Authors: Elizabeth Bear
“Easy to promise,” Qori Buqa said.
The twins smoothed their veil. “He sends me also with an offer in marriage, Qori Buqa Khan, to cement our alliance and the friendship between our tribes.”
Satisfyingly, that surprised him. “A marriage. That could be far more to his advantage than to mine. He has no empire. He does not sit in the Padparadscha Seat.”
“An empire he helped you claim. A saddle he assisted in setting you in. Your magnanimity…” the twins hesitated carefully “… is well-known, Qori Buqa Khagan.”
“Hmph.” The Khan sipped his drink. He cradled the cup with a surprisingly delicate grip. “With one of his children? A dutiful and terrified Rahazeen virgin? What heat would such a one bring to my marriage bed?”
“I am al-Sepehr’s adopted daughter,” the twins said. “Give me back my sword, and I will show you what heat I bring to a marriage bed.”
* * *
The caliph sent Samarkar back to Ato Tesefahun’s house in a sedan chair, under guard—and this time she allowed it to happen. She disembarked in the courtyard, surrounded by oiled slaves in loincloths—each one broader and more beautifully muscled than the next. They stared straight ahead, proud and composed as carriage horses, effacing themselves from her perceptions.
Once, she was uneasily aware, she would have taken no more notice of them than of the sedan chair itself. Possibly less, because she was forced to interact with the litter. But that was before she had come to know Hong-la and her husband’s eunuch administrators. The princes of Song did not call their bureaucrats slaves and accorded them a kind of social status—but that didn’t change the reality of a chattel relationship.
How many potential wizards, she wondered, had been lost among the illiterate ranks of collared laborers? And how would you run an empire without cheap, disposable labor? It was as impossible a question as how you would run one without conquest and expansion.
Irritated, she unfastened her helm, ripping it off as she strode toward the common rooms. She did not look back to see if the slaves broke their statuelike poise to avoid seeing her face, but she did pause to ask the doorman to see that they had water and were tipped before being sent back to the palace.
Hrahima and Brother Hsiung came hurrying out to meet her. “Paper,” Samarkar said, tossing the helm to the monk. He tucked it under one arm, then pulled paper and an Uthman ink-pot from the wallet dependent from his sash.
Silently—how else?—he proffered them.
Stopping dead in her tracks, Samarkar smiled. “Brother Hsiung,” she said. “The ever reliable. I don’t suppose you have a pen or a brush in there too?”
* * *
She sat cross-legged before the low table in her underwear. Ink stained her fingertips black-brown. The gold tassels on the cushion scratched the back of her thighs. Her scrapes stung and itched. Sweat dried in white crusts on her forearms, around the collar of her chemise. It stuck escaped strands of her hair together. The armor and arming coat, discarded in a corner, had been removed by servants.
Hrahima and Brother Hsiung had cleared the room of others for her and then stayed, watching silently. She didn’t know when the others arrived, but when she looked up again it was because Ato Tesefahun was lighting lamps against the failing day, and Temur had come and sat down beside her.
He set a cup of tea by her hand. “I see the princess now.”
“Once-princess,” she corrected. She set the pen on its stand and pushed the pages she’d covered with fine lines of characters toward him, trading for the tea. It was Song style, plain red, drifting with faintly floral steam. The splash of it into her empty stomach awakened a growl.
He glanced at her pages, careful of the liquid ink. “I don’t read Uthman.”
“May I?” Ato Tesefahun reached over Temur’s shoulder; Temur allowed it. There was a pause while the Aezin wizard read; during it, Brother Hsiung somehow produced a plate of food and set it before Samarkar. She ate with her fingers, scooping up fowl, those minuscule wheat-flour dumplings, and steamed vegetables dressed in a richly spicy red paste.
She was still sucking the grease from her fingers when Ato Tesefahun looked up and said, “It is a treaty. Between Uthman Caliph and Temur Khan. In which you agree to relinquish all Qersnyk claim to Asmaracanda and he promises basically nothing.”
“And I sign this … because?”
Samarkar swallowed, her belly almost unpleasantly tight. She still felt like she wanted to eat more. “Because you sign it as Temur Khan. And its mere existence, and the caliph’s willingness to treat with you as a fellow sovereign, establishes your legitimacy in that role.”
