by Melanie Rawn
“Mirzah, you don’t mean this.”
“I mean it with every bone in my body, Alessid.”
“Ayia,” he said coldly, “then I will trouble you no more. There are other beds, after all.”
“Ayia,” she responded in the same tone, “and should I learn that you have lain down in one, I will divorce you as is my right and take my children back to the Shagara tents.”
Alessid al-Ma’aliq was not accustomed to being thwarted; still less was he familiar with being threatened. For a full minute he simply failed to react.
In that time his wife turned on her heel and left the ever-blooming garden he had created for her delight. He heard the soft whisper of her slippers on the tiles. The opening and closing of the doors. The mindless chatter of the fountain and the maddening tinkle of the hazziri. He looked around at the shining tiles—a mimicry of living things and glinting stars, a chill illusion.
To the unreality, he said, “Does she think I do not grieve?”
He left the cold tile garden and never set foot in it again.
Ra’abi el-Ma’aliq and Zaqir al-Ammarizzad el-Ma’aliq duly met, and genuinely liked each other despite the promptings of their parents’ ambitions. She was pleased by his looks, his manners, his elegance, his education—and his deference to her greater position here in Tza’ab Rih while never behaving as anything less than the sheyqir he had been born. For his part, he was pleased that not only was she as lovely as his brother Allim had said, and as clever, but her words were as interesting as they were abundant. In 654 they were wed, and a year later she bore a son. Mirzah wept when she was told the child was a boy, but by the time she went to see him her eyes were dry and she was smiling.
Mirzah remained Alessid’s Sheyqa, capable and conscientious, but she was no longer his wife. He was discreet about his infrequent pleasures. He might have taken an official concubine, of course, but as deeply as Mirzah had injured him, he would not injure her dignity by putting another woman in the palace. Indeed, he never took a woman inside its walls. Instead, when he traveled Tza’ab Rih—which he did often, showing himself to the people and familiarizing himself with their lives and problems—he invariably chose a young widow who never afterward remembered who her lover had been. Kemmal had been most obliging.
The young man had explained himself to his father on the night he offered the talishann. “I understand my mother’s pain. I understand the guilt she feels. Because of her, I am gifted with that which makes me honored among the Shagara, that which allows me to do what other men cannot. But because of her, I will never father a child, and I will be dead at an age when other men are not even old.”
“You may understand, but I do not. Other women have borne Haddiyat sons—Meryem, Leyliah—”
“She suffered greatly, losing Kammil so young,” Kemmal murmured. “Forgive me, Ab’ya, but I think I may be the only one who knows what she feels. He was my twin brother, as close to me as my own thoughts.”
Stung, Alessid said, “He was my son, too.”
“I do not think she ever allowed herself to acknowledge that Kammil or Addad or I might be Haddiyat—just as she does not speak of it regarding her brother Fadhil. But now she cannot escape the knowledge.”
“You mean to say that if she could be guaranteed only daughters—”
“Yes. Only watch her with Mairid. The joy of a girl-child is unencumbered.” Kemmal paused a moment, then said, “I know that you cherish my mother. I know you would prefer to be her husband rather than another woman’s lover. To go from woman to woman reminds you too much of your own father, and the tales told of—”
“Be silent!”
“Forgive me, Ab’ya. All I would add is that for your own health, you should not be emulating Sa’ahid the Chaste, content to chant The Lessons every night until dawn.”
And then he had presented his father with appropriate hazziri and instructions as to how they worked.
With Ra’abi happily married to Zaqir, Jemilha was next. She chose Ka’ateb Tallib from the young men presented as suitable. Her sister Za’arifa, barely fourteen, decided at the wedding that Ka’ateb’s younger brother was the man for her and made the next year unbearable with her impatience.
There was never any further question about where his daughters’ husbands would live. Not only were the girls Shagara, who therefore did not leave the tribe, but one did not marry a son into the family of the Sheyqa of Tza’ab Rih and then negate the advantage by keeping him and her in the desert. The young men were their families’ conduits to influence, and they all knew it.
