Susan Fletcher - Alphabet of Dreams

by Susan Fletcher

  CHAPTER 32

  IF YOU WERE a GIRL

  We rode hard across the plateau all morning, heading west but shunning roads. I soon grew sore, though in my days in Susa I could have ridden thrice as long on my pony and never felt it. And yet to feel the horse beneath me and the wind against my face, to see the land go surging past … It brought back memories, and an ache for things lost. It reminded me of where I had come from. Daughter of Vardan, descendant of the great old Parthian kings.

  When the sun had well passed its zenith, we came to a road and then a caravansary. As we entered the gates, some of the travelers halted in their work and turned their heads to stare at us. Giv looked about alertly, dismounted, then ordered me to water our animals and fill our waterskins. He strode toward one of the travelers and engaged him in conversation. The man twitched and shifted, and often cast a wary gaze at Babak and me.

  Babak had given up crying for Koosha, but he did not seem happy, either. Now we both watched Giv, uneasy.

  It was not long before Giv returned. “Mount,” he said. “We’ll not stay.”

  I tried to pry out of him what he had heard, but he would not say. Had Pirouz stopped by here, I wondered?

  Later we halted to rest in the narrow strip of shade cast by an outcropping of rock. By now Babak seemed to have resigned himself to returning to the Magus. He curled up beside me without a word. “We will be fine, Babak,” I said as Giv attended to the horses. “In Palmyra—”

  Babak squirmed away from me. “I don’t care about Palmyra!”

  In a while, we fell asleep.

  When I woke, the shade had stretched out from our outcropping to the next. Giv, currying his horse, motioned me to come near.

  “How old are you, Ramin?” he asked. His brush moved across the horse’s side in long, gentle strokes. He reached into a saddlebag on the ground and handed me another brush.

  I drew it across the second horse’s flanks, turning my head to avoid breathing the billowing dust. I remembered I had altered my age downward when Melchior asked, to make it seem more plausible that I was a boy. But had Koosha confided what he knew? “Twelve,” I lied again.

  “You ride very well, then—for a beggar and a thief.”

  I stilled my brush.

  “And you speak well too. How did you come by that, I wonder?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “I wish I had found Pirouz,” Giv went on, tossing a blanket atop his horse. “I would have asked him this: ‘Why did you abscond with those children? Was it because you had heard the Magus sets great store by the younger one? Did you know about the dreams? Did you plan to ransom Babak back to Melchior? Or was it for some other cause?’”

  I swallowed. Did not look at him. Moved the brush slowly down the horse’s neck.

  “He told Ardalan some story about returning you to your father. So I asked myself then: Who is their father?”

  “He—”

  “Nay. Don’t bother. You’d lie about that, as well.”

  A protest rose to my lips, but I squelched it. There had been many lies.

  He hefted the saddle up onto his horse’s back and began working with the cinch. “Two men—merchants, they said they were—came through that caravansary earlier this day. They asked if Melchior’s caravan had stopped there. When told it had, they asked about a young boy named Babak and his older brother or sister.”

  Two merchants? The king’s Eyes and Ears?

  “Very well armed, they were, for merchants. They were told, I heard, that this Babak and his brother had been kidnapped and were no longer with the caravan. The men left the caravansary soon after—no one knows where they were headed.”

  “They mustn’t find Babak,” I whispered.

  “No,” Giv agreed. “They must not.” He turned to face me, crossed his arms over his chest. “This’ll amuse you, Ramin. The oddest thing! Koosha … he takes you for a girl. He pleaded to have me release you and Babak to his village—even offered to pay me for you, with animals and with cloth.” Giv paused. “I believe he has some idea of marrying you one day.”

  I drew in a sharp breath, torn between the bewildering pull Koosha exerted on me and rage that he—a country youth, a rustic!—saw me as something he could buy and sell. “Was I to have a say in this? Or was I to be bartered, like one of his donkeys?”

  “Oh, it would have been only with your consent. He was firm about that.”

  My hand halted with brushing, dropped to my side. I bowed my head, leaned in against the horse’s flank.

