A Wind in Cairo (20 page)

She bowed as well as she could, with as much respect as she could muster. “My lords, have you forgotten? The army rides to war. Its commander needs you both. Would you have him lose his war so that you may win yours?”

They did not want to hear it, and never from her. She made them hear it. “If the sultan were here, he would never allow this. Will you give him cause to despise you both?”

She cast her dice. She bowed again, backed away. “Your pardon, my lords. I overstep myself. If you will draw blood, I pray you draw it quickly, before the sultan comes to stop you.”

She turned her back on them and walked away. She prayed that no one would see how she trembled.

There was silence behind her. The emirs let her pass. She yearned to look back, but she must not. That would be a surrender.

Only when she was out of the light could she turn. The space about the fire was empty. The voices that began to speak were none of them the enemies', and none of them edged with rancor.

Her knees nearly gave way. An arm about her shoulders held her up. She looked into her father's face. It was grim, but it was not suffused with rage. He said nothing. She did not try to make him speak. Mutely, side by side, they walked back to their tents.

Zamaniyah had kept the feud from turning anew to blood. Barely. It abated not at all. Certain of the emirs, whether at the sultan's command or their own will, kept the enemies well apart.

Little good it did. Al-Zaman had begun to brood again, blackly, as he had not since his sons were killed. Wiborada slept in his tent still, but it was only that. “He doesn't want me,” she said, sharp with anger and hurt. “All he wants to do is pace and snarl and curse the Egyptian.”

It was all he did when he was not riding or being emir. Zamaniyah could divert him, sometimes, for a little while. Less as they rode deeper into Syria, and met no enemy, and gained both numbers and strength. Damascus fell to the show of arms and to the sultan's largesse: the queen of the cities of Syria with its orchards and its sweet waters, and no man in it bold enough to withstand the upstart out of Egypt.

Victory so easily won only fed the rivals' rancor. “We need an honest fight,” said Wiborada.

In Damascus she had not seen fit to take back women's dress; and al-Zaman cared too little to compel her. She was not concealing her face any more than she must. Here in the stable of the house which the emir had claimed, she bared even her head, her hair in plaits like Zamaniyah's, her eyes interested as Zamaniyah fretted over one of Khamsin's shoes. “Is it loose?” she asked.

“It wants to be.” Zamaniyah let it go. Khamsin was restive, shifting from foot to foot, trying to chew on the posts of his stall. He calmed infinitesimally under her hand. “Maybe we'll get a fight,” she said as she combed his mane. “The Syrian sultan's heir is in Aleppo, walled in defenders and defying our lord. We'll be marching there in a day or two.”

“Will Saladin,”—she always mangled his name so—”will your sultan bow to the prince and rescue him from his wicked viziers, or will he stop pretending and take the kingdom?”

“Salah al-Din Yusuf,” said Zamaniyah with precision, “believes that a land requires a man of experience to rule it; that a child under regents of little competence can only weaken, and perhaps destroy it.”

“Saladin wants Syria,” Wiborada translated, incorrigible. “Syria seems to want him. God knows, he's paid them enough. My father used to say that generosity was all very well, but it were best begun at home.”

“You people are barbaric,” said Zamaniyah.

Wiborada was not at all insulted. “Some of us know when to stop.”

Zamaniyah leaned on Khamsin's neck. Suddenly she was very tired. “I wish my father did.”

“Battle will distract him,” said Wiborada. “Honest war and an honest enemy: give him those, and he'll forget his old ranklings.”

“I hope so,” said Zamaniyah.

The Frankish woman was wise enough, Khamsin supposed. If it were wisdom that he waited in sweating terror, with Zamaniyah on his back trying her utmost not to tremble; and al-Zaman beside them on his nerveless grey stallion, awaiting the signal to attack. If he brooded now, he brooded upon the enemy: a walled town, a broken gate, a bristle of defenders.

Their own line had no order to it that Khamsin could see. That it had two flanks and a center, he knew: he had heard people speak of it. He saw only a mass of men and beasts, a glitter of weapons and helmets, a restless eddy and swirl about no common center.

