Though that, too, was a half-truth, at best. He walked into the low, sprawling house he’d built with the generous income Almalik had always allowed him. Never leave a man without an alternative, he’d said carefully in the audience chamber this morning, to make certain the cleverest among those assembled would begin to spell out the tale as he wanted it told.
But there had been alternatives. There almost always were. Almalik had indeed administered a stringent, deeply humiliating rebuke to his son’s independence and ibn Khairan’s pride on the Day of the Moat. The prince had been rendered a hapless observer of butchery, no more than a symbol of his father’s watchfulness, and Ammar . . . ?
Ammar ibn Khairan, who, on behalf of the ambitious governor of Cartada fifteen years ago, had not scrupled to murder a man named Khalif in the holy succession of Ashar—and who had been branded by that deed ever since—had been defined anew for the peninsula and the world as the coarse, blood-sodden architect of an ugly slaughter.
What he had seen in that Fezanan castle courtyard in the broiling heat of summer had sickened him—and he was a man who had seen and decreed death in a great many guises in the service of Cartada. He detested excess though, and the degree of it in that courtyard was appalling.
Over and above all this, of course, there was pride. There was always pride. He might loathe what had been done to the citizens of Fezana but he loathed, just as much, what had been done to his own name, to his image and place in the world. He knew he was the servant of a king, however lofty his titles. Kings could rebuke their servants; they could strip them of their worldly goods, kill them, exile them. They could not take a man—if the man was Ammar ibn Khairan—and present him to the whole of Al-Rassan and the world beyond mountain and sea as an agent of . . . ugliness.
No alternative?
Of course there had been alternatives, had he wanted them badly enough. He could have left the world of power and its atrocities. He could even have left this beloved, diminished land of Al-Rassan and its puffed-up petty-kings. He could have gone straight from Fezana to Ferrieres across the mountains, or to any of the great cities of Batiara. There were cultivated, princely courts there where an Asharite poet would be made welcome as a glittering enhancement. He could have written for the rest of his days in luxury among the most civilized of the Jaddites.
He could even have gone farther east, taking ship all the way back to Soriyya, to visit the stone tombs of his ancestors, which he had never seen, perhaps even rediscover his faith at Ashar’s Rock, make a vigil under the god’s stars in the desert, finish his life far from Al-Rassan.
Of course there had been alternatives.
Instead he had taken revenge. Had disguised himself and come back to Cartada. Made himself known to the prince and then bribed a palace steward to admit him into the retinue of the court as a slave. The largest single bribe he had ever given in his life. And he had killed the king today, with fijana smeared on a muslin cloth.
Twice now, then. Twice in fifteen years he had murdered the most powerful monarch in the land. A khalif and a king.
I am increasingly unlikely to be best remembered, ibn Khairan decided ruefully, entering his home, for my poetry.
“You have a visitor, Excellence,” the under-steward said, hovering inside the doorway. Ibn Khairan sat on the low bench by the door and the man knelt to help remove his boots and replace them with jewelled slippers.
“You had someone admitted without my presence?”
The man was now the steward, actually. New to his duties in a terrible time, he looked down at the ground. “I may have erred, Excellence. But she was insistent that you would see her.”
“She?”
But he already knew who this had to be. Amusement briefly resurfaced before being succeeded by something else. “Where have you put her?”
“She awaits you on the terrace. I hope I acted rightly, Excellence?”
He rose and the steward did the same. “Only, ever, admit a woman this way. Have dinner prepared for two and a room readied for a guest. You and I will speak later, there is much to be done. I am leaving Cartada for a time, by the king’s decree.”
“Yes, Excellence,” the man said expressionlessly.
Ammar turned to go within. He paused. “The new king. The old king is dead,” he added. “This morning.”
“Alas,” said his steward, with no evident sign of surprise.
A competent man, ibn Khairan decided. Dropping his riding gloves on a marble table, he walked a sequence of corridors to the wide terrace he’d had built on the west side of the house where his own chambers were. He had always preferred sunset to sunrise. The view overlooked red hills and the blue curve of the river to the south. Cartada was invisible, just beyond the hills.
The woman, his visitor, was standing with her back to him, admiring that view. She was barefoot on the cool flagstones.
“The architect didn’t want to build this for me,” he said, coming to stand beside her. “ ‘Open spaces go inside a house,’ he kept telling me.”
She glanced up at him. She would have been veiled for the ride here, but the veil was lifted now. Her dark, accented eyes held his a moment and then she turned away.
“It does feel exposed,” she said quietly.
“But see where we are. From what am I hiding here in the country, I asked my architect and myself.”
