Infidel

by Kameron Hurley

  “I do appreciate proper recompense for the valuable work I provide for Tirhan. If you wish my family and I to soil ourselves in the Chenjan ghetto, please pay me what you would a dockworker, and excuse the state of my soiled bisht,” he said, taking a handful of the gauzy outer robe he wore and holding it out to her. It was not, indeed, soiled, but it was a bit dusty. “I cannot ask for less than fifty-five.”

  “I, too, have mouths to feed, and a public to serve. Do you wish to bankrupt my country? Fifty notes will fill the bellies of half the children in the Chenjan ghetto.”

  “For fifty-two notes, I can feed my children and perhaps excuse the Minister’s insults as to my ethnicity.”

  The Minister leaned back in her chair and regarded him. “You’re very Chenjan,” she said.

  “It’s why you hired me,” he said.

  The Minister pressed her hand to the upper left corner of her desk. Rhys felt the air fill with the soft chatter of wood mites. The mites in the desk vomited up the Minister’s pay tickets. She wrote out a receipt for fifty-two and handed it to him.

  Rhys accepted the receipt and bowed his head.

  “Peace be with you,” the Minister said, “and may God bless your house and family.” She raised her teacup.

  “And yours,” Rhys said, “God is great.”

  He walked out of the Minister’s cool office and into the grand hall of the Public Affairs Ministry. The building’s gilt-domed mosque was on the top floor, two floors above him. He had gone to prayer before his meeting with the Minister, and now he took the stairs back to street level. It was a long descent, but he preferred it to the lifts, which were encased in an opaqued glass shaft that made him nervous. He knew too much about how easily a magician could alter the instructions given to the burr bugs that drove the lift up and down the height of the building. The convenience wasn’t worth the risk.

  As Rhys took the stairs, he passed several other magicians doing the same. Though Rhys had the ability to perceive another magician through look, manner, and gaze alone, magicians on official business in Tirhan were required to wear a yellow, ankle-length khameez with wide sleeves and greenish bisht over the top of it. The bisht was thin and gauzy, hemmed in yellow along the collar, and both garments were cool and light enough to make walking around in the heat bearable. Cool and modest as the garments were, however, they did mark him apart; removed him from the rest of the community. There were days, passing through the streets of Tirhan as people moved out of his path, that he wondered if this was how members of the First Families of Nasheen felt when they descended from the hilltops to mingle with the common folk. Tirhan was notoriously short on magicians and shape shifters, and their genetics and breeding programs had been working on a solution to their dearth of talented individuals for decades. It also meant their immigration policies were extremely favorable toward magicians and shape shifters, regardless of nationality. That had been a blessing six years before when he crossed the border.

  Rhys walked across the cool marble inlay of the foyer and out the wide archway that opened onto the street. He passed through a low-res organic filter that kept out the heat and stepped onto the palm-lined pedestrian way. Bakkies weren’t permitted within the city center, so Rhys had to walk to the edge of the center to catch a taxi. Above him, trains crawled along a suspended rail, spitting red beetle and roach casings from the back end. The trains were good for getting around inside the city and out to the factories, but Rhys lived in the suburbs. His wages were comfortable enough that he could afford a taxi.

  As he walked, clerks, officials, and street cleaners and sweepers stepped out of his way. He passed the big tiered marble fountains and grassy knolls of the park at the city center. In the middle of the fountain stood a stone sculpture of a robed, veiled magician, her hand reaching toward the sky. Water cascaded from her palm and sloshed over the tiers below. Each slab was adorned with gold and silver gilt stone beetles and dragonflies, thorn bugs and owl flies. Stone dogs, foxes, ravens, and parrots crowded around the lip of the fountain. They had been coated with a skein of flesh beetles, so they appeared to shift and move.

  Rhys had never liked the fountain. In Chenja, human representations presented as public art were banned. In Nasheen, they were merely discouraged. Idols left on display encouraged the worship of idols. Rhys often worried to see men and women approach the fountain and toss stones into the water as tokens in return for wishes granted, as if offering up prayers to… magicians. He supposed it was one more alien Tirhani gesture he would never get used to. Tirhan had grown up short on magicians. That idea was foreign enough.

