A Wind in Cairo

by Judith Tarr

“You won’t tell him.”

  “I have to,” said Zamaniyah. Her voice was as tired as she felt. “At home, at judicious intervals, that was one thing. This is war.”

  “I know that,” Wiborada snapped. “Better than you.”

  “Do you?”

  “I was with my father when your kind killed him.”

  “So,” said Zamaniyah. “You have reason to betray us. You defy nature and the will of God that made you woman and slave; you deny Islam. And now you set yourself among armed men, standing armed over my father while he sleeps.”

  “Guarding him,” Wiborada said, still angry, still defiant; but her eyes had widened. Perhaps she was beginning to understand what she had done.

  Zamaniyah pulled on her coat, her trousers, her boots. She twisted her hair into the hasty semblance of a plait.

  Jaffar gripped Wiborada’s arm. She struggled, but he was stronger. She flung up her head. “Let me go! I’ll go with you. I give my word.”

  The eunuch took no notice of her. “Let her go,” said Zamaniyah. “But watch her.”

  That, he would obey. It angered Wiborada.

  It was no more than she deserved. Zamaniyah waited until the Frank had retrieved the fallen helmet and covered her braids with it. Then she led them both into the night.

  oOo

  Al-Zaman had retired to his tent. He was awake still, unattended; puzzled to see his daughter, and disturbed at her disobedience. He greeted her with a frown.

  She abased herself before him. That was unwonted. It startled the sharp words into flight and left him silent, scowling at her, seeming not to see the eunuch and the mamluk.

  Which was precisely what she had prayed for. “Father,” she said from the carpet at his feet. “Father, I have a confession.”

  She dared a glance. His scowl had turned to bafflement. “Are you ill?” he asked her. He turned on Jaffar. “What is this? What has happened?”

  Zamaniyah answered before Jaffar could begin. “No, Father, I’m not ill. I’m only troubled. I’ve done something I shouldn’t have done.”

  His eyes were full on her again. There was no anger in them, not yet. He waited for her to speak.

  Her throat closed. He had not thought the worst of her. He trusted her.

  She could spin a tale, tarry a little, escape. He would never know.

  Damn her conscience. It held her there; it made her say, “I’ve never had a friend, Father. A man was not possible nor proper. A woman could never understand this that I am. I’ve been alone, and lonelier than I knew.” He was listening. He did not try to silence her. She swallowed. Her heart was beating painfully hard. “But there was one...your Frankish concubine. Nahar.”

  “I had known that,” he said, less rough than gentle. “I allowed it. I saw no harm in it.”

  “But you didn’t know!” With an effort she muted her voice. “There was more to it, Father, than an evening or two of gossip in the harem. Whenever she won leave to go out—whenever she could elude her duennas—she used to ride with me. Dressed as I was, with her face covered. She was taken for one of my—for one of my mamluks.”

  She stopped. She ventured to raise her head. He sat utterly still. His face was frightening: there was no wrath in it. There was nothing at all.

  “How long?” he asked at last, calm and cold.

  “A year,” she answered. She was shaking.

  “And you never told me?”

  “I didn’t dare.”

  He nodded once. “Why do you tell me now?”

  She drew a breath. Metal clattered behind her; a fierce and fearless voice rang in the heavy air. “Because the concubine has gone too far.”

  Wiborada stood uncovered, brightly defiant, even as she dropped down in obeisance. “My lord, you must not punish your daughter. I made her take me riding with her. She never knew until now, that I have been riding with the army. That is my sin, and mine alone. She is not part of it.”

  They had shocked him quite as much as Zamaniyah had feared. His face went livid; then it paled. His fists clenched and unclenched. He rose, as if the force of his wrath could not suffer stillness. He bulked above his daughter and his concubine.

  The Frank had never learned humility, nor ever prudence. She rose to face him. She was as tall as he. “My lord, I have done nothing dishonorable, save that I never asked your leave. You may beat me for that; I’ve earned it. But no more.”

  His hand flew up. She braced herself.

  The blow never fell. They both stared. Zamaniyah clung grimly to her father’s arm. “No,” she said. “I began it. I offered her what I had. I had no right.”

