Horns for the Harem Girl

by Lynn Red

  “No, not really.” A smile creased the old woman’s tattooed face. “You can only be confused if you have to make decisions. In that way, it was very comfortable. Choice is difficult, freedom is hard. Being told what to do and simply following orders? That’s as easy as the mid-summer day is long.”

  The old woman looked at a new fire, which sprung up near the wall inside the palace compound. The orange light flickered in her watery eyes. “This has been a long time coming, even if the reason for it is slightly less noble than to free the captured souls of this kingdom.”

  “Love isn’t noble?” Helena asked as she opened her desk and removed the mirror and her journal, before wrapping them both in silk cloths and depositing them into a low-slung shoulder bag. “I think it’s the noblest thing.”

  “The young always do,” Maret said. “You and the prince will have many years to grow tired of each other, I think. But that’s just the musing of a romantic old fool. Right now, you have to get out of here before things get too hot.”

  She snorted. “Fires, you see? Hot?”

  “Very good,” Helena said with a laugh of her own. Even if it was short-lived it felt good to do. “But how am I going to get out of here?”

  Maret tilted her head toward the window. “As I said, this kingdom holds many… strange secrets. Your prince has come.”

  Of all the bizarre things to see presented in front of her, Helena found a grand ibex – it stood tall enough that the tips of his huge, curled horns were visible without looking down. “A… Arad?” she asked, her whispered voice belying her disbelief. “Horns?”

  The ram narrowed his eyes and let out a mighty snort into the cold, night air. Billows of steam erupted from his nostrils, and when Helena stuck her hand out the window, her fingertips met a velvety coat on his snout. “You turn into… an ibex?”

  “Many secrets older than the oldest humans here,” Maret said, pushing Helena toward the window. “Go on, child, he’ll take you to safety and then return for what he has to do here. Go!”

  Lifting a leg, Helena felt unsteady and fearful. She’d never ridden a camel without her father guiding the reins. And this – she’d heard legends about the royal family having strange, magical blood – but she could hardly get her legs around either side of the beast prince’s massive ribcage. Regardless, she slid out of the window at Maret’s urging, and perched atop the huge back. The ibex snorted again, and Maret turned her head.

  “Hum, he says you need to trust him. Let down your legs and squeeze his sides. Take hold of the hair on his neck.”

  “You can understand him? I wish I could,” Helena said.

  The ibex turned his head back to her and nuzzled ever so gently in the crook of her neck.

  “You will,” Maret said. “In time. But for now, just trust what I say. Go with my son, he may be the king’s heir, but he’s not his child. I know his heart, and in time so will you. Now go, and never look back until the flames are gone and the world is new.”

  Astonished, and unable to process anything she’d just been told, Helena grasped tightly onto the coarse hair on the prince’s ibex neck. She squeezed him as tightly as she could with her knees, but still almost toppled off him when he wheeled around sharply and sped off.

  “Ah!” she shouted. “You awful brute! I’m hardly holding on!”

  “Grab… tighter,” a pained voice came. The sounds weren’t quite right, but then again, they’d come from an ibex’s mouth. It must not be all that easy to make human sounds with an animal mouth, Helena thought. He bucked slightly, pitching her forward.

  The girl’s arms naturally went around either side of the great neck. When she lay flat on him, she found that she fit better, and far less awkwardly than when she was sitting up. “I think I’ll stay like this,” she whispered into his ear, hugging his muscular neck tightly and letting the scent of her prince flood her nose. “I’ll stay right like this my prince, for as long as you’ll let me.”

  “Half the night,” he said with a voice that was similar to the one with which Helena was familiar, but with a few peculiar twists to his words. “You stay with your family, enjoy your time. I’ll be back before you know it,” he nuzzled her hand. “I swear it.”

  A tear rolled out of her eye, down her cheek and vanished into the fur on her prince’s neck. “Why me?” she whispered as his trot became a fierce gallop. “Why did you choose me?”

  He made a sound that reminded her of an awkward laugh. “Because of all the women I’ve ever seen, you’re the only one I fell in love with before I saw her naked.”

  His bold honesty struck Helena as hilarious and raw and vulnerable; three things she’d never particularly seen in the prince during their brief, secret courtship. “I’ve felt you through your clothes,” she said into his ear. “I’ve got a fairly good idea of what you’ll look like.”

  It was his turn to laugh. The laugh of an ibex is like a whinny mixed with a neigh mixed with a sharp exhalation. After he made the sound, he kicked his hind legs into the air and reared his forelegs high off the ground. “An ibex wheelie,” Helena giggled. “Of all the things to encounter, this is possibly the last one I ever imagined.”

  “Wheelie. No… hoofy?”

  He laughed again and sped across the parched ground, a cloud rising up in his wake. That was when Helena realized they’d encountered no guards, they’d not even encountered an abandoned checkpoint. “How did we get out so easily?”

  “Blew up the wall. The first fire was a bomb making a hole for us to escape. This has been planned since long before you and I met. I just never wanted any part of it. My mother – Maret,” the prince said, “she gave me up when the king took power. She’s wanted revenge ever since.”

