Heart of Flame

by Janine Ashbless

  That was the notion that brought with it inspiration.

  Without saying anything else to Rafiq, she began to chant. She used the same spell she’d used to draw out the flakes of iron from his entrails, and she used too the words of healing the Egg had taught her that day. Gently, gently, she drew the stone out from the fruit, healing the flesh in its wake. It split the velvet skin and dropped into her palm in an ooze of juice, and then she repaired the wound, leaving the fruit as unblemished as it had ever been, if a little softer. The seed was dark brown and shaped like a kidney.

  “I’ll take the seed,” she said, meeting Rafiq’s questioning gaze. “Give the fruit to Safan, because that’s what he bargained for. I’ll plant the seed in my garden in Dimashq and if it grows, and if I live long enough to see that tree bear fruit in years to come… Well, then I will know that I’m ready to eat.”

  Tarampara-rampara-ram.

  “What took you so long?” complained Safan.

  “There were complications,” Rafiq said. “We’re here now. And we have the fruit you asked for.”

  “I can smell it,” the blind man agreed, flaring his nostrils as he took a sniff, and then groping crabwise toward Taqla. She stood her ground as he sidled up to her and pawed at her sleeve. “Sweet and juicy,” he leered.

  Taqla hadn’t bothered to put on the guise of Zahir since the seer knew all about it. But she colored slightly despite herself. “Hands off,” she growled, and was ignored.

  “You gave up on the Ugly Boy, did you?”

  The question was directed at her. “He left,” Rafiq answered nonetheless, and she could see by the shift of his shoulders that he was readying himself to intervene physically. She shook her head at him.

  “And this one pleases you better, I imagine?” That question was lobbed at Rafiq.

  “I consider it an improvement.”

  “Remember your manners, Grandfather,” she said, extracting her forearm from his grip with some determination. “We’re here to trade, not to waste time.” They had in fact made very sure to arrive in Taysafun in bright daylight so as to avoid the Pale People, but that didn’t mean she had any desire to linger.

  “Oh, time spent with you couldn’t be wasted, little chick.” He wiped his clawlike hands up and down his rags, clutching himself between the legs. “Now, what have you got for me?”

  Taqla unwrapped the fruit from its protective cloth, but she kept a firm grip as his fingertips brushed its peachy skin.

  “Oh!” he moaned, wetting his lips in a manner that made her flesh creep.

  “First the riddle.”

  “The riddle? What riddle is that? I don’t even remember your trivial question.”

  Rafiq recited it once again. “Who is this man who weds two sisters, with no offense at his wedlock being taken by anyone? When waiting on one he waits exactly as well on the other too; husbands may be partial, but no bias is seen in him. His attentions increase as his beloveds grow old, and so does his generosity: how rare is that among married men!”

  “Such a woefully little thing to ask of me. Still, fools must be beggars, eh?”

  “Give us the answer,” Taqla said. “Only then is the fruit yours.”

  “One of the riddles of the Queen of Saba? Didn’t you work it out, little chick? You should have, you know.”

  Taqla felt a sudden pang of anxiety. Had it been something only a sorcerer should have been able to work out, then? Some aspect of a magical process perhaps, or some detail from mystic legend? The Queen of Saba had been both wise and powerful. Her riddles had been meant for the ears of the greatest magician ever born. Couldn’t the answer have had something to do with their shared thaumaturgy? Could she, Taqla, have kept claim to the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge after all? But no last-moment inspiration came to mind no matter how she racked her brains.

  “Tell me,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “It’s kohl, little chick. A stick of kohl applied to the eyes.”

  “What?” she said idiotically, and Rafiq groaned.

  “Now give me the fruit as promised.”

  Still shocked by how obvious the answer was if only she’d seen it, she dropped the fruit into his outstretched hand with hardly a thought. For a moment Safan just cradled it in his palms, head weaving back and forth as he savoured its aroma. “Yes,” he whispered.

  Taqla began to back away, though she couldn’t have said why. She felt obscurely as if it were about to burst into flames in his grasp.

  “Now go. Both of you. Leave me.”

