Black Dog Short Stories II

by Rachel Neumeier

  She came back because of Amira.

  In the desert, Keziah had run down and killed a fox and then, more satisfyingly, a gazelle. She had seen men, but they had not seen her. In her other form, ordinary humans looked away from her and thought she was a dog or a wolf or an ordinary shadow. Their blindness made them weak, made them prey, but Keziah did not kill them even though tonight she would have been glad to kill any man. A fox’s death would not be marked; a gazelle’s death was nothing. But word of the deaths of men might come to the ears of her father, or to Uncle Hamsa, or to some other of her uncles or cousins. They would not be blind.

  She had run a long way, through moonlight and shadow, feeling invincible and savage. Then she had glimpsed another black wolf hunting, much bigger and older than she. It might have been Uncle Hansa; she could not tell; it might have been anyone. She knew it was an enemy. She hid amid the natural shadows until the other black wolf was gone and then she shifted back to her human form so she could think better. In that form, she was still wearing the torn and bloody remnants of her nightdress—she should have expected it, but she had not, and was revolted by its touch, by the smell of it. She stripped off the ugly garment, throwing it away into the shadows. Then she sat down on the ground, naked as she was. She wrapped her arms around her drawn-up knees and sat for a long time in the desert, thinking about what she should do.

  Before she had quite decided, she smelled a hot dangerous wind and knew a sandstorm was coming. She did not know whether the black wolf could breathe the dusty wind or see in that kind of darkness. Besides, there was Amira. So she went back to her father’s villa.

  Aunt Sofia was waiting for her. She had cleaned up Keziah’s room and brought new furniture to replace what had been broken. The room smelled of soap and pomegranates and only a little tiny bit of blood.

  The pomegranates were because Aunt Sofia had brought Amira pomegranates to eat in order to keep her quiet. Probably she had told Amira the juice of pomegranates was the blood of those you hated and you should think of the one you hated with every seed you ate, and then every seed you ate laid a curse on that one until eventually he died.

  That was what Keziah’s mother had told Keziah, long ago, to keep her quiet. It had taken Keziah years to understand it was not true. Otherwise, with all the pomegranates the women consumed, there should have been no men left alive in her father’s household. But in her childhood, Keziah had eaten pomegranates with some intensity.

  Amira knew she had come back first, of course, and turned quickly, shifting most of the way to her other form and then just as quickly back again. Only then did Aunt Sofia look around, carefully pretending not to see Amira shift and shift again, or Keziah shake off the remnants of her dark shadow. Even then Aunt Sofia kept her eyes carefully lowered.

  Once she had shifted back to her human form, Keziah did not say a word to Aunt Sofia, but she make sure to pause and smile at Amira. “Save one for me,” she said, flicking a hand at the bowl of pomegranates, and went to take a bath.

  When she came back into her room, Aunt Sofia gave her a robe and Amira gave her the last of the pomegranates and Keziah sat down on her new bed and told them both, “I will kill him.”

  “Hamsa,” Aunt Sofia said, not quite a question, and then with faint doubt, “Or Rayam?”

  “Hamsa,” Keziah told her, keeping her tone cool. She peeled the pomegranate delicately open with the tip of a shadow claw, which was strictly forbidden, and carefully ate one seed. The taste burst over her tongue, completely different from the taste of fresh blood.

  “Yes. Hansa is clever, and good at hiding what he does,” Aunt Sofia said thoughtfully. “But he does not need to be as good at hiding what he does as you need to be at hiding what you do. If your father finds out what he did to you, he’ll punish Hamsa. But you he will kill. Or again, if you kill Hamsa and your father realizes that your hand held the knife, he will kill you.”

  Keziah said nothing. She knew all this was true.

  “Once you are married to one of ibn Abdel’s human sons, you would be safe from Hamsa,” Aunt Sofia added. Her eyes were calm, her mouth secretive.

  “If I go to ibn Abdel’s palace, Hamsa will be safe from me,” Keziah said. “And I will not leave Amira.”

  “Well, it would not serve anyway. The black wolves of ibn Abdel’s household will be no better and may be worse, and of course a human son could not protect you . . .”

