Authors: Elizabeth Bear
The sun was rolling along the horizon by then, orange rays broken by buildings striping the world into dark and gold bands like the hide of a Cho-tse. A vulture lazed upon the sky, flexed pinions clearly visible. Temur entertained the fancy that it supported itself by its fingertips against some invisible wall.
As if his thought had summoned her, Hrahima’s tiger-great silhouette slipped from the side yard as he and Bansh passed. Bansh rose into a trot. Hrahima jogged gently alongside, keeping pace with swinging, easy strides. Her harness lay smooth and clean over her fur, supporting her knives; a slender rope bounced at her hip and a flap-covered wallet rode the other. Temur had never seen her with more gear.
“Out for a run?” she asked, ever so casually.
“I guess we both are,” he answered.
Mare and cat jogged a few strides companionably before Hrahima raised a retracted claw to the sky. “That’s a steppe vulture,” she said. “They don’t usually come so far west.”
“Maybe it followed us.”
Warming, Bansh stretched out, and Hrahima’s breath and strides came faster. Still without strain, however. When Temur stole a glance at her sideways, her whiskers pricked forward. In her relaxed, ragged ears, the gold rings jingled.
They reached the earth-paved street and were no longer alone. They had continued out the back of Ato Tesefahun’s property, moving farther from the docks and more toward the periphery of Asitaneh. This street was dominated by a glassworks—the roar of the ovens could be heard from the road, even though the building itself was set well back from other structures for safety—and men with carts and little clots of veiled women with market baskets and bags were beginning to make their way through the outskirts of town.
With a shift of weight, Temur slowed his mare. Bansh wanted to run, and at a walk she placed each foot fussily, kicking it high and snorting as she set it down again. Temur and Hrahima—and Bansh, no doubt, with her clean steppe lines and rangy, nearly maneless build—attracted quick glances and a few outright stares.
They edged around a knot of men that crowded the street in front of a coffee seller’s. The conversation in the queue was mostly local politics—the aging caliph’s reputation in contrast to that of one of his popular lieutenants, as near as Temur could gather with his fractured Uthman. Most of these men seemed to be partisans of the charismatic up-and-comer, but one—Temur guessed from his leather apron that he was an employee or the proprietor of the glassworks—was defending the caliph at length, and another appeared to be preaching anarchy.
Temur snorted to himself. So it was the world over: Asitaneh no different from Qarash. Nevertheless, he slowed to listen … and for his trouble heard little more, except a torrent of abuse heaped by two men who seemed to belong to the dominant Falzeen sect upon one whom Temur assumed to be Rahazeen. It broke off, however, as soon as the men noticed the Cho-tse jogging past and listening.
Temur and Bansh and Hrahima won their way through with only a little delay and exited a lightly guarded gate, which seemed to have stood wide overnight. People came and went; there were villages without the walls and farmers were arriving with loads of chickens, of eggs, of melons and dates and other such produce as could be coaxed to grow in the dry plain and rubbled hills behind the city. The angled light showed details in the landscape that Temur had not previously noticed. He was used to glimpsing these hills from the windows and yard of Ato Tesefahun’s house and seeing them baked flat by the fierceness of afternoon. Slanted illumination and shadows revealed textures to the landscape that he had never suspected—wrinkles, gullies, and ridges in sharp relief.
Temur, Bansh, and Hrahima veered off the road after a few strides so they could stretch out and run.
Temur wished Samarkar were with them. He wished they could just keep going until they reached the horizon and then choose another horizon and run some more.
He wouldn’t. He would choose to face the tasks that fate had set him.
But he couldn’t make himself not want to run.
* * *
As they entered the court of the caliph, Samarkar was greeted by the ethereal scent of frankincense and the equally ethereal sound of a soprano voice, floating unaccompanied upon the fan-stirred breeze. The armor, no matter how impressive, restricted her field of vision. She glanced from side to side, but though the motion reassured her of the exact locations of Ato Tesefahun, Hrahima, Temur, and Brother Hsiung, she could not locate the source of the singing.
