Star of Cursrah (9 page)

Star realized the lions must have cut down Gheqet’s brown mare first. The architect’s apprentice had been lucky to escape with just a scalp wound. Hers throbbed like a kettledrum.

“Get me home, you two,” she said, “and quickly.”

The two citizens raised their eyebrows at the command.

“We just saved your life, Samira Amenstar,” Tafir said icily. “Even wounded, Gheqet distracted the lions by jumping and yelling so I could ride in and grab you. That’s why only one lioness raked you, instead of all three pouncing on both of us.”

“That’s all very well,” Star snapped, “but it’s your civic duty to protect your sovereign’s life. You, Tafir, as an army officer who took a sacred vow, and Gheqet, as a nobleman and citizen of the realm. All Cursrahns must keep the welfare of the royal family uppermost in their minds.”

They were embarrassed and angry by her rudeness and ingratitude, but gentle Gheqet shrugged and told Tafir, “She’s upset. She’ll go into shock if we don’t hustle her home.”

“We’d do that anyway,” Tafir snorted. Together they hoisted Star onto the saddle, made sure she was secure, and rushed off through the scrub.

“Can’t complain, but it’s not the life I’d choose,” Tafir droned, “rising before dawn to stand on a cold parade ground, having superior officers scream orders in my face then having to scream the same orders at sergeants, who all resent me being so young so they scream at the troops, who barely understand a word because so many are barbarian mercenaries. There’s the same food day in, day out, marching aimlessly across the plains just to keep busy….”

The men talked while Star sulked and nursed her pain. Gheqet held the horse’s bridle in one craggy hand.

“What would you do if your parents hadn’t enrolled you in the army?” he asked Tafir.

“I’ve no idea,” Tafir groused, “but I wouldn’t be a soldier. I hate it, Gheq. My best hope is for my parents to die young so we inherit, though my brother’s and sisters’ debts will eat up most of that money anyway.”

Low hills unfurled before their tired feet. A bright blue sky beamed. Most of the scenery was covered by tough grass. Distant herds of zebra and antelope grazed. Lonely, parasol-shaped acacia trees dotted the horizon. In pockets fed by tiny springs thrived myrtle trees and dark green cedars. Occasional outcrops of barren rock and sand were ringed by wiry scrub bushes that only goats could eat.

Country dwellers carried warnings to the marketplace that the yellow sand was expanding, that springs and pools dried up seasonally. The land had been changing ever since the Era of Skyfire fifty-two years back, but few city dwellers cared about the wilderness beyond Cursrah’s skirts.

The vast grassland was populated by a few. Shacks and tents belonged to herders and hunters. Travelers lurched and swayed on camels and plodding donkeys, and a patrol of the bakkal’s cavalry rode under a brilliant red pennant.

The one striking structure in this country was a long channel of stone sunk into the ground like a road that undulated to both horizons. Greenery lined both sides of the stone “road,” living on its damp breath. The three adventurers joined the dusty path alongside it for a while then clopped over a raised stone bridge. They heard water gurgling below.

“Cursrah’s greatest architectural accomplishment,” Gheqet said, smiling as if he’d built it personally.

The “road” was actually an underground aqueduct roofed with large, irregular slabs of gray stone. High and wide enough inside for three men to walk upright, the aqueduct rambled for miles across the sun-drenched wilderness, all the way from the distant River Agis to the shallow valley that Cursrah called home. Fine-grained stone had been quarried by dwarves in the Marching Mountains, ferried through the air by genie-slaves, carefully fitted by genie miners, then magically sealed leak proof by marids. Teams of masons patrolled the miles-long aqueduct, inspecting roof stones, clearing weeds, and ensuring no water escaped or was illegally siphoned off. The penalty for stealing “the lifeblood of Cursrah” was to be buried to the neck in sand then left to die in full view of the public. Some citizens argued the inspection teams were a waste of tax money, because Great Calim himself had tasked a magical protector to guard the waterworks. Even the inspectors were unsure how much protection a near-mythical and mysterious marid provided.

“I know how you feel about the army, Taf,” Gheqet said, resuming their conversation. “I didn’t want to be apprenticed to a mason, either. Granted, my family’s not as high born as yours, but my mother’s grandmother was the Second Sama’s favorite lady-in-waiting. She was made a rafayam so we receive yearly greetings and a stipend from the palace, but that’s all the nobility we can claim. I’ll spend the rest of my life working with my hands; inspecting tunnel shorings, building walls, carving gargoyles….”

