A Wind in Cairo

by Judith Tarr

He was giving up everything. He had fought for it; he had won it; he held it firmly in his hand. How could he let it go?

  He smiled sweetly at the ambassadors. He looked much younger than he was, and much less kingly. He looked somewhat of a fool.

  They were as startled as she; but she saw no suspicion in them. They did not know that glint in his eye.

  “Baalbek,” mused the emissary of Mosul. “Homs. Hama. That is most of Syria.”

  The sultan bowed his head. His simplicity of dress, his plain turban and his worn coat and the glint of mail under it, shrank beneath their eyes, dwindled into shabbiness. Even his army—that, surely, would melt away without gold to hold it. Had he not left Aleppo because his coffers were empty? And the Franks had given him no battle, and thus no booty; only a prisoner or two, none worth more than a few dinars in ransom.

  Zamaniyah shook herself. He played it wondrous well: with never a word, he had befuddled even her who knew him.

  The Mosuli stroked his handsome beard and pondered. The Aleppan, who had no beard to stroke, lowered his heavy lids, and raised them slowly. His eyes were full of lazy malice, like a cat’s as it drowses in the sun. “You will not give up Damascus?”

  “Damascus is dear to me,” said the sultan. “I would keep it to console me.

  “Can you hold it?” asked the Mosuli.

  “I can try,” he answered with the merest quiver of doubt, set clear where they could hear.

  “If we accept the cities which you offer,” said Gumushtekin, “we should take also what lies beyond and about them. One fief, to take a plain example. One small holding north and east of Aleppo, in which we have discovered your people: al-Rahba that lies on the Euphrates. Since you will hold nothing north of Damascus, surely then al-Rahba should be ours.”

  The sultan paused. A secretary murmured rapidly in his ear. His eyes flickered. His mouth twitched just visibly, stilled. “Ah,” he said. “Ah, sir. Haven’t I offered you enough?”

  “Al-Rahba,” Gumushtekin pointed out with ponderous delicacy, “lies deeper in the north of Syria than Aleppo itself. How can you hold it from Damascus? How can we allow it? So would the commander of a fortress set his enemy on guard at the postern gate.”

  The sultan seemed most grievously distressed. “Alas, my lord Gumushtekin, of all the fiefs which you might have asked for, al-Rahba is one which I cannot surrender. This my loyal servant, my qadi, his excellency Imad al-Din ibn Muhammad, begs me to remember that the lord Nur al-Din, on whom be peace, granted it to my kinsman, my uncle’s son, who regrettably is not here to speak for it. I cannot strip it from him without cause, without even a word of warning.”

  “Cannot or will not?” demanded the Mosuli.

  The sultan frowned. “Do you question my good faith?”

  The Mosuli stiffened. Gumushtekin sat back at his ease. “If it comes to that,” he said, “yes. Your men are holding al-Rahba: that is fact, and proven. Your cousin’s right to it is no right at all. When you seized Egypt, O servant of my departed master, that same master relieved you and all who followed you of your holdings in Syria. I do not recall that you objected. Egypt, I was given to understand, held recompense enough.”

  The sultan rose. His face was thunderous.

  “My lords!” It was one of the sultan’s Syrians, bold with age and fearful of bloodshed here in council. “My lords, need we quarrel? Three strong cities will pass into Aleppo’s hands. Surely one town with its lands is little enough price to pay: far as it is, and weak, and surrounded by Aleppo’s allies.”

  “So is a worm small and weak and hemmed in; but it devours the apple,” said Gumushtekin.

  “Shall I speak of worms?” the sultan asked with vicious softness. “Shall I speak of your pact with the infidels? You paid them well, did you not? To lure me from Aleppo. To destroy me if they could.”

  “Thereby sending you direct to Paradise,” Gumushtekin pointed out, “as is promised any Muslim who falls in holy war.”

  “Holy! How holy is treachery? You bargain even yet. You promise them my captives in return for those of yours whom they hold. You sell them back the lands which Muslim blood has won. You give them hostages for my defeat. You are traitors to Islam.”

