by Melanie Rawn
Miqelo, his son Tanielo, and four young men who regularly guarded them on trading journeys: These were all that stood between the Shagara and anyone who wanted a look at what might be in their wagons. The women, some of whom had never been farther from the fortress than the riverbank, wept or fretted or rode in stoic silence as their characters prompted. The boys, resentful at first that they were not allowed to stay and fight the invaders, awoke to the unaccustomed freedom of travel and could barely be restrained from galloping off in all directions. Qamar and Tanielo spent a lot of time chasing after them.
On the fourth day—one day after the proposed day of decision about their destination—Miqelo approached Qamar and Solanna very early in the morning and asked them to walk with him for a way.
“The more I think about it, the less I like it,” he said. “We all know what will happen to those we left at the fortress. We have with us the hope of the Shagara. Those boys must be protected at all costs.”
“I recommend poppy syrup in their morning qawah,” Solanna said. “It’ll make it easier to throw them in the wagons.”
“I’ve been tempted,” he replied with a brief smile. “But it seems to me that we have two separate aims. First is to keep these boys and their mothers safe. The other is the work you must do, Qamar. I think we must divide our group in different directions.”
It was decided that the women and boys would travel as far and as fast as possible, find a place to hide—though not the box canyon recommended by Solanna’s aunt—and wait until it was safe to return to Cazdeyya. The guards and Tanielo would go with them. All of them, schooled by Solanna in the basics of the family, would call themselves “Grijalva.”
“Our tile makers have gone to many places,” she explained. “Some of them came home, some stayed. You will be refugees from the conflict, returning to our native villages for safety. They will take you in. Your Shagara coloring can be explained by a generation or so of marriages in foreign towns.” But they were never to mention her name, for the letters she had written earlier in the year had yielded no help they could actually use.
That left Qamar, Solanna, Miqelo, and a woman named Leisha, who volunteered to assist Solanna, and her thirteen-year-old son, Nassim, to assist Qamar. Leisha was quite frank about her reasons: she was convinced that she and her son would have a much better chance of survival with Qamar.
“I think,” she said, “that Miqelo will work very, very hard to be sure you are not found.”
The fourth day was spent making arrangements. Wagons were unloaded, the goods sorted evenly, and packed again. By sundown all was complete, and Miqelo recommended that everyone sleep soundly, for the next days would be difficult.
Qamar sat cross-legged in the dirt beside a small cookfire, listening to the sounds of the camp settling. Familiar to him from his year in the desert, yet there were differences—primary among them being the rustle and slur of the tall pine trees. He reached over to stir the pot of qawah, pleased to find there was still some left for Miqelo, who came to talk with him every night before rolling himself in a blanket to sleep.
Solanna joined Qamar by the fire, kneeling at his side. She had abandoned long skirts, as most of the other women had done, for riding clothes: snug trousers beneath a tunic that fell to midthigh, cut almost like a workingman’s smock. The outfit concealed all feminine curves, and she had concealed her hair within a scarf to protect it from the dust of the road. For all her blonde hair, she looked like a woman of Tza’ab Rih.
Miqelo crouched down on the other side of the fire, not looking at either of them. Qamar was about to offer hot qawah when all at once Miqelo tossed a little woolen pouch into the heart of the fire. His dark eyes fixed on Solanna’s face with a piercing intensity. Smoke billowed up from the fire, as fragrant as it was stinging. Qamar coughed. Solanna gasped—and in doing so inhaled a full lungful of smoke.
“Forgive me,” Miqelo said softly. “But I must know.”
Belatedly, Qamar recognized the scents. Herbs, some spices to disguise the odor, scorched wool from the little bag Miqelo had stored them in. Only a few times through the years had he smelled this exact combination, and the recollection made him want to grab Miqelo by the throat.
Too late. Solanna was trembling beside him. He tried to put an arm around her but she shook him off, scuttled sideways, and began to rock back and forth as she stared blindly into the fire. No, not blindly, but what she saw was not the flames.