  “I will protect myself,” Keziah said softly, savagely. “I will kill them all.”

  “Yes!” Amira agreed, coming to her feet with a grace no five-year-old human could have owned. “I will help!”

  Keziah smiled at her sister, surprised to find an odd, soft feeling underlying her savage satisfaction at this declaration. “Good, good,” she crooned softly. “Yes, little sister, you will help me. Together we will kill them all.”

  “Ambitious,” murmured Aunt Sofia. “Dangerous.”

  “We are not strong,” agreed Keziah. “We are too young.” Amira made a tiny sound of protest, and she smiled at her sister. “As we are not as strong, we must be clever. We will be very clever, and so when Uncle Hamsa dies, no one will know it was us.” She turned then to Aunt Sofia, expectantly. “You are clever,” she said to her, knowing it was true. “You will think of a way.”

  Aunt Sofia smiled at her, looking daringly into Keziah’s face. “When you were born, I alone was not dismayed that you were a girl. I was pleased, for I knew then that if your father let you live, you would grow to be as a knife pointed at his heart. When he murdered Kalila, I mourned my sister, but I knew you would someday avenge her. When you took Amira, I was glad, for a girl needs allies and none are better than sisters. Listen, then, heart-child, knife-child, sister-daughter. I will teach you to think of a way yourself. Cleverness is a woman’s weapon. Your father and your uncles are so strong they do not believe they need to be clever. But a woman must be clever if she will defeat a man. I will teach you to think.”

  “And Uncle Hamsa?” Keziah said impatiently. “I will not have him to touch me again.”

  “Sometimes a woman must be patient with suffering. You are a black wolf, daughter of my sister. Nothing he does to you will leave a mark on your body. That is a great thing for a woman, for you may hate him and hate what he does, but you need not fear him. To achieve your vengeance, are you willing to suffer and be patient? You must decide, for if you are careless or hasty, he will surely kill you and you will win nothing. And Amira will die as well, as your father will not want any black wolf daughter once he understands you could be dangerous to him.”

  Keziah studied her aunt. A human woman had no weapons of her own, no way to protect herself against anything, no shadow to carry away pain and injury. Keziah had known human women suffered, but she had not cared. Now she thought of Uncle Youssef’s Russian woman, of the other women who were used for the pleasure of her uncles and her father. The women who conceived in pain and bore their sons in pain, and whose daughters would be slaves like their mothers and live without even hope of vengeance. She found a part of herself could pity them after all. Nor did she blame Aunt Sofia for wanting to use Keziah to take vengeance of her own on this household. That part made perfect sense.

  She turned her own hands over, studying her fingers, bringing out her shadow claws and then causing them to subside once more. She thought of Uncle Hamsa’s face, carved open by those claws...but he was so much stronger. She could see no way to touch him.

  But Aunt Sofia would teach her to find a way.

  “I will be patient,” she said at last. Patience was not an easy thing for a black wolf, and harder still when she thought again of Uncle Hamsa. Of his breath and weight and his fists, of the way he had forced her to keep to her weak human form while he did as he wished to her. She refused to think of him, yet she could not think of anything else. She said fiercely, “But I will not be too patient.”

  Aunt Sofia smiled. “Do not be afraid. Hamsa will not dare kill you, and anything else you c
an endure. Endurance is a woman’s strength and her weapon. You will think of a way. You will think: ‘What will he do? And if I act in this way, or that way, what will he do then?’ You will learn to understand him. You will learn to make him think what you wish him to think, and when you kill him, he will know that you were his enemy after all and not his prey, and he will be astonished.”

  “Yes,” Keziah said fiercely. “Yes.”

  That was the end of her childhood, that night and the dawn that followed. That was the end of her slavery, though neither her father nor her uncles knew it.

  The marriage to one of ibn Abdel’s human sons did not occur. The negotiations lasted almost a yar, but in the end ibn Abdel could not come to an agreement with Keziah’s father.

