by Melanie Rawn
Solanna was watching him through narrowed eyes. “You had a comment to make, Qamar?”
“Yes,” he said softly. “Empress Mirzah was an unhappy woman, but not for the reason you give. She . . . she very much disliked living in palaces. She missed the desert tents.” It was the truth, just not all of it.
“How would you know how she lived or how she felt about it?”
He looked her straight in the eye, and in the language of Tza’ab Rih—and of the Shagara—said, “She was my grandmother. You will excuse me, I trust. Sururi annam,” he added to the class in general and walked out.
By the time he reached his own quarters—a few twisting alleys off the big eastern courtyard, which the locals called a zoqallo—he was shaking again with anger. Acuyib curse the girl, what business did she have telling her distorted version of history? And how dare she compel him to the unspeakable vulgarity of reminding her who he was and why he knew much better than she what went on in the palaces of Tza’ab Rih? The class had watched with fascination or amusement or boredom as their varying natures prompted, but he’d sensed a flinch run through every one of them at the reminder that this charming young man who lived in their fortress and studied their ways and was a gifted Shagara male was, in fact, a sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih.
Climbing the stone stairs three at a time to his second-floor room, he slammed the door shut behind him and fell across his bed without bothering to light the candle. What was he doing here, anyway? He could be at home, lolling on silk pillows, nibbling wine-soaked pears, and his most worrisome thought would be deciding which woman to invite to his bed that night. He did not belong here. This country was not his.
He lit the bedside candle, then the three-armed branch on the desk by the window. The light would glow down into the alley. He picked up a sheaf of notes on the uses of flowering plants found above a certain altitude in the mountains, read five words, and threw it aside.
She wasn’t coming, not to apologize or to continue the argument or even to rebuke him for being rude.
He opened the folder of notes from Zario Shagara’s class and began sorting through to find the first page so he could begin copying his one- or two-word prompts into sentences that actually made sense. For a moment he thought he’d lost the sheets and cursed aloud.
She wasn’t coming.
Not that he had any reason to expect her. Still, their discussions often continued as they walked through the fortress passageways, until he took the turning that led to the eastern zoqallo. He still didn’t know exactly where she lived. And how she could possibly go home tonight and sleep after insulting him so appallingly, he really didn’t know—
Qamar’s eye and his whole mind were suddenly fixed on the single word written in very large letters on his page of notes from this morning.
WILL.
Zario had said something different when it came time for his usual cautions about blood being insufficient—and indeed completely inadequate—if the work had not been properly prepared.
“It is not the paper, nor the talishann written on it, nor the ink in which they are written, that secure the achievement of your goals. It is not even the addition of your own blood. None of these things can do what your own mind can do. You must will your work into being. You must believe that all these things so meticulously chosen shall combine at your bidding to do your will. You are the most powerful ingredient of any magic. Not just your blood, not just your knowledge, but your will.”
Qamar heard the words echo in his head. This was not something a Shagara of Tza’ab Rih would have said. They were the conduits of magic. They crafted the hazziri or concocted the medicines and took justifiable pride in their work. But they were not part of the magic. They contributed nothing of themselves except their blood. They would not agree that one man’s force of will could play even the smallest part in his creations.
Yet Zario Shagara, only two generations removed from the desert, had spoken of that very thing. Of willing one’s work into being.
Qamar happened to agree. And for the first time, he began to think that he might truly belong here. So intent was he on this thought, and others that followed after it, that he did not hear the soft, tentative tapping at his door.
Nor the less gentle knocking that followed.
He did hear a woman’s voice call out his name. He turned in his chair, wondering bemusedly why she was coming to visit him at this hour.
“Qamar—I’m sorry, all right?”
Frowning, he tried to think what she might be apologizing for.
“I shouldn’t have said that about—about the Empress.”
He remembered now. He stood, about to walk the ten paces to the door—it was a much larger room than the one he’d lived in before—when she spoke again.
“It’s just—I forget sometimes that you weren’t born here. That you’re one of them.”
He unlatched and hauled open the door. “Say that again.”
“What?”
“What you just said. Repeat it.”
“I’m sorry for what I—”
“No, not that, who cares about that? Say what you said just now.”
“That you’re one of them?”
“Exactly. I wasn’t born here. I don’t belong here. I’m one of them.” He grinned at her befuddlement. “Don’t you see? So were the Shagara when they first got here. Yet you wouldn’t call them foreigners now, would you? Different from the rest of the populace, to be sure, but not outsiders, not anymore. You originally came here to get them to work with you against the Tza’ab. That’s not something you do with people you don’t trust.”
“Thanks to your grandfather’s example!” she retorted.
“Exactly!” he said again. Then he paused, and frowned down at her. “You admit that it happened the way I said it happened?”
“I said the invasion was unprovoked and dishonorable. I said nothing about the reasons why it happened.”
Qamar laughed again. He could see things, too: long, contentious talks with this girl, arguing out the finest details and most obscure implications.
