinating promise. So many of them were unknown in Tza’ab Rih. Qamar wished that the Shagara in his homeland had thought to study them before now. If nothing else—and there was a great deal else—there was help here for the pains of the bone-fever that afflicted Haddiyat, help in the form of the humble walnut. Yet the tree had another tantalizing association: it expanded things. Wealth, horizons, the mind, the emotions, the perceptions, the soul...and magic. Its use in inks was long established, but Qamar had from the first seen other ways of using the tree. Specifically, the wood. More specifically, to write on the wood. And finally, and most specifically, to draw on the wood of the walnut tree that expanded magic.
A few months after their marriage, when they were still telling each other things about their families and childhood homes, the sort of idle reminiscences sparked by a word or a scent, Qamar was describing the palace where he had grown up. Gardens, gravel paths through them, intricate mazes of shrubs or walls that led to cooling fountains—all the serene beauties he had so taken for granted.
“But the most beautiful garden and fountain were inside the palace itself. It was all made of tile—the grass underfoot, the trellises of climbing roses, the sky above them, darker and still darker blue until they reached the domed ceiling, sparkling with millions of stars. In the middle of the room was a fountain . . .”
“Made of water, I hope?” An instant later she exclaimed, “Qamar! Stop that, you’ll burn your hand!”
Startled from his thoughts, he snatched his hand back from lighting a candlebranch with a twig and blew out the flame that had indeed come almost near enough to scorch his fingers. And as he felt the heat that had not quite burned him, two separate memories swirled together like different inks combining to make a new and different essence.
“Qamar?”
“Yes,” he said mindlessly. “The fountain. It stopped working. There was a book of drawings, and he drew the fountain from memory, and it worked again—but then it didn’t, and he was dead with burned paper in the hearth—”
“Meya dolcho,” she said with a worried frown, “what are you talking about?”
So he explained it to her, the curious thing he had heard about from Ab’ya Alessid years after the fact. The fountain, the drawing spoiled by blood from a cut finger, the dead fountain and the dead artist and the dead ashes in the hearth.
Solanna stared wide-eyed as he spoke. “Do you think—no, it’s not possible.”
“Isn’t it? Fadhil was burning the drawings he didn’t like or couldn’t use, including the one with his blood on it—the one that had reawakened the fountain.”
“With a picture?”
“Why not? We do it with words and symbols, why not a literal depiction of the thing we wish to influence?”
Suddenly she gripped his arm. “Or the person,” she whispered. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? You could draw a person, and in such detail that it would look real, and—and—”
“And I could do to it whatever I pleased,” he said slowly. “I can do it now, with a name and ink and the right talishann and my own blood—but those are mere curse-tablets, like the Hrumman used to make. Piles of them are found every so often where their temples used to be. But they were superstition, useless. Powerless. If a likeness could be made that looks absolutely real—”
“Stop. I will hear no more of this.” And to emphasize her determination, she rose from the chair beside him and went into their reception room and stayed there the rest of the evening.
So she did not hear his other story, the one about burning his hand as he wrote the letter to Rihana and Ra’amon for Ab’ya. His blood had surely been on that paper commanding them to rule wisely and gently, to unite his name with her power for the benefit of Joharra. Had they not done just that? Even when logic suggested otherwise, they had found ways to combine their strengths and—
—and he had even playfully included talishann for love and fidelity and fertility and happiness, and they had known all of those things in abundant measure.
But Rihana and Ra’amon were both dead, and Allil was ruling unwisely and ungently on behalf of the next queen, who was years away from taking power herself—if Allil was willing to give it up, which Qamar very much doubted.
Neither did Solanna hear his further conclusion: if someone had thrown that letter into a fire or ripped it up, was it likely that Qamar would not be alive?
In all the years since that night, he had never spoken of those things again, except to ask a casual question of one of his teachers. What was done with old pages? Once a healing had been accomplished, what became of the paper used to accomplish it?
“Back into the slurry, of course, to be used again. We’ve always done that—ever since the first years here, when we didn’t have mountains of paper to waste.”
So the blood was diluted, not actually destroyed by fire or its substance ripped apart by tearing the fibers into which it had soaked.
No one knew. No one knew about drawings, and no one knew about destruction.
Qamar kept these things to himself.
The original Shagara magic, in the desert wastes, had been medicine—potions and unguents and dressings made with precision and care—and then the hazziri, made with Haddiyat blood. Here, the medicine still obtained, though with new and different plants replacing the old familiar ones. The hazziri were much the same as well, though the materials used had changed drastically. From gold, silver, and gems to tin and brass, the traditional arts had been translated as best they had been able. But these Shagara had added something no one in Tza’ab Rih had ever even dreamed of—and whatever isolated instances might have provided the clues, no one had put everything together.
Qamar had recognized the entirety of it. The vastness of the magic that no one else had ever guessed. The art of the healer added to the art of the talishann, with quickening blood to kindle the magic, could find its ultimate potency in art.