Those glimpses
did
encourage her to slow her stride and take in the design of the caliph’s palace. The once-princess Samarkar had seen many a royal dwelling, and resided in not a few of them—in Rasa and in Song—but this was like something out of a traveler’s book. She tipped her head back as subtly as she could manage, permitting herself to be all but swayed on her feet by the grandeur of the domed and vaulted spaces above. She—who had seen the impossible span of the Wreaking in Tsarepheth, who had slept and worked within the white-and-crimson walls of its impossible Citadel, who had lived as a prince’s wife in one of the famed—and equally impossible—paper palaces of Song—even she, the once-princess Samarkar, was overawed.
The walls of the palace were massive blocks of gold-chased lapis lazuli, a blue so fine and true as to defy description. There were no skies in all the civilized world that color. Graceful words—passages of the Scholar-God’s scripture—carved fingertip-deep in the walls seemed cut from black shadows, while the walls themselves glowed in the light that fell through glass-finished windows taller than three men standing on one another’s shoulders. The stone filigree holding the glass cast articulated shadows across the cream marble floor as if flowers of light were strewn by giant’s handfuls for any foot to tread upon. Overhead, a lofty chain of vaults and domes seemed to hover, higher and finer than anything Samarkar had even envisioned in dreams. More script adorned it: words everywhere, even worked in gold into the marble underfoot. Even cast by the shadows through the ranks of windows. Even drifting in the air through that unbelievable, acoustically perfect space.
Samarkar noticed that Temur, who tended to hunch uncomfortably under a stone roof, was leaning back and staring about himself in wonder.
“It’s not so humble,” Ato Tesefahun said effacingly. “But it is for the glory of the Scholar-God.”
“Who was the architect?” Samarkar marveled aloud.
Ato Tesefahun looked down at his feet. Samarkar blinked at him from behind her helm’s slatted mask and winced when Hrahima cuffed—gently, by a Cho-tse’s standards—the old man.
“Not so humble,” the tiger scoffed. “Yes, so says a great wizard of Aezin. Not so humble, indeed.”
Samarkar stumbled on the smooth stone. “This was built … in your lifetime?”
He smiled. “In yours, granddaughter, if I estimate your age accurately.”
Samarkar was too stunned by the courtesy he did her—
granddaughter?
—to fill the pause he left her. She knew Aezin folk used family endearments as a sign of respect to unrelated friends—but she also knew they never did it casually.
After a moment, he continued. “Though the thought behind it commenced some fifty years ago, when I was a very young, very conceited man. Knowing what I know now, I might not plot quite so boldly again.”
Hrahima chuffed: her feline laughter. Samarkar noticed how many of the bustling slaves and functionaries who zipped from place to place across the beautiful atrium deviated from their line long enough to nod to Ato Tesefahun in his threadbare, expensive robes—though none of them paused to pass a word, and neither did he seem so inclined.
“I thought—” She glanced from side to side, and lowered her voice, and spoke in the Qersnyk tongue. “I had been given to understand, Ato, that you were not a great supporter of the caliphate.”
He looked at her, wide-eyed, guileless. A simple old man. “Because I am Aezin, or because I make my home in Ctesifon … when I have not been called to Asitaneh on business? Both Aezin and Ctesifon, as you know, are loyal vassals of the caliphate, rendering tribute
willingly
to the representative of the Scholar-God’s hegemony on earth.”
Samarkar heard Temur’s foot scuff the floor like that of a chastened child. For was he not—had he not been?—the soldier of still another conqueror? Was not Samarkar the daughter of such a one? She met Ato Tesefahun’s eyes through the slots of the helm, for a moment forgetting the modesty expected of a woman here. Ato Tesefahun winked into her regard.
It was Samarkar who looked down. In order to keep from shaking her head continually in amazement, she asked, “The singing. A eunuch?”
“A slave poetess,” Ato Tesefahun said.
“But a woman—”
“Oh,” he said, as if apprehending her confusion. As if the source of it were not new to him, and he had made this explanation many times before. “Women are reflections of the Scholar-God and Her Prophet, after all. They are to be encouraged to study the natural histories, or literature, or medicine. For them to do so is like holding a diamond before the lamplight of the Scholar-God’s grace and glory.”
Samarkar touched her mask. “But how can you study science—how can you exist as a colleague—when a man can’t look upon your face? Or speak to you?” She gestured to the air. “How can this poet perform in a public place if she is forbidden to speak to men?”