  “You’re… hers?” Helena said, her voice distant with wonderment. “It makes sense though; you both have such good hearts. You never reminded me very much of the king, I have to admit.”

  “He’s a good man, but a bad ruler. He is my father, but I’m a bastard. He and Maret cavorted back in the days when his father had the throne. Which is probably why she’s so understanding about our little predicament. But anyway, I’d never be part of her plan because I didn’t want the trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Of fighting. Of possibly dying. Of not spending my days running wild and my nights feasting and drinking and carrying on. I never got to the point I wanted to settle down and I…” He trailed off.

  “You what?”

  “I never found a woman I loved enough to risk all that for,” he said simply.

  She hugged him, tighter than before. “I love you too,” she said into his ear.

  Another rearing of his forelegs, then another kick of the back ones. They fell silent as the desert vanished underfoot and the stars blazed in the millions above their heads. Out in the utter pitch blackness, there was nothing to stop their brilliant shining, nothing to get in the way of basking in the beauty of the infinite.

  Helena looked back and watched the palace burn.

  That’s when she realized that she’d understood what the prince was saying perfectly. She felt his words, she knew his heart.

  Sliding a hand around the front of his neck, she felt the thump of his heart beating against her, and flattened her cheek against the hard, thick muscles in the prince’s ibex neck. She held fast, and he ran faster.

  For all their differences, just then, they were one.

  -8-

  “He… Helena? How are you… why are you here? And what in the world is this?”

  Her father’s voice roused Helena from a slumber that felt like it had lasted a month. She rolled over, popped her back and her shoulders and her hips as she always had and then instinctively recoiled, covering herself… even though she was wearing a full, and very modest, set of pajamas.

  “My daughter! Home!”

  Running to her, her father openly let the tears run down his cheeks and embraced her. “I thought you weren’t allowed to leave. I thought we’d never see you again
, I—wait, how did you get here in the first place?”

  “The prince brought me,” she said, truthfully. “And we’re not allowed to leave, it’s just that there’s an emergency at the palace and everyone was sent away. I’m lucky to still have a home. Most of the women were put up in a hotel in the city.”

  Helena was a little surprised at how easily her tongue told a series of lies to the man who raised her. Perhaps the harem life was rubbing off on her a little more than she realized with a shock of horror.

  When he finally pulled away and she wasn’t buried in her father’s long, thick beard, she finally got a look at him. The past six months seemed to have aged him a decade or more. His full, normally round cheeks had hollowed. His eyes were further back in his head than she remembered, and were ringed with black circles. But he still had the same boisterous laugh and bright, honest smile that she remembered so fondly.

  “Girls!” he called to her sisters. “Come quickly! Helly,” that’s what he called her, “is home on vacation from the palace!”

  As the girls filed in, the first one, her sister Alara, noticed that she was covered in sand, and the second that she smelled a bit like an animal. She’d laughed that off. “We had to take horseback to get here,” she said. “There were fires in the city,” she didn’t bother to explain that the ibex who brought her here was the very one responsible for said fires, “and so the palace had to be evacuated for security reasons.”

  If any of them disbelieved her, none made it clear by the way they looked at her or the way they embraced her.

  “Alara!” her father finally said, with a loud clap of his hands. “Let’s celebrate!”

  “With what?” Selene, the middle sister, said. “We’ve nothing to eat, and hardly any water left in the barrels.”

  Flustered for a moment, her father looked back and forth before regaining his composure. “Well, with whatever we have! It doesn’t matter. The rains will come, the land will provide. Your sister is home and we’ll celebrate. Now, do as I say!”

  With a grumble, two of the five girls rose to their feet and tromped off. “We haven’t even a goat to give us milk,” she heard one say as they went. “What are we supposed to—?”

  A great crashing sound, from somewhere at the other end of the small house, interrupted her. “Papa!” Alara shouted, “come here!”

  Helena and her father exchanged a quick glance before both got to their feet and went down the hall to find a goat with his head happily buried in the garbage can under the sink in the kitchen. The sink was running… which it had not done in quite some time, not since the well had gone dry and water had to be delivered by barrel.

  “What is this?” he said in the animal’s direction. “My word,” he exhaled. “Look out there.”

  This adventuresome fellow was not the only new addition to the family. In the pen which used to house camels, cattle, rams and goats, were all those things – which hadn’t been present for years. Not only that, but huge bales of dried grass had been deposited all around, and the water tanks were not only replenished, but new and enormous.

  “What in the world?”

  Her father’s mouth hanging open, Helena smiled and shook her head. Turning into an ibex is one thing, but replenishing a family’s farm with more than they ever had before? That’s more than magic.

  “Helena?” Her father was tapping her shoulder as she was lost in thought. “This… all came with you? How did we not hear? How did you not wake us in the night?”

  The truth was she didn’t have any idea. Moreover, she hadn’t a clue when all this had appeared or how it had been transported. In truth she barely even believed that what she knew happened the night before happened at all. But the proof was right in front of her, braying and chewing on an empty juice carton.

  “I guess we can celebrate,” Alara said, smiling despite her normally sour demeanor. “And I guess having a sister in the harem has more advantages than just being rid of a sister,” Alara’s twin, Jatala, said. They shared a demeanor, but not a voice. Jatala’s was higher and more nasal than that of her sister.