The day after Za’arifa’s marriage, a delegation from Ga’af Shammal begged audience with Alessid. Invited to the wedding for courtesy’s sake, they made the long journey for curiosity’s sake and were dazzled by all they saw. In the audience hall they came straight out with it: they wished to become part of Tza’ab Rih.
Their unmannerly directness offended Mirzah. Standing at her side where she sat in the plain wooden chair she insisted on, scorning the silver throne left here by the al-Ammarad, Alessid felt her fingers claw stiffly into his wrist, and placed his hand over hers in warning.
She spoke before he could draw breath. “You are independent of any ruler. You have ever been so.”
“Yes, great Sheyqa,” said the al-Arroun who headed the delegation. “And have paid for it in our blood. When the Qarrik came, and the Hrumman, and the barbarians from Granidiya and elsewhere—ayia, we survived them all, but we are weary. We must waste the time and strength of our young men to guard the northern border when they ought to be adding to our wealth by crafting goods and tilling fields and tending sheep.”
Living could be dangerous in Ga’af Shammal. Raiding barbarians sacked towns and stole livestock. They did not attempt to take the land, only to take from its people the fruits of it and their labors.
“You have an army, glorious Sheyqa,” al-Arroun continued, “mounted on strong horses.”
“Ayia, I do,” Mirzah told him. “And you propose what, precisely?”
Alessid bowed his head to her, saying, “Your permission, Sheyqa?”
Compressing her lips, she nodded briefly. He was always scrupulously polite about the fiction that she ruled Tza’ab Rih’s exterior as well as interior affairs. He knew she hated him for it.
“We are not just neighbors but kinsmen, if I am not mistaken,” he said. “There is more than one al-Arroun in the al-Gallidh line of my mother, is there not?”
“Perhaps another marriage can be arranged,” Mirzah said cuttingly. “We have one or two daughters yet unwed, do we not, husband?”
Alessid forced a noncommittal smile onto his face. Mirzah seemed to care less and less about the manners she showed him.
Al-Arroun’s eyes—dark green, legacy no doubt of some invading barbarian ancestor he was ashamed to acknowledge—had rounded like dinner plates with the prospect of alliance with the al-Ma’aliq. “It would not need that,” he said hastily, “to bind our loyalty. We have all of us talked long and worriedly about this. There are those who dislike the prospect of becoming part of your realm—no insult to Your Highnesses intended. But they dislike even more seeing their houses burned and their work destroyed and their sons carrying swords. If it is agreeable to you, we would welcome you as our Sheyqa.”
And so it was that Mirzah went to Ga’af Shammal, and met her new people, and set with her own hands the boundary stones that marked the borders. Alessid and five hundred of his cavalry went with her, and two hundred laborers to construct barracks in ten different locations, and ten Haddiyat of the Shagara to work the runes and icons that would seal the safety of Tza’ab Rih on this new borderland.
Some weeks after their return to their palace in Hazganni, a curious incident occurred. The chattering fountain in the chambers Alessid had created for Mirzah, and which she never used or even visited, suddenly stopped working. This was due, said the annoyed Master of the Household, to little Sheyqir Zakim, youngest of Alessid’s grandsons. An energetic to
ddler, he was into everything and usually able to get himself out of it. This time, however, he had decided to bathe his puppy in the shallow fountain pool, and the resulting combination of soap, fur, and a brush that shed most of its bristles had proved fatal to the delicate mechanism. The trouble was that the specifications had been lost, and the artisan who had designed the fountain was long dead. The waters would never play in the same fashion as before.
“Don’t distress yourself,” Alessid reassured him. “It doesn’t really matter exactly how the water dribbles, does it?”
“But, al-Ma’aliq, there is the commission!” When Alessid looked a question at him, he went on, “From Sheyqa Ra’abi, to make for her husband’s exalted mother a book of pictures showing the whole of the palace. It is for the anniversary of the Sheyqa’s ascent to the Moonrise Throne, and it must be finished, it must!” He paced the carpets of Alessid’s maqtabba and fretted as if the fountain had deliberately betrayed him. “Al-Ma’aliq, I appeal to you!”