  Keziah knew this because she had learned to slip into the men’s part of the house so she could listen to what they said when they thought no woman listened. It was very important to be careful, to remain unseen. She learned to move gently and breath softly, how to give her weight to her shadow so her footsteps were utterly silent, how to pull the lesser shadows around her greater shadow so that she always moved concealed. Fear taught her all these things. Necessity taught her. So she knew that any of ibn Abdel’s human sons would have liked to take a princess for a wife, but even when pressed by their father, none of them dared take a black wolf girl.

  They were thus proven cowards and Keziah despised them, but she was glad the negotiations failed. If she had gone into ibn Abdel’s household it would have been more difficult to kill Uncle Hamsa. Besides, she did not think her husband would have allowed Amira to accompany her, except perhaps as a second wife, and Amira, now six, was still three years away from marriageable age.

  And besides that, she did not want to lose Aunt Sofia’s counsel. By the end of the year of negotiations, Keziah had come to truly understand how wise Aunt Sofia was in the ways of men and women, how wise in the ways of masters and slaves, and how subtle in her long designs. By then, Keziah had also realized that Aunt Sofia had always intended to wield Princess Kalila’s daughters as the weapons of her own vengeance. That long intention was a thing of humans and not of black wolves. But Keziah learned it of Aunt Sofia.

  Long intention was something she needed to learn, for Uncle Hamsa came to her room whenever he thought he could do so unobserved. He disgusted and frightened and repulsed Keziah, but Aunt Sofia taught her to hide what she felt, how to pretend to be witless and then how to pretend to be dead. How to pretend she was resigned and then that she did not care. How to think of the empty desert where she would go afterward to run and hunt and tear down prey of her own. Aunt Sofia helped her get out of the house and then back in unseen, and Keziah learned to bury her rage beneath the endless sand and rock and wind. Once she had learned all these lessons well, Uncle Hamsa gradually stopped forcing himself on her because he thought she did not care enough to suffer as he wanted.

  Truly, Uncle Hamsa was very stupid. Like any man, he saw in a woman only what he wished to see: a poor wit and a weak will and a broken spirit.

  So finally Keziah found the means and the moment to lay out her trap for him, like a snare laid out for a cruel and dangerous desert eagle. Aunt Sofia helped her think of it. Aunt Sofia asked questions, and taught Keziah to ask questions, too. What did Uncle Hamsa fear? What did any man fear? What did he want? What did any man want?

  “He fears those more powerful than he, like your father, but that is not what he fears most,” Aunt Sofia explained to Keziah. “A black wolf man need not think of what slaves or women think or feel. But a woman must be able to think as a man thinks, see the world as he sees it. Look through Hamsa’s eyes and you will know what he fears most.”

  As she learned to follow this advice, Keziah came eventually to understand what Uncle Hamsa feared. He feared women. He feared any hint of a crack in the mastery he held over the women of the household. Maimed as he was, he was nearly least among the men. All black wolf men wanted to be feared by women, but this was Hamsa’s weakness: that he cared also whether he was respected. He feared the scorn of women.

  And he particularly feared the disdain of black wolf women, because human slaves were less than nothing, but a black wolf woman was almost a person. That was why, when he’d realized Keziah was becoming a woman, he had wanted to make her less even than a slave. That was why he had lost interest in her once he believed he had succeeded

  “He is weak,” Keziah said to Aunt Sofia in astonishment once she realized this. “He is afraid not only of my father, but of me.”

  Aunt Sofia nodded. “He is strong,” she corrected Keziah. “But his strength is brittle, like a knife made of flawed steel. If he is dealt the right blow, like a flawed knife he will shatter.”

  “How do we do it.” Amira asked eagerly. “How do we strike the right kind of blow?”

  Keziah smiled, because she knew now the shape of the trap she would lay for her enemy. “But we need a weapon,” she said to Aunt Sofia. “He is stronger than we are—and he can force us into human shape. We need a weapon that can make him weak; a weapon that can force him into human shape. We need a knife of burning silver.”

