We are not meant to tell outsiders that Shadukiam is not in its entirety the right and province of the smoke-wights. Let the shade of Kashkash take us with his beard flying. We do not care.
The Quarter Kashkash dragged out for himself became a slum, a place where fire ran in the alleys and crimson teeth flashed in the shadows. Rickety towers were built high through the Rose Dome, until the black tips pierced the spaces between the pale pink petals, and so pressed were we in those turrets that our smoke squeezed through the very walls, our fire shot out from floor to floor, and while Kashkash ate grapes in the governor’s house and counseled him to save his coin when the scaffolders came clambering down from their work, the Djinn suffered and wept in their black hovels. He danced on the crumbling tips of the towers with his fires wreathing his eyes and sparking in the stinking wind and cried poetry to the blood-riddled sunsets, cried ho! For the thousand-year holocaust of the Djinn! And far below the tenements screamed their adoration through the squalor.
We lived in this way because Kashkash told us we must, and twirled his beard when he said so. He had the longest beard of any of us, after all. This is why monarchs are determined by such strange criteria. Each of the thrones demands its favorites: the hottest fire, the sweetest voice, and so on. Kashkash claimed his beard gave him sovereignty—should we choose differently? He brandished his beard and with it crushed an entire race into six thin towers. He told us then it was only the beginning, that we would rest soon on carnelian and brass and silk like blue fire, but day and night smeared their way across the Quarter and still we could not breathe for the smoke of another on our faces.
Finally, we could bear it no longer; the terrible smell and the unburied bodies and the decrepit buildings were close all around us. Some few remembered the open grass. What the clerics will not tell you is this: Kashkash was strangled in smoke on the steps of the tenements and his body burned. The towers were torn brick from brick and within a winter no charred stick of the Djinn Quarter could be scried out among the pretty new marble and hanging tapestries. We buried him at the crux of the crossroads of a new city, as far from Shadukiam and the memory of our shame there as it was possible to go. And we wished for nothing, but with our own hands built up a city of carnelian and brass, with couches of silk like blue fire, and paved out in beryl a long boulevard, along which we raised six Alcazars, one for each of the horrid towers that were.
But guilt rode us like a bull-tamer, and the Djinn built statues over the place where Kashkash had been buried. They swore in his name. They made a secret of what had been done, and named the new city Kash, hoping to avert the anger of his shade and lure some part of the beauty that had been his. To the world we say he was great, and only to ourselves do we whisper: We are glad rid of him. We have never seen the furious ghost of his long beard haunt the streets, but no one can say if this is because we keep his name spit-polished. But we wish to be safe in all things, do we not?
Do you understand, little long-hair? May we go now to our luncheon? And if we hear you swear by the name of that thing again we will cut your tongue from your mouth and that will be that.
THE TALE OF THE
CAGE OF IVORY
AND THE
CAGE OF IRON,
CONTINUED
I BLINKED AT THE KING AND THE QUEEN, WHO peered at me like teachers saddled with a particularly dense student. “I… understand,” I said. “I suppose a Queen must be ready to hear a great many things she would rather not.”
“Quite.” Kohinoor snorted.
They showed me through the Alcazar of Embers with a brusque efficiency, eager to leave me alone. Finally, we came to a small room full of statues in every imaginable stone, from lapis to tourmaline. I gaped, I did not know what to say—there were hundreds upon hundreds, each of them draped in glittering shawls and intricately carved with faces, men and women, human and otherwise, Djinn and else, each different from the other as a rose from a turtle.
“What are these marvelous things?” I cried.
The Hearth-King snickered a little. “They are your wives,” he said.