As he researched and learned and organized his findings, he realized that in hundreds of instances the Shagara here had adapted old formulas without fully understanding the additional significances of the indigenous plants. Solanna knew much of the lore her people had assembled over the years; in remote villages, lacking formally trained healers, most people learned at least the basics and usually rather more than the basics. And whereas every healer—Shagara or otherwise—knew that the poppy was used for sleep potions, Solanna told him that among her people, the white poppy brought the gift of consolation and the yellow, success. How such things had originated, no one knew. But Qamar made note of them all, and through the years had been indulged in his obsession by Miqelo and other friends who traveled for the Shagara, who brought back not just herbs and flowers but books.
In one thing he was stymied. He could not draw. There were people here who had talent and tried to teach him, but it was all quite hopeless. He didn’t dare experiment. What if he had asked someone to draw one of the climbing roses in exact detail, only with summer flowers heavy on its canes, and then added his own talishann and blood—and what if the roses changed, right in front of everyone? Temptation gnawed at him to try it, but his wife’s reaction to the little he’d shared with her cautioned otherwise.
He spent a great deal of tim
e walking the hills near the fortress, not to collect specimens but to escape the noise and bustle that necessarily resulted when hundreds of people lived in such close proximity. He needed to think. He needed to make sense of what he had learned, what he had intuited, and what he suspected might be true. He could not act on any of it until he was sure. But there was always so much more to be discovered, so many things to compare and balance with each other.
One thing became clearer to him the more he considered it. To influence a person, that most wondrous and complex of Acuyib’s creations, a drawing would have to be not just accurate to the last detail but done in colors. The rosy flush of cheeks and lips, the dapple of freckles across a nose, the highlights of red or gold or bronze in dark hair—all these things would have to be depicted. So it was fortunate that he had turned out to be good at mixing inks. He secured a small chamber one floor down from their living quarters, stocked it with the usual and the unusual for making ink, and put to use his ever-growing knowledge. Solanna called this room the Inkwell, more than pleased that her husband’s experiments were not cluttering up her home.
Qamar spent many long hours fussing with various recipes, even though he knew that ink would never be able to capture the delicate coloring of a human face, however subtle the artist. There had to be an answer to the difficulty, and he must be the one to find it—for the rest of the Shagara could not learn that there was any difficulty at all.
Sheyqa Nizhria grew weary of waiting for replies to her letters. Her next action was to send proclamations to all parties. Those who accepted her, she would not annihilate. Those who defied her would be destroyed. These were her terms.
She received many replies this time. All of them defied her, sometimes in language that had never before been read aloud in the presence of a Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar.
The Empress of Tza’ab Rih sent no answer at all.
With the early spring, ships sailed. Landing on isolated shores, they offloaded thousands of the Sheyqa’s warriors, including a large contingent of Qoundi Ammar and their magnificent white horses. When word of the invading forces reached Joharra, Cazdeyya, Elleon, Taqlis, and the new city-state of Shagarra, men who had been training all winter in anticipation of just this event began to march.
This was precisely what the Sheyqa wanted.
Miqelo and his son Tanielo returned early and shaken from their first expedition after the snowmelt. More than half the goods loaded onto pack animals for sale in towns and cities was still securely in place, and on seeing this the crafters groaned. There would be no profits this year from the rolls of paper or the pretty tin hazziri wind chimes, the lush woven woolens or the hundreds of bottles of medicine coveted by traditional physicians. Worse, there would be no sacks of fine grains, no bolts of new cloth, no citrus fruits or dried dates or figs. The only thing Miqelo brought back with him was news. None of it was good.
For the first time in years, Qamar began to feel himself an outsider. Not just gharribeh, foreign, but dangerous. He was Tza’ab. His wife was Cazdeyyan. It had taken a long, long time for the people here to greet them as equals in the zoqallos and streets, then to speak with them, and finally to invite them into their homes for afternoon qawah or a casual meal. Yet Qamar knew that he and Solanna were still looked upon as outsiders. So he was surprised when a girl came to the Inkwell and said she had a message for him. She was a pretty little thing, so much Shagara in her looks that she might have just ridden in with her parents from the winter encampment in the wastes of Tza’ab Rih.
“Please, Sheyqir, I am to say you must be as quick as you can, please. There is an assembly—at the Khoubri.” Her eyes widened like those of a startled fawn at the array of flasks and bottles on the shelves, the tables cluttered by heating rings with iron bowls nestled in them, jars of glass stirring rods, stacks of paper, bundles of unused pens. “The Khoubri, please, Sheyqir,” she said, as if worried that the oddities had made her forget to mention it.
“I shall be there at once. Thank you.” He watched her run out the door and heard the clatter of her shoes on the stairs. A sound he would never hear his own daughter making. There would be no daughters, no sons.
