A Wind in Cairo Read online

  4

  The slave’s voice was sweet and plaintive, bewailing lost love to the ladies of the harem. Zamaniyah barely listened. Jaffar labored over her with skillful fingers, kneading away the knots of a morning’s worth of mounted exercises, working sweet oil into her newly bathed skin. She sighed and rubbed her cheek against her arm. Her hair slid, heavy with damp. She sighed again, this time for what she was.

  Jaffar muttered as he labored, taking the count of all Zamaniyah’s bruises. “And so many only today,” he said.

  “My mind wasn’t on it,” she admitted. She winced as his fingers found the worst of her remembrances.

  She knew what he would say before he said it. “Yes, and if your mind should wander in a battle, you’ll have worse than an aching back to contend with.” His hands had gentled a little, as if some of his disapproval had drained from them into his voice. “I know where your thoughts were, little idiot. On that useless murdering creature you paid so much for yesterday.”

  Zamaniyah sat up so abruptly that she gasped. “He is not useless!”

  “You might,” Jaffar conceded sweetly, ”sell him to your worst enemy.”

  “Al’zan says he can be trained. When has Al’zan ever been wrong about a horse?”

  “Sikandar is a Greek. All Greeks are liars.”

  She hissed at him. His narrow black face was bland, unoffended. She scowled as fiercely as she could when she was torn between rage and laughter. “Have you no respect?”

  He prostrated himself at her feet. “This worthless lump of clay, O great lady, is the slave of your soul. Your every wish is his strictest command.”

  Laughter won. Jaffar leaped up with the grace of a cheetah and towered over her. He was barely smiling, but his eyes glinted. She reached up and took his hand. “You wish I could be a proper woman, don’t you? Like all the rest of them.”

  He glanced past her through the thinly curtained doorway, across the wide scented courtyard to the knot of languid women and the slave with the lute. The light had left his eyes. “It is too late for that, little mistress. Years too late.”

  “For you as for me.” Softly as she said it, she knew he heard. His fingers tightened on her own.

  He shrugged, sighed, smiled the smile he wore over pain. “God does as God wills; and your father is as he is. But that limb of Shaitan that rages in your stable—stay away from him, mistress. Your death is riding on his back.”

  Zamaniyah shivered slightly. She told herself that it was only the room’s coolness, and she bare to the waist. Allah knew, she had little enough to cover. She drew on silken shirt, coat and belt, low boots; boy’s clothing. Her father had commanded it.

  He had caught her once before a mirror, playing with a veil. He had not thrashed her. That was not his way. He had struck her once, hard, for remembrance. Then he had burned the veil and locked all the women’s garments in a single room and given the key into the care of the eldest of the eunuchs, with strict instructions that Zamaniyah was not to pass that door.

  The women had forgiven al-Zaman, who after all was their lord and master. They had never ceased to resent his daughter, quiet though Zamaniyah tried to be, meek and mute and obedient. She could not hide her absences, nor conceal what she brought back from them: the scars, the bruises, the sun-stains of a warrior’s training.

  “If your mother had lived…” mused Jaffar.

  “Or more to the point,” she said, “my brothers.”

  Jaffar plaited her hair, which was her one beauty; which at least her father had let her keep, because a good Turk might do so, although he himself shaved his head as the Arabs did, for coolness and for cleanliness. She considered her face in the silver mirror that had been her mother’s. Thin, brown, pointed. All eyes and angles. Her brothers had been handsome like their father. She was nothing more than passable.

  Perhaps it was as well. Men would not want her even as a boy.

  Jaffar’s long hand patted her cheek. “Little fawn,” he said. His voice was gentle.

  She threw her arms about him and clasped him tight. He held her in silence until she pulled away. She had put on a smile. “Go, take an hour for yourself. I’ll be with Al’zan.”