  “You had every right!” flared Wiborada.

  Zamaniyah spun upon her. “I had none! You were never mine to set free. And I did it. Keeping the secret. Because—”

  “Because?” said al-Zaman when she did not finish.

  “Because she wanted it with all that was in her, and I who had it...I accepted it because I had no choice.”

  The silence sang on a strange high note. Zamaniyah had never told the truth: never where her father could hear.

  “She is what you wanted me to be; and you commanded that she be a woman as all the rest are women. She is bright and strong. The free air is her element. She should have been your heir; never I.”

  “Is it such a burden?”

  His voice was rough. Zamaniyah shut her eyes. Her head shook. “I am what you command me to be. If it pleases you, I school myself to accept it.”

  She could feel Wiborada’s contempt. She did not care. He accepted her submission. It was fit and proper; it calmed him.

  But not wholly. He turned a deadly eye on Wiborada. She was his possession, and she had sinned. She had left the place ordained for her. She had mocked his pride.

  She did not even know what she had done. Zamaniyah should have hated her, or at the least despised her. Her head was high, her back unbending. Whatever she had learned of pleasing her master, she had forgotten. She was all Frank, all insolence.

  He could flog her, sell her, even kill her. She, most surely, would spit in his face. She was gathering herself for it. Zamaniyah could tell. She looked as Zamaniyah all too often felt.

  Zamaniyah caught her father’s hand, pulled him about. “No, Father. I beg you. She doesn’t know. She was born barbarian; and she was raised as her father’s son.” That brought him up short. Zamaniyah prayed Allah to forgive the half that was a lie, and kissed the hand that made no effort to escape. “May I have her, Father? She’s like me. And she’s loyal. Didn’t we ride through the Franks’ land? None of us knew she was there, and she stayed with us. She never tried to escape.”

  His face did not soften. “She has dishonored our house.”

  “How, Father?” Zamaniyah asked, pressing not too hard, holding his hand to her cheek. “She’s been doing no more than I do; and more modestly. She’s always veiled her face.”

  She raised her eyes to him. “Please, Father. What better companion for me? She’ll guard my honor as she guards my body.”

  At long last Wiborada perceived the game. She seized his free hand, dropped to her knees. “Truly, my lord. I will. I will guard her with my life.” And when he said nothing: “Am I so appalling? Your daughter is as she is, by your command. May not your concubine be like her?”

  They had trapped him neatly. His eyes glittered upon them both; his hands tightened to pain. Zamaniyah steeled herself to bear it. Wiborada had paled, but she was silent.

  Abruptly he let go. Neither would stoop to cradle her throbbing fingers. A smile’s very distant kin touched his mouth; he shook his head. “Wise men warned me when I began this dance. Let me loose one woman on the world, and all of them would clamor to follow.”

  “No one else had the wits or the will,” muttered Zamaniyah.

  She bit her wayward tongue. He had not heard, or he chose not to hear. “This one, O my dearest mistake, you may keep. But no more. I will not have my harem turned to a company of cavalry.”

  Sh
e bowed to the carpet.

  “Nor,” he said, “will she ride with you to battle. You must; honor demands it. She must not.”

  “She will not,” said Zamaniyah.

  “See that she does not.” He flicked his hand. “Go.” But when his daughter rose, he pulled her to him, kissed her. Then he let her go.

  Wiborada did not follow. Zamaniyah had not expected that she would. Al-Zaman’s anger would die, or it would smolder unregarded; but Wiborada would do her best to soothe it, now that Zamaniyah had allayed the worst of it with words and wickedness.

  Words were never a Frank’s strength. Zamaniyah laid her weary body down amid the blessed quiet of her bed, and let herself fall into sleep.

  oOo

  Khamsin drowsed uneasily in the horselines. The Bedouin kept their horses by their tents, even within them: wiser by far than this, and more respectful. Here he was roped into a line, beset with stinging flies, and laid bare to any wind that blew. The spirits of the air liked to mock a captive beast, particularly if they scented magic on him.

