by Melanie Rawn
Kemmal dutifully smiled back; Kammil dutifully protested, “We can continue as originally planned.”
“I believe it would be better to wait a day.” He said the words in such a way that they knew they were not to argue.
The next day while they slept, he took care of the restive elements among his cavalry. After a spring and summer of battles, every man was brashly convinced that he could defeat fifty Qoundi Ammar without breaking a sweat. They wanted to fight, and they wanted to do it now. Alessid appreciated and approved their zeal, but if all went as planned, they would do very little actual fighting for Hazganni. Where would all this energy go once they returned to their tents and the admiration of their people? It was a question that had been occupying his thoughts for quite some time.
That afternoon Alessid found a quiet place away from the camp and sat down to consider. His men would return to their tribes and renew the ancient balance of life in the wilderness: work, family, seasonal travel from one place to another. These places had been claimed by them forever; Sheyqir Za’aid had perturbed the natural equilibrium between the wasteland and its people, but had not Alessid done the same thing even while he was attempting to restore it? The men of the Za’aba Izim knew now how to make war to take back what was theirs; would they ever use these skills to take what was not theirs?
For one of the few times in his adult life he called up memories of his father, so that he could review his father’s memories. Rimmal Madar; Dayira Azhreq; the lying, greedy sheyqas who, not content to throw out barbarian invaders, had taken what had belonged to the al-Ma’aliq and made it theirs. Or attempted to. The al-Ma’aliq lands had never truly belonged to the al-Ammarizzad, any more than Hazganni and all the other towns and fields and forests and mountains of this country would ever belong to them. In truth, he could think of only one place and one people belonging entirely to and with each other: the desert and the Za’aba Izim.
As he sat through the long hours of the night, gazing down at the city—and especially the ruined groves—it was with a slow and certain understanding that he discovered why.
The Seven Names, the desert. The tribes were the land’s. They knew it, used it, cared for it. They knew the places where water, grazing, even fruit could be found; they hunted its animals and harvested its plants; they never lingered so long in one place as to deplete its resources. But how had it happened that the desert belonged as well to the Za’aba Izim? For Alessid knew it did; he had sensed it on some deeper level of his soul. It was not because they put walls around the desert, or drew adamant lines on maps, or defended it with their blood, or—
No. That was the reason. The blood. Especially the blood of the Shagara.
The sun and wind and water, the ground from which food grew—the herbs for medicine and the herbs for seasoning—all these things were within the Za’aba Izim and had been for uncounted lifetimes. Their bones and flesh and blood were made of the desert. In the Shagara, for reasons unknown and unknowable, that blood had turned into power.
The land itself had given them the means with which to protect and defend it. The land was theirs.
Not his. Not Alessid’s. He knew that. He no more belonged to this country than it could ever belong to him. He had not given it enough.
Mother, father, sisters and brothers, friends—
But not his blood.
Not until now.
It was nearly dawn before he roused himself. In the dirt he drew a rough map. The mountains here, the coastline there, Hazganni and Sihabbah and Ouaraqqa and other towns marked by pebbles. To the south was the Barrens; to the west, fine grazing and growing land; to the east, more wastes and then the Ammarad; and to the north, the Ga’af Shammal and beyond it the barbarian domains. None of it was needed, none of it even coveted. But great swaths of it were there for the taking.
An army’s purpose was to make war. Alessid had crafted an army that had defeated the best that Sheyqir Za’aid could field against him. This was not so remarkable as it appeared, as Meryem had pointed out.
“The Qoundi Ammar have no homes here, no families, no sheep they have tended or fields they have plowed. But look at the Tabbor—initially reluctant to fight, until their lands were threatened. And then they fought like demons. The wonderment of it is that once their own interests were taken care of, they continued to fight to reclaim the lands of others. Do you see what you’ve done, Alessid?”