  Jaffar scowled, but he let her go. She looked back once. He was watching her, dark-eyed, expressionless. She turned away from him.

  oOo

  His name in Arabic was Sikandar, but no one ever dared to call him that to his face. He was Alexander Hippias: to Zamaniyah, who alone was so privileged, Al’zan as she had called him when her tongue was too young to shape the whole of it. As she grew older, he seemed to be growing younger. He had been ancient when she was very small, august and wise. Now he was a vigorous man in late middle age, his beard more black still than grey, his hair lightly silvered under his Greek cap.

  He had been a slave, taken in the fall of Rûm. Although he had never embraced Islam, al-Zaman had set him free; he had chosen not to return to his own country. “My family is gone,” he had said when she asked, “and my children are here.” His arms stretched to take in her father’s stable. “I’m ruined now for lesser creatures; I wouldn’t know what to do with them.”

  He was a sorcerer, people said. He had a magic with horses; he spoke their language. They would do for him what they would do for no other man.

  He was preoccupied when Zamaniyah found him. The saqla mare, true to her name, had kicked one of her sisters who was in foal. The kicker had received chastisement; she was sullen but contrite. Her quarry stood quiet under the master’s hands, before the interested eyes of several mares and a stable-lad or two. He was talking to her, in Arabic as he always did when he handled his beauties, because they were daughters of Arabia; but in training he spoke Greek, which was the language of instruction. “So, my love; did she wound you? You’ve taken no harm, my hands tell me. Your little one prospers within you. It’s only your dignity that suffers.”

  Even that seemed much assuaged by his attentions. Zamaniyah greeted one or two of her friends among the mares, wandered from the paddock to the stable to the stallions’ court. The stall which her latest purchase had destroyed was still as he had left it. She touched the splintered door, the shattered manger. She left them to climb the narrow stair, to emerge upon a balcony above the inmost courtyard.

  At first she did not see him. The sand was pocked with hoofmarks, spotted with droppings: the scatterings of a stallion’s agitation. Her eyes sought shade after the sun’s glare; and he was there, under the portico. His head was low. His coat was matted with sweat and sand and foam; his mane was a great knot. The beauty that had caught her eye, the brilliance that had held it, were gone utterly. He was only a smallish horse, a common chestnut, somewhat narrow in the chest, somewhat weak behind. He was not even kehailan.

  Feet sounded on the stair. She greeted Al’zan with a faint smile, which he returned. He folded his arms on the rail beside her. “Did I err badly?” she asked him.

  He pondered for a little while before he answered. “No,” he said at last. “I think not. He’s angry now, and he hates, but there’s intelligence in him. He may learn to see sense.”

  He heard them. His head came up. His nostrils flared. His eyes went wide and bright and wild. He burst into the sunlight, a creature all of fire and swiftness, defying them with every line of his body.

  “See,” said Al’zan’s soft dry voice in the Greek of training. “He has both lightness and brilliance. And temper—of that, altogether too much. We shall teach him to master it.”

  “Will he let us?”

  “With time and patience. And love; that, too.”

  “Love in return for hate?”

  “It’s most un-Muslim,” he granted her. He was amused.

  They watched the stallion dance his hatred. Rearing, wheeling, slashing air with hooves and teeth; striving to spring upon them, high though they stood, and railed in stone.

  “He is like a wind of fire,” Al’zan murmured.

  “A khamsin,” said Zamaniyah. “The wind
out of the desert, that burns as it blows, and scours flesh from bone.” The horse sprang into flight, lashing with his heels, slaughtering armies of air. “Khamsin,” she said, naming him. “Khamsin.”

  He stood still below them. His sides heaved, but his head was high, his tail a banner over his back.

  “You are Khamsin,” she said to him, “and I am Zamaniyah. We shall be friends yet, you and I.”

  He turned his back on her and voided on the sand.

  Her laughter was wry. “Well and concisely spoken. But I shall teach you to respect me.”

  His departure was eloquent in its contempt.

  “Intelligence,” said Zamaniyah. “Indeed.”