  Gumushtekin was on his feet, bulking huge before the slender figure of the sultan. The sultan faced him undismayed. The regent’s lip curled. “You were a cringing pup when your master was alive. You are a bold cur, now that he is dead. Grant us al-Rahba and we suffer you to keep Damascus. Refuse us and we take all, and your life with it.”

  “I refuse you,” said the sultan.

  The broad face stilled, closed. The Mosuli was on his feet. Gumushtekin turned like a ship under sail. He spoke no word. His hand rose and flicked. His attendants hastened to their feet, turning their backs, every one, upon the sultan. It was sublimest insolence.

  Half of the army would have risen to destroy them. But the sultan would not allow it. He shocked the innocents among his people: he sent men after the ambassadors, sworn to courtesy, to beseech them to master their tempers. They did not even pause in mounting their horses. In a storm of hooves and dust and half-furled canopies, they thundered from the camp.

  oOo

  “He planned it,” said Zamaniyah.

  Al-Zaman paused in breaking the evening’s bread. “Of course he planned it. So did they.”

  “It’s all a deadly dance. They’ve said the words the patter bids them say. They’ve stung each other into fury; they’ve remembered their pride. And their men saw it. They’ll fight all the harder for it.”

  He nodded. His eyes approved her. He offered her half of his loaf dipped in the pot between them, watched as she ate it. “Did you notice how small the army seems,” he asked, “with so much of it spread so wide, warding villages all about Hama?”

  “And more yet holding Homs; but none so fat that the army can’t be whole again quickly if he needs it.”

  “Just so.” He smiled. “You see, then. Our enemies know that they can win a battle, even without Aleppo’s walls to shield them. Now they know that they cannot lose.”

  “Aleppo knows how large our army is.”

  “Does it? It’s known that the sultan’s resources are hardly infinite. It’s whispered abroad that he can barely hold his men together.”

  “That’s not true.” She nibbled a date, pondering. “Both sides want to fight. They both try to avert it if they can, to win by wit and pretense, without the shedding of blood. Honor, glory, holiness, even a throne—those aren’t the heart of it. The heart of it is gold. Gold to pay one’s army in order to win plunder to pay one’s army.”

  “What else need war be for?”

  He meant it. She stared at him. Sometimes he baffled her. Logic was logic, but there were shades of it that made sense only to a man.

  “I don’t think,” she said, “that we should need war at all.”

  Now she had baffled him. He had no answer for anything so improbable, and so contrary to the Prophet’s teachings. It stung him; he frowned, absorbed himself in the remnants of his dinner.

  She bit her tongue. Sometimes she had no sense.

  The silence grew. There were only the two of them, with servants, and Wiborada. Here, in seclusion, the Frank was bareheaded; her hair, plaited simply down her back, shone burnished in the lamplight.

  Al-Zaman’s eyes had turned to it, drawn by its brightness. Her own eyes flicked up. The meeting was like a crossing of blades.

  Zamaniyah wanted to retreat, and rapidly. But she was trapped between them.

  This was nothing like her own shy fumblings with Abd al-Rahim. There was fire in this, a white heat. She did not know what to call it. Love did not seem to fit it. Passion was too murky. Desire? Too feeble.

  Wiborada was stark white. Zamaniyah sensed rather than saw her trembling.

  He held out his hand. Wiborada’s fingers clenched and unclenched. Her jaw set. Under skillful paint, a bruise was a paling shadow.

  Zamaniyah swallowed painfully. He did not
know. If he saw, as he must; if he asked...

  Wiborada accepted the proffered hand. Her breath was sharp, her face taut. She tensed as if to recoil; caught herself with a visible effort. Held fast. Sighed long and slow, and eased, muscle by taut-strung muscle.

  Zamaniyah turned craven. She left them to it.

  21

  On the second morning after the envoys’ departure, the army, swelled with the forces which had been hidden from the enemy, marched out from Hama. The armies of Mosul had advanced perilously close, to Shaizar that was but five leagues up the Orontes. They were ranging themselves for battle. The sultan hastened to prepare the field.