Alessid knew who must be doing the drawings: Mirzah’s brother Fadhil. He was Haddiyat like the man he had been named for, and at forty-two years old, Acuyib had been kind to him: His age showed not in stiffened joints or wrinkled skin but only in the pure white of his hair and a slight impairment of his hearing. Otherwise, he looked nearly the same as on that long-ago day when he had taken Alessid to Mirzah’s tent to be married. Still, Alessid could not help but contrast Fadhil’s age with his own vigorous prime, though he was only a year the younger. In the spring of last year Fadhil had given over governance of the seaside dawa’an sheymma to a younger healer, retiring not to his tribe’s tents but to his sister’s palace. And in his comparative idleness—there were always sniffles and scrapes and strains and sprains to be treated among the hundreds living here—he had learned from Jemilha how to draw.
She was very good. He was even better. Her work was careful and deliberate. His was instinctive, as if the pen and ink had been waiting for him and him alone. Discovery of this new talent so late in his life was a delightful surprise, and he had taken the likenesses of all the family, illustrated books for the children, and begun a series of landscape studies. He was the natural choice to prepare this very personal gift for Sheyqa Sayyida.
Fadhil laughed when Alessid told him of the Master’s anguish. “I was saving all the fountains for last, you know,” he confided as he opened the leather case containing his drawings. “Water at play is difficult. I’d almost rather draw each grain of sand in a storm! But I think I recall enough of how that one danced.”
The illustrations were exquisite. Every leaf on every tree; each smooth cobble in the courtyards; all the delicate shadows and radiant light caught like an indrawn breath of delight on paper.
The drawing of pictures was not a Shagara art. Indeed, such impulses had always found expression in abstract pattern and ornamentation rather than faithful depiction of scenes or people. Signs and symbols, and the graceful script of The Lessons, these things were common decoration in the homes of Tza’ab Rih. Leyliah had considered this and in typical fashion had decided why it was so.
“If it is not small and portable, the Seven Names have no use for it,” she told Alessid. “Look at that huge leather book my son is assembling! Can you imagine every family lugging something like that from camp to camp, adding to it, creating others through the generations? No, such things are for people who settle in towns, and have money to pay for them, and leisure to contemplate them, and don’t have to pack them up and carry them!”
“But—”
“Yes, I know,” she said before Alessid could fully form the thought, let alone voice it. “My answer to that is that in the distant past all the Names in this land—not just the Seven remaining in the desert, but all of them, Alessid—everyone lived according to the old ways. Some of them decided to stay in one place or another, and that was how Sihabbah and Hazganni and all the other towns were established. But people obviously retained the habits of travel, even though they traveled no longer. Besides, there is the question of materials. Parchment can be written on and scraped clean over and over—and Acuyib knows there are enough sheep and goats to provide it. But paper? Hideously expensive.” She eyed him with the sudden sparkle of a smile that made her look half her age. “Fadhil is lucky that his sister is so very rich that when he makes a mistake or is dissatisfied with his work, he has only to rip the paper up or toss it in the fire.”
Recalling his days of schooling—the tedium of having to scrape his faulty script off a parchment page so he could correct his mistakes was equal to the embarrassment of knowing that the action brayed his errors—Alessid was pleased all over again that he had made so wise a trade agreement with the barbarian realm of Qaysh. An enviable land, Qaysh was so lushly forested that trees could heedlessly be harvested for the production of paper.
A few days after Fadhil started on his depictions of the various fountains, he came to dinner one night with a bandage around his hand. “I was in my rooms, sharpening the pen to get the finer lines right, and the knife slipped,” he explained. “I’m afraid I bled all over the drawing of that fountain in the tiled garden. But don’t worry, I made another.”
“I shall be interested to see it,” Mirzah said at once, with a poisonously sweet sidelong glance at Alessid. “I’ve forgotten how many years it’s been since I was in that part of the palace.”
The next morning it was discovered that the broken fountain had sprung back to life. But the morning after that it was silent and still once more. No one noticed, except for the Master of the Household and the workers he shouted at—for Fadhil had unexpectedly died during the night.