She did this rarely and unwillingly, because the future ought to be opaque to all but Acuyib in His Wisdom. Sight frightened her. It also compelled her—as it had when she had first come into his room on a rainy night long ago, to see if he was truly the one she had envisioned. That seeing, undertaken reluctantly at Princess Baeatrizia’s plea, had been of him, but old and with scars on his face—or so she had said. He had come to believe they were only the lines and wrinkles of great age. Another time, she had taken pity on Miqelo’s dying wife and tried to see whether or not he would be home in time to bid her farewell. She had not quite lied to her friend, saying that Miqelo would be at her side very soon. She had chosen not to mention that she had seen him beside a casket being lowered into the ground.
Her other seeings, those unaided by the herbs, were always spontaneous and always of that exact moment in some other location. The hand she had seen caressing a map, the hand wearing a ring of Shagara making that could only have been taken from the finger of a dead man, had been illuminated by the setting sun; the vision had come to her as dusk fell over the Shagara fortress. The seeing that had shown her Qamar himself, stealing from the maqtabba in Joharra, had come to her—as nearly as they could tell—at the precise moment he put his hand on the money drawer and opened it.
But these visions, the ones prompted by the smoke—they were always of the future. As she shivered and swayed with the smoke swirling around her, Qamar glared across the fire at Miqelo.
“I must know,” the other man repeated.
“How kind of your brother Yberrio to anticipate your need,” he snapped. “Did he prepare it himself, or have a healer do it? Ayia, did he remember to send along something to help her through the next day or two, as she returns to her right mind?”
“The hawk,” Solanna whispered, arms wrapped around herself. “The hawk flies from the empty mountain—across the river—”
Miqelo leaned toward her, his face obscured by flames and smoke. “Who is still alive?” he demanded. “Tell me what the hawk sees—”
“Be silent!” Qamar snarled.
Solanna heard neither of them. “Tents . . . carpets . . . the river and the hill . . . the white horses and—and—”
“And what?” Miqelo urged.
“—the book, the book—by lantern light—the boy has come, he’s finishing—”
“Qamar’s book? What boy? A Shagara, to take and preserve the book? Do you see our success? Solanna, answer me!”
But her eyes rolled up in her head. Qamar caught her as she collapsed toward the fire, barely keeping her from the flames. Without another word he gathered her into his arms and rose, carrying her to the deeper darkness beneath the trees. There he held her until dawn, ignoring the sounds of bridles and harness as the others made ready to go separate ways. At length all was silent. Qamar cradled his unconscious wife against his chest and did not stir from his place beneath the trees.
The boy Nassim eventually called out very softly, “Sheyqir, Miqelo and the others have departed. If the lady is well enough, we ought to go. Sheyqir?”
He rose to his feet, still with Solanna in his arms—and almost stumbled as his stiff knees grated with pain. So it was beginning for him, he thought; he could not blame this on the cold, for it was high summer, nor on the damp, for it had not rained in a month. It was beginning.
“Where is Tanielo?” he asked.
“Waiting with the horses. The others—”
“I don’t care about the others.” So Miqelo had assigned his son to protect Qamar, had he? Unab
le to face him or Solanna after what he’d forced upon her with the fire and smoke? “Bring my horse. We cannot ride far today, but we must ride.”
Tanielo was wise enough to stay as far as he could from Qamar. By midafternoon, his whole body aching now with the strain of holding Solanna secure in the saddle before him, Qamar was more than ready to call a halt. But this morning’s sharp ache had warned him that from now on he would have to learn how to hide pain. So it was nearly twilight before he reined in and told Nassim to bring Tanielo to him.
“Your father was my friend,” he said flatly. “I will treat you with the respect I would show to the son of a friend who has died. Because he is dead to me now, for what he did last night. Don’t even think of doing the same. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Qamar.”
“Sheyqir. You will address me as Sheyqir. All of you will. Bring Leisha to me now, and tell Nassim to make camp.”
