A Wind in Cairo (29 page)

The ranks of Islam were nothing like ordered Frankish lines. They shifted and flowed about the standards of the captains. The young and the eager tested their weapons, limbered their mounts, simply fretted in and about their places. Seasoned fighters took their ease in what shade they could contrive; some even seemed to sleep.

Messengers galloped back and forth. Men of neighboring companies mingled, companionable. There was a great deal of laughter and song; and Zamaniyah could see a game of dice in progress. The players were wagering their hopes of plunder.

She had dismounted to spare Khamsin. After all his fretting, he seemed to have seen the virtue in quiet. He had an understanding with Jaffar's mule; they were side by side, nose to tail, flicking the flies from one another. Terror or no, she found herself smiling at the sight of them.

Someone was standing near her. He had been standing there for some little time, saying nothing. She turned. Whatever she would have said, she forgot entirely.

Abd al-Rahim bowed like a courtier. “Lady,” he said. “Have I your leave to wish you well?”

She was conscious of Jaffar standing as close as her shadow, and of her father caught up in his command. She was sharply, almost painfully conscious of the young man who had risen to meet her eyes. She had no voice to speak. She nodded.

His smile was luminous. He dared mightily, almost unpardonably: he touched her cheek.

His hand leaped back even as it touched, as if it burned him as it had burned her. “Allah protect you,” he said.

Jaffar's snort was as eloquent as Khamsin's. She could have hit them both. But Abd al-Rahim was there still, bowing again, leaving her in a faint scent of musk and leather. His place was far down the line, among the Syrians.

She willed her eyes to stop following him. Thunder rumbled all about her. A shout went up. She snapped about. An army was coming at the charge.

Her body never stayed for her sluggard of a brain. She vaulted into the saddle, snatched her bow.

People were raising a deafening clamor. Its sense dawned on her. Not dismay. Not enmity, or the madness of battle. Joy. “Farrukh-Shah! Shihab al-Din! Taqi al-Din!” The sultan's kinsmen, his uncle, his brother's sons, come at last as he had prayed. “Egypt! Egypt has come!”

In force, with a high heart, singing. Suddenly all the sultan's army was the center, and Egypt spread wide in its wings; and they who had been a small force to be so strong, were a mighty army.

And Aleppo, on the plain, had flowed together with Mosul and come on with the speed of war: agonizingly slow, appallingly swift.

Zamaniyah did not know how it was for other people. For her everything was both bitterly clear and lost in a haze of terror. She could read every word on every banner of the army that came against her; but she could see nothing of the warriors' faces, only a blur of white, brown, black, and a gleam of eyes, and a glitter of sun on bared steel. That undulating roar was the massed voices of the armies, and the thunder of hooves and drums, and the shouted commands of the captains.

She had learned, by laborious degrees, to focus. To see only what was directly about; to hear only her own commander. Since he was her father, that was less difficult than it might have been. It gave her an anchor in the sea of milling, shrieking, murderous humanity.

She was aware, as she must be, of who nearby was friend, and who was enemy. The emirs who had been with the sultan throughout this war were together, apart from the Syrians and the half-wild Bedouin. The Egyptians flanked them all, riding and fighting too far away to matter.

As she moved with the mounted archers to begin the charge, her eye's edge marked the nearest banner. At first she did not know it except for
ours,
and then for not there when she had looked before. Recognition struck as she strung her bow; it nearly flew from her slackened hands.

Pray God her father did not see who had come to flank him. Luck, fate, design, some failure of the sultan's vigilance—no matter what it was. Hard upon the right hand of the Zamani cavalry rode the levies of Ali Mousa Sharif.

Everything in battle was an omen. She fumbled with her bowstring, all skill deserting her, all courage reft away.

Khamsin tossed his head and neighed. Her father's voice rose strong and deep and much beloved. The drums quickened to the charge.

Khamsin sprang forward. She lurched; he jibbed, offended; laughter tore itself from her. She found her balance with her strength. An arrow leaped from quiver to hand to string. With a high fierce cry she aimed it into the seething mass that was the enemy, and let it fly.