A clear voice rose up to heaven. “God is great! God is great! There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God! Come to prayer, O ye Muslims! Come to prayer!”

Drums beat, sudden and fierce. Men's voices shrilled above the muezzin's wail. “
Allah-il-allah! Allahu akbar!”
Swords flashed out, up. Arrows flew. The tide of Egypt swept upon this small islet of Syria.

There were no limits to terror. It mounted and mounted and mounted. It swelled from pain into sheerest, starkest exhilaration. He cried aloud. Zamaniyah's voice echoed him, thin and high. Her arrows sang above his head. His feet bore them both where her will, his madness guided. Forward, spurning earth. Forward into death's maw.

This was the mightiest prayer of Islam. Holy war. War that is holy, just war, war in the name of one's God and one's Faith and one's sultan.

Charge met charge with the clangor of steel on steel. Horses screamed with rage and in agony. The air throbbed with the iron sweetness of blood.

Zamaniyah thrust her bow into its saddle-sheath. It slapped Khamsin's side; he bucked lightly, offended. Her sword rang from its scabbard. They waded in a sea of steel. He leaped, struck, slashed with teeth and heels. Bodies shrieked and reeled and fell.

It was nothing, this battle. A mob, armed. A city, hostile. Had he not seen it in Cairo? and he all but alone then, unarmed, unready; but walled now in army, a flood of shrieking, slashing, steel-toothed champions. They were splendid. They were God's own. They were victorious.

Jaffar had thought that he had borne all that a human creature need bear, and somewhat over. He had been a perfect innocent. He had never sent his mistress off to battle. He had never stayed behind in his proper place, the servant's place, on guard over her tent; and known through every instant that she could be dying, now, while he kept useless watch over trifles.

Nor could he suffer in merciful solitude. Ah, no. The master's tame Frank had to plague him with her presence.

“You look like a panther,” she growled, “prowling. Can't you ever sit still?”

“No!”

She gratified him, slightly. Her eyes widened at his vehemence. His mind took the measure of her. Bleached corpse, stone-eyes, straw-hair, hideous. White, gold, eyes the deep pure blue of lapis, face carved in ivory, rare and unflawed beauty. Even in mamluk livery. Even scowling.

He, as beautiful among his own kind as was she among hers, as hideous here as she would have been to his slender ebony people, met scowl with furious scowl. “How can I sit still? She could be dead.”

“I could be fighting beside her.”

His head tossed, contemptuous. “What use would you be? You'd never be thinking of her.”

“And you would?”

“Always.”

Her scowl smoothed to a broad mime of astonishment. “By the saints! How you love her!”

“She is my mistress.”

The Frank laughed, loud and mocking, barbarian. “Oh, certainly she is.” Her eyes narrowed. “You couldn't really? Could you?”

He could have killed her. It would have been simple. She fancied herself a warrior. He was one. And no one knew; no one but Zamaniyah.

He sat by the tent's flap and smiled his sweetest smile. “Would you truly like to know?”

She had no shame, and precious little fear. “People tell stories. They say your kind aren't all alike. Some of you have enough for the purpose.”

His smile widened to a panther-grin. “If I did, would I tell you?”

“Of course not,” she said. She clasped her knees and rocked. Movement. At last. He almost laughed. “What would her father do if he knew?”

Jaffar did laugh then. “What makes you think he doesn't?”

“But—” she said. “But he—you—she—”

“I was bought for her. Because I am what I am. Because a fat capon could never guard her as she of all women must be guarded. Our kind are valued, O innocent. Some of us rise high. The one who wards the little prince of Syria, who rules the kingdom in the child's name—he's one of us. Didn't you know?”

Even ignorance could not shame her. “You want no more than Zamaniyah.”

“Should I want more?”

“There's power,” she said. “Riches. Freedom to revel in them.”

He spread his hands. “What are they? Will they give me back what is gone? Will they free me from death?”

“Death is better than life.”

“Is that why you evade it so cleverly?”

She hissed at him. “I would be free.”

“Would you? You could have been. You need only have walked out of camp in the Franks' country.”