Shrugging off the thought as something he could never afford to dwell on, he rinsed his ink-stained hands in a bowl of clean water and ran his wet fingers through his hair. He was thirty-eight this year, but other than a few strands of gray and some lines around his eyes from squinting at his books too much, his age rested lightly on him. Especially for a Haddiyat. He knew this wouldn’t last much longer. He dreaded every winter morning, positive that he would wake to pain in his hands, his knees, his back. Not yet, praise Acuyib. But soon.
The Khoubri was one of the oddest features of a very odd fortress. Its name was its description, for it served as a bridge between the outer wall and the building that housed the unmarried guards. At the junction, the bridge descended in a series of steps that gave out onto a large room with no windows and only one other exit. The idea, Qamar supposed, was that enemies gaining the walls would be funneled through the passage, push each other into the open, and discover they had only two choices: go forward through the single door and down the stairs, or shove their way back across the bridge and try to find another way in. Swords and spears would be waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs, of course.
Whatever the case, the room turned out to be a good place for general meetings. A speaker could stand a step or two above, to be seen more easily. The echoes in the Khoubri were annoying, but after a while one learned to deal with that.
Qamar climbed the stairs and sidled along with his back to a wall. There was no place to sit and no time to wriggle himself a space, for Miqelo was already standing on the second step, holding up his hands for quiet.
“The Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar has a new weapon. It is called a ballisda, and it need not be brought in the ships. These things can be built here in a day or two. It is a mechanical arm that throws giant stones, burning pitch, anything at all either into or over any walls.” He paused. “Even ours.”
Snorts and a few shouts of laughter greeted this. Miqelo again raised his hands.
“Listen to me! I have seen for myself what these things did to the walls of Granidiya! Nearly the height of our own, nearly as thick, and blasted in places to rubble as if Chaydann al-Mamnoua’a had directed a bolt of lightning! I saw from the nearby hills, I watched the smoke still rising from the city, and the only reason I was not here yesterday is that my son disobeyed me, and ran down to the walls, and came back the next morning with the whole story. And it is as well that he did.”
Tanielo came forward when his father beckoned. Tall and gangly, with golden Shagara skin, though his golden-brown hair proclaimed at least one local man or woman in his ancestry, he cleared his throat nervously. “She—the Sheyqa—her ships did not land near Shagarra alone. More of them sailed on to the shores of Ibrayanza and began the march northward. The others marched west, and they met at Granidiya and destroyed it. But before this, they laid waste to every town in their path. Those with walls, they attacked with the ballisdas. Those without, they simply attacked and burned. But here is the terrible thing. This army has now split in two again, with one section heading for the palace at Praca, where the Queen of Ibrayanza lives. It may be there now. But the other part is marching north, due north.”
“For Joharra!” someone called out.
“No!” Tanielo cried. “No, not Joharra at all! They won’t touch Joharra, not a handful of its soil! Sheyqir Allil is her ally, he gave them maps of the easiest routes, and—”
“Why would he do such a thing? Doesn’t he understand?”
“He’s not one of us—he was never one of us—”
“And what of our own people?” another man yelled. “I thought that soldiers were coming from Taqlis and even Elleon, and everyplace in between, to fight the Sheyqa’s army!”
Miqelo waited until the cheers and shouts had faded a bit, then told them, “I’m sure that was their intent—
until they saw what happened to Granidiya! There is no army to oppose her, there is no one who—”
The uproar and the outrage shivered the stones of the Khoubri. Qamar didn’t hear most of it; he was staring at the wall opposite him, and in his imagination its blankness was overlaid with a map. Tza’ab Rih to the south; Ibrayanza just beyond the narrowing; Shagarra to the east. Joharra just north of Ibrayanza . . . but not in the path of an army marching due north. Toward Cazdeyya.
He pushed away from the wall and waded into the eddies of seated men, trying to be careful not to step on anyone but intent on joining Miqelo and Tanielo at the stairs. When he was halfway there, someone called out his name.
“Qamar! Why don’t you tell us all about Sheyqa Nizhria al-Ammarizzad al-Ma’aliq!”
He stopped, and turned. “That, I am unable to do. But I believe I can tell you what she wants.”
“Our lands! All of us dead!”
“No.” He glanced around the Khoubri. “The last thing in the world that she wants is the death of a single Shagara.”
He was, of course, correct.
They did not believe him for quite some time, not until reports began to trickle in about the route being taken by the Sheyqa’s armies. The troops that subdued Ibrayanza stayed there. Joharra was never threatened, never even touched, and this was understood to be Sheyqir Allil’s doing—that same Allil who had been Qamar’s commander years and years earlier, and who had decided to buy off the armies of Rimmal Madar with maps and advice. That portion of the army marching north kept marching, with only occasional forays into total destruction along the way, just to educate the populace. They had a goal, and they wished to reach it by midsummer.
And when they did, all the arguments anyone in the fortress could muster could not persuade Qamar to abandon them to their inevitable fate. It took his wife’s cooperation—though some have termed it “treachery”—and a sleeping potion to remove him from the fortress. Any recounting of his life that asserts otherwise is a lie.