by G. Wulfing
“I pleaded again with my father today,” Zayn said brokenly. “… He is resolute.”
Afif hugged his prince as hard as he could.
Zayn gripped the back of the stable-boy’s tunic as a drowning man grips a rope, and wept.
And Afif wished with all his might that there was a way he could rescue his prince from this unhappiness.
~*~*~*~
The night after, the lamp was yet again in the prince’s window. Afif hated himself for dozing off, worn out as he was by lack of sleep, by restless dreams and by misery. He woke as a nightingale started to sing, the sound reaching his sleepy brain through the windows of the stable loft. Furious with himself, he hastened over the roof and to the prince’s vine. He could tell by the stars that it was not very much later than the time when he would usually visit the prince, but he hated to keep the wretched prince waiting and wondering whether Afif could not or would not come.
As the waiting prince embraced him, Afif exhaled an apology. “I’m sorry, my friend; I dozed off, I could not help it, I was so tired and I have been so unhappy thinking of you …”
Zayn hushed him. “I understand. I am thankful that you came at all. … I do not wish to exhaust you with my problems; I simply miss you so much, my friend.”
Zayn then told Afif that he had again pleaded with his father, asking him to delay the marriage by three years or two or even one. But the sultan was adamant: the marriage was already ordained for Spring with the royal family of Hagara, and to delay it would bring into question the sultan’s motives and the prince Zayn’s willingness, which would almost certainly cause offence and suspicion.
“I thought – your father wished for his sons to rule themselves,” the stable-boy faltered.
Zayn nodded, hanging his head. “He says so, but … when it comes to the sultanate …” Zayn shrugged: “he is sultan and therefore he must act as sultan.
“My father has sold me, Afif. I knew that this might happen; all of us brothers knew that our wives would not be ours to choose, and our fates as princes were decided for us the moment we drew breath; but – I did not know that I would meet you! I did not know that marrying would cost me my freedom, and the person I love best in all the world ––
“That night in the starlight – I almost wish it had never happened! For then I tasted freedom, and then I met you, and since then my life has been better than ever, but now it will be taken from me.”
The prince was weeping now. He flung himself on the edge of the bed, kneeling on the rug. “I wish I had died three nights ago. For then I was still a child, and no one was trying to take my freedom and my friend from me, and my father had not made himself my enemy.”
Afif knelt beside the prince, and laid his arm across the sobbing prince’s back and shoulders, leaning against the bed, and laid his head on the coverlet beside the prince’s arm.
Afif had bought his horse by saving as much of his meagre pay as he could, every day for years, until the debt of Shadows’ price had been paid off to the chief groom, who had bought Shadows’ mother at the market, on behalf of the sultan, not knowing that the mare was already in foal. When the piebald foal was born, he was not particularly needed or wanted – of unknown father, he was not of the pureblood stock that the sultan was inclined to breed – and thus Afif was able to buy him. He had trained the colt himself whenever he had a spare hour, and when the horse’s price was finally paid, he had felt freedom. He had a horse of his own. Few stable-boys could ever afford to buy a horse, but few ever made the attempt. Afif now owned something that no one could take away from him.
But how does one buy freedom for someone who already has everything?
Perhaps it could not be bought. Perhaps it had to be stolen.
“Run away, my prince,” Afif murmured, almost without intending to speak.
He was not sure that Zayn had heard him, but he kept murmuring anyway, giving form to dangerous thoughts that should perhaps be left unsaid. “Leave these walls. Leave your fate. Find a place where no one knows you. … Take Aruna and leave here. Ride far away. And be free.”
He heard a sound almost like a hiccup, and Zayn lifted his dark head slowly, turning to look at Afif.
The stable-boy met his gaze in silence.
After a long moment of staring at each other, Zayn said, “But … is there such a place? Where could I go?”
The stable-boy shrugged. “There must be somewhere. The world is so big, according to your books – surely there is some place where no one will know you.”
