by Melanie Rawn
“How long?” Azzad grated. “How long will you—”
Fadhil deliberately misunderstood him. “I will work as long as I can.”
“How long?”
This time he did not pretend. He sighed quietly against Azzad’s shoulder. “Do not grieve over me yet, my friend. I am alive and as well as any Haddiyat can expect to be at my age. I have never regretted what I am. And Acuyib has favored me beyond human reckoning. I have a good life, and it is not yet over.” He drew back a little, to smile into Azzad’s stricken face. Lines there were on his golden skin, and the frail dry wrinkles of a man half again his age, and a depth of weariness to him that now frightened Azzad. “Another secret to keep, to be locked away with all the others.”
“I won’t tell Jemilha,” he said thickly, letting Fadhil go. “Or the children.”
“I didn’t think you would.” His gentle smile widened to a grin. “Only please, Azzad, do take that pitiful expression from your face before we get home! Jemilha is no fool—and neither are your children.”
“But Sheyqa Nizzira is,” another voice said behind them. Both men whirled to confront a man unknown to them: young, perhaps twenty-two years of age, with a scanty beard and a reddish glint to his thick black hair. “You don’t recognize me, I suppose, Chal Fadhil. I was only a child when you left the Shagara tents. My name is Haffiz, son of Murrah, and I have come to warn you.”
“Warn of what?” Azzad asked warily.
“May we speak of this in a place more private?”
They walked on in silence, to a side path leading to a rocky promontory overlooking the valley. It had been one of Jemilha’s favorite sites since childhood; she had herself built the knee-high pebble castle, endearingly lopsided, next to a bench put there for her father and uncle. Azzad sat on the bench now, with a glance for the shadows sliding across the hills. Soon the nightly promise of Acuyib’s Glory that was the sunset would paint the land in fabulous colors, intimations of the splendor that awaited the faithful after death. A few hundred feet below, clinging to the side of the mountains, was Sihabbah; below it was the estate still known as the House of al-Gallidh. All at once Azzad felt the threat to its peace deep in his bones, an ache like unto the pain Fadhil had finally admitted today. Fadhil stood behind him, watchful and silent, as Haffiz turned his back on the valley and faced them to tell his tale. He had recently journeyed to the coast, with hazziri for the zouqs in several towns there. In one place, he heard of a party of al-Ammarad merchants, also there for trade, and put himself by way of observing them.
“But if they were merchants,” he said flatly, “I am the next Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar.”
“Geysh Dushann?” Azzad asked.
Haffiz nodded. “The same. And with much time to spare before their assigned kill, or so I thought, for they were drinking like horses ridden hard for three days. I disguised myself, as you see—” He gestured to his hair. “—and pretended to be an Ammarad trader, long resident in this land. They drank, and I drank, but I was wearing this to protect me from drunkenness.” He held up his left first finger, encircled by a silver ring set with an amethyst. “What I heard when we all stumbled back to their lodgings is what I will tell you now.”
“Which is?” Fadhil prompted.
“Nizzira is sending an army. Five hundred of the Qoundi Ammar, supported by Acuyib only knows how many foot soldiers. Their orders are to lay waste to all that Azzad al-Ma’aliq possesses.”
Azzad shrugged. “Nizzira cannot spare so many from Rimmal Madar and hope to keep the country in her palm. Her soldiers are her fingers, and the northern tribes will take advantage of her loosened hold.”
“I know nothing of this,” Haffiz replied. “I know only what I heard that night. The failure of the Geysh Dushann weighs heavily upon them—they are to meet this army when it comes ashore and guide it first to Hazganni and then here to Sihabbah. This is why they drank, to drown the voices of reproach in their heads for their failure to kill you all these many years. That night, they were angry. What they will do to the people of this land when they are both angry and sober does not bear considering.”
“Is this possible, Azzad?” Fadhil asked quietly, his voice hushed in the deepening shadows. “You know this Sheyqa. Would she do this?”
Azzad rubbed his beard. “The Geysh Dushann have known nothing but failure, as Haffiz has said. Nizzira could be that desperate. If my agent in Dayira Azreyq knows what happened to the sheyqirs, then others must—and such a thing cannot go unavenged.”