“Oh,” Temur said. He looked over his shoulder at his grandfather. “Read it to me. Word for word.” To Samarkar, he added, “And you—be prepared to answer questions.”
She pressed her teacup to her mouth so he would not see her smile of approval.
* * *
No man could endure this. As Ümmühan was jostled in her sedan chair, the louvered windows offering no significant breeze or escape from the trapped, suffocating heat, she was certain of that as nothing else. Trapped and suffocating herself, her silks adhered to her flesh by rank sweat, she gritted her teeth and told herself over and over again: no mere man could endure this.
Of course, no man would have tolerated it. If
she
were a man, she’d have climbed out herself and walked or ridden camel-back under a suspended canopy. Men did not have to tolerate such things. They used their physical strength to see to it.
In part, Ümmühan thought—wincing at a sharp jar through her hips through the cushioned seat as one of the bearers stumbled—men used their strength in that way because in all other ways they were pathetically fragile. What did physical prowess matter when spiritually, emotionally, they were weak?
Men must be protected from so many things: the sight of women’s faces; the truth about God. The apparently crushing fear that a woman might judge them in relation to another man and find them wanting, if she had any standard of comparison.
Ümmühan sighed and lazily waved her fan. As it happened, she did have some standard of comparison. And as it happened, she did judge.
“Not too much farther, my flower,” said a male voice from outside. A shadow fell across her louvers as Kara Mehmed leaned close, down out of the tasseled saddle of his gray gelding. “Be grateful you’re sitting inside in the shade, not out here toiling over stones.”
As if she had not been the one whose plots and counterplots and careful webs of alliances had brought them here.
But men were weak and must be permitted their illusions.
“My gratitude to you knows no bounds, O lion of the desert.”
The slave poet pitched her voice low and sweet and gently teasing, resting the folded fan on the (sweaty) pillow of her abdomen. Her rings glittered dully in the filtered light. At least the sedan chair and its curtains kept most of the dust out, and she could lower her veils.
“Not ‘lion of your heart’?” he responded, playfully hurt.
“That too, of course. Do you see the forked rock yet?” Surely, surely they must be in sight of it by now. Ümmühan sipped her carefully hoarded water.
“Not five hundred cubits off. Shall we pick up the pace, my flower?”
Ümmühan touched her golden collar, traced the words of the Prophet inscribed there:
Wise are the blossoms in a walled garden, for they shall know no want.
“Not unless the gardener doesn’t show up for work,” she muttered, shaping the words without breath behind them. She knew how her sedan chair amplified every sound from within. From behind screens, she had collaborated with the wizard who had designed it for her.
“He will find us,” she said. “Have no fear.”
She let the lassitude of heat take her. Half a varst, five hundred cubits, another two finger-widths of the sun moving across the sky. Enough time for a brief rest. She was jolted from her reverie—a more romantic word than
stupor
—when the sedan chair was lowered. The bearers were skilled, but the ground was hard and uneven. The heat still oppressed, but no light fell through the louvers, and Ümmühan realized her chair stood in shade.
She heard Mehmed dismount. Someone shot the bolts on her sedan chair and drew the slatted door open. Dusty silk draperies lofted on the arid wind, and her robes and veils swirled around her as she allowed Mehmed to hand her out. She stood, breathing in relief, amazed that
this
air could seem cooler when it dried the sweat from her body in instants.
The bearer on the near front quarter stood with a canted ankle. It must have been he who stumbled. Red dust palled all of them to thighs bronzed dark as old metal; their sweat had dried too quickly to streak.
As Ümmühan straightened, pushing her fists into her back, Mehmed sent the bearers out of sight, around the spire of stone they had paused in the shadow of.
Nothing was in sight now except for Mehmed, his horse, the sedan chair, and the wasteland. The glittering-pale gelding nuzzled among stones with a dished black nose but found nothing. Ümmühan let her hand fall on Mehmed’s arm as if she needed him to steady her. She turned to regard the desert. A line of hills separated them from Asitaneh and a view of the sea. In the other direction, a cracked plain swept to the foothills of haze-blurred mountains. They looked so close … but Ümmühan knew that she, Mehmed, and the horse would all die of thirst and the brutal sun before they walked halfway there. Distances in the desert were deceptive.
