Authors: Elizabeth Bear
The moment could have chimed like crystal. The wind fell away; the desert was as still as the moment after the last breath of a dying man.
Kara Mehmed nodded and Ümmühan allowed herself to breathe again.
“We must kill the bearer slaves,” al-Sepehr said. “And in their blood I will write your destiny. With their entrails I will divine the path that will lead you there.”
“The bearers,” Mehmed said. “Who will bring my flower back to Asitaneh?”
“Kill them,” said Ümmühan. “The rukh must eat.” She showed her palm to the vast bird as if to a pony, smiling when it cocked its head to stare at her out of an eye she could have stood inside. “As for me? When we return to Asitaneh to claim your new city, my caliph, my lion? I shall ride the wind.”
Mehmed grabbed her shoulder, clawed fingers bruising. The fabric of her robes bunched under his grip. Perhaps silk had not been the best choice for this day’s activities. She turned to meet eyes narrowed with jealous rage and quickly downcast her own. Men were weak, so weak, contemptible.
Men, but not al-Sepehr.
“Alone with this one?!” Mehmed fumed.
“He is a priest!” she said. “And I am the woman who loves you. I have given my heart and my will over to only one man, my lion. Fear not that they will ever desert you.”
Oh, she lied behind the veil. But when she smiled behind the veil, who could know it?
Not Kara Mehmed, blinded by his heart, his arrogance, and hisambition. He looked away from her; his clutch at her shoulder became a caress the length of her arm.
“Very well. Sacrifice the bearers,” he said.
“Have no fear of me, Kara Mehmed. Show me your weak caliph,” the al-Sepehr said. “It is time a strong man ruled.”
* * *
Ümmühan needed nothing in this moment, save to die. Thirty years a poet, twenty-five years a slave; lover of great men, weak men, men who aspired to neither; conspirator, visionary, secret priestess—nothing in her experience ever had or ever could rival this: winged flight.
The body of the rukh rose and fell between its toiling pinions. The head stayed steady, more or less, as the long neck compensated. Ümmühan bestrode a saddle just behind the crested skull, with straps and harnesses—and al-Sepehr’s arm about her waist—to hold her in place.
She wouldn’t have cared if he’d hurled her to her death, if this was the last thing she experienced. The hot wind tattered her veils. It blew them back against her face. The ground rushed below—she knew by the wind how it rushed—but it was so far beneath them it seemed to crawl. It was unwomanly, but she laughed and could not stop laughing. Though she felt the stiffness of al-Sepehr’s disapproval in the grip of his hands, she threw her hands into the air and tried to grasp the wind.
Let him disapprove. Ümmühan was flying.
They swept over cragged and crenellated lands, spinning wide around the city to approach it from the sunset shadows of the east. Their shadow raced them to one side, an oblique smear cast by the last rays of the sun. A salt pan shone like a pool of blood in the sunset. Above it, the curls of a rising dust-devil rose in lazy spirals.
That was wrong. The sun was setting now, the air cooling and settling. Ümmühan was no wizard, but she had been the lover of a few, and she knew the desert weather well enough for metaphor.
When blue tongues of flame lashed through the rising vortex, she was sure. “Al-Sepehr,” she said, returning her hands to the saddlebow. “Are you prepared to meet a djinni?”
“I see it.”
The rukh dropped its tail like a hovering hawk and backbeat, throwing Ümmühan’s shoulders into al-Sepehr’s chest. He bore it stolidly, reaching around her to choke up on the rukh’s reins as the whorl of fire whipped higher. Ümmühan felt the expansion of al-Sepehr’s body, heard the rush of air as he drew and held a breath.
Out of the vortex rose a naked figure of an azure man, his ropy body wreathed in cerulean fire. He towered; he ascended; he folded hands more broad than the rukh’s wings over lean forearms latticed with distended veins that might have been small rivers. His lower body rose in flame from the shadows of the rising twilight. The light cut a bright ascending line across his chest, like sunset chasing up the slope of a mountain. He tipped a head so wreathed in the haze of altitude and distance that his features blurred with it. Ümmühan could not be sure, but—craning her head back—she thought his eyes slitted against the sun, or perhaps in irritation.
The heat blasting from the djinn curled her eyelashes. She sensed the rukh’s desire to withdraw, the force of will with which al-Sepehr held it steady.
A rumble like the earth cracking wide shook the air under the rukh’s fluttering pinions. It was a moment before Ümmühan realized the djinn was speaking.
“
MUKHTAR AI-IDOJ. YOU HAVE TRIED TO
TRICK ME
.
