Authors: Elizabeth Bear
She had not allowed herself to think of the child as male or female before this moment. She had forced herself neither to consider names nor to ponder the child’s future. Born into such a world, born to such parents—who could tempt fate?
But now, in her labor, feeling the suns wear across the sky outside as surely as if their light shone on her skin, she wondered if perhaps she should have focused her intention, brought her will to bear on her unborn and his or her future. If perhaps she should have tried to shape the child and the world with her will.
And so she wore circles in the stone floor, a round brown ghost that sailed in a fleet of gray and gaunt ones, and she felt the contractions coming faster and sharper, sharper and faster, until the world narrowed to a single perfect goal. She screamed aloud; she crouched down by the bathing pool. The ghulim urged her to the chair, but they were nothing to her. Temur should have been there, and Altantsetseg, and the female elders of the Tsareg clan. Perhaps Temur could have moved her, but these creatures might as well have been water dripping over stone.
Ghulim held her up on either side, supporting her arms and squeezing her hands. She screamed again. She caught her breath and held it, a fuller breath than she’d drawn in months. Blood seeped from the split scabs across her back. The pain was nothing. She felt her body stretch, felt the slip of something hard in blood. A ghul crouched before her, hands outstretched, her blood running over them. Edene shut her eyes, not to block out the sight but to concentrate her strength more fully.
There was the head. And there the rush of release as the tiny body followed. The physician (unless it was a midwife) held the babe up for Edene to see, bloody and trailing the cord still, eyes squinched with rage and throat distended with an unearthly howl.
“A boy,” she said, surprised by the rush of disappointment. A boy, another soldier, another pawn for the games of kings—
A strong son. A hero. An heir to the Queen of Erem
.
She closed her eyes with another contraction. When she opened them again, panting, disoriented, they were holding up the vein-fretted liver-purple placenta for her inspection. She watched a ghul run hands along the cord as if milking a mare to squeeze the blood from it into the babe, where it could do some good. Another lowered Edene to the floor, allowed her to sit, brought cold, wet cloths to lay between her thighs, towels to dry the sweat from her body, a robe to wrap her shoulders. Not the red one she’d been wearing before—how many hours?—but a blue one, fresh and dry.
She watched lazily as the ghulim cleaned and dried the babe.
A name, he’ll need a name.
A call name and a true name, before the suns set that night.
I wonder if Temur will know. I wonder if there will be a moon.
Her eyes drifted closed, and might have remained so until the babe was brought to her breast, except for the abrupt and enraged skreeling of the ghulim. Edene was on her feet, staggering, forcing herself to stand despite the exhaustion and pain.
Not so much blood lost then, not if I can do this
. But she was staggering, and it struck her that she could stand. That the physicians—unless they were midwives—were not holding her down.
She assessed the situation in an instant. The midwives had tied and cut the cord, and now the djinn held Edene’s son in his palms, bent over him with a curious expression. The babe looked up, fascinated, silent, and the ghulim circled just beyond the djinn’s reach, shrieking and clicking. As if the physical reach of a djinn’s arm meant anything.
“My child,” Edene said. She held out her hands, the strength of the ring buoying her. Could she contest a djinn, even so armed?
There is nothing of this world too strong for you, my Queen.
Ah, but was a djinn of
this
world? Even the Sorcerer-Prince had been defeated in the long run, though it had taken all the gods to do so. With a moment’s chill, which she did not permit to reach her expression, Edene realized,
he wore this ring as well.
Well, she would be a craftier queen than he had been prince. For one thing, Edene would arrange not to enrage the gods.
Nor would she trust in the actions of supernatural creatures.
The djinn smiled at her. He held the babe carefully and lifted it to his mouth as if to whisper in its ear. The child remained still, untouched by the fires that haloed the creature, and gurgled fascinatedly at whatever sounds too soft for Edene to hear came from the shapes the djinn’s lips formed. The child was too young to smile in reality—she knew that—but still he seemed to smile in response.
“My
child,
” she said, imperiously, as if there were not blood crusting on her thighs, as if her hair were not a sweat-drenched mass of tangles.