“As we have seen.” Fadhil paced a few steps from behind the bench to the cliff’s edge, then turned. “They have been preparing over these last months, then. Gathering themselves elsewhere. That is why there have been no attacks.”
Azzad nodded his agreement with this estimation. “And this is what I feared, my friend, when Abb Shagara made my enemies his enemies so many years ago.” And still Azzad had taken his vengeance, and still he gloried in it, and still he trusted to the Shagara to keep him and his safe. Had Jemilha been right after all?
No. Acuyib had allowed him to live, that horrible night long ago, and to know what had happened to the al-Ma’aliq. How could any man worthy of being called a man live out his life without exacting payment for such evil?
“You are not just ‘any man,’ Azzad,” said his wife’s voice in his mind.
Fadhil was pacing again, back and forth along the precipice. “The hazziri we once used against the invading barbarians—”
“—are old,” Haffiz finished for him. “And the men they were made for are dead these hundred years and more.”
Azzad clenched his fists. “I don’t want the people of this land to suffer, Fadhil.”
“A noble sentiment,” said Haffiz. “And I am reminded that when I reported all this to Abb Shagara, he gave me things for you.” From his sash he produced a fistful of gold, silver, and jewels: necklace, armbands, rings. The late sunlight glossed the finery in red-gold. “Not to replace the ones you wear now, but to add to their protections.”
“Abb Shagara is generous and wise,” Azzad said. He accepted the gifts, and had put on the two rings and one armband when Fadhil suddenly leaped toward him and snatched the necklace from his fingers.
“What is this?” he gasped. “Azzad, get rid of those—hurry!” His fingers scrabbled at the armband. “Haffiz, what have you done?”
“Righted a great wrong,” said Haffiz—and in a movement too swift for eyes to follow in the dimness, he stabbed a long, dark, needle-thin knife into Azzad’s arm.
Azzad grunted, more with surprise than pain. The knife slid from his flesh, leaving only a single drop of blood to stain his sleeve. Haffiz stood immobile, the knife shining clean now in his hand, watching as Fadhil emptied his satchel of medicines onto the ground.
“Traitor!” Fadhil spat, searching frantically through the chaos of vials and packets and small glass bottles.
“You are the traitor,” Haffiz replied calmly. “You dishonored yourself and the Shagara by selling your heritage to this gharribeh. He so corrupted you that you used your healing skills to help him mutilate—”
“They were his enemies, and thus my enemies.” Fadhil squinted at the label on a bottle, then discarded it for another. “Tell me what you used on him. Tell me!”
“No.”
Azzad regarded all this with a frown. It was but a pinprick, not even painful.
And then he realized that it should have been painful.
“He deserves to die,” Haffiz stated.
“For what reason?” Fadhil cried. He grabbed for a little silk pouch, opened it, ripped Azzad’s sleeve, and sprinkled whitish powder on the wound. Azzad could not believe that any pinprick so tiny could kill him—but he also knew how skilled were the Shagara.
“He brought new ways,” Haffiz said, as if that were the sum and substance of it. “With his horses for riding and his enemies that are nothing to do with us, he is as deadly as a disease. But he will die, and when I am known to be his kill
er, I will become Abb Shagara and lead our people back to the true path.”
“How did Meryem fail to discover your madness?” Azzad asked, and his voice to his own hearing was as an echo coming up from the valley far below.
“Madness?” His words came from blackening shadow. “Is it madness to kill you before the army of Sheyqa Nizzira comes—so that with you already dead, the land and the people will not suffer?”
Fadhil had chosen a vial from the litter on the ground, and forced it to Azzad’s lips. “Drink. Quickly.”
He gulped, and coughed at the sour taste. Surely this could not be happening. Not to him. Not now. Not after all he had been through and all he had done—
“As for Challa Meryem—she knew nothing of my thoughts or my plans. None of them did. More fools,” he added with a shrug. “She and Challa Leyliah will be the first to admit their errors and accept me as Abb Shagara, or they will be the first to die.”
Fadhil sprang to his feet and cuffed him across the face.
Haffiz staggered, tripped over the Jemilha’s little castle of pebbles, smashed it beneath his boot heel. He caught his balance, then coughed and spat out blood. “Another perversion. Would you sin against all Shagara by murdering a fellow Haddiyat?”