He saw indeed. Where once Za’aba Izim and townsfolk had been almost strangers to each other, and the only bonds between them had been of language and trade, now they had begun to think of themselves as a single people, and all this land as theirs, together. It had not happened when the Qarrik invaded, nor the Hrumman, nor the northern barbarians from beyond the Ga’af Shammal. It had taken twenty years of Sheyqir Za’aid’s rule to make it happen—and, Alessid knew without vainglory, the presence of one man strong enough to unite tribes and townsfolk against a common enemy. One man who taught them how to make war in a new and terrifyingly effective way.
He would win. He knew it as surely as he knew his father had not been capable of this. Victory was a honey-sweet thing, and the people had discovered its taste and liked it—but what happened when the enemy was gone? Proficient in war, the tribes might fall upon each other—definitely a thing to be avoided. But without practice, the skills of war would wither, and anyone with an army could invade this land again. The Qarrik had done it, and the Hrumman, and the northern barbarians, and the al-Ammarizzad.
“It will not happen again,” he vowed quietly. “We will be strong.”
After Hazganni was taken and Sheyqir Za’aid was dead, there would be a tense time while everyone waited for Sheyqa Nizzira’s vengeance. Yet after that—? An army was necessary, but it was necessary to give an army something to do.
The first of the al-Ammarizzad had found a solution in Rimmal Madar. Deeply as Alessid despised the thought of borrowing ideas from his family’s enemies, he had to admit it made sense. The majority of men who fought to protect their homeland did so because they wished their lives to be what they had been: settled, serene. These men would sheathe their swords without regret and go home. But those who had a real talent for armed conflict—ayia, these were the men that had been formed into the Qoundi Ammar. Azzad al-Ma’aliq’s youthful ambition had been membership in this elite corps, and his reminiscences flooded Alessid’s mind.
Neither time nor contemplation would reveal any other solution. Those of Alessid’s army who wanted only to have done with war and go home, they would do so with his blessing and the gratitude of the Za’aba Izim. But those who enjoyed war—those who, he suddenly realized, found laughter in contemplation of battle, just as he did—those men he would keep.
He would ask Razhid to watch and listen and give him a list of names. And he looked at the map drawn in the dirt, and especially at the Ga’af Shammal and the rich lands to the north. Odd names they had: Granidiya, Trastemar, Qaysh. He wondered if he had not found something for his soldiers to do.
“Soldiers of the Qoundi Ammar! Tonight one wall of Hazganni will collapse! Tomorrow night, another wall—and then another, and another, until the towers are rubble and the city lies in ruins! You people of Hazganni who despise the Sheyqir, I do not ask you to rise up against him, for fighting is the work of warriors. My words are for the Qoundi Ammar. Those who do not wish to die, come out by dawn light and throw down your swords. By Acuyib’s Glory, you have the word of Alessid al-Ma’aliq that you will not be harmed. All those who refuse this offer of life, prepare yourselves to die!”
“Ah-less-eed! Ah-less-eed! Ah-less-eed!”
That night he went with his sons to the walls of the city. Clothed in black—and careful not to be seen, for the hazziri were theirs, not his—he walked beside them down a ravine and out on the flatland. Once there had been green crops here, graceful palm trees, sturdy pines. Now: scrub grasses, dry and yellow amid the stumps and charred corpses of trees. What had Za’aid al-Ammarad been thinking? Al
essid shook his head. The man was a fool, and deserved to die as a consequence of his folly.
He saw no glint of swords. A light burned in each tower, but he was willing to wager that Shagara magic had everyone in Hazganni busy shoring up walls. As they neared the city, sounds echoing off the buildings confirmed it: shouted orders, clattering wood beams, the hollow ring of hammered nails. He very nearly laughed aloud.
A disembodied whisper and a hand on his arm slowed his steps. The hazziri truly were remarkable; he could see Kemmal only as a vague shadow against the starlit hills. “Ditch,” was all the young man said. Alessid nodded, and followed him cautiously downward, giving grudging acknowledgment to the cleverness of the Qoundi Ammar. At the bottom of the ditch were short, sharp stakes—made of wood, not steel that would gleam even by night, their angle and the dark smear of poison on their tips fatal to charging men and horses.