  “Indeed,” said Al’zan, stroking his beard, frowning down at the empty court.

  oOo

  Zamaniyah dried her damp palms on her trousers. She had Al’zan’s leave for this, and his presence out of sight, and a pair of days to gather her courage. Time and solitude had tamed Khamsin, a little. Already he was letting the master feed him, cleanse his enclosure, linger unmolested in his presence.

  She drew a deep breath, tightened her grip on the bag she carried. Al’zan held the door for her. She stepped through it.

  Even in the portico’s shade the sun was blinding. She blinked hard against it, willing her eyes to clear.

  He was in the far corner, hipshot, tail flicking at flies. As she filled his manger, his head turned. His ears pricked. He trotted toward her.

  She drew back a little. Her palms were cold again. She willed her heart to slow. Feed him only, Al’zan had commanded her. Linger as close as he would allow. Let him become accustomed to her nearness.

  It was hard to stand unmoving. Harder yet to look at him, even sidelong and carefully nonchalant as one should always look at a horse one means to seduce. He was filthy. She wanted to scrub him smooth; to coax his mane out of its appalling knot. He itched: his skin quivered; he snapped where no flies came.

  “It’s a pity,” she said softly to the air just aft of his ear, “that you will let no one touch you.”

  His head came up, jaws working. He did not shy away from her.

  She kept talking. “I know you hate us. But Allah has given you to us; and you have done nothing for your beauty in defying us. Won’t you let me touch you at least? Scratch you where you itch? Comb out your tangles?”

  His ears went back. One flicked forward. He snorted, scattering grains of barley.

  “Suppose,” she said, ”that I take a twist of straw, so. Will you let me make you comfortable with it? Your poor coat; it was so beautiful when I saw it first. Now it’s as drab as a servant’s gown.”

  As she spoke, she edged toward him. He did not edge away. He was not wild, Al’zan had said; he had known human hands. He was merely rebellious.

  Lightly, calmly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she touched him. He quivered; his eye rolled. But he did not snap or strike. Slowly, crooning she cared not what, she began to curry him. She was gentle: his skin was thin, high-bred, tender. Little by little he eased. He leaned into the rubbing where the itch must have been strongest. “Yes,” she said. “Yes my beauty, my splendor, my Khamsin. How sleek you are still; how strong. And your coat—so soft. Like silk, like red copper. How beautiful you are!”

  He was royal indeed, that one. He basked in flattery.

  When his coat was brushed into brilliance, his mane and tail combed into silk, she stood back to admire him. He posed for her, arching his neck, preening. Her eye met his. Almost he seemed to smile.

  His head snaked toward her, teeth bared. It met her fist. He shied, wheeling, escaping into the sun of the courtyard.

  “Well done,” Al’zan said dryly.

  She whipped about. He gave her no time to excuse herself. “Is that guilt I see? Surely by now you should know how to judge your time with a horse.”

  “Even with that one?”

  “You bought him.”

  “Allah knows why.”

  “Trust Him, then,” said Al’zan. “And train your stallion as seems best to you. What else have I trained you for, but for this?”

  She stared at him. He had just given her the world and all its kingdoms. And she… ”I’m not ready,” she protested. “I don’t know anything.”

  “Of course not. You’ve never trained a horse from the beginning.”

  Her heart was bursting with pride and with terror. “But what if I fail?”

  “There is no such word in our philosophy,” said Alexander Hippias.

  oOo

  Zamaniyah had ample cause to remember that. She reckoned the days in battles. Battles to catch the beast; battles to touch him. Battles to set a halter on him, to lead him, simply to stand by him unbitten and untrampled and unkicked. He gave no quarter. Even when, outflanked, he yielded, he yielded without submission. That warmth she had known for a brief moment, he did not grant again. Either he suffered her or he hated her. There was nothing of acceptance in him.

  “But he will yield to me,” she said to Jaffar as she settled to sleep. “He can’t fight if I refuse to.”

  His eyes were eloquent, reckoning her scars. Khamsin had bitten her once, badly. The wound was healing slowly, though by Allah’s mercy and Al’zan’s skillful doctoring it had not festered.