Mirzah refused to leave her chambers. Alessid knew she mourned not just her brother but her remaining Haddiyat son, even though Kemmal was still alive and well and strong. Impatient with her obstinate determination to suffer, Alessid left her to it. She could accomplish her goal much better without him.
The morning after Fadhil’s death, Leyliah prepared to take her son’s body back to the desert. She invited Alessid to help her sort through Fadhil’s possessions for remembrances to distribute among those he loved.
“I don’t know why it happened,” she fretted, folding and refolding tunics, shirts, trousers. “He was always well, wasn’t he? A healthy little boy, and even as he grew older it never seemed as though he was growing old.”
Alessid busied himself packing books that would be added to his own libraries—for the Shagara did not haul books from camp to camp any more than they did big leatherbound folders of artwork. He said nothing to Leyliah, but he was thinking that with the death of her adored son, she seemed all at once to have grown old.
“Something hidden,” she went on broodingly, “something without symptoms . . . such things are not unknown, of course, but I wish I knew . . . I wish I had been here with him . . .”
He glanced around, astonished to hear tears in her voice. But she was dry-eyed, self-disciplined as always. He wished Mirzah could summon up the same control. Ra’abi had told him that her weeping was the worried talk of the palace.
To Leyliah he murmured, “It was very quick, I was told. A servant had brought qawah only moments before and hadn’t even reached the stairs before she met a messenger in the hallway.” What he didn’t mention was that however swiftly death had come upon Fadhil, it had not been painless. The messenger, receiving no answer to his knock, had debated a moment whether or not to enter. A cry and a clatter from within decided him. Sprawled before the blazing hearth was Fadhil, already dead, an expression of appalling agony on his face. “And the oddest thing, al-Ma’aliq—I didn’t like to talk of this, either, not in front of his mother and the Sheyqa, but—” The messenger twisted his fingers together. “Both his hands were reaching toward the fire—like claws, as a heat-maddened man would grope his way toward water in the desert.”
Why there had been a fire in the hearth in late summer was obvious to Alessid now. There were scraps of paper in the grate. Fadhil had been cl
eaning out his sketches, tossing into the flames those he didn’t like or couldn’t use. As Leyliah went through her son’s jewelry coffer, Alessid crouched down and picked up the few remaining bits of scorched paper. A horse’s head and part of the neck, the windblown mane much drawn-over, as if he couldn’t get it quite right. The flow of a curtain drawn again and again, each one different, as if recording the shift of the breeze against the silk. The first tiled tiers of a fountain pool, which Alessid reluctantly recognized, a few stray droplets caught gleaming, the paper discolored by some brownish stain. A man’s and a woman’s clasped hands, with the beginning of a verse from The Lessons scrawled below (“Let the woman and the man live with and for each other—”). Alessid could not help but note the tenderness of that drawing, and wondered all at once if Fadhil had ever loved a woman. If he had ever regretted not having a child.
“What are those?” Leyliah asked.
She was standing right beside him, and only a lifetime of self-control prevented him from flinching his startlement. He showed her the little handful of half-burned drawings. “He was talented,” he murmured. “Very talented.”
“Yes.” She glanced through them, lingering over the partial depiction of the fountain. Plucking it from his fingers, she said, “This must be the one he spoiled by bleeding on it. I must look through the finished pieces, to see if he managed to do a fair drawing for Sheyqa Sayyida.”
She turned away, the blood-stained drawing still in her hand, and opened the leather book. Muttering something about better light, she swung the book around on the table, and put her back to him. Only when her shoulders began to tremble did he understand. He tossed the remnants of Fadhil’s art back onto the hearth and let himself silently out of the room.
With her surviving children well married—all but Mairid, and Kemmal who had long been divorced—the Sheqya Mirzah applied herself more and more to governance of a realm that now stretched from the Barrens to the sea. Al-Ma’aliq turned his own attentions to study of the barbarian lands, for he wished to increase trade and make Tza’ab Rih even wealthier.