Just after dark, Solanna woke. Qamar was still holding her, dozing at her side beneath a light blanket. That day they had climbed far enough so that the air was thinner, colder, sharper with the scent of pine. It reminded him of his journeys to Sihabbah.
“How much did I say aloud?”
Qamar jerked awake, arms tightening around her. “Don’t worry about that now. You need to eat.”
“Tomorrow morning,” she murmured. “Water will do, tonight.”
As he sat up and reached for the nearby jug of stream water, he said, “I can’t believe Miqelo did that to you.”
“It was wrong of him, but I understand it. Did I say anything?”
“Something about a hawk.” He handed her the water jug and wished there was a fire nearby, so he could see her expression.
“Nothing else?”
“No.”
“Good.” She drank long and deep, then set the jug aside. “Miqelo wouldn’t have liked it.”
He waited. At length she pushed her tangled hair from her face and sighed.
“The Sheyqa’s army was camped on a wide, flat plain. It was autumn—the trees were red-gold and the river was shrunken from its banks.”
“White horses, you said.”
“Yes. The—what did you call them? The Qoundi Ammar. Many tents, many flags. One tent especially, red with gold, on the highest ground, with carpets flung all around it, as if to spare someone actually touching the earth—”
“—with her exalted feet,” he finished. “The Sheyqa’s tent, then.”
“Likely.” She sipped more water. “There was another army, behind a hill to the north. Cazdeyyan, Ibrayanzan, Qayshi—but some were golden-skinned. Tza’ab, Shagara—” She shook her head. “There were no walls to be toppled. Only the plain, and the two armies. Thousands of men, thousands.”
Again he waited. When he could bear it no longer, he asked, “What did you see by lantern light?”
Solanna gave a start of surprise. “Did I say that?”
He nodded. “And something about the book.”
Her smile was weary and triumphant. “Your book, meya dolcho. I saw your book!”
Then she had seen success. He smiled back and kissed both her hands.
It was still high summer when they rode into a sanctuary that remains unlocated to this day. Miqelo Shagara had learned of it from his father, and he had told his son, and it was to this place that Tanielo guided the Diviner so that the great work might be accomplished.
Meantime, the armies of the Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar continued their assault on the land and its people. Towns and cities fell. Joharra remained untouched. The march northward to Cazdeyya was accomplished.
Some have said that Qamar hid himself and his wife and servants in the deepest reaches of the mountains out of fear. This is a lie, and any account of his life that asserts otherwise is false.
—HAZZIN AL-JOHARRA, Deeds of Il-Ma’anzuri, 813
24
Qamar was sure that it would not happen that autumn. The assembly of so many soldiers from so many places simply wasn’t possible in so brief a time. It might be the next autumn, or the one after that. But it would not happen this year.
This did not mean he worked any less persistently at the task he now believed Acuyib meant for him to accomplish. And if it was destined that he do this thing, then it was also destined that, like his grandfather and great-grandfather before him, he would succeed. Solanna had seen it.
The pocket in the mountains where Tanielo guided them was inhabited only by sheep. But there were stone huts already built for the convenience and comfort of the shepherds when they came at irregular intervals to check on their flocks. Within these snug little shelters were sacks of flour, dried fruits, and other provisions. There was even a small garden planted with root vegetables that were evidently unappetizing to the native animals, for no fencing had been placed around it.
Qamar took the largest of these huts for his workroom. The second he and Solanna used as living quarters; the third, which contained the provisions and a cooking hearth, was gradually expanded over the summer to provide sleeping room for Leisha, Nissim, and Tanielo. Qamar tried to ignore the noise as a wall was knocked down and the stones rearranged to form a foundation for the wooden slats of the disassembled wagon. But sometimes he needed absolute quiet, and took a sheaf of notes, a pen, and a bottle of ordinary ink and walked up to the narrowest part of the tiny valley, where a spring rippled down the rocks to a small pool. Seating himself beside the stream that whispered into the valley, he would mark off what was essential, what was important, what could be included if there was room, and what could be eliminated without damaging the whole. As the summer went on, he had to become more ruthless in his editing. The notes made over a dozen and more years had been distilled into sharp summations of his classes, his talks with fellow Haddiyat, other books, and his own experimentations. But he did not possess the luxury of infinite pages within his green leather book. He must restrict the final text to what was vital.
