I hesitate at the cave mouth. Inside, it is cold. Wet. Dark. A screen for the bloody shadow-puppet show of my unexorcised memories. Hisham died in a cave like this one. The Jesuits chained him to the wall. In the Cave of the Mad, they said, the healing powers of the saint would save him.
The saint did not save him.
“The beautiful Zahara,” says the man who can only be Prince Fakr-ad-Din. Each time I have come before, it has been full dark, and the prince has been engaged in secret meetings, but his supporters do not dare visit in daylight.
He takes my hand, kisses it. Christian women permit such things. My mother would have clawed out his eyes.
The prince has a woman’s height. He has a curling white moustache and a waist-length beard that obscures the thread-of-gold embroidery decorating his silks. He carries a lantern in his left hand. A scimitar hangs at his waist. “It is a gift of heaven to meet you at last,” he says. “My nephew told me the story of how he shot one of your goats. Instead of bringing the Janissaries, you vowed to keep us from starving, and here you are, true to your vow. Is your husband in good health?”
God loves Fakr-ad-Din.
“My husband is blessed with excellent health,” I say by rote.
See me, God. I give bread and cheese to the one that you love. Will you give me some crumb in return? Or has my baptism truly cleaved me from you? Can you truly be turned aside by water?
“And your children?”
“My daughter is also blessed, your Highness. Is your royal family well?”
There it is. The mouth slackened by distress. The tic in one eye. The breath in his lungs that is suddenly not enough. Finally, he wets his lips and speaks.
“My… my nephew is well. Nephew!”
The middle-aged cavalryman who killed my goat comes out of a side-passage. He carries a Turkish bow and a musket. It has been three months since I first saw him and though he still wears the same brown tunic, baggy black trousers, and knee-high boots as he did on that morning, his neat black beard is no longer neat.
He quirks an eyebrow that is sliced in half by an old scimitar scar.
“Yes, Uncle?”
“You did not tell me that the talented Zahara is also a musician. You did not tell me she carries an oud.”
“Do you think music is prudent in this place, Uncle?”
“She will play for me in the inner chamber. My soul is weary.”
“As you wish, Uncle.”
If Fakr-ad-Din fears his father’s demons, it does not show. He leads me deeper and deeper into the cave. My foot slips on uneven ground and the jostling wakes Ghalya fully. Though soldiers cannot, in general, be trusted, I have no fear that these will harm her. They depend on me.
“I don’t like the dark,” she says in a frightened voice by my ear.
“Hush, little squirrel,” I say, struggling wearily to find my balance. “I will play some soothing music, soon.”
“But Aunty Rafqa says–”
When we reach the inner chamber, I let Ghalya slip down to the carpet. She stretches, but stays hiding behind me, peeping around me as I unsling the oud case and sit with my legs crossed beneath my many-layered skirts. White beards frighten her.
“What would you hear, your highness?” I ask.
“You hold your head tilted back,” Fakr-ad-Din observes lightly. “You wore a tantoura when you learned to play.”
“Conversion is permitted, O Prince of the Druze.”
“This Prince of the Druze only wonders if the talented Zahara knows any verses of the Koran.”
“Yes. Of course.”
I begin to play, with the risha I made from my husband’s breastbone, and to sing, with a voice that the Sunnis would say is heretical. To them, the voice of a woman is the voice of temptation. And not just to them; Hisham’s sister Rafqa is Christian, but she never passes up a chance to declare to me that my singing is a sin and a scandal.
The Muwahhidun, on the other hand, do not care, so long as the songs are not sung to outsiders.
Until al-Hakim returns, I think, the curtain is drawn, the door closed, the ink has dried up in the inkwell, and the pen is broken.
At first, I think the howling is the howling of my husband as the demons torture him in the Cave of the Mad. Then I realise it is Ghalya.
“No!” she scolds, little fists on my back. “Aunty Rafqa says God wishes women to be silent. You must not sing God’s songs, Mama!”