“Your child,” said the djinn. He held his hands out, the babe within them. “I have taken the liberty of giving him a name. But you may call him Rakasa ai-Erem ai-Nar.”
Edene looked into her son’s indigo infant eyes, calm and dark and endless as the night, and felt as if the world were swept away around her.
* * *
Hsiung and Hrahima arrived among the caravanserais of the trade town in time for the festival of camels, an event they had not known to anticipate. Not—Hrahima admitted—that it would have changed their decisions. There was a time limit at play. But the presence of so much prey, in such close proximity, was simply … distracting.
Hrahima wouldn’t eat another sentient creature unless she absolutely had to, of course, but that didn’t stop the monkeys from smelling like food. Filthy food, when they gathered in their seething, chattering, poo-flinging tribes, but food nonetheless … and that was ignoring their flocks of prey animals, bred so dull and stupid they didn’t even know to fight or run. And if human cities teemed with appetizing distractions, how much more so the corrals and picket lines of the caravanserais, where camels and pack mules and ponies of a dozen breeds jostled for hay and for water troughs. There were many of them—too many, suggesting that the caravan masters still felt no desire to risk their stock and lives upon a landscape at war.
The disappointing impression was reinforced by no sign anywhere of loading, or wagons loaded and ready, or camels under packs. No one seemed to be moving—not Qersnyk, not Song, not Aezin—not even the notoriously reckless Messalines, who would take their camel caravans across the Mother Sand itself in the cool season. The tents and clothes were every shade—green and blue, gray and white, dull yellows—and the sounds of voices and music rose on every side. They diced and quarreled; they cooked and fought; and in deference to the pale gray Rahazeen sky overhead many women went veiled, although not the Qersnyk—who did not care if Uthman savages thought them barbarians—and the Song, who considered their own cultural hegemony to extend to any ground upon which they stood.
There was even a group of Kyivvan traders, faces pale as mutton fat, encamped in a circle of their strange drab tents, a few Indrik-zver big as houses on tree-trunk legs picketed with elephant chains within. Even Hrahima could not consider those slope-backed giants dinner—at least, not once they were full grown—but the Kyivvans showed no more interest in leaving than anyone else. Still, Hrahima marked them; if they were to return home, they would at least be traveling in the right direction. If nothing easier presented itself, she would approach them and see if the protection of an Hrr-tchee, a wizard, a horse-lord, and a warrior-monk could help persuade them that it was better to seek a fortune on the road than huddle in a city that might itself trade hands several more times before the fighting was done.
The whole of the trade town sprawled under the scent of dust and dung, the haze of flies and smoke. A dozen languages and a thousand smells assaulted the senses. She caught a glimpse of troops moving through the haze, but either they didn’t see her, or they didn’t put a random Hrr-tchee together with the missing Qersnyk prince.
And then … there were those camels. Hsiung spotted them first, a whooping, shoving crowd surrounding a rope-marked square. Within it paced men leading beasts, both decked in rich finery. The camels had been bathed and perfumed and curried, their long lashes blackened and extended with a mixture of grease and lampblack that left alluring smudges below dewy eyes. Hrahima had seen the like on Rahazeen warriors, who shadowed their eyes in order to protect them from glare—and she had seen it as well on Uthman courtesans. When eyes were the only portion of the body permitted to show, they must be rendered most perfectly expressive.
Monkeys,
she thought disgustedly, and then—glancing at stolid, barrel-bodied Brother Hsiung, she felt ashamed of herself. Had not her tendency to judge others harshly led her to where she now stood: alone in a land of soft-handed monsters?
If she had managed to regard others with charity, as illuminated in their own ways by the Sun Within, she might not be a rag-eared exile, wearing earrings she’d bought with mercenary gold to replace the ones that had been earned and given and stripped away again.
She huffed angrily at her own distraction, amused when three bystanders staggered back hastily and Brother Hsiung turned to her, a mild and curious expression decorating his pleasant face.
“A camel beauty contest,” she said disingenuously, waving into the corral, the sweep of her gesture taking in gray and blue rags knotted on the rope boundaries and the slow pacing of a white-kaftaned man who—by the way he looked and frowned and looked again at every passing camel—must be the judge. “What will they think of next?”