The prince sniffed, and wiped tears from his cheeks with his fingers.
“And – and what would I do? Would I have to work?”
“I suppose so. But you are clever – you could teach people to read, as you taught me. And teach them about the stars, and chess, and everything you taught me. There must be a place where people need to learn such things – do not even you have tutors yourself?”
“Become a tutor …” Zayn wiped more tears, his dark eyes staring unseeing at the coverlet in the low lamplight as he processed this thought.
Then he said, “But – my duties – I am to help run the palace when my eldest brother becomes sultan ––”
“Zayn, your father has four other sons to help him. Four.” Afif held up four fingers. “I have no doubt that he will miss you, my prince, – I’m sure that everyone will miss you, but … is there any other way you can be free?”
Zayn thought deeply.
After a while he said, “But I would have to leave you … I would never see thee again.”
Afif felt a small smile begin in his eyes. “I’ll come with you.”
Zayn stared.
“Would you – would you really?” he asked.
Afif nodded seriously. “Yes, my friend. I would come with you. And stay with you, wherever you go.”
Zayn sat back on the rug, facing Afif, his legs folded untidily beneath him.
“But … we would have nothing.” The prince glanced at Afif for confirmation. “We could take hardly anything with us; only what our horses could carry.”
Afif nodded slightly. “That is true.” He paused.
Then he said, “Prince, you have always had everything. Everything in the whole world has always been yours. Compared to you, I have always had nothing. Nothing, but my horse and myself.”
Afif hesitated. “So, my friend, I can teach you. I can teach you how to have nothing, as you have taught me so much.”
Zayn was silent for a while. Afif waited.
“But – I cannot,” the prince said, almost tearful again. “To leave everything – to leave everyone I have ever known and everything I have ever had and everything I have ever been ––”
He laid the back of his head on the embroidered coverlet, and stared at the ceiling.
“To leave my family …”
Afif, the orphan stable-boy, was silent.
“My father would be furious. It would be a terrible insult to the princess and her family. My brothers would be angry too; I would be abandoning all of my duties forever …”
Afif was silent for a moment more. He had said nothing for some time. Then he said,
“I will understand, Zayn. I will understand whatever you do.”
Zayn looked at him. “You will. But they will not.”
“That is true.”
Zayn looked deeply into Afif’s eyes for a long moment, and Afif returned his gaze unwavering.
“And … I think … I would rather be with someone who understands no matter what I do,” Zayn said softly.
He took a deep breath. “We once said that one can choose what one’s own happiness looks like; that we are the ones who decide whether we will be happy within our own cages.
“But my happiness does not look like this, Afif. I care not how foolish it is – I cannot be happy like this. I refuse this cage.”
Afif hesitated. The implications of his own suggestion
had been unfurling themselves, one by one, in his mind; as thorns and nettles unfurling before a traveller who thought that he had walked into a meadow of wildflowers; and furthermore he had realised that the prince would be placing his hope in Afif’s guidance: their survival in the world outside the padded luxury of nobles and royals would be largely Afif’s responsibility.
“You are going to try to dissuade me,” Zayn guessed, reading his friend’s face.
“I do not want you to suffer, prince.”
“I will suffer if I stay. And there is no time to compare the two types of suffering to find which is more palatable: I cannot run away once I am married; that would be outright disobedience to the sultan and a gross insult to Hagara. I must jump, now, and hope I land well, or remain and watch my future unfold as it has been arranged for me.”
Still Afif hesitated.
“My friend, do not give me hope of salvation if you are then going to pull your hand away,” Zayn murmured reproachfully.
Afif dropped his head forward, chastened. “I am afraid that I will fail you,” he confessed agitatedly.
Zayn shuffled closer on the rug and leaned his curly black forehead against Afif’s.