  Rhys lined up for a taxi at the edge of the center. The porter directing traffic insisted he come to the front of the line. Rhys no longer protested such treatment. The first few times he insisted on waiting in line—at the taxi ranks, at a restaurant, while out with his wife at a local art gallery—the porter, the clerks, and all of those waiting in line had grown anxious and expressed their concern—and later, outrage—at his refusal of their courtesy, particularly after they heard his Chenjan accent. Tirhanis would not have foreigners calling them impolite.

  He stepped into the front passenger seat of the taxi, and four other men squeezed into the seat in the back. The driver refused a fifth who wanted to sit between him and Rhys.

  “I am escorting a magician!” the driver yelled, and shut the door.

  The driver was Rhys’s age, probably in his early thirties, and he appeared to have been trying, unsuccessfully, to grow a beard for some time. It had grown in in patches. He kept it short, which eased the contrast between beard and hairless cheek.

  The men in the back wore white khameezes, aghals, and sandals, and from the look of their manicured nails and neat beards, they were probably lower-level assistants or officials working in the financial district. They could have, perhaps, been lawyers or businessmen, but they seemed too young to have reached such heights, and interns would not have had the cash for a taxi fare.

  The driver slowed the taxi as the traffic ahead of them came to a halt. Rhys looked out the window. He saw a toppled rickshaw thirty meters up the road. He closed his eyes and searched for a local swarm of wasps to sniff out the disturbance, but could sense none nearby. He gave up and opened his eyes.

  “Pardon, Yah,” the skinny man in the middle said, and leaned forward. Yah, or Yahni, was the polite prefix to a magician’s name across Umayma, an old term dating back to the days when bel dames policed the world.

  But Rhys had never been certified as a magician. The title was not earned, just assumed when he wore the robes.

  Rhys did not correct him.

  “You are married, yes?” the man asked.

  “I am,” Rhys said. He wore a silver ring on each of his ring fingers, the left to symbolize his engagement, the right to confirm his marriage.

  “And how is it you drew this woman’s interest? Was it that you were a magician?”

  Rhys’s wife was Chenjan, but she had been raised in Tirhan. He had had to learn his courting behaviors whole cloth. Not that he had much experience in courting before he came to Tirhan.

  “It did help that I was a magician,” he said.

  The men nodded seriously.

  They got off at the next street. Rhys and the taxi driver rode the rest of the way in silence. Just outside the hybrid oak park at the edge of Rhys’s district, the driver came to a halt.

  Rhys stepped out. “What shall I give you?” he asked.

  “Praise be, it’s an honor to ferry a magician.”

  “From the city center to the grove is generally a note and a half. Is this agreeable?”

  “A note and a half? Do you wish to see me starve?”

  “I am a fair man, not a fool.”

  They haggled. Rhys paid the driver a note sixty-five. He took the shortcut through the grove. It smelled of lemons and loam and the tangy sap of the hybrids. Bugs swarmed the treetops, none of them virulent. Clouds of wasps patrolled the streets, tailored to track and record
the movements of nonresidents. At the end of the grove, he stepped out onto his street.

  Rhys had wanted to live somewhere in the hills, but Shirhazi, at best, rolled. It did not have proper hills, not until it came to the base of the mountains, to the north. And by then the city had turned to scrubland and clover fields. So he settled for living in a three-storied house made of mud-brick and bug secretions sandwiched at the far end of a long row of similar houses. There was a roof garden, and a wide, open balcony on the second floor. There were no windows on the first floor, of course, but windows on the upper floors opened out onto the rear garden, and during the hottest part of the day, they could push them all open and catch a breeze off the inland sea.

  They. Rhys had expected to remain alone in Tirhan, his narrow days interspersed with occasional visits to Khos and Inaya, his fellow exiles, to ease some of the loneliness. But it hadn’t turned out that way. Nothing about his life in Tirhan had turned out the way he expected.