Azzad was not sure if the world was darkening because of the poisoned knife or the gathering dusk. But when his friend knelt before him and took both his hands, he knew. Even in the darkness he saw his own death in Fadhil’s tear-filled eyes. Numbness had spread up his arm to his shoulder, across his back, and would soon find both his head and his heart. It occurred to him that the Mualeef boy would be finishing his book rather sooner than either of them had expected. Ayia, an interesting ending to an interesting life.
But it was not yet over, and there were things he must say.
“Even if Haffiz is correct,” Azzad said slowly, “and Nizzira’s army spares the people, my wife and children will not be spared. See them safe, Fadhil. Please.”
“I will do it. After I kill Haffiz.”
“No. Do not break your ancient laws. He matters nothing.” He heard Haffiz suck in a breath at this insult. He wondered briefly why Haffiz was content to stand and watch Azzad die, then decided he must truly be mad, to think that killing a single man would solve all his problems, fulfill all his dreams, make him Abb Shagara. Fadhil was safe from him; Shagara tradition would not allow him to kill another Haddiyat.
“Azzad—” Fadhil’s voice was cloudy with tears.
“Take Jemilha and the children away. Now. Tonight. Take all the horses. Leave—” His lips felt cold and stiff. “Leave only fire behind you. Especially the maqtabba. They must not know the names of those I employ in Rimmal Madar.”
“It will be done, al-Ma’aliq. I will make all appear as if everyone died in the fire.”
As his mother and sisters and aunts and cousins had died. Perhaps it would work. If Fadhil left talishann enough, the Qoundi Ammar would believe. He tried to say this, but his mouth was reluctant to form words. It didn’t matter, anyway; Fadhil would know what to do.
But there was more he must say. He struggled, purposely biting his tongue to feel pain, refusing to be frightened when the response was sluggish and muted, and managed, “Children—tell them—”
“I will, Azzad. I will tell them how much you love them.”
A long while seemed to pass. He seemed to hear the shrieking of a hawk somewhere above the trees. He tasted blood, coppery-sweet, flooding away the bitter medicine, and then he could taste nothing at all.
Now, at the last: “Jemilha.”
“Yes, Azzad. I will tell her.”
Ayia, she was never “just any woman,” my Jemilha, he thought, wishing he could smile. The numbness that had claimed his lips reached his heart, and then, through the gathering darkness, his eyes as he looked down at the tiny lights that marked his home, where his children were, and Jemilha. Fadhil would see them safe.
The army of Rimmal Madar invaded, plundering and burning, putting all to the sword. From the coast they marched inland, where the terrified city of Hazganni surrendered rather than be destroyed. When Sheyqir Za’aid, Nizzira’s son and leader of the army, learned that the trees around the city were the trees of Azzad al-Ma’aliq, he ordered them hacked down. With the Qoundi Ammar to control the land with sword and ax and fear, he declared it part of the realm of Rimmal Madar.
Haffiz had not been alone in his disaffection; six young Shagara who thought as he did, and as secretly, had stolen into the house in Sihabbah. Haddiyat all, armed with hazziri to cancel those set by Fadhil—as those made by Haffiz had unworked those worn by Azzad—they slaughtered the family within and set the house afire. When Fadhil, mourning over Azzad’s newly dead body up on the mountainside, looked down to see the blaze, he struck Haffiz a blow that sent him tumbling over the cliff to his death in the night shadows below.
Fadhil ran down to Sihabbah, and spent his body’s strength in fighting the fire beside the people of the town. The house went up in flames, and the stables. The rest of Sihabbah was spared.
At dawn, by the embers’ glow, Fadhil saw Azzad carried down from the mountainside by six grieving women. Yaminna had discovered the corpse; Feyrah and Sabbah had washed and shrouded him. He was buried beside the noble Khamsin. Of Jemilha and the children, there was nothing identifiable to bury.
As the last clods of earth fell, Fadhil raised his eyes from the grave to the pasture, and caught sight of a tall young boy on horseback. There was nothing that could lift the darkness from his heart, but sight of the boy was like a distant glimmer that might yet shine. Fadhil rose painfully to his feet and waited for the rider to approach. Together he and Alessid left Sihabbah.