Kohinoor rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a child, Khaamil. In the years after Kashkash perished, the six monarchs looked to other races to learn the shape of a reign. Human Kings had many wives—why should we not? Are we not greater and wiser and lovelier than men? Yet it had also been long decided by worried priests that no King or Queen of the Djinn should ever be allowed to marry or have children, for the lineage, as you should well know, is not counted from parent to child, and should we bear children like an apple tree bears apples, surely some one of us should be tempted to wrest the throne for their little ones. Thus this rather pretty compromise was reached—we commissioned their carving long ago, and they are passed from monarch to monarch, both Queen and King, for if the humans count their power with wives, should any Queen of ours be counted less? We have the most delicate, pliant, and quiet wives in the world, more beautiful than flesh, and easier to transport. And more than any human ruler could dream of.” She sniffed. “We treat our stone wives with much more care than they treat their warm ones, anyway. I personally dust mine once a week, and I know Khaamil gives them presents when I am not looking. These are yours—they are in your care, and you must be faithful.”
With that, they left me alone in my bedchamber, braziers of white-hot coals casting shadows on my hands. I crawled onto my bed, and listened to the breeze through the arched window, trying not to feel hundreds of stone eyes on me until I fell asleep.
I was Queen for one day before I was asked to lead an army.
The Hearth-King sailed into my Alcazar at first light, his smoke trailing behind him like a cape. “It has been decided!” he announced. “We are headed across the nine deserts to Ajanabh, and woe to them when we arrive!”
I poured my hair into my baskets and tried to clear my eyes, to be ready for my first day as Queen. “What?” I put on my best imperious tone. “Why was I not told? Why must we go to Ajanabh?”
“Because of the war, of course.”
“We are at war with Ajanabh?”
“Not yet, but when we arrive we certainly shall be.”
I clutched my head. “But why? What have they done to us?”
Khaamil smiled, his dark features rippling, streaks of fire playing under his skin. “You must understand, my newest sister, that Ajanabh is a dead city. The spice fields died and it is easy fruit; only a few folk even remain within its walls, and it is a lovely city with a seaport and a river and any number of things. We will make it magnificent again with only a few short and graceful battles.”
“But it is so far away! What use is it as a colony?”
Khaamil’s smile faltered slightly, his flames flaring white. “There is also, ah, the matter of a holy object which lies in there and which they have refused to give up to us as we have so politely and often asked. Now that the city is dead, there is no reason not to root through the corpse for our property.”
“What is it?”
“That is none of your concern!” said Kohinoor, her voice deep and rolling, echoing in my hall like a golden ball tossed from wall to wall. “You are too new to understand, and besides, it is hardly necessary that you know every little part of our minds. The five of us will look after you, never fear. And wait until you see the army we have assembled!”
I was nervous to put on the general’s sword so soon after my Ember-Crown, but I could not show them. “Where is the army, then? On the boulevard? In the square? I should like to inspect the troops.”
The King and Queen laughed, their expressions delighted and cruel, like children who have played an especially good joke. “They are on the field already, little firefly! Our wish has been approved by the Khaighal, and when the others have arrived, we shall wish ourselves in their midst, and woe betide the Ajan Gate!”
The other three monarchs swept into my Alcazar before I could draw myself up to my full height and demand an explanation: the Tinder-Queen with her long, high-
collared orange robes, modest to the last; the Kindling-King with his belt of driftwood; and the King of Flint and Steel, his endless beard tucked into a golden pouch at his waist. Behind them like ghostly winds the six priests of the Khaighal blew in, holding in their hands a fiery book, whose pages were pure white smoke. Their own smoke was equally blanched, and I did not like the look of it at all. These were the men who determined the way of wishing among us—for not a Djinn in the world could wish a thing which Kashkash had not in his time wished; this is hubris which would bring his wrath upon us. In their books was every wish the famous Djinn had ever committed or granted. They were consulted whenever a wish was desired, be it for peasant or lord, woman or Djinn. I do not know of any case of a shade’s wrath descending, but the wrath of the Khaighal is terrible, and their hearts toll like bells when a wish not in their books is uttered. Their punishments are fell and feared, and there is no dark corner where a Djinn might utter a wish they do not countenance, where they will not hear it. They must not know the truth of Kashkash, I thought. They must believe it all, or they would wish for whatever they liked, and who could stop them?