Bow to lance to sword. That was the way of her people in war. For the sultan there would be order in it, and shape, and plan. For her there was only battle. Her father's standard was beacon and guide. Her duty was to hold fast beneath it and to cut down any who hindered her. She felt in her skin the eunuch fighting like a tiger behind, and the Frankish woman close by him, mutely defiant, wielding sword with a man's deadly strength. They were an army of their own, an arrow shot into the enemy's heart.

Khamsin lunged at a howling Turkoman, smote him down, trampled him. Her sword bit flesh beyond him. Her back quivered; she flattened. Steel sang over her, clashed on Wiborada's sword.

Her stallion bore her out of it. Nothing leaped to strike. She drew a breath, glanced quickly about, started. Her father's banner was far to the left of her. Close, so close that she might have belonged to it, Ali Mousa's green standard whipped in the wind.

Khamsin squealed, kicked hard. The battle had found them again. Its course bore them steadily rightward.

There—an opening; a path to al-Zaman.

Khamsin bucked and balked. The path closed. The tide bore her toward her father's enemy.

Khamsin hardly knew what he was doing until he had done it. Making choices when he thought they were all made. Being drawn to that banner as if he had no will of his own.
God is great,
said the letters upon it,
and inscrutable are the ways of God.

Green and gold. So too his trappings. It was too perfect for irony. It must be fate.

His rider's resistance was sharp, but steel was sharper yet. She wasted no strength in fighting him. There were enemies enough to hand.

Two who belonged to al-Zaman were with them yet. The woman on her tall gelding; the eunuch on his mule that had the spirit of his dam. They fought well. He could notice that, slashing, twisting, standing taut and poised as Zamaniyah crossed swords with a glittering warrior.

He was aware, always, of his father. Ali Mousa was sharif, sayyid, descendant of the Prophet. He could have chosen quiet: the life of the scholar, the saint, or even the prince. But the Prophet had spoken.
War is ordained for you,
he had said. And Ali Mousa, who hated killing, who abhorred the ugliness of violence, had chosen war.

Yet, having chosen it, he had made it his element. He had the commander's art: he could both defend himself and order his troops. He found weaknesses in the enemy's line. He judged them for traps of for truth. He wielded his men as he wielded his sword, with honed and tireless skill.

If he had marked the three who should not have been there, he betrayed no sign of it. They were driving back his enemies. They were heeding his commands because Khamsin was, and Khamsin carried Zamaniyah, and the others followed her.

After the headlong rush of the charge, their advance had slowed. But not to a standstill. They moved forward step by step. That meant something. Khamsin had no time to remember what.

Battles had eddies and shallows, pauses and sudden flurries. Ali Mousa seemed most often to be in the thick of it. Enemies aimed for his standard, for the glory and the profit of felling an emir. It would be very thick indeed in the center, where a trebled wall of fighters defended the sultan.

Khamsin's advance and his mistress' valor had brought him almost to Ali Mousa's side. She was a little heavier on his back. Tiring, and fighting it. And enemies innumerable before, about, behind.

Even behind.

Khamsin slashed with his heels. Hands clutched his trappings. A sword thrust upward.

With a panther-scream, death fell upon the swordsman. The eunuch's mule half reared, flailing. Fighting.

Falling. Its belly opened, spilling its secrets.

The eunuch flung himself free. He had a spear, scarlet-headed. Even in the air he wielded it. It found flesh. As his flesh found steel: a hedge of blades. Khamsin saw his face with deathly clarity. There was no fear in it; only exaltation. His long hands closed about the yelling throat, circled it. The man hacked at him. He laughed, light and glad and free, though his life's blood bubbled in it; and snapped his slayer's neck. They went down together into the dark.

Khamsin stilled. He had seen death enough to last a thousand years. But never anyone he knew. Never anyone his mistress loved.

A cry smote his ears. It was low, raw. “Jaffar,” cried Zamaniyah. “Jaffar!”

And she shifted. To dismount. Here. In the jaws of battle.

He knew how to shed a rider: oh, perfectly. But never this. How to keep one if she would not stay.

He lunged forward. Instinct ruled her, thrust her down into the saddle, tightened her hands upon the reins. His head snapped up with the sudden pain of it. His teeth clamped upon the bit. She hauled at it, wailing aloud, cursing, pummeling his sides, hacking at anything that came near her. “
Jaffar!
”

He would never hear her now.