Brother Hsiung grinned and shook his head, pushing his hood back to let the sunlight fall through the patchy, close-cropped stubble on his skull. His fingers seemed thick and soft for what Hrahima knew they were capable of—poetry, killing—and she took it as a reminder that things were not necessarily as they seemed.
They walked on.
Even in such a relatively cosmopolitan setting as the caravanserai of a city that straddled the Celadon Highway, the presence of a monk of the Wretched Mountain Temple Brotherhood in the company of an Hrr-tchee hunter was uncommon enough to occasion a good deal of comment. Hrahima’s ears were keen, and she overheard more than she was intended to.
Ahead, another crowd—glimpsed between tents lining what passed for a thoroughfare—and the milling heads of coffee-gray and tea-golden camels under a pall of dust. Hrahima could pick out the sharp tang of their excitement, the ammonia reek of urine, the baked-grains smell of hunger from the bony children on their backs, starved until they were light as those feathered seeds that are lifted by the wind. Men in concealing dishdashas paced along each side of the road, stringing ropes marked with fluttering rags dyed shades of gray.
Marking the course. Hrahima wondered if there would be some sort of warning before the race began.
She leaned down until her whiskers brushed Brother Hsiung’s ear. In a dialect of Song, she said, “People are talking about us.”
He nodded, though whether he’d overheard too or he was encouraging her to continue was anyone’s guess. But then he made a winding gesture with his hand, as if spooling yarn, and she guessed he wished a fuller explanation.
“That man there,” she said, pointing below eye-level with her tail to a desert tribesman whose loose robe and full cowl shaded him from the punishing sun, “is mentioning to his friend that I might be the Cho-tse for whom the priests have offered a reward. Three streets over, a crier is calling Samarkar’s and Temur’s description through the streets as wanted criminals, and saying that anyone with information should come to Mehmed Caliph’s troops for a reward. I’d say the Rahazeen are in town ahead of us again, and this time they have the local authorities in their red-stained palms.”
Hsiung nodded. He pointed upward and shrugged.
“True,” said Hrahima. “At least they can’t rain assassins on us from the rooftops in a tent city.” Although many of those tents were more like bannered pavilions. “But I’m beginning to think better of hiring on with a caravan. I think we’re better served to buy horses and supplies and go it on our own.”
They had come closer to the churning crowd around the camel paddock. Hrahima’s ears twitched, her boughten rings jingling, at the rise of wailing music. Criers went out, clearing the road, and Hrahima lifted one of the boundary ropes for Hsiung before herself stepping over it. Hrahima had a clear view over the heads of even the tallest in the human crowd. All those delicious camels were males, jowly and bearded and so racing-fit they had no humps to speak of. They’d be stringy and lean. A pity.
They went from milling to bunched up, their bony-jointed, loincloth-clad jockeys guiding them into a group, shoving and jabbing for position behind a thick white tape. They might be rib-shadow thin and they might be children, but they perched on the rumps of their beasts as if they had been born there. One slashed another rider’s camel across the nose with his crop; there were baritone camel squeals and shrill childish curses and when the second rider more or less brought his protesting beast under control, he retaliated against the first rider’s flank. The proctors of the race seemed to have no interest in controlling the fights; at the rear of the group, two of the monkey cubs had come to blows. No one intervened, but their competition took the distraction as an opportunity to shove them back from the starting line.
Someone shouted. The whining music ended. A hush fell, and a booming voice counted backward from four. Someone shrilled on an instrument. The tape fell.
The jostling tan-and-gray animals, their woolly heads bobbing, straining on long pipe-curved necks, lunged forward. They did not gallop, but loped awkwardly, big padded feet slapping billows of dust from the road. The monkeys were pressed up against Hrahima in every direction, shoving Brother Hsiung against her. He grasped her wrist, cub-small monkey’s fingers not quite closing around the bones, and tugged her back in the crowd, away from the rope. They were trapped here, pinned down; he was right to move them. Shrill screams of excitement and encouragement rose from the crowd. A woman all in black with heavy veils swaddling her head bounced on her toes, waving a fistful of gray and colored betting chits on high.