“Not long now, my lion,” she assured Mehmed.
He lifted the fall of her head scarf and smoothed it over her shoulder. Her collar weighed on bones.
From those mountains, a shadow sailed up and swept closer. It seemed to come slowly, on ponderous wingbeats, but its speed must be tremendous to be seen to be moving at all. It grew—and impossibly grew—and grew once more until the shadow of its wings seemed to sweep from one horizon to the next. Not so, of course—but when it furled its wings, banked, and beat downward to a heavy, hunch-shouldered landing it was still so immense that Ümmühan imagined she must be entirely beneath its notice … unless it should deign to consume her like a date: in one juicy bite. Ümmühan’s veils gusted about her, obscuring her vision until she caught them back. Mehmed’s horse quivered, white-eyed, ears rolling. Mehmed stood with a hand on its reins, an arm draped over its withers: Ümmühan thought it only stood, even then, because it was hardened to cannons and to war.
The rukh lurched two steps, a red-crested head dragging its curved neck into jerky thrusts until it found its balance. Stone-gray wings flipped closed, concealing paler flanks. The hooked beak snapped with a keratinous
clack
and Ümmühan’s breath of awe swelled her chest painfully.
Great is the God from whose studies such wonders arise!
She would write a poem to the praise of this great bird and the man who had tamed it.
The ladder unrolled across the rukh’s shoulders, and in a billow of white and indigo a figure slid down. His veil concealed everything about him except for eyes that must have been almost black once, before the blue of incipient blindness hazed them. He squinted, examining the man and woman who awaited him.
“Kara Mehmed,” he said. “I am Mukhtar ai-Idoj, al-Sepehr and servant of the Scholar-God. I come at the summons of a woman who loves you.”
He ignored Ümmühan utterly, as was polite—not even an acknowledging flick of his gaze. That did nothing to silence the thrill that rose up in her at the sound of his voice. She could not cling against Mehmed’s side, not here where another man could see them. But she did step back as if she were lending her support, as if she were shrinking behind Mehmed for protection. It would have the same effect.
“I too come to the summons of a woman,” Mehmed said. “Are these not strange days?”
Ümmühan bit her lip. The veils hid so many sins.
“Stranger than you may know, Black Mehmed. Shall I speak plainly?”
“If I have my way,” Mehmed answered—a flash of humor that almost made Ümmühan like him, momentarily, when all the hours she had spent pretending to adore his earnest sweating atop her softness had only resulted in her despising him the more.
“Your caliph is weak,” said al-Sepehr. “He is profane. He is no true follower of the Scholar-God and Ysmat of the Beads, Her Prophet.”
“That is treason,” said Mehmed, but he did not sound upset.
“The caliphate needs a new king.”
“I see nothing in your words to disagree with.”
“That king should be you, Kara Mehmed. A strong man, a pious man. A man with many allies among the war-band. A man who will restore trade and make the caliphate a great empire again.”
“I am listening,” Mehmed said. “Who are you to ensure such a thing?”
“I am the priest who leads all the Rahazeen. I am the recipient of all the secret knowledge of Sepehr al-Rachid ibn Sepehr, whom the uninitiated call the Sorcerer-Prince. And trust me”—even behind his veil, Ümmühan could tell that al-Sepehr smiled—“his wizardry is a very great and holy wizardry indeed.”
“And what do you gain?”
“An ally,” said al-Sepehr. “An end to persecution for my tribe. Renewed trade and political stability. All the things I gain by also trading with the Khan of the horse tribes—oh, you have heard? Yes, Black Mehmed. I hide nothing from my allies.” He leaned forward slightly and pulled the veil from his face.
Though her heart beat savagely in her chest, Ümmühan averted her eyes. But she could not close her ears to the roll of persuasion that filled his voice when he said, “Trust in me.”
She thought she would have offered him her heart on the point of her knife if he’d asked—and not only for love.
Mehmed considered for a long while. And then he said, “Your blood on it.”
Al-Sepehr drew a dagger from his sash and set the point against his wrist, above the border of the tattoos. He pressed down until the skin dented, and a red bead welled. “I have a few men—chosen from among the finest of the Nameless—in Asitaneh already. I can deliver the army: my priests have converted their leaders. All I need now is you, Mehmed Caliph.”