“You’re both better off than I,” fluted a voice. The two young men turned. Star’s face was taut with pain, but she forced a smile. “You can direct your lives a little or at least count on some surprises. Look what fate awaits me back at the palace and count yourselves lucky.”

She paused, looking down at nothing, then said, “I apologize for snapping earlier. My leg throbbed like fury, and my temper grew short.”

Embarrassed, her friends looked at the road.

“If I’m short-tempered, I’m also stubborn,” the samira continued. “Who knows? I might foist my arranged marriage off on my sister Tunkeb—she does whatever my parents wish anyway—then I could marry anyone I choose. I might marry one of you. Or both!”

Her teasing made the men blush, so they were glad when riders approached in blue kilts and tunics painted with eight-pointed stars. Yuzas Anhur, captain of Star’s personal bodyguard, spurred the troop to a canter. “Your majesty,” he said, “why do you persist in slipping away … ?”

Star tuned out the familiar lecture as guards fussed over her bandaged leg. Gheqet and Tafir collected black looks for leading her majesty into danger.

Following the aqueduct, the party eventually passed from grasslands into farm country, a beltland three leagues wide and lush with squash, strawberries, winter melons, caraway seeds, green and broad beans, chickpeas, cabbages, eggplant, asparagus, celery, lentils, rye, and barley. Farms and granaries dotted rich brown fields well-tended and well-magicked by farmers, well-manured by livestock, and well-watered by irrigation ditches fed by the aqueduct. Eventually the road left behind the heady aroma of spring blossoms and manure and dropped over the lip of Cursrah’s valley.

More travelers rode camels, jounced in chariots, were toted in pallaquins, and even perched astride the occasional elephant. Some were Cursrahns but more were strangers, aiming for the city like bees to a hive. Visitors were another measure of Cursrah’s wealth, for scholars journeyed from all points of the civilized world to study at the famous library. “The world in ignorance streams to Cursrah’s enlightened door,” citizens liked to say.

Like newcomers, Gheqet and Tafir paused at the lip of the valley to look. The city below glittered like nested, jeweled bracelets. Sculpted valley walls and precisely laid streets formed concentric rings as regular as ripples in a pool.

Nodding at the many visitors, Tafir joked, “Our pretty city draws more suitors.”

“True,” Gheqet said, frowning, “but I hope they brought enough to drink.”

The two young men still led Star’s horse, and now turned onto the winding cobbled road that switchbacked down the valley rim.

Tafir asked, “How’s that?”

“Lately I’ve learned a few things from studying engineering and stonemasonry that bother me, Taf. Our aqueduct and its lakehouse … they’re parts of a very delicate instrument.”

“Delicate?” laughed Tafir. “What an odd word. They were built by genies and genie-slaves.”

“That’s just it,” Gheqet admitted. “This city was built by genies but is maintained by men, mostly.”

“Tell me.”

As they walked, the architect’s apprentice talked and pointed. Cursrah, everyone knew, was a thrice-blessed city, for it had sprung from the brow of Calim. Greatest of ancient genies, Calim came from the far south to the peninsula now called Calimshan in his celebrated Great Arrival. Plying powers beyond imagination, Calim worked endless wonders. Among them, in one barren, sandswept valley, an army of minor genies and their human and non-human slaves labored for years to fashion a city called by some “Calim’s Cradle” and others “the College,” for Cursrah served a sole purpose: to record the accomplishments of Faerun’s greatest genie, Calim.

From high on the valley road the young citizens could see the fabulous library and college, a long, low building anchored by stair-stepped ziggurats and painted a blinding white. At the city’s center, on its own water-ringed island, glowed the fabulous Palace of the Phoenix, rich with gold leaf. Radiating outward streamed plazas, arches, lush shaded gardens, solemn gated necropolises, the domed temple of Shar and the crescent moon temple of Selune, and more. The city of ten thousand spilled up the slopes in scores of high-walled mansions, apartment houses, neat cottages, and—highest of all—ancestral tombs with their ends brightly painted or hung with floral wreathes. Only at the south did the valley’s rim dip, and there a sturdy wall was manned by the bakkal’s tiny army.

“Anyone can see that Cursrah is prosperous,” Gheqet admitted, “but money can’t buy water that doesn’t exist.”

“Doesn’t exist? We’ve got oceans of water. Well, lakes of it.”