  Rhys walked across the street, through the front gate, and onto his tiled front patio. He heard laughter from behind the house. He passed through the cobbled alley to the treed yard surrounded in an eight-foot-high privacy wall. His family’s refuge.

  His daughters played in the yard, attaching strings to giant ladybugs and hanging them from the wisteria bushes that bordered the backyard. Ladybugs were supposed to be lucky, and were a popular symbol of the Tirhani Martyr. It was said that after she was burned, her body was consumed by ladybugs. It was nearing the time of the Martyr’s festival, when the whole of Shirhazi would fast for nine days and feast for nine nights down at the beachfront. It would be the first year he and Elahyiah felt the girls were old enough to join in the nighttime festivities. There would be fireworks and magicians. Elahyiah had friends running the food kiosks and performing in the theater groups. The girls had been talking about it for weeks.

  He stood at the edge of the yard and watched them. The girls were two and four now, not old enough, in his opinion, to be left out in the yard with bugs in the sun, but he did not see Elahyiah or the housekeeper. The girls had shed their coats and played uncovered in the dirt.

  “Laleh, Souri,” he said. The girls lifted their heads. Souri, the younger, squealed and ran across the dirt in her bare feet. Souri had once eaten a spider and nearly died from it. Laleh was far more cautious, willing to follow but never lead.

  Laleh hung back with the bugs under the scant shade of one of the thorny acacias.

  “Where’s your mother?” Rhys asked Souri.

  Souri clung to his robe.

  Rhys scooped her up and asked Laleh, “How long have you been out? Come inside. You’re going to get cancer.”

  “Da,” Souri said, and threw her little arms around his neck.

  “Come,” Rhys said to Laleh again, and held out his hand.

  Laleh took a few tentative steps forward, head lowered. He often wondered where Laleh got her docility from. Certainly not from her mother.

  They passed through the filter spanning the arched entryway of the porch and stepped across the cool tiles and into the house. A dozen succulents with broad green leaves crowded the porch, situated around a low, bubbling fountain lined in blue and green tiles. The main floor was one big room, loosely divided by hand-carved screens that Elahyiah’s father had brought over from Chenja. The screens were her dowry; her family had little else to offer besides Elahyiah herself.

  Elahyiah sat bent over her desk near the ceramic stove they sometimes lit during the cool winter evenings, consulting her Tirhani dictionary. She spent several nights a week improving her Tirhani with a group of women downtown. The women were all Chenjan refugees, or the children of refugees. She had emigrated to Tirhan when she was nine, and he thought she spoke the language well, but she was constantly worried about it. “When we met I believed you would think I was some uneducated Nasheenian, it was so poor,” she once confided.

  He had thought nothing of the kind. Elahyiah was nothing like a Nasheenian woman, though he had not felt the need to tell her why he knew that for a certainty.

  Elahyiah turned when he entered. He saw that she had the long stare of deep immersion. It took her a moment to focus, to come back from wherever she had been in her head, and then she was looking at him, at the children—and she smiled.

  “You left them outside uncovered,” he said.

  She blinked, and the smile faded. “It’s only been a few minutes.” She turned to look at the water clock next to the call box.

  “Where’s the housekeeper?”

  “I sent her home. It was such a beautiful day.”

  That was Elahyiah—compassionate when she remembered to be, but not always practical. God, he loved her for the compassion, but….

  Rhys left the girls with her and walked into the kitchen. Dirty dishes littered the counter; half-eaten mangoes and a loaf of uncovered rye bread, plates smeared in peanut butter and toast and grasshopper heads.

  “Elahyiah, you can’t send her home before she’s even finished the tea dishes.”

  When she did not reply, Rhys turned to look back into the study, and saw Elahyiah giggling over some bug with Souri.

  “Elahyiah?” he said. “The tea dishes.”

  “Hm?” She raised her head, distracted. “That’s just tea.”

  Rhys felt slow irritation building in his chest, disrupting his hard-fought calm. He closed his eyes. These are not important things, he reminded himself. It was a blessing that his days no longer consisted of cutting off heads and blowing up buildings. A blessing.

  “Let’s get the children slathered down and put to bed,” Rhys said. “I’m not paying to have their skins replaced before they’re twenty.”