“I find nothing amusing about any of this.”
“Of course you don’t. I haven’t explained it yet.” Then he had to admit, “I’m not sure I understand much of it myself—yet.”
Solanna regarded him as if suspecting that despite all the healing Zario had done and the precautionary talishann around his room, he’d deliberately plunged head-first into a wine vat and drunk his way out, with predictable effects on his reason.
Grinning at her, he went on, “Would it help if I told you that you were right? What you said about the Tza’ab not belonging here.”
“You’re admitting to that?”
“Of course. You were right. But what came next—you were wrong, and the Shagara here are the proof. They were strangers here once. Generations ago. In the time since, they’ve married and had children with local women and men, haven’t they? Of course they have—names like ‘Zario’ and ‘Evetta’ confirm it.”
“Just because their blood is mixed with—”
“You’re not seeing it.”
She stiffened with insult, aware that he had used that word deliberately. When he laughed again, she turned for the door.
“No, wait—you haven’t heard—”
“I have heard more than enough. And I have seen more than enough as well!”
“Have you? More than me, wallowing in wine?”
And then something else occurred to him. She had seen him old. She had seen him with—what, lines on his face? White hair? She had said scars, but couldn’t they just have been wrinkles? It didn’t matter. She had seen him old.
Old!
It meant he would succeed. It had to mean that. It must meant he would grow old the way other men grew old, and if he didn’t actually conquer death, then at least he and his kind would no longer have to die too young.
“Wallowing with your whores, you mean,” she snapped. “You were disgusting, and I don
’t know why I bothered to bring you back here. Filthy from your hair to your toenails, and the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”
With difficulty he dragged his attention away from his glorious new realization. What he saw in her eyes was just as glorious. He knew that the damage of that autumn and winter was long gone. Bloodshot eyes, puffy face, thickened body—ayia, he had been ugly. But he wasn’t ugly now, and he knew it.
“Why did you bring me back here?” he asked softly. “And why do you stay?”
Her back was to him, and he spent the moments of her silence admiring the coil of pale hair at her nape and the way curling tendrils escaped down her neck.
“What else have you seen, Solanna?”
“Myself,” she whispered, not facing him. “Here. As a young woman, as I am now, and—and as a very old woman. I know what it means. I will spend most if not all my life here.” Turning, she gave an unconvincing shrug of indifference. “So it would be absurd to leave, wouldn’t it, for I will only return again. Why put myself through the bother of the long journey to my home, when I already know—”
“It’s farther to the seacoast, where I was, than it is to Cazdeyya,” he pointed out. He was enjoying this far too much, he knew, but he owed her a few moments of discomfort. Time to bring in another contender for the dominant emotion in her eyes, he told himself. “Did you see anyone with you, when you were old? Did you see me, Solanna?”
The victor turned out to be fury. He hadn’t expected that. She took the four steps separating them, slapped him full in the face, and was gone before he could do anything more than gasp.
That slap was most inconvenient to the rest of his evening. The impatient and at times fretful exploration of new and puzzling ideas was interrupted by a stinging pain every time he grinned or laughed when another suspicion became a certainty. He managed to work out quite a bit of it all the same, even while being reminded of another puzzle he had some very good ideas about how to solve. And each time he thought this, he grinned again, and laid a hand to his cheek.
What he had realized, and what became the foundation of his beliefs, was that his grandfather and great-grandfather had been correct about many things. For the thing briefly discussed with his grandsire Alessid years earlier burst into his mind, and he understood Acuyib’s meaning.
Each people, he reasoned, belonged to its own land by virtue of oneness with the soil, the air, the water, the plants and animals, becoming a part of the land and sharing in the spiritual quality unique to a particular place. Before one could truly understand and work the magic of the land, it must be in one’s blood, and one must understand it, learn its ways and moods and contours. This could take years, or generations. But it did happen, as Azzad al-Ma’aliq had come to belong to the land he served.
Kings, armies, empires—these things came and went, and they were irrelevant to the land. The round of the seasons, birth, growth, thriving, death, and rebirth—these things were the essentials. They were, as Alessid had reasoned, the balance of living in the place one knew and understood, of being part of a place and its elemental nature.
The relationship between this rich green land and its people was comparable to the correlation of the Za’ada Izim to the desert.
It remained for him to find that balance in a land new to the Tza’ab. For if his people were to endure in this new place, they must become part of the land itself.
Any recounting of the Diviner’s life that attributes to him motives other than these is a lie.
—HAZZIN AL-JOHARRA, Deeds of Il-Ma’anzuri, 813
22
Over the next years Qamar discovered several things, not all of them to do with his newfound art. He learned, for example, that a man could woo a woman with exasperation instead of exuberance, and manage it quite successfully, too.
He found out that his wife’s visions of the present were spontaneous, but that to see future events required the burning of a complexity of herbs that sometimes worked and sometimes did not but that always left her helpless with exhaustion for a full day afterward. When he had refined enough of his ideas to share them with her—knowing that imprecision would only annoy her and leave him open to criticism—she commented that by this way of thinking, her susceptibility to the smoke of these herbs seemed just one more way the land provided for the people who belonged to it.