  “It is good that you are not a girl,” Giv said. “You are of an age—which I suspect is older than you admit—you are of an age that you would not be permitted to lodge with me. You and Babak would have to stay with Melchior’s wife, and I think she and her women will not journey with us if we go beyond Ecbatana. So then what would we do? Melchior will want Babak with him, and if you were a girl … it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, for you to come with us. Do you take my meaning?”

  I straightened, nodded slowly, not looking at him. I thought I understood what he was saying.

  “Aye, it’s good you are not a girl. For if you were, you would be a woman before long, and if you were not isolated during your monthly courses, you would offend the Wise God and likely bring down his wrath upon our journey. Do you see that, Ramin?”

  I nodded again.

  “So if you were a girl, you would have to tell me if that happened. And I would make arrangements.”

  “Tell you?” I turned to glare at him.

  “I wish you had your mother here to tell,” Giv said, “whoever that fine lady might be….”

  Tears sprang into my eyes; I dashed them away.

  “But for now it will have to be me. Would have to be. If,” Giv added, “you were a girl.”

  *

  We rode all the rest of the day and well into the night. Small white whirlwinds arose in the hot afternoon, far out on the rocky plain. The mountains loomed higher to the south and west, ridge behind serrated ridge, deep brown at the peaks, fading to soft blue and peach on the lower flanks. The following day we rode due west into the foothills, with mountains now cupping us on three sides. We stopped by a river in the heat of the day, fed and watered the horses, and had a repast of bread and dates. Giv and Babak curled up in the shade of some trees and straightaway went to sleep. Though I was weary, slumber did not come. I tried to cast out thoughts of Koosha but could not. And something else was troubling me, a peck-peck-peck of worry, fraying the edges of my mind. Softly I got up, took a large calabash, and made my way around a bend in the gurgling river, where hanging willow branches cast shade upon the surface of the water.

  I took off my boots and waded over the shifting, rounded pebbles into the shallows. I stripped off my clothes, folded them on a flat rock and, standing on the bank behind a screen of branches, poured cool water on my body, scrubbing off the grime with handfuls of sand. I washed my hair, teasing out the tangles with my fingers as well as I might.

  Different. My body felt different from before. Not so many bones jutting out under the skin, but soft, curving places, hips and belly and … I looked down at myself. Small, rounded breasts. Riding the horse, I had felt a new, disturbing sensation, a looseness where it had used to be taut. And there, below my belly … wisps of coarse hair where there had not been hair before.

  Quickly I pulled on my tunic and trousers, folded my arms across my chest. Was that what Koosha had seen? This new, womanly roundedness? But he couldn’t have! The shape of my tunic revealed nothing. So what, then?

  I walked along the pebbled edge of the river to where a small pool formed in the shallows. I squatted down and peered at the reflection of my face.

  It was a small face, smudged with streaks of grime on cheeks and chin, and framed with a wet tangle of shoulder-length hair. A boy’s face, you might think—if you didn’t know.

  I scooped up water in my hands, scrubbed and rinsed off the grime, then pulled back my hair from my face, as my
mother used to do. I walked a bit upstream, where the water was smooth and clear.

  Straight, determined mouth. Frowning eyes. The pointed chin I remembered from when I used to look in my mother’s bronze mirror in Susa. Zoya was right; I was no beauty. Nor even pretty, like my cousin Atoosa. And yet …

  The arch of my mother’s brows was mirrored here. The high, wide prominence of her cheekbones.

  Perhaps I could deceive people for a while longer by wearing the garb of a boy. But it would not last forever.

  I have eyes to see.

  Your monthly courses, Giv had said.

  In Susa my mother and her women would cloister themselves in her chambers for some days every month. I was allowed to visit, if I liked—but never the men, not even my father. There would be storytelling, and laughing, and painting and daubing of kohl and henna and perfumes. They would brush one another’s hair, I recalled, and plait it with ribbons. The women’s gods came out, small figurines of Anahita, of Ashi, of Armaita.

  Courses. I combed through my memory, trying to pick loose some clue. What exactly were courses? How did you know when you had them?

  Blood. Hadn’t I heard whispers of blood?