“Ghalya,” I hiss. “You are angering the prince! Be quiet or I shall slap you, hard!”
But the prince is smiling.
“Never mind,” he says. “Hush, child. Hush, Zahara. It was wrong of me to ask. You are a Christian woman now. I only thought to distract myself from dark thoughts with prayers from my childhood. They make me feel a boy again, playing warlord in my father’s jeweled costumes.”
I understand with a thrill that this is the key to my new song. The black, unshelled kernel of his grief. If he will only show it to me, I can weave it into my protective music. Then all I will have to do is steal one of his son’s bones for my new risha, and Ghalya will be safe.
No pine nut was ever shelled without first hitting it with a rock.
“Did your son dress in your robes, as a boy?” I ask with false hesitancy, my heart galloping.
“Yes, he did,” Fakr-ad-Din says hoarsely.
“In your castle by the sea?”
“No. In the Palace of the Moon. He laughed, even when he grew tangled in them and fell. He cut his lip. Kept laughing, even as he bled.”
“Is that where you buried him?” I prompt softly, dangerously.
But Fakr-ad-Din’s gaze is vacant. He travels along the river of his grief. I must put my waterwheel into that flow. I must harness the power of it.
The Prince’s nephew returns and the moment is lost. He guides me out of the Prince’s inner sanctum and pays me for the food in gold coins I can never use, never show to anyone. I carry them back down the cliff face with my dangle-legged daughter, my oud, and my frustration. I am so close.
Next time. Next time, he will tell me.
When I get back to the stone hut in the pine forest, half my goats have been trussed and slaughtered. My jars of flour and oil have been loaded onto donkeys for transport to the town.
Bristling with edged weapons and hostility, the Janissaries are waiting.
* * *
The pasha’s narrow face is impatient.
He taps his palm with a riding crop. The end of his jewelled turban tucks under his grey-bearded chin. The beard boasts to all who see him that though he leads the uniformed Janissaries, he is not of them.
He is a pasha of Damascus, a Muslim and a free man, not a Christian conscript sworn to celibacy, trained for war, and severely disciplined since childhood to owe his loyalty to the Sultan alone.
“I told you, I haven’t seen anyone,” I say again, my throat shrivelled with thirst. Forced to kneel before the pasha with a yatagan sword resting lightly on the nape of my neck, I glance at the huddle of villagers behind the pasha’s retinue, Ghalya among them, restrained tightly by her terrified Aunty Rafqa and Uncle Estefan.
“Where is your husband?” the pasha demands. “Consorting with the rebels, no doubt.”
“He is a woodcutter, my lord! He is cutting wood in the forest!”
“We will see. Take the instrument from her.”
The sword at my back slides beneath the knot of the sling. If they take the oud, it will mean my daughter’s death. My fingers fly over my shoulder to the knot, to seize the sling, and are sliced through for their troubles.
My blood is everywhere. Men are shouting. I am frantic.
“No, my lord! Please, my lord!”
Somebody kicks me between the shoulder blades. Somebody else drags me away from the green where the Pasha holds court. I smell incense and fowl droppings. My right hand, before my eyes, is a fountain of red. The fingers do not function.
They have taken my oud. I will never play again.
Sons like Rafqa and Estefan’s son. His name was Yusuf. Now it is Mehmed, but I still recognise him. I remember how Rafqa cut her hair when he was taken, as though he had died. Now, his face swims in front of mine.
Young. Handsome. A bare, cleft chin.
“Wind it tighter to stop the blood,” he tells Rafqa. “I will beg my lord for the use of his Jewish physician.”
I realise Rafqa is ruining her best striped sash by binding my bleeding hand with it. Estefan looms behind her, muffling Ghalya’s face against his paunch.
“Kill her,” I gasp to my dead husband’s brother. “Kill her, or find a way to bring my oud back to me.”
“You should not have been carrying it, Zahara,” Estefan answers, stricken. “You gave up women’s witchcraft when you married Hisham. Music is for men only.”