”
All that breath came back out of al-Sepehr in one long, liquid, convoluted, incantatory pronouncement.
“O Fy-m’shar-ala-easfh-ala-wtqe-shra-tw’qe-al-nar-ala-fasheer! Hail, prince of fire! Hail, prince of the air!… Actually, I rather think I
succeeded
in tricking you. But only because you thought to turn the trick on me.”
Around and around the pillar of the djinn, the flames crawled higher. Ümmühan would have squeaked, perhaps even screamed, but she could not get a breath. The djinn’s name rang through her head as if she had been struck like a gong and she hastened to memorize it—a poet’s trained recollection a blessing now—as it had been all the times she snuck and spied. Mnemonics and images built upon each other as she built a room in her house of memories just for it, and for everything it might say.
In the path of the whirlwind, the moonlit desert lies afire.
She expected the djinn to roar, to bellow. With a shock she realized that these thundering tones were its equivalent of mocking, furious sweetness.
“THE BLOOD OF A WORLD STAINS YOUR HANDS, AL-SEPEHR.”
Those hands—tattooed with geometric patterns in black on the backs, rust-colored on the palms—did not move on the great bird’s reins. Al-Sepehr didn’t seem to see the need to raise his voice either. He leaned over Ümmühan’s shoulder, his breath hot on her ear, and said, “You were content enough to trigger war when you believed you were thwarting me. So you’re here in wrath and fire because I won a wager you accepted willingly?”
The djinn settled back—Ümmühan would have said on his heels, but his heels were obscured by the vortex of the tornado of fire that he rose out of. “
MY KIND WOULD REJOICE SHOULD YOUR WET, COLD LITTLE RACE BLOT ITSELF FROM BENEATH THE FOUR PILLARS OF THE SKY.
”
“But a war that serves my purposes, O Fy-m’shar-ala-easfh-ala-wtqe-shra-tw’qe-al-nar-ala-fasheer—that, you will have none of? That, you threaten and rage at me for? Tell me, Djinn—did you come here in the hopes that I would make some other error?”
The djinn looked crafty, and remained silent.
“So destroy me, then,” cried al-Sepehr. “If you do not think I fooled you fairly! Destroy me, if you think the compact permits it! Destroy me, if you think your case would stand before the Justices Eternal!”
He was, Ümmühan thought, beyond magnificence.
The djinn crossed his arms and boomed, “
WHERE IS YOUR GREEN RING NOW, AL-SEPEHR?
”
“The Green Ring was stolen from me, O Djinn! Its curse lies on another head now! But the bargain was not that I should keep it.” Though Ümmühan could feel him shaking, al-Sepehr stripped his veils from his face, tossed his head back, and laughed. “But it’s true. I have bested you, and you admit it.”
The djinn’s expression could have been no blacker if he actually were ablaze.
“I DO.”
Al-Sepehr smiled. “Then you must serve me and seek redress, as the ancient pacts require. Is this not so?”
“YOU TOO ARE BOUND BY THOSE PACTS. I AM FORBIDDEN TO HARM ANOTHER AT YOUR COMMAND.”
“Fear not; I will not abrogate the ancient contracts.” Al-Sepehr’s voice rang with masculine calm and certainty.
“YOU WILL REGRET THIS CHOICE, AL-SEPEHR.”
“I regret many things, O Djinn. After the manner of princes, I often do them anyway.
“Here are my commands. You will travel to ancient Erem, called Erem-of-the-Pillars, called City of Jackals and first of that epithet. You will seek there a woman known as Edene…”
11
In the court of Qori Buqa, the twins experienced a rough and unpredictable luxury. There might be only limited water for drinking and none for bathing—but the lack was made up by rich wines in golden goblets, by scented oils that could be slathered on the skin and scraped away again with implements of gold and mother-of-pearl. There might be no flour for bread, no oats for porridge—but there were potted meats from Song, rank in their complexity, and there were lychees preserved in syrup and fragrant cinnamon. There might be no blankets, but there were furs.
Two trading parties set out in the first five days after the twins’ arrival—one east and one west, both heavily guarded by Qersnyk riders. Qori Buqa was attempting to reopen the Celadon Highway. No caravans arrived with fresh materials, though, and laborers and artisans conscripted from the very borders of the empire by Mongke Khagan or his father Temusan, Khagan before him, made do with what was available or could be salvaged as they attempted to rebuild.
