Nine White Horses (9 page)

Khalid lay down and wept. The wazir went away. They all went
away, taking Kehailan, leaving the mamluk to his sorrow.

o0o

Once the first shock of his father’s grief was past,
Kehailan found again his first delight in his ensorcelment. He had all that man
or beast could wish for. A stable of his own, silken-walled, deep in straw; a
manger of marble and gold filled with the golden barley of Yemen, scented with
spices and made rich with a leavening of mutton; a wide garden to run in, and
cool water to drink, and sweet singers to beguile his ears; and the loveliest
of mares in Egypt to be his wives and concubines.

No one spoke to him of duty. No one vexed him with cares of
state. No one compelled him to any will but his own.

Not even Khalid. Khalid had learned the virtue of silence.
He served his master with mute obedience, fed him, tended him, made him
beautiful for his mares and for his own pleasure.

The wazir he seldom saw. He was rather shamefully glad of
it. The old man’s sorrow cut too close to the bone. It made him wish, however
briefly, to be a man again. It made him remember that he had been the most
credulous of fools. Khalid had told no more than the truth; Kehailan had
brought the rest upon himself.

o0o

His tale spread as all such tales must. His father’s
guards kept the importunate at bay; when one or two enterprising persons
breached the wall of the garden and began to conduct the curious therein for a
high price, their quartered bodies appeared without, for the education of their
imitators.

But some, the wazir himself admitted. Imams intoned the Qur’an
over Kehailan, and invoked the Holy Name, and prayed day and night about his
stable. The Khalifah himself sent his personal saint; the emirs of Alexandria
sent a sibyl in a bottle; the syndics of Cairo dispatched three mullahs and
three masters of the art of magic. Kehailan received the prayers with proper
devotion and the incantations with proper awe, but with no slightest alteration
of his enchanted shape.

The magi cast endless horoscopes. The rabbis droned over
their Kabbalah. Even a Christian exorcist wheedled and groveled his way into
Kehailan’s garden, fouled its sweetness with his unspeakable incense, wailed
his backward prayers and danced his twisted dances and cast out not even the shadow
of an imp. But a demon came at the climax of his rite, and bore him gibbering
away.

The philosophers fared no better. The Platonists informed
him that his form was a shadow of the true Form, and that he must reconcile the
two through the exercise of his will. The Pythagoreans reminded him that he had
fallen down the ladder of creation; he must restore himself, or he would be
reborn as a creature lower still: a dog or an ape, or worse. He was appropriately
horrified, but he remained a man in a stallion’s body. The Aristotelians
endeavored to disenchant him with invocations of purest logic; the Epicureans
intrigued him with the doctrine of life as the simple pursuit of pleasure,
while the Stoics instructed him to suffer in silence. The Sophists tangled him
in nets of persuasion, the Theosophists in webs of mysticism. He learned that
he was an illusion; that the world was a dance of atoms in the void; that all
was nothing and nothing was all, and philosophy was merely another name for
windy nonsense.

When the rival schools began to come to blows in his garden,
he watched the spectacle until it palled; then he drove them out.

Scarcely had he recovered his equanimity when the doctors
fell upon him. They stabbed him with needles. They bled him and purged him and
dosed him with potions. Milk of the nightmare. Mares’ nests powdered and
steeped in hippocras. Water from the Hippocrene; coltsfoot, horsetails, horse
chestnuts, leaves of bay; herbs distilled in arrak and kumiss and concoctions
viler yet. He went mad on hippomanes, and might have died, but for the mercy of
Allah and the aid of Khalid’s swift hand. The mamluk struck down the poisoner
and cast out all the man’s cohorts; and he did battle with the maddened beast,
sang to him, stroked him, nursed him back to trembling sanity.

The women were, Kehailan conceded, more pleasant to look at
than the pack of learned tormentors. Sweeter to the ear and to the nose, and
much gentler upon his body.

They pleased him as a brisk brushing pleased him, and no
more. They did not shatter his spell with human lust. Not with his mares dropping
great-eyed foals who would be grey when they were grown, and coming into the
foal-heat, and casting him into perfect paroxysms of desire.