  “He hasn’t bitten me since,” she pointed out.

  “Yet,” said Jaffar. “There’s a devil in him, mistress.”

  She could not deny it. “But there’s good there, too, though he’s buried it deep. I’m going to find it, Jaffar. I’ll bring it to light.”

  The eunuch smoothed her hair and settled the coverlet over her. “You never take kindly to resistance, little falcon.”

  She smiled. “Nor do you, old nurse.”

  He, who was not old at all, laughed unwillingly and kissed her forehead. “Sleep well,” he said.

  “Allah bless,” she answered, drowsy already, sliding into sleep.

  oOo

  She slept deeply as she always did. She had a gift: to set troubles aside where they could not vex her peace.

  Jaffar had no such fortune. And he had dreams, which was a curse upon him. For wanting them. For hunting them.

  He lay on his mat across her door, set the dagger beneath the fold of linen that was his pillow. His body settled easily enough, but his eyes stared sleeplessly into the dimness.

  Forget, others of his kind had told him when he was young enough to listen to them. Forget what you were. What you are, you are. There is nothing left for you but that.

  They had told him that he was fortunate. The slaver who had taken him had wanted him for himself. Had taken only what was necessary to keep him forever a boy; had kept him, cherished him, called him beautiful. And had died of a fever, casting him still no more than a child into the hideousness of the slave market. Five masters in a year, because he would not forsake his pride; scars innumerable, both without and within. The Seljuk emir’s slavemaster had bought him for the harem, because he was as black as mother night and therefore far too ugly to tempt a noble lady, and because he could be fed and trained and rendered fit for the warding of women. His seller had not seen fit to confess that he was dangerous, a rebel, a wicked hand with knife or spear. That he still had either hand, or the life that went with them, he could ascribe only to the fortune that had kept him from turning steel against one of his masters.

  His shoulder flexed where the worst of the old scars tended to tighten. It was not easy to see beyond the barrier of pain, the wall of the knife and the gelder’s chair. But some madness drove him always to remember. He had been whole once, and young, and a fool. He had seen the awe accorded his grandmother who was a dreamer of power, his uncle who was a great worker of magic. He had coveted what they had. With a child’s arrogance, a young male’s impetuousness, he made great sacrifice. He commanded the gods to give him power.

  They gave him power. They gave him war, the fall of his city, the slaughter of its elders and its fighting men, the taking of slaves. T
hey took his family and his freedom and his manhood. And of all of it they granted him foreseeing, but clouded, veiled in incomprehension. To know, and not to know. To understand without knowing what he understood.

  Vision skulked behind his eyelids. Out of knotted green, a burst of blood and fire. A stallion who was no stallion, who wore the face of a man.

  No use to flee the power when it was on him. The sooner faced, the sooner over. He studied the creature which it cast up before him. All a man now, whitely and plumply naked, nothing like his own ebon slenderness. And yet, strangely, kin to him. Young, arrogant, blind to aught but his own perfection: the perfect image of a fool.

  He addressed the dream softly in his own tongue, honey-sweet after the harsh rattle of Arabic. “You mean no ill. No more did I. But the gods have no care for what is meant. Only for what is demanded of them.”

  The white boy could not understand. Jaffar would not give him the slavers’ Arabic. Let him learn true human speech if he would converse in dreams.

  Jaffar laughed soundlessly, lying there. And what did he call himself? The slave’s name, the eunuch’s name. Jaffar. The knife had taken his child-name. He had not presumed to give himself another.

  The dream-youth melted into the red stallion. Khamsin, she called him. Burning destroyer. She was wise, this mistress of theirs, but no more than any earthly creature could she see through the shadows to herself.

  “Nor can I,” said Jaffar. “I was given to her to be her thing; to serve her, to be owned by her. But never, I vowed to myself, to let her touch my soul. Nothing left living could do that. Until, all unwitting, she did.” He showed the stallion his white sharp teeth. “Be wary, wind of the desert, lest she win you as she won me.”

  Never, the beast’s eyes vowed. Never.

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