  “We’ve no argument with that,” said Rafiq, catching Taqla’s sleeve and steering her toward the rubble path, and following on behind with his face still turned to the seer and his hand on his sword hilt. When there was enough distance between them and the old man, he stopped retreating and turned to hurry. Taqla looked back once as they rounded a broken wall. She saw Safan squatting on his haunches, the golden fruit pressed to his lips, his shoulders hunched and quivering. The fruit was the only thing in that picture that had any color to it, and she suppressed a twinge of guilt almost as sharp as if it were a child that she were leaving in that desolate place to be devoured.

  “We’ve done it!” said Rafiq as they walked away, lengthening their strides. It would have been fatal to try to ride the Horse Most Swift in that labyrinth of ruins, so they both had to head to the city boundary on foot. “We’ve got the answer! You can cast the spell now!” He sounded almost giddy with triumph.

  “Yes.” She smiled behind her veil. She was relieved too, though she couldn’t forget the dangers and difficulties that lay ahead of them still.

  “Back to Baghdad now, and once we get the scroll, we’ll be ready to take on the djinni.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be quite as easy as—” Taqla stopped talking and drew to a halt as a horrible sound pierced her ears. “What’s that?” she asked, twisting about.

  Rafiq cocked his head. “Safan’s laughing.”

  It was laughter, a wild, unpleasant, hysterical laughter. Taqla shuddered and pressed on. They’d only taken a few more paces when the noise changed its note, though it grew no quieter.

  “He’s not laughing now,” said Rafiq grimly.

  “Oh God,” said Taqla faintly, wanting to stop her ears.

  “Come on.” Rafiq urged her over the next set of crumbled walls. “Looks like you made the right decision.”

  So Taqla put her head down and they walked without speaking until they were beyond earshot, and all the time she wondered what Safan had seen.

  But Rafiq’s serious mood didn’t last. Before they reached the walls of Taysafun he was smiling to himself. “The old man was right though,” he said. “You should have guessed that one.”

  “I should have?” She was goaded.

  “Yes. You’d have saved us a lot of travelling—not to mention all that coming eye to eye with death and a whole lot of money—if you’d just thought of eyeliner.”

  “Why should I have?” she demanded. “I don’t wear kohl!”

  He smiled sideways at her. “Well, true enough. I suppose you don’t need it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you have beautiful eyes anyway. Particularly when you’re glaring at me. Yes—like that. Wow.”

  “Stop that!” she complained, but there was no bite in her voice.

  “What? Your eyes are wonderful. I’m sorry—but if the face is covered then of course a man notices the eyes more. What about you, when you go about in Zahir’s shape? Do you notice? I mean—do you feel things differently when you’re male?” He spun on one foot to walk backward, grinning. “Do you find yourself longing after women…?”

  “Shut up!” she cried. “I’m not talking about it.”

  He laughed for a long time at that one.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In which a magical scroll is read and a djinni moves home.

  Tarampara-rampara-ram.

  Taqla sat on a rug overlooking the roofs of Baghdad with
a narghile at her side, and tried not to betray any unseemly impatience as she drew upon the ivory mouthpiece and watched the sun sink in a dusty haze toward the western horizon. The stones of the marble city turned from white to gold as she watched, and the bubbles gurgled through the water in the pipe with a soothing sigh, and every time she caught the anxiety knotting up her stomach, she would force herself to relax, to savour the mild mint-scented smoke and the sensation of being well-fed, clean and dressed in fresh clothes, and to enjoy the view.

  Baghdad, she thought, her eyes sweeping the stepped roofscape, was undoubtedly the greatest city on Earth, casting even ancient Dimashq into its shade. And up here she had one of the best possible views. The caravanserai had been full when they had arrived, but the steward had offered to set up rugs and an awning on the flat roof, and in all honesty, Taqla was very pleased with the arrangement because they had more space and light and were farther away from the smells and noises of the animals penned in the ground floor.

  With each inhalation, the charcoal at the top of the stem glowed red, the pipe bubbled, the taste of mint and tobacco filled her throat. With each exhalation, fragrant smoke drifted from her lips to join the scents of evening cooking fires.