  “Mother,” I whispered to the reflection in the water, “why didn’t you tell me? You should have told me.”

  All at once something swept over me—some longing or some grief—so fierce, it buckled me at the waist.

  I knelt with my forehead pressed against the ground until it passed.

  CHAPTER 33

  ECBATANA

  On the third day, not long after the sun had slid beneath the westernmost peaks, we spied Ecbatana in the distance, ringed with white-tipped pinnacles and flooded with ruddy light from a molten sky. The city’s sevenfold walls rose in tiers that echoed the immense surrounding ranks of the mountains. It seemed that the city had simply grown there, a great, glowing rose having naught to do with masons and chisels and grout.

  The heat had abated as we rode through the passes; now a mountain breeze played in my hair, bathing me in welcome coolness, perfuming the air with the fresh scent of trees and a distant, metallic whiff of snow.

  Giv spoke for a time with the guard at the gate. “Our ‘merchants,’” he told me when he returned, “may have stopped by here. But they soon left and have not been seen since.”

  I felt myself tense. “Did anyone follow them? What if they’re lying in wait for us?”

  “They have no way of knowing you’d be found. There are only two of them. They’ll want to move on, to tell the king what they know.”

  Still, the peace I had felt at the beauty of this place was gone. And by the time we had passed through the outer gate, and thence through gate after gate until we reached the palace courtyard, all outward peace had shattered as well.

  A roar of voices assailed my ears as the last gate creaked open. The courtyard was thronged. A groom came for our horses; I took Babak’s hand and followed Giv through the lengthening shadows, among camels, donkeys, horses, heaps of rugs and bundles, cooking fires, tribes of roaming chickens, and men: men eating, men playing dice and draughts, men sleeping, men fetching water at a well. I breathed in the familiar caravan air, redolent of smoke, dust, dung, feathers, sweat, roasting meat and onions. Yet something seemed different. Men huddled in small groups, muttering and glancing furtively about. There was no music, I realized. No strains of flute or horn or lyre. And yet I did see a horn player—jabbing a finger at a patient-faced man I did not recognize, scolding him for some offense. And there, the drummer, wandering about, sullenly pounding his tambour. He caught me staring and made as if to pitch the drum hard at my face. I pulled Babak’s hand and ducked into the crowd.

  Something was amiss. It did not seem to have to do with Babak and me, which was a mercy. But Giv saw it too; he was taking it all in, somber and alert.

  When we reached the palace door, he identified himself to a guard, who called another guard to take us to Melchior. Word of our arrival must have gone before us, for a third guard, the guard to Melchior’s quarters, was waiting to let us in.

  “You found him!” Melchior boomed. He heaved himself up from his divan and bore down upon us, scattering crumbs and morsels of food from his lap, trailing a wake of anxious servants.

  He frowned at Giv, then turned to gaze with a kind of hunger at Babak. “Is the boy well?” Melchior demanded. “Whole and hale?”

  Giv nodded. “Well enough.”

  “Who took him? Was it Pirouz?”

  “Aye, and his servant, Arman.”

  “What of them? Where are they now?”

  Giv hesitated. “They eluded me. I thought it best just to hunt down these two and fetch them safely back.”

  Melchior fluttered his hands at the others in the room. “Leave us! Away! Away!” When all but we three and the guard at the door had hurried out, Melchior turned and picked up a length of white cloth from the top of a trunk. “Here,” he said, addressing Babak, thrusting out the cloth. “Dream tonight, boy. Dream as you have never dreamed before. I want to hear it all—first thing on the morrow. Don’t forget a bit, do you hear me?”

  Babak shrank from him. I started to tell Melchior that pressing Babak this way might well scare the dreams straight out of him, but Melchior was not interested in me; I was invisible. Giv spoke to Melchior in a soothing way. He took the cloth from him and then handed it to me, gesturing for me to tuck it into my sash. Then behind his back he made a shooing motion; Babak and I retreated slowly toward the door. Whose garment was it, I wondered? Melchior’s? Or …

  Giv made his prostrations and returned to us. “Send someone to find Pacorus,” he told the guard. “Tell him—”

  The guard started to open the door; there was a thump and a cry of pain. Pacorus appeared, rubbing a toe and looking sheepish.