—FERRHAN MUALEEF, Deeds of Il-Kadiri, 654
Il-Nazzari
631-698
Let me tell you of him.
Orphaned through treachery at the age of fourteen, taken to live with the Shagara who had repeatedly saved his father’s life, it would be natural to assume that he would spend his life in obscurity, hiding from his enemies in the desert.
Instead, he became the ancestor of empresses.
By Acuyib, the Wonderful and Strange, that which follows is the truth.
—RAFFIQ MURAH, Deeds of Il-Nazzari, 701
11
Along and bitter journey it was from Sihabbah. Alessid spent much of it unable to see clearly for the tears that came to his eyes no matter how he fought them. Ayia, he was a man now and should be past childish weeping. But weep he did—though only at night, when Fadhil couldn’t see him in the moondark wasteland.
They rested during the hottest part of each day and rode on at dusk, stopping at dawn to graze and water the horses. Of all that had belonged to the al-Ma’aliq in Sihabbah, only the horses were left—those, and Azzad’s rings. Fadhil had shown them to Alessid, offered them silently in an outstretched palm. He shook his head sharply, refusing them.
He refused everything about his father now. He had to. Azzad al-Ma’aliq had been a fool—and Alessid knew that to be like him, to admire him, to love him still, would make of Azzad’s son an even greater fool.
He had always adored his father. He had wanted to be just like Azzad al-Ma’aliq: tall and handsome, always smiling, beloved by his family, cherished by his friends. Alessid, during near-sleepless afternoons and long, starhazed nights, examined the events of his own scant fourteen years of life and determined that from now on he would work very hard to be as different from his father as possible.
I am alive, he would tell himself when the tears blurred his vision. I am alive, and everyone else is dead. My Ab’ya is dead, because he was a fool.
Everyone knew the story of how Azzad had been dallying with a mistress in the city of Dayira Azreyq when the al-Ma’aliq were massacred. He had survived by the Grace of Acuyib, not through his own cunning. It had happened differently for Alessid.
It happened again and again in his memory as he rode to the Shagara camp. Again, and again, and again . . .
/> Mother was greatly annoyed when Father and Fadhil did not return for dinner. Later, after everyone had gone up to bed, Alessid was awakened by the sound of footsteps in the hall. Thinking that his father had at last returned, Alessid went to his door—about to open it and warn that Mother was very angry. Then he realized there were far too many footsteps, and a voice he didn’t know said, “Two more boys, and the two girls. The infant will be with the woman. Pay heed to their hazziri—we don’t know what Fadhil made for them.”
Geysh Dushann—again. But how had they entered past the protections? And how did they know Fadhil’s name? Alessid ran to his balcony, flung open the carved wooden screens, and shinnied down the flowery trellis to the ground. Moonlight shone on the garden and the pastures beyond—but brighter was the red glow from his parents’ windows. Before he could do more than blink, the glass burst and fire gushed outward like Chaydann’s gloating laughter from a fissure in the earth.
Alessid sprinted for the door of Uncle Bazir’s maqtabba. Within, he coughed on smoke gushing down from the upper floor. His mother, brothers, sisters—where was Father? Had he and Fadhil returned? Did they burn, too, in the inferno overhead?
Alessid heard more footsteps, and peered from behind the maqtabba door. Six men clattered down the stairs a mere jump ahead of the hungry flames.
“Ayia, we shouldn’t have been so merciful,” grumbled one man, “to kill them and all their servants before the fire took them. The walls have been silenced. No one would have heard them scream.”
Another man snorted. “More merciful than the Geysh Dushann would be—or the soldiers of Sheyqa Nizzira.” He paused to cough smoke from his throat. “Hurry. We must set the rest afire before we meet Haffiz at the boundary stone.”
“Did we get them all? The biggest boy was wearing no hazziri that I could see.”
It was then that Alessid knew that Addad, son of his mother’s favorite maidservant, his friend and playmate all the fourteen years of their lives, had been mistaken for him and had died in his place. Their rooms were not so far from each other, a circumstance that had allowed for much midnight mischief in the past. Knuckling his eyes, Alessid slipped out the back door and looked upward. The whole top floor was burning. The roof above his parents’ chambers fell in with a horrific crash. And just as al-Ma’aliq had died nearly twenty years ago, so al-Ma’aliq died tonight.