“It has been determined,” droned the head priest in a bored tone, “that our lord Kashkash many times wished himself on the field of battle before hostilities began in order to stymie his enemies. Therefore you may wish in his Shadow and his Stead.” The new wish was recorded in a different book, old and dusty, with wooden boards and lazily cut pages. It did not flame even a little.
The Kings and Queens of Kash gripped my hands and before I could blink we stood on a wide red plain before a city whose walls were so tall clouds wisped at their heights.
I had never seen such an army. My flames caught in my throat, banked in wonder. Every soldier, if they could be called such, was armored in fabulous metals that glittered in the bloody sun. Their shoulder-plates were flared and fluted, edged in antlers and diamonds, their helmets topped with feathers from birds I could not begin to name. They sat astride war chargers whose chests bulged like boulders, and carried swords that no doubt had endless lineages and cost more than whole towns. The supply carts and pages stretched off in the distance—including six vast carriages carrying our wives like cannonballs behind the artillery—like the audience at a circus, and the hot wind blew back the hair from thousands of craggy, stern, proud faces, faces forged by generations of select nobles courting their select cousins.
In the Bay of Ajan floated dozens of long black ships, and on the beach were dragged dozens more. Campfires glittered on the floor of the plain, which spread out below the high hill of Ajan like a woman’s scarlet skirt.
“We have had to call in every wish we have ever granted to gather them,” Kohinoor said, her own face set to the wind, the smoke of her skin billowing gray and black. “An army of Kings and Queens; not a pauper in the lot. They owe us, or their father owes us, or their grandmother. Their aunt became eternally young, their foster mother promised her firstborn to pay for the life of her lover. And now they are all here, paying their debt as good breeding will, and never has an army of more beauty been assembled. Some of them are unused to battle, having sat upon cushions and not upon horses, but they have the finest military minds in the world, and they will find a crack in those walls for us.”
“Please. Your Majesty,” I said. “Tell me what we seek in this place.”
Kohinoor rolled her eyes. “It is a box of carnelian, and in it is a thing which is mine and no other’s, which they have no right to keep from me. More than that I will not share with a young upstart with no military experience. Matters of state, you know. Suffice it that we wish to have it. The priests of Kashkash have determined that it is not righteous that we simply wish it out of its hiding place—for what fool hid a thing from the fire-tyrant? But fear not! This city is so weak that you will doubtless hardly know the battle has begun before it is over. Sit back, drink your brandy, and enjoy the sun.”
She passed me a vial of brown liquor and I sniffed at it, but did not drink. Instead I drifted down from our little cliff and through the ranks, where Kings and Queens of unpronounceable places groused about their conscription and cursed the Djinn under their breath, or bragged about how much better they would prove at killing than their layabout knights had done. I trailed my smoke behind me and let them choke on it. Why should I be kept out of their councils, kept ignorant of their ridiculous box? Was I not Queen as well as they? So far my throne had gotten me little but a vast, empty house and a closet full of stone wives.
The sky was growing dim as I approached the massive Gate of Ajanabh. The stone of it was red as a girl’s hair, red as my own ribs, and as blemishless as any wall I had seen. I wondered if Kohinoor had examined it this closely, closely enough to see it was not easily broached, closely enough to see that the Gate itself was a huge pair of arms crossed over each other, with a worn and weathered face frowning down at the adorned throng.
“Go away,” the face said.
I saw what she did not: There was no Gate at all anymore, just this gargantua whose shoulders spanned the breadth of what was once the Gate. His belt grazed the rocky earth. His eyes were old and cracked at the edges, bronze-green, his brow beaten leather, his jowls deeply stained with wind and sun, his great arms and hands the red rock of the wall, huge and dry and barnacled, a petrified giant. Moss grew on his knuckles; birds nested in his ears. His voice was slow and slurry as old snow.
“I am sure you think I am impressed with your brigade of strutting swans. I have been here since the pepper plants were taller than stallions in the fields. You will not chisel one flake of stone from me.”