Tafir pointed across the city. Throughout the public sector, and at every home, pools and fountains and waterfalls sparkled like living things in the bright spring sunshine.

“True, but the aqueduct water enters there,” Gheqet said, pointing higher up the valley wall where a blank stone building crouched, “where it’s channeled into underground pipes, then,”—the apprentice swept his finger toward the valley’s lowest point, where glittered a small, clear lake sporting sailboats and punts, and a tiny island sprouting a blocky building—”most of the water empties into the lake and from that pumphouse is distributed all over the city. That’s where the marid lives, the sea genie bound by Calim to oversee and protect the entire waterworks from this valley clear back to the River Agis itself, at the Mouth of Cursrah. I’ll concede, the whole waterworks is a miracle, Great Calim’s finest work, all praises to his name and so on, but think … only this water and thin winter rains keep Cursrah alive. Every drop hinges on one fragile aqueduct and one ensorcelled water genie.”

“So? Bitrabi is immortal,” Tafir said, then yawned from a long night and day, and now a long walk.

“Look what happened to Calim, may all mortals revere him,” Gheqet persisted. “In the Era of Skyfire he battled Memnonnar and wound up banished to the winds. Don’t you see? If one genie can be banished, so can another. If Cursrah loses Bitrabi, our marid trapped against her will in that pumphouse, it loses its water … and its way of life. No one’s even sure Great Calim guards our city these days. My master, old as he is, has never even seen Bitrabi. No one’s seen her in over fifty years. We’ve put all our eggs in one basket… or all our water into one jug.”

“Hush, you scurvy beggars,” Yuzas Anhur, loyal defender of the crown, growled. “You speak heresy, young sir. Cursrah shall live as long as Calimshan endures.”

Gheqet and Tafir let their faces go blank. Preoccupied with her aching leg, which was cradled by a guard walking alongside the horse, Star ignored how her captain chastised her friends.

“Forgive my waywardness, Yuzas,” Gheqet mumbled, “I’m but a simple student with much to learn. A thousand pardons, I beg you.”

“Accepted,” the captain ceded, “and you may put your mind at rest. Our genies will never forsake Cursrah, no more than our other sprightly beings, for they glory in serving Calim’s Cradle. From Bitrabi below to Jassan above, we’re safe as long as the sun shines.”

Gheqet and Tafir turned their eyes upward. Jassan was another Cursrahn legend, an invisible air genie, a djinni, who patrolled the sky and kept dragons at bay—or so people reckoned, for in the city’s long history no dragon had ever come marauding. Gheqet believed in the djinni too and had been warned as a naughty child that Jassan might swoop down and eat him, and danced in the Dragon Parade every year at Jassan’s Jubilee. Lately his educated mind noted it was impossible to prove or disprove the existence of a mile-high invisible air spirit.

Some guardian genies were seen every day, as well as other enchanted beings from planes known and unknown. In Cursrah’s parks, sylphs flitted on dragonfly wings and sang their sad songs while stwingers swung from tree branches and filched sweetmeats from picnickers. In noble kitchens, ice mephits chilled food. Down in the sewers, steam mephits cleared drains and cured odors, and at the city’s dump, elemental vermin flame-lings incinerated garbage while grigs potted rats.

Anhur addressed Amenstar. “Your majesty, the first sama, your gracious mother and mistress of the hearth desires an audience,” he told her. “First, though, we needs conduct you to the vizars to see that leg treated.”

“Very well,” Amenstar, tired, bored, and sore, replied, “but between visiting my mother and suffering those creepy vizars, I don’t know which is the greater punishment….”

“Hold still, Your Majesty, this will sting. It’s venom from horned vipers diluted in wine.”

Amenstar squeaked as the medicine dripped into the long gash on her calf, then burned so hot tears erupted from her eyes. Panting, she clutched the marble table until the scorching eased. From shelves along the wall, eerie animal heads atop canopic jars—jackals, cobras, falcons, mountain apes, boars—stared with green feldspar eyes. In other jars stirred leeches, maggots, and worms.

“Painful, no?” the vizar-in-waiting hissed. The priest’s hollow lisp reminded Star of a snake stuck in a well. “Life is pain.”

Star found all vizars loathsome, and normally she avoided the priests. They were the kingdom’s healers and keepers of life and death, though heavily weighted toward death. Star had little choice but to lay on a cold marble slab in their subterranean den and endure the touch of their slimy, chilly fingers.