  “So, how many times have I told you not to eavesdrop, then?” Giv growled.

  Pacorus grinned. “It is good to see you,” he said. He turned to me and then to Babak. “All of you. What happened? How did you—”

  “Never you mind,” Giv said. “Have a room prepared for me and show them to it. Set a man to watch outside their door. See that they have plenty to eat and drink. Stay and attend to their needs. I’ll come when I can.”

  Pacorus led us to a small room with high, narrow windows and a door that gave onto a gallery. He lighted the brazier. “Wait here,” he said.

  I had tried to push the news of the “merchants” far back into a corner of my mind, but now that we were alone, it began to rattle around inside of me. I paced up and down the carpet, trying to squeeze down my fear. They’re gone now, I told myself. No one knew where to find us. We’re well protected here.

  But they had learned we were in the Magus’s caravan. They had followed us so far!

  Babak watched me, worried. “Sister, what’s amiss?” he asked. I was trying to think how to comfort him when he jumped up and shrilled, “Shirak!”

  Pacorus stood in the doorway holding a platter of meat and bread. He smiled, set down the platter, then plucked Shirak from his sash and set him on the floor. Shirak pranced across the carpet to Babak, who squatted, stroked the kitten’s head.

  “What about Gorizpa and Ziba?” I asked Pacorus. “Have you taken care of them? Have you anointed Ziba’s sores?”

  “Huh! That one. That Ziba, as you call her. She nearly bit off my head. But yes, I anointed her. And tended Gorizpa as well.”

  As we filled our bellies, leaning back against the soft cushions, Pacorus urged me to relate what had befallen us. Between bites I did so: told how Pirouz and Arman had come for us, how we had escaped into the qanat, how Koosha had found us, how Giv had tracked us down. I did not tell everything, though. Not why Pirouz had taken us, nor that I had gone willingly. Nor did I tell what Koosha had seen in me.

  I tried to sense whether Pacorus saw it too, but I could read nothing beyond friendliness in his manner. He did not seem overly curious, either, being full of news himself. Melchior and Gaspar, it seemed
, had indeed come to Ecbatana to consult with a third priest, one whom Gaspar revered. It had to do with the stars, Pacorus said. With something they had seen in the stars.

  Babak looked up sharply at this. I itched to draw him to me and rub his back to comfort him, but instead I lay a brotherly hand upon his shoulder. He went back to feasting, but his ears were pricked, I could feel it.

  “Do you recall that night in the castle south of Sava?” Pacorus asked. “Do you recall the instruments Gaspar used—the globe and the chart and the disc? That star-taker disc, like the one Melchior has? Well, every night he consults these instruments, gazing up at the stars. And this third priest, this Balthazaar …”

  Pacorus rose and pulled the door inward, leaving it just slightly ajar. Outside I heard the groan of a camel, the creak of the windlass by the well. “There are disputations among the Magi,” he said. “I hear them at night, when they confer together: that bellow of Melchior’s, and sometimes Gaspar’s voice.

  “And among the caravans themselves,” Pacorus went on, “there is discord. Gaspar’s archers take umbrage at the size of Melchior’s party—the women and entertainers and their mountains of baggage. They chafe at the slow pace and sneer openly at the camels’ gaudy tassels and chest bands and drapes. Melchior’s party returns their contempt. The musicians refuse to play for Gaspar’s men, and the women whisper, point, and laugh at them.”

  “What of Balthazaar’s men?”

  Pacorus shrugged. “They speak softly and seldom.” He stared up through the high, fretted windows, where a few early stars pricked the darkening sky. Babak sighed and lay his head in my lap, with Shirak nestled against him.

  “They say,” Pacorus mused, “that something Melchior and Gaspar have seen in the stars compels them to take a journey to the west, deep into Roman territory.”

  My heart leaped. “To Palmyra?”

  “I don’t know. The territory of Rome is vast.”

  “But it’s still west they will be traveling?”