Casket of Brass
Page 3
The wand clattered to the tiled floor.
Maridah bent over, gasping. Her vision blurred, crimson, as if her eyes had been washed in blood. A gentle touch steadied her. She inhaled her cousin’s perfume, the scent of rosewater and cloves.
Maridah was still unable to speak, but could stand on her own, when Hadidjah released her. Slowly, with resolve taut in every line of her body, Hadidjah bent to pick up the wand.
Slim fingers closed around the ivory rod. For a moment, the delicate engravings shimmered. Then the light passed from them. Hadidjah straightened up. Trembling shook her body. She looked up, an unnatural brightness in her eyes. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but no words came.
Maridah found herself unexpectedly moved by the sight of Hadidjah, ashen and resolute. She could not imagine what her cousin must be suffering. Moving stiffly, for her muscles had not yet fully recovered, she fumbled for her handkerchief.
Hadidjah waved it away and clasped the wand against her body. The chamber, empty except for a guard at the doors, had fallen very still. Maridah could hear nothing above the rasp of her cousin’s breathing and the thrumming of her own heart.
Color seeped out of Hadidjah’s skin, her hair, her beautiful hazel eyes. For an instant, it seemed that she had become part of the wand. Ivory, once living but now with only the memory of that life. Enduring, enslaved. Glistening with magic as if with tears.
Yussuf covered his face with his hands, his shoulders shaking, making no sound.
Although the gesture brought her a sadness she could not explain, Maridah bowed to her new sovereign. “You are now the Princess of Khazarand, and so I will say to the whole world!”
o0o
Later, much later, the two cousins stood on a balcony overlooking the twin rivers. Dusk perfumed the shadows as Khazarand’s thousand gardens released the heat of the day. The moon, just past full, cast a softly golden light.
Maridah, still in her favored robe of soft cotton, her hair simply dressed, breathed in the lingering sweetness.
“You have not yet made your plans to return to Samarkhand,” Hadidjah said.
“Not yet.” Maridah still dreamed of Samarkhand and, sometimes, a statue who had perhaps become a man, who spun tales of wonder more real than the stones beneath her feet. A wooden horse waited to carry her to her heart’s desire, if only she knew what that was.
“There is something I would ask you,” Maridah said, “although you may think it presumptuous.”
Hadidjah’s smile was a ghost in the gathering dark. “Dearest cousin, we know each other too well for formal courtesies.”
“Well, then. When you took up the wand — you saw what it did to me, and I had come here determined to take the throne. I never realized how much greater was your own desire. You were never ambitious, not in that way. I thought you content with pretty clothes and ardent suitors.”
“Of which I have many, all of them interested in power,” Hadidjah interjected. “I must marry and provide our city with an heir, but I will choose carefully. I did not pick up the wand in order to give away everything I worked so hard to achieve.”
“Why, then? Why did you do it?”
“Did I have a choice? How else could I put forth a lawful claim to the throne? I took it up because there was no one else, and to spare my father.”
Maridah nodded silently. Uncle Yussuf would not have lain down the Regency until Khazarand had a rightful Princess. Now that Maridah had abdicated in Hadidjah’s favor, the throne was secure.
“I saw what the wand did to you,” Hadidjah went on. “I had not the slightest doubt it would bring me even greater pain.” She paused, blinking hard.
From the way her cousin spoke, and the coiling silence that followed, Maridah knew the pain had not abated, but it was of the heart and spirit, not of the body. She said, “I cannot envy you.”
“You need not.” Hadidjah paused. “Did Grandmother ever tell you — do you know what the wand does? How it grants power?”
Maridah supposed the wand bestowed some exceptional degree of prosperity, health, good luck, or invincibility in battle.
“It reveals the truth,” Hadidjah said quietly.
“Surely that’s a good thing. To know when your adversaries or even your own advisors are lying.”
“You may say so, you who have lived for your philosophy, who breathed in Grandmother’s tales of enchantment as a fish breathes water. Such stories are beautiful and bewitching. One forgets that not every true thought or every true word, spoken in haste or anger, is kind.”
In Maridah’s sight, moonlight turned Hadidjah into a woman of silver-washed ivory. Maridah remembered the wetness of the wand, how it had appeared to weep. She thought of the statue, animated by passion. Even as the stone had come to life, life now seeped from Hadidjah’s human flesh as ivory, beautiful and hard, took its place.
Maridah’s heart shivered. Were they not two sides of the same hand, the dark moon and the light? Truth bound one with barbed chains, scouring away trust and love; the other was seduced by a world of easy dreams, of riddles that tantalized and intoxicated.
By the grace of the Infinite, what were stories for?
All her life, she had wandered through a world of stories. And what use had they been, except to make her entirely mistaken about her uncle, the sorceress, the statue? Even Hadidjah.
Even herself.
Yet... if stories had the power to give life to stone, to comfort a dying old woman, to ease the loneliness of a royal child, might they not also give life... and hope... to this woman she loved, who was even now turning into ivory?
Smiling, Maridah laid her hand upon her cousin’s arm. “I think we have, between us, more than enough truth and more than enough dreams, for any one lifetime.”
Together they went into the old work room, where the brass casket whispered poisoned secrets in the wavering candle light. Together, they opened it. The ball and the top were in their proper places, no longer inert but charged, waiting.
Together, they put away the ivory wand and the little wooden horse, closed the casket, and sealed it with molten lead.
Together, they placed it back in the stronghold.
The next morning, Hadidjah would sit upon the throne, judging with her own mind. And Maridah would enter Grandmother’s chambers and throw open the doors to the clear light of day. She would study, as was her talent; she would tell all the stories she knew, not to insulate and cripple, but to bring life to the ivory statues of men’s hearts.
I will carry you
Wherever you truly wish to go.
Hadidjah would dispense justice, and Maridah would spin out dreams, and together they would create such an age that there would be no end to the tales of wonder.
Publication Information
The Casket of Brass
Deborah J. Ross
Book View Café edition April 2011
Copyright © 2009 Deborah J. Ross
First published in Sword & Sorceress 24,
Elisabeth Waters, editor
Norilana Books
Cover illustration: Arabian Nights
Virginia Frances Sterrett, 1928
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