At long last she flushed. Her eyes darted. “Where would I have gone? My father is dead. Others would long since have taken our lands. What could I expect but beggary and scorn?”

“What,” he asked, “indeed?” She glared at her knotted fingers. He contemplated his own. “I think you did want to go. I think you pondered it, long and cruelly hard, and chose what you have. There are flaws enough in it, and Islam is never the Faith for you, and your man is hardly a tender young lover; but he is, as much as any man can be, yours. So is my mistress mine.

“We do choose,” he said, “in the end. Even when we hardly know what we have chosen.”

“No more do they know. We're slaves. Bought fidelity. We're nothing to them, unless we vex their peace.”

“And then they forbid us to die with them.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes!”

Zamaniyah did, after all, come back. Alive; whole, as far as he could see; mastering her demon of a horse. There was blood on her armor, on her sword. She was greenish pale, although she smiled, dismounted with her wonted grace, accepted willingly Jaffar's entirely unwilled embrace. He clutched her blindly, babbling nonsense, shaking her and railing at her and clutching her again. “Never,” he said. “Never leave me behind again. Never!”

No matter that he had chosen it, because it was his duty. He was beyond reason.

Briefly enough. He let her go, cheeks burning. “Mistress. I didn't—”

“I missed you, too,” she said. No one else could have heard how her voice shook. She held out her hands, stiffly, as if they did not belong to her. “I'm all blood. I'm supposed to be clean. I have to go back. Father—the sultan—”

“Did they command you?”

Her eyes flickered. “There's so much still to do. Khamsin—”

“I have Khamsin,” said Wiborada, who knew him well enough to ignore his flattened ears and shaking head. She led him protesting away.

Jaffar led his mistress protesting to bath, bedgown, bed. He had almost to sit on her to keep her there. But her body had more sense than she; it conquered her before she knew what it had done.

She kept him by her, holding his hand in her small cold one. In the tent's dimness, lamplit, her face was thin and pinched. “Have you ever killed anyone?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Does it get easier? The more you do it?”

“Some say it does.”

She shivered and clutched his hand. “I don't want it to. I want to remember what it is, and how it is, and what it does to souls. I never want to forget.”

It would have been easy to turn his hand. To fill it with the new and startling fullness of her breast. To know what it was that a man could have.

He sighed invisibly. Even a eunuch, it seemed, could be a fool for love.

She did not know. His fingers were limp under hers, oblivious to the lure of her, to the beauty that was growing in her, slowly, surely, wondrously. Pain was shaping it, fining it.

Let no one know, he prayed to any god who could hear. Let no man see, and rouse to lust, and take her away.

“You should remember,” he said. “But not too much. Not beyond bearing.”

“It should be unbearable. It has to be.” Her fingers warmed upon his, fever-hot. “War is not holy, Jaffar. War is horror.”

He bowed his head to wisdom.

“It's a madness,” she said. “Blood is beautiful: so red, so bright. It leaps in fountains. It enriches the earth. But death...death is blood when it has dried. Death is hideous.”

She was beautiful, living, drifting on the borders of sleep. She was slow to cross them. Dreading, surely, what waited there. Dreams; horrors.

It was bitter to see, in her who had had the art of dreamless sleep. He stroked her hair with gentle fingers, and murmured words in his own tongue. His mother had spoken them over him when he was small: a spell, very old, very strong; a ward against ill. Inch by reluctant inch she yielded to exhaustion. He watched nightlong, guarding her body as his words guarded the gates of her dreams.

The dead wandered the field of their slaying, dim shapes, bewildered, bewildering. Why did they linger? Could not an angel have been spared to snatch them to Paradise? They were not supposed to wander thus, lost, drifting shadow-frail across the world of the living.

They seemed not to see one another, or the men who labored in the aftermath of battle. Perhaps they could see Khamsin. They moved aside as he passed, although they made no move to evade the woman who led him. She walked through one shadow warrior: terrible to see, her ripe humanity filling for a moment the shape of a ghost. Then they flowed apart, the dead questing for he knew not what, the living for something other than the horselines. Those were well behind.