  Clapping again, her father ordered the girls to get a goat, and prepare a feast, while he himself sat down and took a long, happy drink from the cold water that squirted out of the spigot when he turned the handle. “I don’t know how, or why, we’ve been so blessed. But when you see the prince next, thank him for us. I’m sure this is his doing,” her father said.

  “I will,” Helena said with a wistful smile. “Next time I see him, if I see him again, I’ll thank him for all of us.”

  *

  Two days came and went, spent in gorging themselves and laughing. Along with the animals and the water tanks had come great big barrels – two of them, one of wine and one of beer. Her sisters and she shared the wine, but the beer was all for her father. Apparently.

  After the first night, he swore over and over that he’d never drink again, but on the second night of the unexpected feast, he was back at it, singing and laughing and hooting like the old days. A handful of friends joined in the second night, and for the first time in her life, Helena was invited to the party that lasted until dawn came and the men and all of her sisters had to sadly disband to sleep, or work, or go back to wherever it was they needed to go.

  It wasn’t so much that she was home – although that was certainly part of it – no one could believe the fortune that her father and sisters had somehow fallen into. At the same time, no one seemed to question it, or her connection to the prince, and why a royal would deign to do so much for a girl who was really just as common as common came.

  That is, until they all woke up on the third day to find the family’s cellar filled with preserves and salted lamb, pork and goat.

  “Either you have a djinn watching your back, or you have managed to get in good with someone very rich, sister,” Alara said, ever doubtful of anything slightly unbelievable. “Which is it? And you know that no one’s seen a djinn in the kingdom for at least a hundred years, so I doubt they made an appearance just for you. What have you done?”

  Helena, still half asleep, just frowned and looked at her sister for a moment, trying to decide how much malice there was in her question. Whether or not it was there wasn’t the issue. With Alara, there was always malice in her questions.

  “Why are you so sour?” Helena asked.

  “I’m not, I’m just concerned. News came of the fires in the city. I know you told Papa that the harem was evacuated because of some emergency, but you didn’t bother listing the reasons for the fires. So either a djinn set them, giving you a holiday from the harem, or something else is afoot. And since djinns aren’t usually known for delivering people on the back of a horse and then delivering entire herds of livestock without,” she paused, “I don’t know, stealing a baby or something, I’m guessing it’s something different.”

  Helena exhaled a long puff of air, blowing the long tendrils of curled brown hair out of her face, and with it, any semblance of civility. “What does it matter?” she asked with a curl of her lip. “We have food, you and father and mother get to enjoy life a little more, have less worry. And all you can do is act skeptical and jealous?”

  “Jealous? Oh sister, you don’t know the first thing about me if you think this is jealousy. I’m worried that you’ve got us all into something with your impish, childlike stupidity.” Alara bit her lip. “That was a little stronger than I meant to come across.”

  Her anger boiled inside her for a moment before Helena had to admit, first to herself and then to her skeptical sister, that maybe there was something to that worry. She still felt like she had to defend herself, her decision, but for some reason, she didn’t bother. She knew that with Alara, she was as transparent as a plate of glass.

  “I don’t know,” she finally said. “It all happened so fast that I never had time to think, I just listened to my heart. It was going a lot faster than my brain had time to adjust to.”

  Alara smiled. “So it’s the djinn
, then?”

  Helena laughed. For all their differences, she and the decidedly bossier one of the twins had always shared a special bond. Alara was reserved, analytical and intellectual. Helena was… none of those things. Her heart drove the bus, her mind often played second, third, or sometimes fourth, fiddle.

  “Sometimes it feels like he’s a djinn,” Helena said. “What with the secret meetings, the schemes and the plotting. I don’t know, it all just seems so exciting and wonderful. And oh my, the way he kisses, the way he smiles and touches me,” she drew a breath, “I can’t—“

  “You’re intimate?”

  “Well,” Helena said, slightly blushing. “I suppose I—“

  “You and a djinn have been intimate?”

  Helena sighed a deeply held breath, laughing on the tail end of it. “Oh Alara, you always were a jackass. Me and the prince. I have been with a prince,” she hissed. “Well, sort of, he was insistent that we save the most special for, well, he kept saying that he was going to save it so he could do it right.”

  Alara shook her head. “My first time involved the stable boy from down the way, and straw that smelled like camels. Yours involves a prince who is willing to keep his desires in check and some kind of lavish rose petals in the bath seduction? Anyway, how do you manage to be in the harem for six months and still have this be your first time?”

  Now, Helena was blushing as fully crimson as dawn had been six hours earlier. With a bashful smile, she looked down at her toes. “Well, I’ve been training more than anything. Haven’t had much time for, er, extracurricular activities. And the king is very set in his ways. He’s got his favorites and he sticks to them. And before I was in the palace, you know how reserved and demure I am.”

  At that, Alara snorted a laugh. “By that you mean that as the family’s baby, Papa always watched you closer than he did anyone else.”

  “Well, that too,” Helena said. “But you’re right about the fires. I wasn’t entirely honest.”