And yet, Kehailan had begun to think, stallionhood was rather
less than bliss. It was not the vexation of all the attempts to restore him to
humanity. Beyond and about them lay vast expanses of sheer and deadly boredom.
No one would presume to ride him. He could not converse; his speech was stallion
speech, and sorely limited. Music was only half of itself when he could do no
more than listen; and what was fair to human ears, all too often was a torment
to his more-than-human senses.

Even his mares were losing their power to beguile him. They
were not like human women. Unless it was their season, they had no care for
love; and they were most emphatic in expressing it.

Humanity began almost to seem appealing. He wondered what
had transpired in the court. He found himself remembering what little of the
diwan he had ever harkened to, and running through passages of the Hadith, and
pondering obscure points of law.

All of that was lost to him; and perhaps, he told himself
until he was certain that he believed it, well lost. He had a cure for memory:
to mount a willing mare, or to race the wind in his garden, or to linger by the
pool to marvel at his own, luminous beauty.

o0o

A year to the day after Kahailan’s ensorcelment began, Khalid
approached Kehailan in his garden. The mamluk bowed down and kissed the earth between
his hands. Kehailan left off his desultory grazing.

“O my master,” said Khalid. Kehailan waited prick-eared,
knowing that tone from of old, and bearing in mind the power of hooves and
teeth. “O my master, it is now a year since you fell under this deplorable enchantment.
Many have begun to despair of your walking again as a man. Even your father—” Khalid’s
voice wavered. “Even your honored father has forgotten the sweetness of hope.”

Abruptly and most astonishingly, the slave gave way to
tears. Kehailan nipped his arm to make him stop.

He raised his head. His face was as Kehailan had never seen
it, raw and ravaged with grief. “Yes, O my master. Your father is dying. Little
as it matters to you, whose only care has ever been your own comfort. He has provided
for you and for your get. You need suffer nothing for his passing.”

Kehailan tossed his head. He was too shocked for anger. Of
course his father was not dying. Why, only yesterday…

The day before? A fortnight ago? A month? Or perhaps a season?

The old man could not bear to see him. That was all. He
understood it. He forgave it.

“He has taken to his bed,” said Khalid. “He has arranged for
the disposition of his property; he has laid aside his office and composed
himself for death. Because,” said Khalid, “without you to be the comfort of his
old age, he sees no profit in living.”

Kehailan raised his voice to its utmost, a ringing scream of
rage and denial. Khalid fell back, hands clapped to his ears. Kehailan beat
down the gate of his garden.

His hooves clattered on tiled floors. Servants fluttered,
squawked, and fled. One bold soul with a rope leaped aside from his headlong
assault. “Make way!” Khalid called out behind him. “Let him pass!”

The last door fell open before him. Carpets eased his passage.
He was nearly blind in the dimness. Voices were praying. The air was heavy; it
choked him.

The man in the bed bore his father’s scent, but could not be
his father. Not this feeble creature, wasted to a shadow, too weak even to
whisper a greeting. His father was the wisest and strongest of men. His father
would live forever.

For the first time he yearned truly for hands. For arms to
lift that body, and throat and tongue and lips to utter human words.

He could not bow down in prayer as a good Muslim must do. He
could not even weep.

He wanted to be a man. He wanted it, at last, with all that was
in him.

His body mocked him:
kehailan
of perfect beauty, and perfect heedlessness, and perfect idiocy. He had fled
humanity, with all the troubles that beset it. Now he had nowhere to flee.
Wherever he turned was death’s bloodless grin, and the black shadow that was
his own impenetrable folly.

o0o

Khalid left the son beside his father’s bed. Out of all
the gathered futilities of doctors and sorcerers and philosophers, he had
distilled one dram of wisdom. Someone had laid the spell; that someone had not
come forward to lift it; and Kehailan’s will alone could not set him free.

Khalid had not been idle, knowing what he knew. His searches
had discovered nothing. His spies had revealed that the wazir’s enemies
rejoiced in their rival’s pain, but that they had had no part in it. This plot
ran deeper, if plot it was, and not the caprice of some prankster of the jinn.

While Kehailan faced himself and saw a mortal fool, Khalid
slipped out of the palace and the city. A guard or two was richer for his
passing; one honest man slept and would wake, Khalid hoped, with no more than
an aching head.