No?

Wind in Khamsin's ear. A shadow amid the seething shadows of the battle. And Zamaniyah had gone mad, and the Frank vanished, Allah knew where, for Allah knew how long; and Ali Mousa…

Alone. Afoot. Ringed in death. His charger lost, his banner fallen, his warriors scattered, and everywhere the madmen of Mosul.

Khamsin forgot his rider. He forgot his shock. He forgot even his bone-deep cowardice. He leaped into the worst of it.

The weight on his back rocked and nearly fell. The wind in his ears keened in helpless rage. The weight steadied. The wind skirled away.

A horse reared, wheeling. The man on its back whirled the black blur of a mace. Khamsin sprang.

He stumbled to his knees. A body rolled underfoot, screaming. The mace swung keening down. Ali Mousa's back opened wide for it, all undefended.

Zamaniyah flung herself out, up. Her sword clove air. Her body caught the mace.

In all the clamor, in all the whirling and plunging and shouting, Khamsin heard that one small sound. A ringing of metal on metal. A soft thick echo afterward: the meeting of mace and flesh and bone. And the thud of body on earth, abrupt and absolute.

Khamsin stood like a true beast, mute and witless. His back was empty. It was not supposed to be empty.

There was a great deal of noise. Men in green; horses. More men running away. They were nothing.

The wind cursed him endlessly and with great eloquence. It almost had a shape, a long dark shadow-shape with eyes like faded moons. He walked through it.

She was all disarrayed. Her helmet was gone. Her hair was a snake, coiling in blood. He touched nose to her shoulder. Blood, and breaking. She was broken.

She could not be. She was his. She could not be broken.

People were there. A mamluk whose scent was a woman's, blood-tainted. A man whom he had known once. Whom he had loved. For whom—he—

He climbed the sky, screaming. He smote earth, battering its blind indifference.

A hand held him. A voice spoke to the will beneath the madness, calming it. Ali Mousa looked down at the one who had fallen, and his shock was black, like ancient blood. “A woman?” he asked, a dry whisper. “A woman in war?”

“A woman, yes!” This voice was patently no less, even raw with grief. “And one you know, if you know anything at all.”

He did. He was refusing it. Even Iblis could not mock him so. Destroy him so, by making him the destroyer of all the house of al-Zaman.

The Frank knelt with none of her trained and womanly grace. There were wounds on her. She took no notice of them. She bent her ear to the crushed and bleeding breast, held her had to the motionless lips. Her eyes opened wide. “She's still alive!”

Khamsin froze. Not so Ali Mousa. He bent. With strength that could startle the man locked deep in the beast's body, he lifted Zamaniyah. He shook off the Frank, who was snatching, shouting, drawing sword.

He came to Khamsin. “Kneel,” he said, expecting obedience.

He received it. He bestrode the saddle. At a word, Khamsin rose, balancing the doubled weight. As softly and yet as swiftly as he had ever moved, he bore it away from the roil of battle.

Someday he would remember how it was. The enemy was driven in rout, its back broken, its brief flurries of resistance scattered. Such as the one from which he came. The one which had felled Zamaniyah.

Ali Mousa's men were quick enough to flock to their commander, now that he had no need of them. Most he sent away under the chief of his captains, to harry the enemy until the sultan should call them in. Some he kept. Of their spears and their cloaks he made a canopy; he laid Zamaniyah under it.

Wiborada said, heatedly, what Khamsin could not. “Why here? She should go to the camp, to the doctors.”

Ali Mousa sent a man to fetch one. Then he spoke to her, not looking directly at her, as a man should do with another man's woman. “She would not survive the journey.”

Wiborada dropped beside Zamaniyah. “She won't survive the hour if you leave her here.” Even as she spoke, she struggled with coat and corselet. No one would help her. Khamsin could not. His heart ached for hands; for speech; for tears.

The Frankish woman had no shame of stripping Zamaniyah to the skin, baring the great raw wound. Red blood, white bone; side and shoulder shattered, arm dangling broken. She breathed, rattle and catch, rattle and catch. Death had pitched camp in her face. It bubbled in her lungs. It rode her heart to foundering.