Now, the bandits, as you may imagine, had not been historically wellorganized. But in recent years they had fallen under the sway of a new leader, a handsome strong-limbed man who some said had been a simple talus-herder in his youth, and others said was a Khanzadeh, a son of the Khagan, or the son in hiding of one of the Khagan’s vanquished enemies, who were many. Over the course of time, he brought the many disparate tribes of bandits together under one black banner, and taught them to fletch their arrows with black feathers.
Whether it was the name he had been given at the cradleboard, none knew, but what he called himself was Temel.
To say that Nilufer could not be kept in a tower implies unfairly that she did not dwell in one, and that, of course, would be untrue. Her mother’s palace had many towers, and one of those—the tallest and whitest of the lot—was entirely Nilufer’s own. As has been noted, the Khatun’s province was small—really no more than a few broad plateaus and narrow valleys— and so she had no need of more than one palace. But as has also been described, the Khatun’s province was wealthy, and so that palace was lavish, and the court that dwelled within it thrived.
Nilufer, as befitted a princess who would someday rule, maintained her own court within and adjacent her mother’s. This retinue was made up in part of attendants appointed by the Khatun—a tutor of letters, a tutor of sciences, a tutor of statecraft and numbers; a dancing-master; a master of hawk and horse and hound; a pair of chaperones (one old and smelling of sour mare’s milk, the other middle-aged and stern); three monkish warrior women who had survived the burning of their convent by the Khagan some seventeen years before, and so come into the Khatun’s service—and in part of Nilufer’s own few retainers and gentlewomen, none of whom would Nilufer call friend.
And then of course there was the Witch, who came and went and prophesied and slept and ate as she pleased, like any cat.
On summer evenings, seeking mates, the talus crept from the mines to sing great eerie harmonies like the wails of wetted crystal. Nilufer, if she was not otherwise engaged, could hear them from her tower window.
Sometimes, she would reply, coaxing shrill satiny falls of music from the straight white bone of her reed flute. Sometimes, she would even play for them on the one that was made of silver.
Late one particular morning in spring, Nilufer turned from her window six towering stories above the rocky valley. The sun was only now stretching around the white peaks of the mountains, though gray twilight had given a respectable light for hours. Nilufer had already ridden out that morning, with the men-at-arms and the three monkish women, and had practiced her archery at the practice stumps and at a group of black-clad bandits, slaying four of seven.
Now, dressed for ease in loose garments protected by a roll-sleeved smock, she stood before an easel, a long, pale bamboo brush dipped in rich black ink disregarded in her right hand as she examined her medium. The paper was absorbent, thick. Soft, and not glossy. It would draw the ink well, but might feather.
All right for art, for a watercolor wash or a mountainscape where a certain vagueness and misty indirection might avail. But to scribe a spell, or a letter of diplomacy, she would have chosen paper glazed lightly with clay, to hold a line crisply.
Nilufer turned to the Witch, darting her right hand unconsciously at the paper. “Are you certain, old mother?”
The Witch, curled on a low stool beside the fire although the day was warm, lifted her head so her wiry gray braids slid over the motley fur and feathers of her epaulets. The cloak she huddled under might be said to be gray, but that was at best an approximation. Rather it was a patchwork thing, taupes and tans and grays and pewters, bits of homespun wool and rabbit fur and fox fur all sewed together until the Witch resembled nothing so much as a lichen-crusted granite boulder.
The Witch showed tea-stained pegs of teeth when she smiled. She was never certain. “Write me a love spell,” she said.
“The ink is too thin,” Nilufer answered. “The ink is too thin for the paper. It will feather.”
“The quality of the paper is irrelevant to your purpose,” the Witch said. “You must use the tools at hand as best you can, for this is how you will make your life, your highness.”
Nilufer did not turn back to her window and her easel, though the sun had finally surmounted the peaks behind her, and slanted light suffused the valley. “I do not care to scribe a love spell. There is no man I would have love me, old mother.”
The Witch made a rude noise and turned back to the fire, her lids drawing low over eyes that had showed cloudy when the dusty light crossed them. “You will need to know the how of it when you are Khatun, and you are married. It will be convenient to command love then, your highness.”