The creatures of the night made revel under the moon. Khalid
passed among them in the armor of his faith. He was not without fear. His
bowels had loosened with it; more than once he halted to grant them their
sovereignty. But love drove him on; the Name of Allah preserved him from harm.
The wings of afarit did no more than brush the summit of his turban. The imps
of the empty places mocked him and danced about him and wove knots in his mare’s
mane, but laid no hand upon his body.

Cold, shaking, his mare near collapse with terror, Khalid
came to the heart of the wilderness. The moon had cast upon it a mighty
enchantment. Above the fallen stones floated a palace of air with walls of
light, a vision of beauty without mortal substance. Khalid’s hand, brushing a
column, passed through it, sensing only a breath of coolness, a memory of fire.

The Sultan of the Afarit held high court within the walls of
light, seated on a throne of air and fire, hearing the pleas of his subjects
and receiving their tribute. Khalid gasped at the riches which the spirits of
the air laid at their master’s feet. The barest tithe of them would have
rivaled the wealth of Suleiman; the full count was almost inconceivable in its
splendor.

Amid such perfect beauty, the court of the afarit was appalling
in its ugliness. Demon forms flapped and writhed and screeched. The bodies of
beautiful women bore the heads of snarling beasts. Faces of surpassing
comeliness shone above the shapes of nightmare. Monsters out of blackest dreams
promenaded in silk and jewels, chattering the airy chatter of courtiers.

Most hideous of them all was the Sultan of the Afarit. It
dawned slowly upon Khalid that the expression on the demon’s face, which in a
man would have been a grimace of most horrible rage, was a smile of purest
contentment. When he smote his hands together in delight, thunder rolled. The
dance of lightning was a tribute to his joy.

Khalid tethered his mare in shadowed safety and crept closer
to the palace of air. The demons’ clamor came clear to him, telling in many
guises the tale of their sultan’s gladness. The worst of his enemies and the
greatest rival for his throne, Muammar of the line of Iblis, had fallen into
the depths of the nether realm. “In the very act of ravishing our lord’s
daughter, he fell,” said an ifritah close by Khalid. “Aye, our own dear
Princess Subhiyah, whom the Queen of the Indies bore to our lord, and whom he
loves as his dearest self. A mortal man came upon the monster at his labors,
and felled him with the Name of Allah, Who wrought both men and jinn. Great is
his honor who freed us from that scourge, human creature though he be.”

“Surely,” said the ifrit beside her, “our princess gave him
fair recompense.”

She laughed and tossed her snaky hair. “More than fair! He
had his heart’s desire. But he could not have our princess. She is meant for
the son of the sultan of the jinn that dwell under the earth.”

“But I hear tell,” said another ifritah, whose closest kin
seemed to be the wild boar, “that she gave her savior somewhat more than her
intended might be pleased to know of.”

“Mortal blood will call to mortal blood,” sighed her scaly
sister, not entirely in scorn. “Puny creatures as they are, with scarce a drop
of magic in them, still they have a certain…something. When they are good to
look on, they are very good indeed.”

“And quite accomplished, in their way.” The tusked ifritah
smiled and tweaked the ifrit’s mighty yard, turning his scowl to an expression
of sheerest outrage. He roared and snatched. The two females laughed and let
him seize them, and together bore him down, making amends for their presumption
in every way they knew.

An ifrit, it is said, is terrible in copulation. Khalid crawled
away, bruised and buffeted and most astonishingly enlightened.

o0o

From another and less lascivious assemblage be learned
that the Princess Subhiyah was present, and that her father intended that very
night to proclaim her betrothal to the Prince of the Jinn. His emissaries bowed
even now before the sultan, offering gifts that as far outshone the rest as the
sun outshines the moon. Khalid turned his face away lest he be blinded, and his
mind lest he forget why he had come.

It was written that he must come here on this night of all
nights. Surely also it was written that this princess was the one whom he
sought. His heart raised a prayer to the All-Seeing; his eyes cast among that
unearthly throng for a female as appalling as the sultan himself. Each seemed
more ghastly than the last. None was as ghastly as he.