  Below her in the hidden cleft of the streets, goats bleated and children running home from the schools called to each other. A woman sang. And somewhere, she allowed herself to hope, Rafiq was hurrying back from the House of Wisdom with a scroll in his hand. She hadn’t accompanied him because she didn’t trust her spell of disguise to last in such an emotionally charged moment—and she didn’t dare associate her real face with the name of Umar the Scholar. Rafiq couldn’t depart the House of Wisdom with Zahir and return with a woman, she’d decided. So she’d stayed to sit watch over their baggage and drink sherbet, and to smoke, and to wait.

  She was good at waiting, she told herself acidly. Sometimes it felt like she had spent her whole life waiting.

  The wooden ladder from the floor below creaked and, as Taqla watched, a servant scrambled up, somehow managing to balance a brass tray on one hand. He was followed by Rafiq, who flashed a grin of triumph. Quietly Taqla averted her face so as not to catch the servant’s eye as he bowed and set out a long-spouted jug of coffee and two goblets and a bowl of salted pistachios. She set the narghile stem down and waved him away with what she hoped was proper nonchalance as Rafiq seated himself cross-legged on the rug facing her.

  “I have it,” he said in a low voice, reaching into his shirt. There was no one else up on the roof at the moment, but it wasn’t the sort of thing they wanted overheard.

  “Are you sure?” The small scroll was slightly warm in her hand as she took it from him, his body heat clinging to the parchment. It was fastened with the unbroken seal of the House of Wisdom, she was careful to note.

  “A fair copy in the original Greek. I talked to Hunayn ibn-Ishaq himself. He was most pleased to know we’d been successful. And he kicked himself when he heard the answer to the riddle.”

  “Feh.”

  “He also asked me what a man of Dimashq might be looking for in such troubled times. He’s sharp, that one.”

  “She hasn’t been found yet?” No such word had come to the caravanserai or the bathhouses they had already culled the gossip from, but Taqla knew that official channels would be swifter.

  “No sign of her.”

  Taqla cracked the seal with her thumbnail but then hesitated.

  “Go on. Aren’t you going to read it? This is it, you know.”

  “I know.” She spread the scroll between her hands and let her gaze rest on the inked letters within while her mind shifted into the right patterns for the foreign script. “An invocation for the finding of that which is most desired, wheresoever it may be, on earth or at sea or in far lands,” she read out.

  Rafiq nodded, biting his lip, then, too restless to sit still, busied his hands pouring coffee for them both while Taqla scanned down the page. Aware that he was waiting, she managed to mutter as she read, “Yes, I understand…quite straightforward…there’s an incantation to be said…and a potion to be brewed and drunk…of ‘ingredients most rare in all the world’.”

  The jug nearly slipped from his fingers. “You’re telling me we have to go looking for those now? More travelling?”

  “Hold on…” She held up her hand. “I haven’t got that far yet.”

  “God have mercy! Hasn’t it been hard enough already?” He sounded, oddly enough, amused rather than angry, but Taqla wasn’t paying attention to him, too fixated on the words she was translating.

  “If you’ll just—” She stopped then, frowning.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The ingredients… I’m so sorry, Rafiq.” Her voice wobbled as doubt crept over her. “I think I might have led you on a wild-goose chase. I’m not sure this is a spell at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It looks like a joke…or a parable. The ingredients it demands for the potion are…impossible. Wilfully impossible. It might just be a way of saying that the thing you desire most will be forever out of reach.” She lifted her eyes to his and found them intent and interrogative. “I’m sorry.”

  “What are they?”

  She glanced back at the scroll. “Five ingredients, to be mixed and burned and consumed by the seeker. Firstly, the heart’s blood of an immortal. Second, the wine of Hades. Third, the—”

  “Hades? Who’s that?”

  “Uh…it’s an old Greek word for the place the infidel dead go—the Grave. We can hardly be expected to travel to the underworld, can we?” She licked her lips. “Third, the seed of understanding. Fourth, sand from the depths of a sail-less ocean… No,” she corrected herself, “it’s not just no sail…an ocean that has never been sailed upon. What ocean has never been sailed?” Taqla shook her head, even as somewhere at the back of her mind something stirred.

  “Well, hold on,” Rafiq interrupted. “I have one of those. The heart-blood of an immortal, you say? How much?”