“I will not marry for love,” said the princess, cold and serene as the mountains beyond her.
“Your husband’s love is not the only love it may be convenient to command, when you are Khatun. Scribe the spell.”
The Witch did not glance up from the grate. The princess did not say but I do not care to be Khatun.
It would have been a wasted expenditure of words.
Nilufer turned back to her easel. The ink had spattered the page when she jerked her brush. The scattered droplets, like soot on a quartz rock, feathered there.
The princess did not sleep alone; royalty has not the privilege of privacy. But she had her broad white bed to herself, the sheets and featherbed tucked neatly over the planks, her dark hair and ivory face stark against the snowy coverlet. She lay on her back, her arms folded, as composed for slumber as for death. The older chaperone slept in a cot along the east side of the bed, and the youngest and most adamant of the monkish warrior women along the west side. A maid in waiting slept by the foot.
The head of the bed stood against the wall, several strides separating it from the window by which stood Nilufer’s easel.
It was through this window—not on the night of the day wherein the princess remonstrated with the Witch, but on another night, when the nights had grown warmer—that the bandit Temel came. He scaled the tower as princes have always come to ladies, walking up a white silken rope that was knotted every arm’s-length to afford a place to rest his feet and hands. He slipped over the window-sill and crouched beside the wall, his gloved hands splayed wide as spiders.
He had had the foresight to wear white, with a hood and mask covering his hair and all his face but for his eyes. And so he almost vanished against the marble wall.
The guardians did not stir. But Nilufer sat up, dark in her snowy bed, her hair a cold river over her shoulder and her breasts like full moons beneath the silk of her nightgown, and drew a breath to scream. And then she stopped, the breath indrawn, and turned first to the east and then to the west, where her attendants slumbered.
She let the breath out.
“You are a sorcerer,” she told him, sliding her feet from beneath the coverlet. The arches flexed when she touched the cold stone floor: of a morning, her ladies would have knelt by the bed to shoe her. Scorning her slippers, she stood.
“I am but a bandit, princess,” he answered, and stood to sweep a mocking courtesy. When he lifted his head, he looked past a crescent-shaped arrowhead, down the shaft into her black, unblinking eye, downcast properly on his throat rather than his face. She would never see him flinch, certainly not in moonlight, but he felt his eyelids flicker, his cheeks sting, a sharp contraction between his shoulder blades.
“But you’ve bewitched my women.”
“Anyone can scribe a spell,” he answered modestly, and then continued: “And I’ve come to bring you a gift.”
“I do not care for your gifts.” She was strong. Her arms, as straight and oak-white as her bow where they emerged from the armscyes of her night-gown, did not tremble, though the bow was a killing weapon and no mere toy for a girl.
His smile was visible even through the white silk of his mask. “This one, you will like.”
No answer. Her head was straight upon the pillar of her neck. Even in the moonlight, he could see the whitening of her unprotected fingertips where they hooked the serving. A quarter-inch of steady flesh, that was all that stayed his death.
He licked his lips, wetting silk. “Perhaps I just came to see the woman who would one day be Nilufer Khatun.”
“I do not care to be Khatun,” Nilufer said.
The bandit scoffed. “What else are you good for?”
Nilufer raised her eyes to his. It was not what women did to men, but she was a princess, and he was only a bandit. She pointed with her gaze past his shoulder, to the easel by the window, on which a sheet of paper lay spread to dry overnight. Today’s effort—the ideogram for foundation—was far more confident than that for love had been. “I want to be a Witch,” she said. “A Witch and not a Queen. I wish to be not loved, but wise. Tell your bandit lord, if he can give me that, I might accept his gift.”
“Only you can give yourself that, your highness,” he said. “But I can give you escape.”
He opened his hand, and a scrap of paper folded as a bird slipped from his glove. The serving, perhaps, eased a fraction along the ridges of her fingerprints, but the arrow did not fly.
The bandit waited until the bird had settled to the stones before he concluded, “And the bandit lord, as you call him, has heard your words tonight.”