In the meantime, Qori Buqa Khan—or Khagan, as he had begun to style himself with Saadet’s encouragement—gave away riches to his men at every opportunity—horses and salt, goats and sheep, pelts cured supple as if they still graced a living animal.
In a fashion, the Khans were to be pitied. They did not wield the spiritual authority of an al-Sepehr and must ensure the loyalty of their tribesmen by providing plunder and through even more direct forms of bribery. It was a simple matter of appealing to the greed of men who had not yet come into wisdom, and spiritual adulthood, and the embrace of the Scholar-God.
The Khans led by acclaim rather than by birthright, and so the trade routes must be reopened if word was to spread of Qori Buqa’s assumption of the Khaganate. He could not rule the wide-ranging people of the steppe unless they came to support and acknowledge him, and once they did he must be able to feast them and reward them. Which would mean the promise of new lands to conquer and new riches to pillage. Empires must grow to live, and there was only one way for an empire to grow.
It did not take long for the twins to identify the major powers among Qori Buqa’s war-band. There was Hulegu, gray-templed and suspicious, the traditionalist—a role she wondered if he had fallen into because he was the youngest of Qori Buqa’s inner council and wished to be taken seriously. And there was Gansukh, with a forked beard and a bald pate and a taste for coats dripping with gold embroidery. He was friendly to Saadet, which set her more on her guard than Hulegu’s patent dislike.
Summers on the steppe were balmy by standards honed to the Rahazeen wastelands. When Qori Buqa summoned the twins to ride out with him hawking, Saadet’s now-habitual wardrobe of trousers, robe, veil, boots, and weapons demanded no amendment. She simply rose from the couch where she and Shahruz had been reading, made sure her veil was well wrapped about her face, and followed the messenger through the doorway and down a hall contained between the inner and outer files of the keep’s stone wall. It was narrow enough that even Saadet must turn her shoulders to pass from time to time—where stones made level on the exterior protruded less neatly into the passageway—and a ceiling too recently rebuilt to have yet garnered many smoke stains hunched close overhead.
Qersnyk tribesmen did not believe in stables, per se. The Khan’s herds were guarded by boys and girls out on the plain that stretched in all directions around Qarash, and selected animals brought to the would-be Khagan for his use as required. By the time the twins attained the courtyard, six matched mares stood in readiness. Their white-dappled, steel-colored coats were brushed gleaming, their pale faces marked by expressions of alertness. They wore Qersnyk saddles—high-cantled, high-pommeled—with a bar at the front of each, padded thickly in leather. The horses’ caparisons were inky black, appliquéd in golden curlicues and spirals. Women and men garbed in knee-length coats and fur-trimmed hats adorned with similar designs—the gold rose like stylized flames along the plackets and unfurled over the yokes—stood beside five of them. A boy held the reins of the sixth out to the twins.
“Her name is Khongordzol,” the boy said.
Thistle.
Well enough. The twins showed the mare the flat of their hand, and waited while she snuffed it. They wondered where Qori Buqa was—and, more immediately, his mount. But as the men and women in black and gold seemed to respond to some signal the twins did not recognize by assembling each beside their stirrup, the twins too moved to the ready position—and so, when five black-coated Qersnyk lofted as one into the saddle, the Rahazeen in white and indigo was only a half beat behind.
Those skirted coats did flare dramatically.
The mare—Thistle—sidled. Shahruz straightened her with a touch, then the twins settled a pistol more comfortably in their sash. Now younger boys—and one girl—also in the black-and-gold livery proceeded across the blue flagstones toward them, each one carrying an enormous bird on braced arms at shoulder height.
The twins had heard of the Qersnyk hunting eagles, but never seen one. These could be nothing else: the copper-black wings mantled over children’s arms that trembled at their weight, the napes of feathered necks that shimmered in sunlight as if they had been bathed in gold dust, the great round amber eyes larger than a man’s. Their beaks were black, and each hooked to a point like an awl. The strong forecurves of their wings could break a man’s arm. Their talons could pierce a wolf’s skull.
They were used to
hunt
wolves, or so the twins had heard. Saadet hoped faintly that it was not wolves they would be hunting today.
A clatter of hooves drew the twins’ attention as another mare entered the courtyard, bearing Qori Buqa. This one was also a gray, with a bone-white face still dark around the eyes. Tiny freckles of red hair speckled her coat everywhere it showed through crimson and gold, drawing into a mark like a dripped bloodstain down one side of her throat and across one shoulder. Even in close quarters, constrained by the rein and the would-be Khagan on her back, she moved like a falcon’s shadow speeding over snow.