  He chose the rolling level that rose into stark dun heights, the hills called the Horns of Hama. There in the open, with no walls to defend him and no city to guard his back, he waited for his enemy. It was not the stretching frustration of a siege, nor yet the breathing space of the days at Hama. This was a mounting tension, a bracing, a firming of will before battle.

  oOo

  “Is it certain?”

  Zamaniyah paused in honing her sword. “The sultan has sworn himself to it.”

  Wiborada was undismayed. She had been spending her nights again with al-Zaman. There was no glow on her that Zamaniyah could put a name to, no intimation that her fear had miraculously melted away; but she was calm, and the haunted look was leaving her eyes. “He’s kind,” was all she had said. “Much kinder than I deserve.”

  She set herself to polishing her helmet. Zamaniyah eyed it but said nothing. “I’ve heard,” Wiborada said, rubbing hard, bending her eyes upon it, “that the sultan has given way to expedience. That he has made the same bargain with the Franks as the one for which he castigated Aleppo and Mosul.”

  “Hardly as sweeping as that,” said Zamaniyah. “He’s promised to give them back their prisoners if they stay out of this war.”

  “But he’s been thundering anathemas against his enemies for treating with the infidel.”

  “That’s rhetoric,” said Zamaniyah. “It’s always high and furious before a fight.”

  “Like dogs snarling.”

  “Or stallions challenging one another.” Zamaniyah sighted along her blade. It was straight, and keen enough to draw blood from the wind.

  “You people lie at will, don’t you?”

  Zamaniyah glanced up sharply. “Only to enemies. And to merchants. And to people we love, to keep them from pain.”

  “That’s everyone.”

  “Not quite,” said Zamaniyah, sliding her sword into its sheath.

  Wiborada bent to her polishing. “I know what you want to say. Franks never tell the truth at all.”

  “Not to infidels.”

  “What does that do to us?”

  “You’re family. You get the truth.”

  “Even if it hurts?”

  “It would hurt you worse to suffer a falsehood.”

  Wiborada hugged her suddenly, without any softening of face or eyes; and let her go just as suddenly, and went back to the scouring of her helmet.

  Zamaniyah nodded as if Wiborada had spoken. The silence was hardly comfortable, but the strain in it had use and purpose, like the tautness of a bowstring. It marked the presence of something strong, with truth in it, and a little—but a sufficiency—of joy.

  oOo

  “Butterflies!” the sultan cried.

  His temper frayed easily of late. He was not turning capricious, as far as Zamaniyah could see, but he was easily pricked to wrath; and a king enraged is a deadly beast.

  She was there because he had summoned her. What he wanted her for, in the ants’ nest that was his tent, she could not guess. Surely he would not abandon it all to ride with her in a country full of spies and deadliness.

  She had found a place out of the main thoroughfare of men and messages, a corner where she could sit and watch and listen and only rarely be fallen over.

  The sultan was dictating a letter, with impassioned commentary. “Write,” he said sharply, “to my uncle, may God preserve him from harm: ‘Allah knows that we do not swear truce with the infidels by our own will; that the perfidy of our enemies has forced us to it; that we strive ever and only on behalf of the people of the Faith. But those very people, lighter of mind than butterflies—’” He tossed his head, remarkably like Khamsin in a temper. “Why can’t they see? I’ve taken on two armies at a time. I can’t leave a third unbound at my back. If I am to wage holy war, I must—I must—unite Islam. Half of Islam refuses union without battle. Therefore I give it battle; and requite treachery with treachery, bargaining with the devil behind, the better to overcome him when the time comes.”

  “Shall I write all that, my lord?” his secretary asked, treading softly in the storm.

  “Yes. Write it. Write it all. Then give it to the messenger. And pray God that the Franks accept my terms before the battle begins.”

  One or two people, overly dutiful, did just that, in loud voices. The sultan snarled at them. “Egypt,” he muttered. “Egypt comes to strengthen us. But slow—all of it, too slow.” He spun. His finger stabbed. A secretary leaped, pen in hand, to write whatever he should bid. Sweetness this time, and sugared indirection, and never a word of bargaining with the devil: a letter to the Commander of all the Faithful, however feeble in truth his sway may have been, the caliph in Baghdad.

  oOo

  “Does it trouble you to see how a king must be?”