  “It doesn’t say. Just blood.”

  Turning to their piles of baggage, he opened a saddle bag and pulled out his travelling clothes. He’d thrown out his bloodied shirt and trousers when they’d bought new ones, but his old belt was still there. Sorting through to the end of the sash, he showed Taqla the cloth—which was smeared with black stains from the jade heart of Vizier Najib.

  “Well?” Pulling out his knife, he sliced off the end of the belt and dropped the dirtied piece in front of her. “She was immortal, until she cut the stone out.”

  “You’re the seeker.” Taqla’s mouth had gone dry. “You do know you’ll have to consume it if you choose to go ahead?”

  “You think it’s dangerous?”

  “I just meant that it’s haraam to eat blood.”

  He pulled a face. “Of course. But you know what you said about my Fate? I’m beginning to believe you.”

  “All right then.” She was wearing Zahir’s travelling robe, as usual, over new clothes. She shrugged it off, then took her eating knife and cut the stitches of its heavy hem. The robe had been washed and patched, but was much the worse for wear following their travels. From the inside of the hem she poured out a stream of green sand onto the body of the cloth, the last detritus of the storm in the Abu Bahr. She remembered with a shiver that ghostly undersea realm with its monsters and its strange beauty. “Sand from an ocean that’s never been sailed,” she admitted, starting to feel lightheaded.

  Rafiq nodded. Then he reached from his pack for the leather flask of wine that Safan had gifted him with. “The wine of the dead,” he murmured, laying it upon the small heap of sand.

  “You still have that?” she said disbelievingly.

  “I forgot it, to be honest. But he did say it would come in useful.”

  After that they just looked at each other in silence, both knowing what had to happen next. It took effort for Taqla to move her fingers to the pouch she had strung around her neck, to the seed that nestled wa
rm and precious between her breasts. She laid it on the cloth between them. Rafiq lifted an eyebrow questioningly, but she nodded.

  “Thank you.” His hand strayed out as if it would clasp hers, and she withdrew her fingers hurriedly. Rafiq’s gaze fell. “What’s the fifth ingredient?” he asked. “You said there were five.”

  Taqla looked at the last on the list and felt her stomach fill with cold as she worked it out and knew it was up to her. “Don’t worry. I can get that,” she said in a gray, even voice.

  “What is it?”

  “You’d be happier not knowing.” She had no intention of telling him, not if the Archangel Jibreel himself dropped from the sky and ordered her to.

  Rafiq wrinkled his nose. “Something to do with graveyards again?”

  Let him think that, she told herself, feeling relieved. She shrugged her eyebrows in a noncommittal way that confirmed his worst fears, and he shook his head.

  “I’m eating this lot? Ack.”

  “It’ll be burned to ash, most of it.” She stood. “Well, I’ll go do my bit. In the meantime we need a brazier, and a coffeepot that’s never been used, and cinnamon sticks and frankincense. Charcoal, wine, a flask with a stopper. Oh—and a pestle and mortar—again, never used. Can you get that stuff?”

  “No problem. I can find them all without leaving this building.” He tucked the seed, the scroll and the scarf scrap back into an inner robe pocket for safe-keeping, leaving the innocuous little heap of sand on her aba. He folded the garment over that to stop it blowing away on any breeze.

  “Good. Meet you back here. She walked away without hesitation or glancing back, not allowing herself to look anywhere but forward at the task awaiting her. Heading down the ladder and out into the twilit city—not toward any graveyard but to the women’s bathhouse, which was the only place she could purchase the solitude she needed.

  Rafiq finished his tasks and was back on the rooftop well before Taqla, despite having to share a cup of wine and a sticky pastry with every one of the merchants he’d called on for his purchases. He was a bit surprised to find himself on his own up there, and he sent a servant off for lamps. Then he sat down to wait. The moon was rising in a perfect indigo sky and he sat for a while and watched the stars come out. Dogs barked in the alleys below. On a lower roof nearby a lame old man was crawling on all fours, and he watched the movement idly. But that distraction didn’t work for long. Eventually he took the Scroll of Simon out from his shirt and unrolled it.