  “I will get you such a knife,” Aunt Sofia promised. “A knife with a silver blade and a hilt wrapped in leather and steel wire, that you may told it without danger to your hands.” Her dark eyes gleamed. She was never precisely happy. Happiness was not a woman’s privilege; not in a black wolf’s house in Riyadh. But she was pleased. She was very pleased. Keziah understood this. It was the satisfaction of a woman who had suffered for a long time in patience and now saw the time coming when her enemies would suffer instead.

  Never before had Keziah thought of her own newly womanly shape as a weapon. She had seen this only as a problem; a thing that made her father think of how best to sell her and Uncle Hamsa think of her at all. But once she understood Uncle Hamsa, she knew immediately how he would feel if she dressed, not to hide her body, but to accent the swell of her breasts and the curve of her hip. This was the way a helpless human woman might dress because her only safety lay in pleasing a man and making him her protector. All her life she had seen this, but she had never understood.

  Now she understood. She knew exactly how Uncle Hamsa would feel if she dressed in that way and then caught his eye and gave him the kind of look a woman gives a man. First the look a woman gives a man she desires. Then the heavy-lidded sideways look she gives a man she scorns.

  The slave women had showed her these things. Keziah had paid little heed. She was not one of them. They were not her kind. But all the women were the same in this: they were all hated and desired by men. And now Keziah found she understood the weapons of a woman better than she had guessed, for she had learned from the human women of the household without ever knowing what she learned.

  So Keziah dressed herself carefully, accenting her eyes and lips and cheekbones as the slave women did, as Aunt Sofia taught her. But the silver knife she gave to Amira. That part would be her sister’s. That part could not belong to Keziah.

  “You he will not expect at all,” Keziah told her sister. “Even if he realizes you are there, he will not care. Never in life would he expect you to have such a weapon, for you will be behind me, where I cannot see you. What black wolf would let another hold such a weapon at his back?”

  Amira grinned fiercely. She was slim and graceful in her human form; small and almost delicate in her shadow form. But though she was a child, her shadow was strong and she was quick. Though the men of their family held girls in contempt, Amira was born to hunt and kill—and she hated Uncle Hamsa as much as Keziah hated him—and Keziah trusted her. Men could not trust one another, but sisters were different. Keziah had learned that, at least. Aunt Sofia had been right from the beginning. For a woman, a sister was the best ally.

  So the end it was not difficult to kill Uncle Hamsa. The difficult part lay in luring him out into the desert, for killing him in the house would have been too dangerous. Even that was not actually difficult. Kez
iah merely passed by Uncle Hamsa when the women brought out the food for the evening banquet on the holiday of Eid al-Adha. Of course her father and uncles did not care about the holiday itself; such things mattered to humans, not to black wolves. Still, her father made the gesture of providing roasted lamb for anyone who came to their villa’s compound before feasting himself, and so the meal was served late and everyone was hungry. Keziah brought the very best platter of roasted lamb to the table herself, but though she served her father first, she served her beautiful cousin Malik, Uncle Ahmed’s eldest son, with a special smile—one that she had practiced before Amira and Aunt Sofia. Amira had laughed when Keziah smiled so. Aunt Sofia had not.

  Now Keziah turned with swaying hips and gazed over her shoulder with heavy-eyed desire toward Malik. And then she turned as though by chance to catch Uncle Hamsa’s eye, and on him she turned a glance of such scorn and contempt as no woman should dare show any man. Only a flickering glance, and only for Uncle Hamsa to see. He did see it. She knew. He hid his anger. Uncle Hamsa never showed his rage to his brothers or their sons for fear of their mockery. But Keziah felt it even across the banquet hall.

  He came for her that night. Of course he did. But she fled the way she had prepared, out into the courtyard and up the palm tree, through the window and out, across the rooftops and down into the wild desert. She fled first in black wolf form and then in human form as Uncle Hamsa forced the change on her, but she had known she would have to run this way in her human form. She had practiced for it.

  Uncle Hamsa pursued her. But he was too angry to be suspicious; too angry to suspect a trap even when he ought to have wondered at the certainty of her flight. Keziah did not get very far from the house. But she did not have to get very far. Only to the wadi that cut through the earth, and the shadows of the rocks where Amira was waiting.