“She sings from behind a screen,” said Ato Tesefahun. “Or from within a veil. That is Ümmühan, one of the city’s greatest slave poetesses. Is she not fine?”
“Ümmühan,”
Samarkar said dubiously.
“‘The Illiterate?’”
Her voice was pure and powerful enough that Samarkar could have believed it to have belonged to a eunuch.
“Their performers,” said Hrahima, “are given stage names by their patrons or owners, and the more humble the name—so as not to affront the Scholar-God—the more prestige usually attached to the performer.”
“I see,” said Samarkar finally, a little forlornly. The worst of it was, she did.
She tugged her helm down a little more snugly over the cushion of her hair and squared her shoulders as Ato Tesefahun led their little party across the word-wrought stones. They progressed toward an area beneath the great dome that was segregated from the common atrium by pierced stone screens and ranks of
kapikulu,
fanatical slave mercenary guards in skirted coats of cerulean blue.
The
kapikulu
were legendary for their loyalty and fierceness, and Samarkar knew they served all over the realms claimed by the Scholar-God. But they were not the only holy warriors sworn to the caliph’s service. Arranged among the
kapikulu
were the royal guards, the so-called Dead Men, whose presence supplied another hint to the caliph’s location.
They numbered a dozen. They stood arrayed in elaborate reproductions of Uthman grave robes wrought from rich fabrics, the wide sleeves decorated with artful, layered tatters of dust-colored linen and silk, the hoods dropped down their backs. Each robe was belted with a crimson sash through which was thrust a sword, but otherwise left to hang open-fronted over silver-bright mail. Like the robes, shaven heads and eyebrows indicated that these Dead Men no longer belonged to the world.
They had no families outside the caliph’s household. They were chosen from among the orphans of the street, ceremonially beheaded and reborn into the caliph’s family and raised up as warrior priests. The caliph’s household provided everything for them: education (or perhaps
indoctrination
would be the better-chosen word), training, wives, wealth, care for their children, the assurance of Heaven. There were said to be no more pious, no more incorruptible swordsmen in the world. There were certainly few better trained, if the reports of Samarkar’s father’s intelligencers could be believed.
* * *
The caliph was a man—no longer young but not by any means frail—whose dark eyes blazed out from bruised hollows. A few steel-colored hairs stippled his brows and beard, but a filet-bound linen cloth edged in indigo and crimson embroidery concealed his hair, so Samarkar could not see if the signs of age progressed further. Veins and tendons stood out in the backs of hands like saddle leather, incongruous as they cradled an eggshell-porcelain coffee cup.
Upon an elevated platform he sat, not enthroned but rather upon a sort of chair consisting of a brocade sling between crossed wooden supports. The richness of his raiment half-concealed it. At his right hand, a veiled and shrouded woman crouched upon cushions, motionless as if carved. She supported the tray from which the caliph must have lifted his coffee cup. Three well-dressed men, whom Samarkar assumed to be heralds or viziers or advisors of some sort, were arranged seated behind and below the caliph’s chair.
The caliph looked up as Ato Tesefahun’s little band was brought before him, but he did not speak. The slave poetess sang still.
She must be concealed in the louvered sandalwood box just big enough to comfortably enclose a standing woman that had been placed at the base of the caliph’s dais. It must have been cunningly constructed to augment sound, because the poet’s voice rang as clearly as if she stood at the focus of any amphitheater.
Samarkar could now make out most of the words of her chant, though the dialect was archaic and the diction formal. Still, that was the way of court language everywhere, and Samarkar had been raised and bred to it.
The poem was a young girl’s plaint of grief, a plea for a husband gone to war to return safe and soon. It might have seemed simple, Samarkar thought—and on the surface it was. A ballad, with the end-rhyming lines that marked Uthman poetry—but the naïveté of the poem’s construction and topic was underlain by darker threads. The poem might be written in the voice of a young girl, but it marked a mature woman’s understanding of inevitability, and it was shot through with a sense of futility and loss and wasted youth that made Samarkar think that the robed silhouette visible only as flickers of movement through the slats of the blind was no girl, but a poet of experience and grief. Samarkar would have hoped that Temur’s shaky Uthman was insufficient for him to understand the gist of the song, but a glance at his face disabused her. His eyes bright, his expression blank … she knew without asking that he was thinking of Edene.