Then the arrow did waver, though she steadied it and trained it on his throat again. “Temel.”
“At her highness’ service.”
Her breath stirred the fletchings. He stepped back, and she stepped forward. The grapnel grated softly on the stone, and before she knew it, he was over the sill and descending, almost silently but for the flutter of slick white silk.
Nilufer came to her window and stood there with the string of her long oak-white bow drawn to her nose and her rosebud lips, her left arm untrembling, the flexed muscles in her right arm raising her stark sinews beneath the skin. The moonlight gilded every pricked hair on her ivory flesh like frost on the hairy stem of a plant. Until the bandit prince disappeared into the shadow of the mountains, the point of her arrow tracked him. Only then did she unbend her bow and set the arrow in the quiver—her women slept on—and crouch to lift the paper bird into her hand.
Red paper, red as blood, and slick and hard so that it cracked along the creases. On its wings, in black ink, was written the spell-word for flight.
Blowing on fingers that stung from holding the arrow drawn so steady, she climbed back into her bed.
In the morning, the Khagan’s caravan arrived to collect his tithe. The Khagan’s emissary was an ascetic, moustached man, graying at the temples. The Witch said that he and the Khagan had been boys together, racing ponies on the steppes.
Hoelun Khatun arranged for him to watch the butchering of the talus from whose guts the tribute would be harvested, as a treat. There was no question but that Nilufer would also attend them.
They rode out on the Khatun’s elderly elephant. An extravagance, on the dry side of the mountains. But one that a wealthy province could support, for the status it conferred.
A silk and ivory palanquin provided shade, and Nilufer thought sourly that the emissary was blind to any irony, but her face remained expressionless under its coating of powder as her feathered fan flicked in her hand. The elephant’s tusks were capped with rubies and with platinum, a rare metal so impervious to fire that even a smelting furnace would not melt the ore. Only the talus could refine it, though once they excreted it, it was malleable and could be easily worked.
As the elephant traveled, Nilufer became acquainted with the emissary. She knew he watched her with measuring eyes, but she did not think he was covetous. Rather she thought more tribute might be demanded than mere stones and gold this time, and her heart beat faster under the cold green silk of her robes. Though her blood rushed in her ears, she felt no warmer than the silk, or than the talus’ tumbled jewels.
The elephant covered the distance swiftly. Soon enough, they came to the slaughtering ground, and servants who had followed on asses lifted cakes and ices up onto the carpet that covered the elephant’s back.
Despite its size and power, the slaughter of the talus was easily done. They could be lured from place to place by laying trails of powdered anthracite mixed with mineral oil; the talus-herders used the same slurry to direct their charges at the rock faces they wished mined. And so the beast selected for sacrifice would be led to the surface and away from others. A master stone-mason, with a journeyman and two apprentices, would approach the grazing talus and divine the location of certain vulnerable anatomic points. With the journeyman’s assistance, the mason would position a pointed wrecking bar of about six feet in length, which the brawny apprentices, with rapid blows of their sledges, would drive into the heart—if such a word is ever appropriate for a construct made of stone—of the talus, such that the beast would then and there almost instantly die.
This was a hazardous proceeding, more so for the journeyman—rather trapped between the rock and the hammers, as it were—than the master or the apprentices. Masons generally endeavored to produce a clean, rapid kill, for their own safety, as well as for mercy upon the beast. (The bandits were less humane in their methods, Nilufer knew, but they too got the job done.) She licked crystals of ice and beet sugar from her reed straw, and watched the talus die.
On the ride back, the emissary made his offer.
Nilufer sought Hoelun Khatun in her hall, after the emissary had been feted through dinner, after the sun had gone down. “Mother,” she said, spreading her arms so the pocketed sleeves of her over-robe could sweep like pale gold wings about her, “will you send me to Khara-Khorin?”
The possibility beat in her breast; it would mean dangerous travel, overland with a caravan. It would mean a wedding to Toghrul Khanzadeh, the sixth son of the Khagan, whom Nilufer had never met. He was said to be an inferior horseman, a merely adequate general, far from the favorite son of the Khagan and unlikely, after him, to be elected Khan of Khans.