“My son risks his life for you,” Rafqa says, crushing my hand between both of hers. “He betrays a lingering affection for his former family simply by speaking to his own mother, and now–”
I watch her mouth moving but the sounds lose their meaning. In the white clouds overhead, I see the shapes of snow-covered pine trees, and Hisham standing beneath them, swinging Ghalya into the sky. I see him drinking from the mineral spring.
Then the spring dries up. Hisham digs a well behind the stone hut. Down in the dark, that is where the demons find him. They slip from the stone into his bones. They make him scream and writhe.
The Jesuits hear him in passing. They hold long conversations, not with me, but with one another and with the God they say has led them through the valley. I don’t hear their God speak, but the brothers say that Hisham must go with them to the monastery.
I trail after them with Ghalya like a milk goat with a kid at foot, ignored by them, until they are forced to bar me from the Cave. My woman’s blood will pollute it, they say.
“Run away, Ghalya,” I try to say. “Run away. Don’t go to the cave. Don’t go to the cave, Hisham. You’ll die there. You’ll die in chains.”
Whiteness is everywhere. The clouds have come down. They are all around.
“Which cave is she talking about?” Rafqa says sharply.
“My God,” Estefan says. “She is speaking of the grotto. The grotto of Fakr-ad-Din’s father. She knows where he is. The pasha spoke true. Hisham is a traitor.”
“We must tell the pasha, right away. With this information, we can protect our son. We can protect the village.”
And then I do not hear or see anything at all.
* * *
When I wake, frogs are crooning to a crescent moon.
The bed by the open window is a heap of layered blankets on a swept clay floor. My right hand is a heavy lump of bandage and clotted blood. I can’t feel anything inside. There is no sign of Ghalya, but then, she would not be allowed to sleep with me. I am a bad influence. Rafqa will be her mother, from now on.
For as long as she has left to live.
Crawling to the storage shelves behind the closed door, I take Rafqa’s funeral garb from its wrappings and put it on. My husband is dead. I have never worn mourning colours for him, but the night is black, and the robes are black, and I must reach the grotto to warn Fakr-ad-Din of what I have accidentally done.
Is that why? Mother’s voice demands in my imagination. Is it to warn him, or to find out, at last, where he has hidden the bones of his son? Is it to warn him, or to beg him to bring his soldiers down into the valley and murder the pasha, murder all his Janissaries, including your own nephew, so that you can have your oud returned to you and save Ghalya from the stone demons?
I climb out of the window. Take the forgotten road out of Bkassin, far enough that the pasha’s guards will not see me, before circling around, heading for the southern end of the valley where the mighty cliff waits.
It takes hours to cross the valley floor. There are no wolves in the pine forest. They will not come where there are demons.
I see no demons.
“Where are you?” I wonder aloud; I wonder if I am still delirious. Or walking in a dream, for I do not grow thirsty, or tired.
I find the base of the waterfall by its spray on my face, and climb the perilous path between the sleeping firebirds. The path is treacherous enough by day. It is foolhardy to attempt it by moonlight. Yet I make no missteps in Rafqa’s curled, black satin slippers, and when I find the grotto I call Fakr-ad-Din’s name into its empty depths.
For, of course, it is empty. There were no scouts to give warning of my approach. No lanterns live in the dripping dark.
I stand there, a pillar of futility and pain, wondering if I should simply throw myself off the edge. It is a long way down. There is no chance I would survive.
* * *
When I arrive back at the village, it is emptied of the pasha and his soldiers.
I realise that the shapes of men I avoided on my way to the valley were the bodies of villagers who had defied the pasha, tied to upright halberds before being stoned to death.
Placing one foot after another, one ruined slipper after another, between the uneven stones of Bkassin’s main street, I collapse by the building that houses the village spring, drinking spilled water from broken buckets out of a dust-flecked pool while reflected sunlight spears my gritty eyes. The village water is tasteless. Not like the mineral water that rushes from the mountain.
