Nine White Horses (11 page)

He opened his eyes on splendor. He breathed in musk and
honey. He wept with purely human grief, and purely human joy, and purely human
terror.

o0o

His son’s voice brought the wazir back from the gates of
death; his son’s face healed him more swiftly than any physic. He rose from his
deathbed to take up all that he had laid down, but first, to weep upon his son’s
blessedly human neck.

With his father’s joyous consent, Kehailan took to wife the Princess
Subhiyah, who had given up her immortality for the sake of his perfect
imperfection. If his ensorcelment had not made a wise man of him, it had taught
him at least the beginnings of wisdom. With his father and his wife to guide
him, and with his own will marred only on occasion by a lapse into his old
folly, he rose high among the sultan’s most valued servants.

When at length and at a great age the wazir passed into the embrace
of Allah, al-Kehailan took up his office, and held it in as great honor as his
father had held it before him. It was said of him that he never failed to
temper justice with mercy; that he could scent a lie as unerringly as a
stallion scents a jackal among his mares; and that whenever he was tempted to
fall short of his duty, he betook himself to his stables, where the children of
his hooved children grew strong and wise and beautiful under his watchful care.
Their blood lives yet among the horses of Egypt. There is none fairer or more
valiant, or less enduring of human arrogance.

As for Khalid, whose tongue began it all and whose spur of wisdom
had earned for him the name of his master’s conscience, when the wazir had come
to himself again, he forgave the mamluk with all his heart, and set him free.
In reparation for his sufferings he gained the fairest of the wazir’s daughters
for his wife, whom he had loved since they were children together; and the
wazir made him brother to Kehailan in name and in law as he had always been in
heart and deed.

That the brothers lived in perfect amity is, perhaps, too
simple an ending for their tale. They lived in love, and for the most part in
peace. And if Kehailan had learned to be the wiser in pursuit of his duty, Khalid
in his turn had learned to curb his tongue in the curbing of his brother’s
folly.

When Kehailan rose to his father’s wazirate, Khalid rose
with him, to stand at his right hand and to be, as ever, the better half of his
self. And thus they lived in wealth and in gladness until the book of their
lives was written, and, as they had passed in the same hour into the wilderness
of the world, so did they pass together into the hands of Allah. Praise be to
Him, Lord of the Worlds, the Beneficent, the Merciful, in Whom are the
beginning and the end of all tales!

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In the Name of
Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate!

It is related in the annals of the wise—but Allah knows
all!—that once in the city of Cairo dwelt a mare of remarkable lineage. For her
dam was
kehailan
and queenly, daughter
through many mothers of the queen of the
Khamsa
,
most blessed of the mares of the Prophet, on whose name be blessing and peace;
yet through her sire she traced her line to the Prophet himself. Born and bred
a man and a prince, for a space and for his sins he wore the body of a horse.
And being a horse, and quite untroubled by the eunuch’s malady, he had done as
any horse would choose to do, until love and an ifrit princess returned him to
his former dignity.

The get of his stallionhood were numerous and of exceptional
beauty, but most beautiful of all was the last of them. Al-Ghazalah, they
called her, so like the gazelle was she: great of eye, slender of limb, swifter
than the wind across the sand. Her color was the best of all colors, the bay
that sprang first from the mind of Allah, Who made all things that are. Her
mane was night and silk; her coat was silk and fire; a star shone on her brow.

Her existence, and that of her sisters, was a difficulty. The
imams had settled it by fiat. What Hasan Sharif al-Kehailan had done in
stallion’s shape was only what stallions were made to do. The issue were a
stallion’s get, and
kehailan
: of the
pure blood of the horses of Arabia. They did not partake of their sire’s
humanity.

None of them knew what she was, and none would have cared if
she had known. They lived out their lives in peace, treasured like queens,
mated to kings, mothers of royal houses.

All but Ghazalah. She did not know when she first knew that
she was different. She was the youngest, the last and fairest. On the day when
she was foaled, her father’s wife brought forth a son: the first and, by the
will of Allah Who is ever merciful, the last of the children of his human form.