  He went upstairs to the tidy bedroom and changed his clothes. The housekeeper had the unenviable job of trying to keep up with his distractible wife. She did her best to keep the children fed and the common rooms clean, but it often fell to him to keep the bedroom neat. He had become terribly fastidious about it. When he came back down, Elahyiah had managed to move the children halfway to the bathing room. They stood in the hallway talking idly about how fast bees could fly.

  Together, he and Elahyiah got Souri and Laleh bathed and slathered in burn ointment and put to bed. It was a long, drawn-out process. Laleh, ever the dour, sensitive one, cried and protested. Elahyiah kept up a constant stream of chatter, spoke of Heidian philosophy and Tirhani verb structure, and Souri spun stories of dervishes and sand demons who lived in the garden and became imprisoned in the belly of a sand cat.

  By the time they put the girls into their room, the suns had died and the blue dusk had long since fallen.

  As Rhys stood at the door of the girls’ bedroom, he realized all of them had gone without dinner.

  Elahyiah remained inside the bedroom, telling the girls stories about Chenja and the war in her soft voice.

  “I need to speak to you when you’re done,” he said.

  “I’ll be down in a bit, love,” Elahyiah said.

  A night without dinner would not kill them. If Elahyiah didn’t remember to feed them in the morning, the housekeeper would.

  Rhys walked back down to the disastrous kitchen. There were no clean knives. He rolled up his sleeves and threw out the rapidly rotting food—nothing left uncovered for long kept well—and opened the bug bin. He stacked the dishes in the bin and opened the access panel for the refuse beetles. They would lick the dishes clean in a quarter hour.

  Rhys left the rest for the housekeeper and made himself a quick meal of stale rye bread, curried protein cakes, and a lone mango he found at the back of the ice box behind a very curdled jar of cats’ milk. He opened the jar and threw it and its contents into the bug bin. The beetles hissed.

  As he ate, standing next to the counter, he wrote some notes for Elahyiah on the live countertop. Make sure the children eat breakfast. Don’t send the housekeeper home early. Don’t leave the girls outside uncovered. He nearly wrote, And remember to eat something, yourself, but that was t
oo much, like reminding her to wash her hair. Which she also often forgot. I’m not raising three children, he amended. How did such a brilliant woman lose so many details? Why did he have to play father to all three of them?

  He finally went upstairs to find her.

  The window was open. A cool breeze stirred gauzy curtains. Elahyiah stood at the door that led out onto their private balcony. Her hair was unbound; black curls tumbled down her shoulders. She wore only a loose shift.

  She turned when he entered, smiled.

  “I missed you,” she said.

  He moved toward her in the dark. “Elahyiah, the children—”

  She brushed a hand across his mouth, delicate as a moth’s touch. “Hush now, they’re in bed. I missed you.”

  She kissed him.

  They didn’t make it to the bed. She straddled him in the dark, almost frantic, passionate, as if they would be caught and stoned like two unwed lovers.

  The whole world, for a moment, was just this: Elahyiah, his wife. The spill of her hair. The warmth, the urgent desire. He didn’t know where her sudden passion came from on these nights, when he was nearly exhausted and the house was in disarray. But her passion never ceased to move him.

  Later, he got up to use the privy, and paused again as he entered the archway leading into their shared room. He watched her through the stir of the white curtain that separated their room from the hall. Elahyiah was already asleep. She looked small and dark; she had the fine features of a lizard; delicate as a dragonfly. Their girls had been born small—too small for him not to worry. Both were growing up as fine-boned as their mother. She was peaceful and perfect in sleep, disarmed, completely vulnerable.

  He loved her. He felt that in his bones, but some days, even when he lay next to her, when he looked at her as he did now, he could not help but feel, somewhere just under the surface of his love, of their sometimes strained contentment, that something that should have sustained him was missing. He supposed all marriages must be like this; great chunks of contentment, frustrated daily living, shot through with moments of absolute terror and doubt and disappointment. The world was large. It was no fault of his or hers, he supposed, to sometimes wonder if a mistake had been made.