  Allah and Iblis were not finished with him. An emir had charge of the beasts and the baggage. It was a great charge, for without them the army could not live, still less come to battle. The sultan would never give it to any but a man of both wisdom and experience. Both of which, Ali Mousa had in plenty.

  He liked to walk the lines of an evening, to see that all was well, horses and camels fed and watered, hobbles and leads secure, guards at their posts. Tonight the destiny of God had stopped him by Khamsin, hearing a guard’s whine of complaint. And having resolved it, with little enough gratitude from its maker, he had lingered yet a while, as if in thought.

  He looked thin and drawn, and much older than two years might account for. A scent of old sadness lay upon him.

  Khamsin strained against halter and lead, stretching them to the borders of pain; but he could touch his father’s arm, rest his head lightly against it. It was all the comfort he could give.

  Ali Mousa accepted it. He even smiled and fondled Khamsin’s head, saying nothing, letting presence suffice. In a little while he went away. And Khamsin, whose every fiber ached for sleep, could barely pass the borders of it.

  oOo

  Past Busra the pace slowed almost to an amble. The army had swelled; it was a proper army now, wide enough to fill narrow valleys, long enough to seem immeasurable from the midst of it.

  It was neither long nor wide enough to sunder devoted enemies.

  A small thing began it. One of the baggage camels was given to straying; she had a way of shedding her burden and bolting for freedom. Her handlers knew her: they kept her on a lead, but she was clever in slipping it. A day out of Busra she broke it altogether. Because escape was clear from the line of the army full across the west of Syria, she veered eastward, tangling the baggage in confusion, and plunged squealing into the heart of the rearguard.

  They lost a good half day of marching, and a horse that, evading the camel, caught its foot in her trailing lead and went down; and its rider was much bruised and battered, and most outraged.

  The commander of the baggage train and the commander of the rearguard faced one another that night across the sultan’s fire. They were exquisitely, poisonously courteous.

  “The very least,” purred al-Zaman, “which my lord emir might deign to bestow, would be the life of a worthless camel in return for the life of a queen of coursers, a mother of champions, the light of her master’s eye.”

  Ali Mousa’s head was high, his eyes dark and haughty. “My lord Turk may be pardoned his ignorance in demanding the execution of a royal beast, a swift runner, a bearer of mighty burdens, a beauty and a thoroughbred: and for a cull of a lesser stable, who was suffering sorely from the strain of the march. Yet the rider has suffered; he shall be consoled from my own purse and from my own mounts.”

  That was a noble recompense. Al-Zaman bowed to it. But he said, “My lord emir is most generous, but most unwise. He suffers the sinner to live unharmed. He offers her no punishment. Tomorrow, perhaps, she will essay a new escape. What then if no beast dies, but a man? Can my lord offer a man in place of a man?”

  “If need be,” replied Ali Mousa, “yes.”

  Al-Zaman smiled with purest pleasure. “For a camel, lord emir? For a camel you will threaten the lives of our men? Is it an Arab doctrine, sir? Or is it a Shiite heresy?”

  “I am quite as orthodox as you,” replied Ali Mousa.

  Breaths caught. Al-Zaman’s smile never wavered. “Ah then, lord emir. Perhaps it is merely your way. A man’s life is little enough to pay for a good beast; if he be a Turk, so much the better. So much the fewer of us to vex your sacred peace.”

  “Peace is to be desired, if it be peace from enmity that has no end and no foundation.”

  “Before I saw your face,” said al-Zaman, soft almost to silence, “I had sons.”

  “I am not answerable for the folly of children.”

  “Nor, I presume, for the folly of camels. I understand, my lord emir. You answer for nothing, to no man; perhaps not even to God. Are you not of the lineage of the Prophet, may Allah shed blessing and peace upon him? Are you not above the angels?”

  “Certainly,” said Ali Mousa, “I am neither a fool nor mad.”

  Steel rang. Al-Zaman’s sword was out. Ali Mousa’s leaped to meet it.

  oOo

  Zamaniyah looked from face to face round the circle. They were like men at a cockfight: eyes glittering, eager, reckoning stroke and stroke, casting wagers on the victor. The sultan made no move to stop it. He was not there. Need had called him away; and his deputies were as greedy as the rest for a taste of blood.