It was inevitable that they be brought together, the sister
and the brother; it was written that there be love between them, and that
al-Ghazalah be the sole and cherished mount of Shams al-Din. His beauty was the
sun to the moon of hers; in spirit, in temper, in fire, each had no equal but
the other.

Yet even he did not know her secret. For a long while she
was not aware that she had one. It came first upon her all unlooked for, in the
deep night, as she drowsed by her mother’s side. She yawned and stretched and
thought of hunger, and there was strangeness in her.

She looked at herself, and she was not she. She was
something other. Something frail and soft and hairless, with toes where hooves
should be. And hands. Humans had hands, clever for opening gates, skillful in
stroking one’s tender places. She had hands. She was human.

But she was not. She reached toward the warm drowsing
horseness of her mother, and something shifted. It was like pain. It was like
pleasure. She was herself again, slender-legged, drowning her bafflement in her
mother’s milk.

The strangeness kept coming back. In the night, always: she
would wake from a dream, and she would have hands. She taught herself to walk,
tottering two-legged. She listened to the humans; she learned to talk, if only
to her mother. She learned that she could will herself to change. She
discovered the advantages of hands on latches and bolts, and the wideness of
the world beyond her stable yard.

She never shifted where anyone but her mother could see her.
It was not secrecy. It was a sort of delicacy. Everyone could do this, surely;
no one did it in front of everyone else; therefore it was a private thing.

She wondered whether all the humans were horses in the
night, or whether some were hunting dogs, or cats, or even—she knew which those
would be—braying asses. Her father had been a stallion. Everyone said it,
though it seemed that he was one no longer. Perhaps this was only a pleasure
for one’s youth.

She would be sorry, if that was so. She liked the suppleness
of human shape. She liked to talk; she loved to sing. She learned to read, from
being tethered close by Shams as he endured his tutors. She heard the
disputations of philosophers. She became, had she known it, most widely and deeply
learned, while her brother and master yawned and groaned and took flight
whenever he could. He would only hear his lessons at all when she was near,
because it inconvenienced his teachers, and because she provided swift escape.
They learned to ride well and swiftly, those masters of the arts, or they did
not linger long in his service.

He would happily have dismissed them all. But his father was
adamant. “I was a knave and a fool,” said Kehailan. “My son will learn to be
wise.”

His son did not want to be wise. His son wanted to ride
a-hunting, or a-drinking, or a-whoring. Shams al-Din, as his father’s mamluk
observed, was in all respects his father’s child.

o0o

When both al-Ghazalah and Shams al-Din had attained their
seventeenth year, Ghazalah knew that she was like no other creature in the face
of God’s creation. Mares, except for Ghazalah, remained mares from birth to
death. Maidens, except for Ghazalah, held that form by day as by night.

It was noted that the four-footed line of Kehailan seemed to
partake somewhat of the longevity of their human forebear. It was also noted
that Ghazalah seemed most fully to have held to human youth: slow to reach the
fullness of her growth, and slow to settle to the placidity of age. That she
remained a maiden, however, she owed to Shams al-Din. She was his. No other, be
he beast or man, might have her.

She was, as she thought, content. Her secret was hers to
cherish. Her brother was the fairest youth in Egypt, the best horseman, the
surest shot with the Turkish bow, though he was no Turk but Arab of the holy
line of Mecca. If he was not also the wisest, if he lacked perhaps some essence
of intelligence, that was little enough to sully her peace. She had sufficient
for them both.

It is the way of mares and of educated maidens, as all the
wise know, to have no patience to spare for the follies of love. Likewise, it
is the way of young men, and most especially of ruinously spoiled young
princes, to have patience for nothing else. Shams fell in and out of love a
dozen times in a day. The swiftness of his falling out, Ghazalah observed, was
directly proportioned to the swiftness of his gaining his desire.

Therefore she was neither surprised nor unduly troubled
when, in riding through the city of a morning, he halted abruptly and drew a
long sigh. “There,” he said. “There is the love of my life.”