A brief climb, and they were at the wall. Alessid crouched low, watching as twin shadows drifted back and forth, back and forth. They had begged him to stay in the camp, but they needed a guard just in case, and who better than their own father, their commander? This reasoning had fooled neither of his sons. He wanted to be there, he wanted to witness this magic being conjured at his pleasure.
He knew they were drawing griffins and vultures in their own blood: retribution and death. He wasn’t certain which other symbols they used, but he did know dozens of bloodstones were being wedged into the cracks between bricks. Collected from hazziri worn by Shagara and Harirri and Tallib, Ammal and Tariq and Azwadh and Tabbor, they had previously been worked for beneficial purposes: to stop bleeding, to protect against scorpions, to purify the blood, to assuage grief. Over the past days Kemmal and Kammil had changed them, charged them with new purpose.
Kemmal had told him, “Were there clouds, we could persuade them through the bloodstones, and there would be a tempest. The same with wind, which also responds to this stone. But because there are no clouds and no wind . . .”
“One does not mock Acuyib by attempting to raise storms in late summer,” Kammil had added. “There is a balance to magic, a rhythm that intertwines with the world of which it is a part.”
“All I require is the toppling of a wall,” Alessid had assured them. “Nothing so gaudy as a storm.”
He listened to the frantic midnight noise from within the city and watched the dark and silent suggestions of men move back and forth nearby. Not fifty feet from him was an iron door in the wall. He looked at it longingly, wondering if he should have sent someone to steal inside and poison the Sheyqir’s well, or open the main gates for the army, or scatter hazziri around the barracks to unman the Qoundi Ammar, or—
No. It was better done this way, done with demonstrable magic. Everyone in the city would see that the wall had toppled without any visible attack.
At length he began to hear a low, silken hum. Frowning, he concentrated—and gave a start when he realized it was coming from his sons. Rising, falling, a tuneless song and a wordless chant, the sound soothed and stimulated all at once, and he was so intent upon it that the first he knew of the magic’s effect was when the wall at his back quivered.
Alessid scrambled to his feet as dust-dry mortar sifted down on him. The twins had done their work too well—the wall was not supposed to topple until tomorrow. Again he felt a hand on his arm, and the shadow before him murmured, “It begins—but it will be slow.”
“You’re finished?”
“Yes, Ab’ya.” Kammil’s voice was distant, exhausted. Alessid put his hands where he thought his son’s arm must be and held only empty air. The shadow had moved on.
They were back down at the bottom of the ditch, weaving their way through the wooden stakes, when they heard the footsteps. Kemmal and Kammil had not reported any patrols on the other nights of their working—another stupidity of a complacent, arrogant al-Ammarizzad. But footsteps there were, and Alessid froze, his sleeve a finger’s breadth from poison. He was trapped here in the lethal forest, hideously exposed and utterly helpless.
He looked over his shoulder. A single man, bent nearly double under the weight of a huge sack, trod heavy-footed to the iron door. He lowered his burden to the ground, wiped his brow, and drank from a waterskin at his belt. Alessid’s muscles began to ache with the strain of immobility and the thwarted urge to flee.
A few minutes passed. Then the door opened, silent on well-oiled hinges. A woman’s shape was limned by light from the small candle she held. The man swung the sack over the threshold as she groped in a pocket of her dark cloak for a small pouch, which she handed to him. Food, Alessid thought. Only a woman buying food for her family or for sale. With the cessation of regular delivery from the countryside for almost a month, people acquired food however they could. He watched the man shake his head and try to give back the pouch and deduced that he was a relative, perhaps a brother or cousin, unwilling to accept payment for keeping this woman and her family alive. At least the Sheyqir’s idiocy in not posting regular patrols allowed clandestine supplies to enter Hazganni. Perhaps some of the Qoundi Ammar were well-paid to ignore the traffic.
But the woman glanced over her shoulder nervously, as if worried she might be seen and caught. The man moved to close the iron door as she hunched over, grasping for a hold on the burlap. All at once she jerked convulsively, and pitched forward to sprawl across the sack.
The man stumbled, and cried out, and fell down dead, and five soldiers surged out the door, crimson cloaks swirling as the dreaded Qoundi Ammar spread out to search for other prey.