  She set her teeth. She slid between two burly emirs, under the arm of a third. They barely noticed. The enemies stood face to face, nearly body to body, locked in a perfection of hate.

  She thrust herself between them, braving steel, braving the white heat of rage. They moved in the concord of hatred, lowering blades, flinging up empty hands to cast her aside. She braced her feet; their hands met, locked, recoiled. They stood still. The reek of their anger was like hot iron.

  She bowed as well as she could, with as much respect as she could muster. “My lords, have you forgotten? The army rides to war. Its commander needs you both. Would you have him lose his war so that you may win yours?”

  They did not want to hear it, and never from her. She made them hear it. “If the sultan were here, he would never allow this. Will you give him cause to despise you both?”

  She cast her dice. She bowed again, backed away. “Your pardon, my lords. I overstep myself. If you will draw blood, I pray you draw it quickly, before the sultan comes to stop you.”

  She turned her back on them and walked away. She prayed that no one would see how she trembled.

  There was silence behind her. The emirs let her pass. She yearned to look back, but she must not. That would be a surrender.

  Only when she was out of the light could she turn. The space about the fire was empty. The voices that began to speak were none of them the enemies’, and none of them edged with rancor.

  Her knees nearly gave way. An arm about her shoulders held her up. She looked into her father’s face. It was grim, but it was not suffused with rage. He said nothing. She did not try to make him speak. Mutely, side by side, they walked back to their tents.

  15

  Zamaniyah had kept the feud from turning anew to blood. Barely. It abated not at all. Certain of the emirs, whether at the sultan’s command or their own will, kept the enemies well apart.

  Little good it did. Al-Zaman had begun to brood again, blackly, as he had not since his sons were killed. Wiborada slept in his tent still, but it was only that. “He doesn’t want me,” she said, sharp with anger and hurt. “All he wants to do is pace and snarl and curse the Egyptian.”

  It was all he did when he was not riding or being emir. Zamaniyah could divert him, sometimes, for a little while. Less as they rode deeper into Syria, and met no ene
my, and gained both numbers and strength. Damascus fell to the show of arms and to the sultan’s largesse: the queen of the cities of Syria with its orchards and its sweet waters, and no man in it bold enough to withstand the upstart out of Egypt.

  Victory so easily won only fed the rivals’ rancor. “We need an honest fight,” said Wiborada.

  In Damascus she had not seen fit to take back women’s dress; and al-Zaman cared too little to compel her. She was not concealing her face any more than she must. Here in the stable of the house which the emir had claimed, she bared even her head, her hair in plaits like Zamaniyah’s, her eyes interested as Zamaniyah fretted over one of Khamsin’s shoes. “Is it loose?” she asked.

  “It wants to be.” Zamaniyah let it go. Khamsin was restive, shifting from foot to foot, trying to chew on the posts of his stall. He calmed infinitesimally under her hand. “Maybe we’ll get a fight,” she said as she combed his mane. “The Syrian sultan’s heir is in Aleppo, walled in defenders and defying our lord. We’ll be marching there in a day or two.”

  “Will Saladin,”—she always mangled his name so—”will your sultan bow to the prince and rescue him from his wicked viziers, or will he stop pretending and take the kingdom?”

  “Salah al-Din Yusuf,” said Zamaniyah with precision, “believes that a land requires a man of experience to rule it; that a child under regents of little competence can only weaken, and perhaps destroy it.”

  “Saladin wants Syria,” Wiborada translated, incorrigible. “Syria seems to want him. God knows, he’s paid them enough. My father used to say that generosity was all very well, but it were best begun at home.”

  “You people are barbaric,” said Zamaniyah.

  Wiborada was not at all insulted. “Some of us know when to stop.”

  Zamaniyah leaned on Khamsin’s neck. Suddenly she was very tired. “I wish my father did.”

  “Battle will distract him,” said Wiborada. “Honest war and an honest enemy: give him those, and he’ll forget his old ranklings.”