They had come to the fringes of the bazaar; the streets were
full to bursting. But Shams had eyes for one alone. Ghazalah discerned her
easily enough by the yearning of her brother’s body on her back; and she was,
admittedly, noticeable. In that city of small, dark, slender people; she
towered like a young tree. Her hands and the oval of her face were white as
milk. Her hair under its drift of veil was the color of gold in the forge. Her
eyes were as blue as the sky in winter, and bold, knowing nothing of modesty.

They met Shams’ with most unmaidenly directness, measuring him
as if he had been the slave and she the lord of Islam. They gave him due credit
for his beauty, but reckoned his youth and his callowness and his
disinclination to use what wits he had, and discarded him.

He, of course, was smitten to the heart. “I will have her,”
he said. “I must have her. I will die if I do not have her.”

She had turned her back on him. Bravely he battled the
currents of the city, following her as best he might through the rounds of the
market: the bakers, the sweetsellers, the cloth merchants, the sellers of
spices, and, at length, the butcher who tended the needs of Cairo’s Christians.

Not a whit daunted, Shams clung to her track. It led him out
of the bazaar at last, through many windings of the city, thronged always,
never open to him when he would press closer, armed to speak, to touch, even,
it might have been, to seize her and bear her away. Shams in love was no more
to be reasoned with than a leaf in a whirlwind. It mattered nothing to him that
his beloved led him ever deeper into the Christians’ quarter, or that his
turban and his Arab face were far from welcome there.

The woman, turning without warning, led her company of
porters through a gate in a blind wall. He spurred Ghazalah so suddenly, and
with such unwonted force, that she leaped like the beast of her name. The gate
was swinging shut. She hurtled through it.

Shams was out of the saddle before she had plunged to a
halt, prostrate before the Frankish beauty, babbling passionate nonsense.

Ghazalah snorted at the sunlit courtyard, the astonished
porters, the servants arrested in mid-stride. Shams had lost his turban; his
hair, of which he was girlishly vain, was tumbled in the dust. Yet even so
dimmed, it shone like jet and raven.

The Frank seemed both amused and fascinated. When he began
to kiss her foot, she did not at once pull away. “What,” she inquired in
passable Arabic, “is the meaning of this?”

He raised his head. His face shone. He had never been more
beautiful, and for once he was not aware of it.

“Love,” he said. “It is love.”

The Frank blinked once. “Just like that?”

“Like an arrow in my heart,” cried Shams al-Din. “Like light
in the darkness. Like fire, like lightning, like—”

“You are mad,” said the Frank. She clapped her hands. The
porters came, big men and burly, unmoved by young ardor. They lifted Shams, one
to his head and one to his feet, and tossed him lightly through the gate.

Ghazalah did not wait to be assisted. She bolted in his
wake. The gate boomed shut. Bolts slid, sharp and final.

Shams picked himself up, and he was smiling like a man in
bliss. “Did you see? Did you see, sister? She looked at me; she loves me.” He dusted
himself off, still smiling, but sighing a little. “Of course she had to cast me
out. Too many people were watching; she had no choice. Had she but been alone . . .”

Ghazalah wanted to shake him. A slave was bad enough, but a
Christian slave was unconscionable.

“So beautiful,” he murmured, lost in his madness. “Lapis and
gold; ivory; the merest shimmer of rose. Her feet, her hands, her perfect
fingertips . . . her lips, like flowers . . .”

The wench was as tall as he was, and nigh as broad in the
shoulder. Ghazalah bucked and twisted, to distract him. He barely noticed. He
was lost. Utterly. Again.

She did not know why it mattered. It was not his first
slave, nor even his first Christian. He had been smitten thus powerfully
before, and for less cause.

And yet Ghazalah was uneasy. The woman’s eyes when they had
rested on Shams—yes, for a breath’s span they had softened. It was a strong woman
indeed who could resist such beauty in a man. Yet there was more. Something
strange; something awry.

o0o

Ghazalah was waiting when Shams came creeping through the
night, robed in black but with splendor gleaming beneath, and on him a scent of
musk and sandalwood. She suffered him to saddle and bridle her; she let him
smuggle her out through the garden gate.