It was occasionally maddening. It was always frustrating. And each evening when the light grew too dim for him to work outside in the fresh air, he had Tanielo move his table back indoors and light the lamps, so that he might work well into the night.
When they first arrived, there was a particular notch in the cliffs where the sun disappeared. As the days shortened and the sun vanished earlier and earlier, farther and farther north of that notch, Qamar counted the pages he had written that day and began to despair. He knew he would finish, for Solanna had seen it, but he was afraid he would not be able to include the finer details, the subtler points. He wanted to finish quickly, because he had it in mind to have Nissim begin making a copy as soon as possible. And after that, another copy, and another. It would keep them busy during the winter when snow would trap them inside the huts. As his knees twinged more severely and more often, he began to fear that as the nights turned colder, the ache would move into his fingers. He told himself that the stiffness in his back was due only to long days bent over the manuscript. And if he must squint to see into the distance, to mark the movement of the sun farther and farther from that notch, it was only eyestrain from reading too much.
There was no word from the larger world until the shepherds came to attend to their flocks. From these men there was no astonishment that someone else was living in their little valley, no anger that their supplies had been used. On the day Qamar and his little group had ridden in, Tanielo had pointed out a series of wind chimes fashioned out of tin hanging from sapling pines: hazziri. Qamar had renewed them, added to them, and in some cases improved upon them, to ward away thieves, wolves, and lions. So the shepherds, already familiar with Shagara magic, had no complaints. They were getting more Shagara magic for free.
From these shepherds Qamar learned that Sheyqa Nizhria controlled Ibrayanza. She controlled Shagara. She controlled the passes that led to Tza’ab Rih. She controlled half the length of the great river, and portions of Elleon. She did not control Joharra, nor yet all of Cazdeyya.
“But there’
s two reasons for that,” the most talkative of the shepherds told Qamar over an outdoor fire the evening they arrived. “That filhio do’—” Breaking off, he bowed slightly to Solanna and Leisha. “Forgive me, ladies, my mother would scrub my tongue with lye for my manners.”
Another of the men grunted. “We don’t spend much time around decent women.”
“Eiha,” the first went on, “Sheyqir Allil, he’s kept Joharra out of it by keeping Joharra in it, if you see what I mean. His soldiers are wearing the colors of Rimmal Madar. They only change back to their own shirts once the Sheyqa’s army has moved on. And then—surprise! The nicer bits of Ibrayanza and Shagarra are redrawn on the maps as part of Joharra. He’s acting for the Empress, of course, cursed be her name.”
Tanielo asked quickly, “And Cazdeyya?”
A shrug. “The Sheyqa is about halfway up the great river, camped in a huge red tent all hung about with gold and silk. Her feet never touch the bare ground, they say, for all the carpets flung about.”
“She’s not in one of the palaces?” Leisha asked.
“You’d think there’d be enough to choose from, wouldn’t you, that she could live in one of them instead of a tent? But she’s taken a vow of some sort, to live as her soldiers do until she rules from Cazdeyya to Ibrayanza.” He snorted. “I’ve yet to hear that her soldiers dine off golden plates!”
“For myself,” said the oldest of the shepherds as he politely poured out qawah for them all, “I think she has a yearning to rule more toward the south, if you see what I mean.”
“That has always been my thought,” said Qamar. He had given them only his first name, and let them assume he was called Shagara just as Tanielo and Leisha and Nissim were. Ayia, how very astonished they would be if they heard his full name—and how very dead they would make him within moments of hearing it.