He agreed with her and added the observation to the notes he was assembling. For the most important thing of all that he discovered was that he must learn everything—everything—about this land before he could truly begin what he saw as the great work of his life. The work that would mean his life.
Upon their marriage, Qamar and Solanna were assigned three rooms on the second floor of a building overlooking the west zoqallo. It was a corner apartment, with the reception room and Qamar’s study—which he persisted in calling the maqtabba—facing south, a coveted advantage; they were given the chambers only because Zario Shagara, just before he died, asked that his rooms should become theirs as his wedding gift to them. Their bedroom window had a clear view of the western mountains. It became their habit, on clear days, to sit and watch the sunset together. Qamar both loved and dreaded that little ritual. Each nightfall meant that soon he would be in bed with Solanna—but each also meant that another day had passed without his solving more than a tiny fraction of the puzzle.
They had also inherited all of Zario’s books. These included volumes that were relics of the exile, made of parchment in thin, light leather covers, bound in the outdated method of sewing together the tops of the pages. These days books were assembled with the stitching on the left. It was a small, eccentric collection, mainly poetry, and included the collected works of Sheyqir Reihan al-Ammarizzad.
“It’s easy to tell which poems he wrote before, and which after,” Solanna remarked one night. He had been teaching her to read and write the more ceremonial version of his language, the style used in all poetry. “I expect you have no need to ask‘Before and after what?’”
“None at all.” He did not look up from drawing acorns. A dozen types of oak trees grew in the foothills, and he was discovering that each had subtly different properties.
“Neither do you feel any remorse for what your great-grandfather did to him.”
“None at all,” he said again.
“Using Shagara magic to help him do it.”
He set down his pen. He recognized that note in her voice, the one that meant she would pursue the topic until he answered in a way that either satisfied her or angered her so much that she left the room. “Would you like me to write him a letter of apology? He’s dead. What happened is what happened. Nothing I can do, say, think, or feel can possibly make any difference.”
“It might, if you knew what his kinswoman has it in mind to do.”
Frowning, he stoppered his ink bottle—he would get no more work done this afternoon—and said, “What have you heard?”
“Miqelo returned from Joharra yesterday.”
She put the book aside and began pushing hairpins back into the coil at her nape. It was a very hot summer day, one of the few each year when Qamar regretted the south-facing windows that were exposed to fierce sunlight from dawn to twilight. The heat rarely bothered him, but Solanna suffered terribly on days such as these. Not that she would countenance a change of clothing to the practical silks and tunics worn in Tza’ab Rih; that would be conceding to those she considered her enemies. Qamar never quite understood how she could love him, seeing as how he was technically her enemy—but he never said a word about it. His mother would have told him he was learning wisdom, and about time, too.
“What does Miqelo have to say?” he asked.
“That there is a new Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar.”
“New? Kerrima is dead?”
“This winter. Someone called Nizhria sits on the Moonrise Throne now. A cousin of yours in some way, but I’m not sure how.”
“Kerrima’s younger sister. And before you say it, I am quite sure the death w
as not a natural one. They’re worse than spiders, those al-Ammarizzad. They not only eat their own young, they devour anything they can find.”
“I thought the name was al-Ma’aliq these days, not al-Ammarizzad?”
“Only part of it.” He rose and went to the cupboard where fruit juice was kept cool by their daily summer ration of hoarded winter ice. “Considering the woman Nizhria’s name recalls, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she gets rid of it. And, to be honest, it’s been a very long time since any al-Ma’aliq set foot in Rimmal Madar. The people will have forgotten us, I think. If Kerrima, who was a good friend to my grandfather and my Aunt Ra’abi, did not die a natural death, then I suspect it was done by the faction at the palace more loyal to the al-Ammarizzad than to the al-Ma’aliq.”
Solanna had finished repinning her hair, and now shook her head in amazement—an action that threatened to loosen the hairpins again. “How do you keep track of them all?” she asked, accepting the clay cup of juice he gave her. “No, never mind, it makes my head ache even to think about it. And it doesn’t matter anyway. Nizhria has decided that our land was so easy for the Tza’ab to conquer, surely her armies will do even better. From what Miqelo heard of the talk in Joharra, they fear she may have it in mind to use us as a base for conquering Tza’ab Rih itself. Or it may be simply that she hates the idea of the Empress owning more land than she does.”
Qamar hid a smile behind his cup. Solanna would never accept the notion that the Empress of Tza’ab Rih was her mother-in-law. “Has Nizhria taken into account that she could be fighting both the locals and the Tza’ab here?”
It turned out that she had. Qamar couldn’t decide if the new Sheyqa was worthy or unworthy of the woman for whom she was named. Nizhria certainly had the acquisitive instincts, but she was also about as subtle as an avalanche.