“If I am to be condemned to an unhappy fate,” he said quietly, after a moment, “I would rather it be at the hand of one who truly seeks only goodness and happiness for me; rather than at the hands of those who say they love me but ultimately sell me for purposes that are not mine.”
Afif swallowed. His eyes were prickling.
“Then will you trust me, even if I fail you?” he asked, lifting his head from the prince’s.
The prince thought.
Then he reached for Afif’s hand, and gripped it. “Yes. I will trust you, even if you fail me; because I know that you love me for the person I am and not for what I can do for you.”
“H-How do you know?” Afif asked. “How do you know that I will not kill you and take your horse and your money and flee?”
Zayn smiled. “Because if you wanted to do that, you could have done so already.
“In all the years that I have known you, Afif, you have never asked me for anything. You had the friendship of a sultan’s son, yet you never asked for any favours or gifts or honours. On the night of starlight, in the desert, you could have snatched my dagger and killed me and ridden away with Aruna, and it would have been blamed on bandits. Yet it never even occurred to you to do so.”
Afif blinked, surprised. How had the prince known that such a thought had never entered his head?
“How do I know?” the prince supplied. “Because I know thee, Afif. I know thee like I know myself.”
He held Afif’s gaze. “And even if,” the prince murmured, so softly, “I am wrong, I would rather die believing that you loved me thus, than stay here out of fear and know, deep in my heart, that I had lost something precious and irreplaceable because I was too afraid to believe in it.”
Afif could do nothing but embrace his prince; and the prince gave a slight, sad, joyful laugh, and the stable-boy’s tears spilled.
After a long moment, the stable-boy spoke through his tears.
“My prince, on the night we rode together, you asked me if I had ever met a soul that shone so beautifully as one of the stars above us,” Afif said slowly. “I answered that I had never met such a soul in a person. … But on that night, I did.”
The prince whispered, “So did I.”
~*~*~*~
And so they made their plan: on the next dark night, Afif would bring their saddlebags from the stables to the prince’s bedchamber, and there they would pack the saddlebags with supplies and necessary equipage. They would leave the palace the same way that Afif always did, carrying the saddlebags back to the stables. They would collect their horses, then leave via the horse fields, past the great guard dogs at the field gates. The dogs knew both Afif and Zayn and would not bark: their job was to stop strangers coming to the stables from the fields, not to stop those whom they recognised going to the fields from the stables.
In the intervening days, the prince feigned submission to his father’s will, and secretly prepared for his escape, deciding which possessions he would most need to take, and smuggling provisions up to his chamber.
Prince Zayn prepared a letter to his family, explaining his absconding and begging that no effort be made to find him. As he explained to Afif, if no message were left then it may well be assumed that the prince had been abducted, and a search would be conducted. “This way, they will still search for me,” Zayn said, “but they will not worry quite so much, and they may relinquish the search sooner.”
He hesitated, then added, “Afif, if they find us … I pray that they will not, but if they find us, I will tell them that it was my idea, and that I forced your help and your secrecy.”
Afif nodded reluctantly, his face sober. He and Zayn both knew that a runaway prince would be punished, but a stable-boy who abducted a prince would be summarily executed.
“You do not have to do this,” Prince Zayn said quietly. “I will understand if …” Uncharacteristically, he did not finish his sentence.
Afif shook his head. “It was my idea. I should not voice my words if I do not wish to take responsibility for them.
“Besides, they will not find us. We will disappear.” He smiled up at his prince, who smiled back.
More than once, Prince Zayn looked around at his lavish chamber with all its beautiful things, and sighed in reluctance to leave them. Afif did not blame him.
As he cared for the horses at the stables, Afif silently said ‘farewell’ to each of them. Some of them he had known for his whole life. Before he met Zayn, horses had been his family, his teachers, and his dearest friends. He would miss them greatly.
Too soon, the night which the prince had calculated would be dark enough for their escape arrived. On that night, Afif waited with rapid heartbeat for the stables to fall asleep. Then, gathering up in a blanket his few possessions, he stole down from the loft and stuffed his things into his saddlebags.