After a short rest, I stagger back to Rafqa’s house.
“I curse the day that Hisham ever laid eyes on you,” she cries. “I curse the day your house was joined to mine.”
Ignoring her, I seek another source of crying, one that comes from a room that once belonged to Rafqa’s son. His toy wooden animals still sit on the window sill. Ghalya lies limply in a bundle of furs. Her face is flushed and her eyes are staring.
I see the stone demons move inside her. I see them eating her from within. Estefan moves back from her. His eyes are wild.
“We should not have done it,” he says. “We should not have helped the pasha. Now the girl has no father to guide her. No wonder she has gone mad.”
I feel my knees touch the floor beside the bed. I gather Ghalya into my arms.
Let them leave her body, I beg wordlessly. Let them leave her body and enter into mine.
But they do not leave her body. Three days later, she is dead.
* * *
Standing before the stone firebirds, I take the oud out of its sling.
Every movement that I make is slow and deliberate. I have only half a thumb and my two smallest fingers remaining on my right hand.
It was months before my wounds healed and I was able to steal the oud back from the wedding celebrant who had taken it. After that, it was only a matter of desecrating Ghalya’s grave. The stone cover, placed there to prevent her demons from infecting anyone else, was no barrier to the demons, though it was to me. I used a woodcutter’s axe in my left hand – the hand furthest from God, the hand closest to the Devil – to break through the stone, and then through the ribcage of the perfect daughter I had borne.
With her breastbone for my risha, I knew the song of my grief would be powerful enough to move mountains.
I look up at the firebirds. When they awaken, fire will cover everything that falls into their line of vision. The pine forest will burn. Gazelles and wildcats will flee for their lives. Villagers, too.
My mother told me the music was not for setting the firebirds against the Ottomans, but that was before they murdered my child. Her granddaughter. She cannot stop me.
She will not stop me.
“Awake, spirits of the mountain,” I sing. “Children of the sun. Fakr-ad-Din is taken to Constantinople. There is work to be done.”
The great birds shiver. They ripple. They begin to glow.
In the always-shade of the clif
f face, the firebirds open their eyes.
Art by Alice Meichi Li
Free Jim's Mine
by Tananarive Due
* * *
May, 1838
Dahlonega, Georgia
“He out yet?” Lottie’s husband, William, breathed behind her, invisible in the dark.
Lottie’s heart sped, a thumping beneath her breastbone that stirred the child in her belly.
“Don’t know,” Lottie said. “Hush.”
She stared from her hiding place behind the arrowwood shrubs, heavy belly low to the soil. They had slipped past the soldiers at Fort Dahlonega, and now they were twenty yards west of the mine’s gate, which stood open wide as miners escaped the cavern’s mouth for the night. Shadowy figures ambled toward them, unaware.
Would she know her Uncle Jim in the dark? Lottie had not seen her father’s brother in five years. Until then, he’d come to see mama two or three times a year after Lottie’s father died. But now he was a freeman – the only free Negro she knew. Free Jim, everyone called him.
Mama said God shined light into his massa’s heart one day and he wrote up Uncle Jim’s freedom papers after church. But most said Uncle Jim bought a mojo and poured a powder with calamus, bergamot, and High John the Conqueror root in his massa’s morning tea.
As tiny feet kicked at her, Lottie vowed she would name William’s baby Freedom. If only she could find Uncle Jim and survive the night, they could all change their names.
A few white miners remained huddled at the gate while she waited and hoped to see Uncle Jim’s beard or his shock of white-splashed hair. One by one, the miners untied their horses. About a dozen colored men emerged last, but they did not have horses. Instead, they shuffled down the road as fast as they seemed able, lanterns swinging. Uncle Jim, born a slave, had slaves working for him? What makes you think he’ll help you? The forlorn call of a bullfrog hidden somewhere nearby reminded Lottie of swinging from a rope on a rotting oak branch, slowly to and fro.
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Page 3