“That’s two,” a soldier said to his companion, “who’ll not be defying the Sheyqir’s orders.”
“Did they think us so stupid that we would not be watching, even when we seem not to watch?” another chuckled.
Alessid could not even tell his sons, his twin shadows, to escape. He dared not utter a sound. He found that he could not utter a sound. Yet it was not fear but anger that closed his throat and thickened his tongue within his mouth and sheened his skin with sweat. He had been as stupid as the pair now lying dead on the ground. He had put too much faith in Shagara magic to keep each and every member of the Qoundi Ammar working at the walls all night in terror of their falling down tomorrow. Instead, his enemies would fall upon him—it would be only moments before their questing eyes turned to the ditch—and his dream would die with him. His purpose, his hope, his desire, his reason for being alive, all would be gone. And without him—
He saw then the danger of investing all vision, all power, in one man. One mortal, killable man.
Over the renewed shouts within the city and the calls of the soldiers to each other and the thud of their boots on the sun-baked soil, Alessid heard a hiss of pain. An instant later he felt someone take his hand and force upon his thumb a ring that felt slick and wet. The world became darker, and the starlit edges of the stakes and the ditch and the hills beyond blurred delicately. And he saw, quite clearly, Kammil standing beside him, no longer wearing the hazzir of agate and opal and silver that rendered him invisible. The young man’s eyes were hazy with the lingering effects of his work, his face haggard, his shoulders sagging.
“Hurry—I’ll distract them.” His voice was scarcely a whisper.
“They’ll kill you—” This from Kemmal, still a shadow.
“I’m already dead.” He held out his arm, where the sleeve had been torn by a sharpened stake of poisoned wood.
Alessid never knew whether or not Kammil had grazed himself intentionally. It would be like him: a sacrifice to save father and brother, the act of a truly noble man. Alessid had time only to touch his son’s face with a shadowy hand before Kammil ran back up the slope and called out derisively to the Qoundi Ammar.
Alessid and Kemmal escaped. They reached the hills, and the encampment, and Alessid’s tent, and there Razhid was waiting. When he heard what had happened, he wept for his grandson, for in their shock and grief and exhaustion, his father and twin brother could not.
The w
all fell.
Sheyqir Za’aid was slain by his own frightened and disaffected officials, who then surrendered the city to the mercy of Il-Nazzari.
Of the hundreds of Qoundi Ammar who had not managed to kill themselves for the shame of their defeat, Alessid selected ten and set the rest to replanting every single tree that Sheyqir Za’id had destroyed. When he was satisfied, he had them slaughtered. The ten, however, he sent back to Rimmal Madar. These were given hazziri to prevent them from taking their own lives because of their dishonor. Once in Dayira Azreyq, they said to Sheyqa Nizzira what Alessid had told them to say: that there was now a new, strong, united country in the world. Its name was Tza’ab Rih, for the searing, golden sand-laden storms that scoured its deserts, and for the army led by Il-Nazzari—whose true name was Alessid al-Ma’aliq, son of Azzad al-Ma’aliq.
When Nizzira raged and swore retaliation, the men told her the story of the fall of Hazganni.
Nizzira gave immediate, infuriated, inevitable orders to the qabda’ans of her army: Make ready a force sufficient to crush the al-Ma’aliq forever. The humiliated Qoundi Ammar agreed, eager to reestablish their honor. That night, the qabda’ans quietly and secretly came to a very different agreement: Enough soldiers and strength and substance had been spent on a land no one but the Sheyqa cared about. An hour before dawn, they sought out the only al-Ma’aliq remaining in Rimmal Madar in her well-protected obscurity, and they called upon her to leave her insignificant estate outside the city and become the new Sheyqa.
The precise circumstances of Nizzira al-Ammarizzad’s death remain unknown.
Sheyqa Sayyida’s first act was to declare that she and her progeny would henceforth be known as al-Ammarizzad al-Ma’aliq, in memory of her murdered forebears. Her second act was to send her eldest son to Hazganni on the fastest ship in the fleet.