  Zamaniyah greeted the magus with a smile and, when he would not let her rise, a bow of the head. But her answer was grave. “It’s necessary. He doesn’t like it, I can see. But he’s good at it, and he doesn’t let it go to his head.”

  Anyone else would have smiled to hear such words from her, young as she was, and female besides. The Hajji simply nodded. “He knows his own measure.”

  They listened to him lament the treachery of Aleppo and Mosul. “He’s eloquent,” said Zamaniyah. She did not know that it was admiration. She had mooned after him like any silly girl, once. That was gone.

  Yes, after all, she admired him still. Liked him very much.

  Loved him?

  She loosed a small sigh. She would follow him anywhere. Even, she realized, without her father to command her. “How odd,” she mused. “I didn’t want to come to Syria at all. I was deathly afraid.”

  “And now?”

  The Hajji’s eyes were bright and dark at once, piercing to the heart of her. She tore her own away. Her palms were cold, for no reason at all, except maybe that she had remembered what he was.

  She rubbed them against her thighs, warming them. Her voice was almost as light as it wanted to be. “Now I can’t imagine not having come.”

  “Are you still afraid?”

  She started to deny it. Then she shook herself. She was no good at lying. Not to a magus. “Still. Now I know what I’m afraid of.”

  “Death?”

  Again an answer came: the simple answer, the obvious one. Again she changed it. “Pain.”

  He nodded slowly. “He needs you, you know.”

  She blinked at the shift, but she understood. Her cheeks warmed a little. “What would a king need from me?”

  “Truth,” the magus answered. “Loyalty. Respect without servility. And, with it all, a clear eye and a thinking mind, and the wisdom to know when to use them.”

  “But I hardly—”

  “It is what you are.”

  “What I am—”

  He was not there. She had been looking at him, glaring for a fact, and she had not seen him go.

  She finished it because she had to. “What I am is neither fish nor fowl.”

  What you are is yourself.

  She had not heard that, that voice like wind in her ear. She had imagined it.

  Then the sultan called her, and there was no time to ponder anything.

  He wanted to ride, or at least to walk alone and unharried under open sky. Cheated of that, he dismissed everyone he could dismiss. “Go,” he said to them. “Rest; take an ho
ur’s peace. Come back for the noon prayer.”

  Some tried to protest. He would not listen. “Imad al-Din”—The chief of his secretaries, who was also his friend, raised cool intelligent eyes and nodded—”will see to anything that needs seeing to.

  “Because,” he said when there were only guards and her silent eunuch and the two of them, “I need time to breathe.”

  “Should you have it, my lord, this close to the fight?”

  He stopped short in his pacing. She watched his temper rear up, waver, break into laughter. “Of course not! But I shall. I’m the king. My will is law.”

  She bowed at his feet, and that was true, but so also was the wickedness of her glance as she came up. She sat on her heels. “And what is the king’s will for his lowliest servant?”

  For a long while he did not answer. He paced, restless as a panther in a cage. She watched. Hunger was a familiar ache, dull, ignorable. Her arms and her hands twinged a little from a full morning’s practice in archery. she flexed her fingers, feeling of the calluses, the roughness that was nothing like the soft smoothness expected of a woman.

  For once it did not trouble her to think that old and painful thought. The Hajji had done something. Or time had. She was aware, watching that man who was a king, of what she was. Her slenderness that was nothing like his. Her shape under light mail and quilted coat. Even that she had no beauty. It did not matter.

  When he stopped, turned, she was ready. He seemed nervous suddenly, uncertain, as if he had had a purpose and now he did not know if he dared to speak of it.

  She could not help him. She could only wait and be quiet and try not to fidget.

  “Are you in comfort?” he asked at last.

  She nodded.

  He shook his head sharply. “Not here. I meant, here.”

  And she had called him eloquent. She bit her lips to keep back the smile, lest he misunderstand it.

  “Here,” he repeated, annoyed with himself. “In the army.”

  “Do you ask that of every emir’s heir?”