For the last time, Afif made the familiar journey over the tiled roof, over the wall, down the chinar tree, across the sweet-scented garden, and up the faithful vine; this time awkwardly bearing two sets of saddlebags. So that the vine would not have to bear the weight of Afif plus his burdens, Zayn tossed down a rope and drew the saddlebags up thus.
By the warm, rainbow light of the multicoloured lantern – the same lantern that had watched their meetings for years – the prince and the stable-boy carefully filled the saddlebags and prepared their luggage. The prince packed his plainest clothes, which were still far more luxurious than any commoner’s, but this could not be helped. He wore his dagger, and gave to Afif another that had been a birthday gift to the prince from a wealthy noble, complete with a beautifully tooled leather belt.
Zayn lingered reluctantly near his shelf of precious books. “I wish we could take them,” he told Afif longingly.
Afif pulled his few clothes aside in one of the saddlebags to reveal the gap that he had deliberately left. “We have room for one scroll, dear friend,” he told Zayn.
Zayn glanced at him in delight before turning back to the bookshelf with a frown of pain. “But which shall I choose?” he moaned.
With difficulty, Zayn made his selection, and he and the stable-boy quickly finished packing the saddlebags with their carefully pre-selected accoutrements. Afif had brought from the stables a few tools he thought they might need, and Zayn had chosen some of his less distinctive jewels which could be sold if need be. They made bundles of clothing and blankets to be strapped onto their saddles and worn on their backs. They packed a small lantern, but did not carry one.
At last, when all was ready, the prince Zayn and the stable-boy Afif turned toward the window, and Afif slid back the lattice. For the last time, Prince Zayn snuffed out the multicoloured lantern.
They stepped to the window and looked out. There was no moon; the stars were quiet, giving
just enough light for Afif and Zayn to see the shapes of the fountain and the various shrubs in the garden below, the leafy head of the chinar tree rising past the stone wall, and the long, dark bulk of the stable building beyond. The shadows were thick and plentiful, perfect for hiding a runaway stable-boy and his maverick prince.
Below them, the great vine waited darkly on the palace’s white wall, the breeze making its leaves whisper faintly. Are you ready? Come away … come away … Climb to freedom, as you always have used me.
Afif took a deep breath, as his heart sped with nerves, and glanced at his friend.
The prince had frozen, staring out of the window at the thick, green vine.
“Afif … I am afraid.”
“You have climbed this vine before,” Afif reminded him. “We have practised.”
Zayn shook his head, and Afif realised that it was not falling from the vine that the prince feared.
Afif swallowed. “The son of a sultan, afraid?” he offered, almost managing a smile.
“But that is just it,” Zayn exclaimed, and Afif heard the fear thrumming in his voice. “I am leaving that behind. When I leave here, I will no longer be the son of a sultan. I will not be a prince. I will be … nobody.”
Zayn looked apprehensively at Afif. “I have only ever been a prince. I do not know how to be – someone who is not a prince. When I leave here, I will be nothing.”
With his heart pounding, and tears starting in his eyes, Afif grasped Zayn’s hand. “And I have only ever been a stable-boy. I don’t know how not to be a stable-boy. I don’t know what I will become when I am not a stable-boy in the sultan’s palace anymore.
“But, my friend Zayn, if we stay here, a prince and a stable-boy is all we will ever be.” He gulped. “So if we want to be anything other than what we are, we have to leave this place. And we have to do it now.”
Afif swallowed again, almost panting with nerves, and looked out of the window. “There is one thing we will still be after we leave here, Zayn,” he remembered. He looked at his soft-spoken prince. “We will still be friends.” He squeezed the prince’s hand. “Let us start with that.”
Zayn nodded, holding Afif’s gaze for a moment.
Then he took a deep breath and looked again at the vine.