He glared at me and tightened his arms.
“Who are you?” I gasped.
He seemed to consider for a moment. “I am the Guardian of the Gate. I had a name once, but it is no use to call me by it. I am Ajanabh. I surround it and contain it and feel its barges on my back, and so I have become it. It is better to call me Ajanabh than to guess at what my name might have been before I laid my limbs down around this place…”
THE TALE
OF THE GIANT
WHO STAYED
ONCE AJANABH HAD SAD AND CRUMBLED WALLS, with a gate like a crease in a cheap linen curtain, when I came to work the fields, as my folk often did during the harvest season. The pay is steady, and my shoulders bear those tiny yokes far better than poor, feeble horses—why, I hardly feel it! The streets just began somewhere in the middle of this rocky red plain, and sooner or later if you followed them you came to the spice plantations and then to the city proper.
Lawlessness doesn’t mean there’s no law, you know, it just means that there are a lot of different laws slugging it out in the streets, and none of them have come out on top yet. Anyone can dole out stocks and nails and a right tap in the gut for infractions of whatever law they take a fancy to, even ones you never heard anything about, so you just learn to watch yourself. Ajanabh was lawless then, which is as good as a wall twice my size.
And so I worked in the red-pepper fields, the black-pepper fields, the green peppers and the pink, and the cinnamon groves, and the coriander fields, and the saffron fields, and the cumin farms, on the salt flats combing and drying the crystals like hard, cutting snow. I pruned and tended the mustard plants, the paprika bushes, and cut vanilla beans from the vine. I crushed them all, endlessly, with my feet in a mortar the size of a galleon. I was happy with my work. Then, Ajanabh smelled so rich and sweet and smoky, all her spices puffing from one window or another as they were rendered, pulverized, and mixed. During the long, warm harvest, when the sun turned the bay into a great glittering mirror, I pulled spices from the earth—for who does not want their food well flavored? And during the spring I put my back to the plow, and drew furrows deep as a man’s legs in the rich soil.
But soil does not stay rich. Who can say why land which gives and gives like a mother with endless sweets in her skirts one day shakes her finger at her babes and denies them?
In my own country we are so c
areful, we plant only every other season, and we are so large that we digest but slowly, and need only to feast like bears through the summer long every second year. But those feasts! A whale would be embarrassed by our plenty. Goblets bigger than camels’ humps, plates the size of shields.
But in Ajanabh they were not so careful, and greedily ground into powder everything the earth could throw up, until she put her hands on her aproned hips and shook her head sadly. No more, she sighed. And there was no more. But such things do not happen all at once. For a long while no one noticed, and the sacks of saffron went out into the world as they had always done. I kept at the plow, even though my heart told me to rest, that there was no use in it. But I loved Ajanabh by then, roving laws, stolen coins, spice-smog and all. I would not leave her. But slowly, in clutches like wild rabbits, the Ajans began to go.
Carrying bags on their backs they went across the plains with squinting eyes, or to the harbor with rum flasks at their hips and oranges to hold against the rotting of their teeth. The bargers went first, since moving downstream for them is as easy as eating. Then the other giants went, following the promise of better fields in the east where they could pull up strawberries and turnips like red and white bouquets. They begged me to go with them.
“The feast is almost here!” they cried. “Where will you find enough mule meat and coconut-wine to satisfy you?”
“Ajanabh will provide for me, and I will sup as well as you,” I answered.
Well, I did not sup nearly so well as they, and I cracked my own coconuts down by the bayside, and drank the raw, unfermented milk. It did not really compare. But I did find a mule to roast, left behind by one of the sea-bound families, and I sat on the beach with my driftwood fire snapping like a housecat, and gnawed my mule bones, and sucked my coconuts dry, and it was not too wretched, really. At least I could still smell that sweet, smoky air, the cumin and the turmeric wafting over the broken walls.
The Orphan's Tales Page 66