“And what did you answer yourself?” she asked, looking at the terraced slopes towards the river and the setting sun. “And your architect?” She was extremely beautiful, in profile. He remembered the day he had first seen her.
“Not this,” he said, after a moment, gesturing at the land stretching before them. She was clever, he would do well to remember that. “I will admit I am surprised, Zabira. I am seldom surprised, but this is unexpected.”
The foremost lady of King Almalik’s court, the courtesan who was the mother of his two youngest children, effectively the queen of Cartada for the past eight years, looked back at him again and smiled, her small, perfect teeth showing white.
“Really?” she said. “On a day when you kill a king and are exiled from your home by your own disciple, a simple visit from a lady is what disconcerts you? I don’t know whether to be flattered.”
Her voice was exquisite, there seemed to be music beneath it. It had always been thus. She had broken hearts and mended them when she sang. She smelled of myrrh and roses. Her eyes and fingernails had been carefully painted. He wondered how long she had been here. He ought to have asked the steward.
“There is nothing simple about either the lady or the visit,” he murmured. “Will you take refreshment?”
A servant had appeared with a tray bearing pomegranate juice and sherbet in tall glasses. He took the drinks and offered her one. “Will I offend you if I also suggest a cup of wine? There is a Jaddite vineyard north of us and I have an arrangement with them.”
“You would not offend me in the least,” Zabira said, with some measure of feeling.
Ammar smiled. This was the most celebrated beauty in Al-Rassan, and young still, though perhaps a little less youthful after this morning. Ibn Khairan was only one of the myriad poets who had extolled her over the years. He had been the first, though, there would always be that. He had met her with Almalik. Had been there when it began.
The woman we saw at the Gate of the Fountain,
As twilight stole down upon the city walls
Like a cloaked thief of the day’s light,
Wore the first holy stars of Ashar
As ornaments above the dark fall of her hair.
What shall be the name of their beauty
If it be not her name?
Sacrilege, of course, but Al-Rassan after the Khalifate’s fall—and long before—had not been the most devout place in the Asharite world.
She had been seventeen years old that evening when the king and the lord ibn Khairan, his closest friend and advisor, had ridden back into Cartada from a day’s hunting in the western fores
ts and had seen a girl drawing water from a fountain in the last of the autumn light. Eight years ago.
“Really, Ammar, why would you be surprised?” the same woman asked him now, infinitely sophisticated, eyeing him over the rim of the glass. Ibn Khairan gestured at the servant, who withdrew to bring wine. “What do you imagine Cartada might hold for me now?”
Carefully, for he was conscious that what he had done this morning had turned her world upside-down and put her life in peril, he said, “The son is son to the father, Zabira, and much of your own age.”
She made a wry face. “You heard what he said to me this morning.”
Not quite, the prince had murmured. They had all heard that. Zabira had been careful, always, but it was hardly a secret that with Hazem the second son entangled hopelessly with the most zealous of the wadjis, her own older child was the only real alternative to Prince Almalik—provided the king had lived long enough for the boy to come of age. He had not. Ammar wondered, suddenly, where the two children were.
“I heard what he said. Despite that, Almalik ibn Almalik has a nature not immune to enticement,” he replied, still being cautious. In its own way he was making an appalling suggestion, though by no means an unprecedented one. Royal sons succeeded fathers, in more ways than one.
She gave him a sidelong glance. “A man’s enticement, or a woman’s? Perhaps you could enlighten me as to that?” she said sweetly. Then went on before he could reply: “I know him. I’ve had him watched a long time, Ammar. He will be immune to whatever charms I yet retain. He is too afraid. For him, I will carry the shadow of his father wherever I go, in bed or in court, and he isn’t ready to deal with that.” She sipped from her drink again and looked out at the gleaming curve of the river and the reddening hills. “He will want to kill my sons.”
Ammar had been thinking the same thing, actually.
He decided it was better, in the circumstances, not to ask where the boys were, though it would have been useful knowledge for later. The servant returned with two more glasses, water and wine in a beautifully crafted decanter. He had spent a small fortune on glass over the years. More things to leave behind.
The tray was set down and the servant withdrew. Ibn Khairan mixed water and wine for the two of them. They drank, not speaking. The wine was very good.
The image of two small boys seemed to hang in the air in the gathering twilight. Suddenly, for no good reason, he thought of Ishak of Fezana, the Kindath doctor who had attended upon Zabira for both those boys—and had lost his eyes and tongue after the delivery of the second. He had gazed with an infidel’s eyes upon the forbidden beauty of the woman whose life he had saved. The woman now standing here, her scent vivid and distracting, her white skin flawless. He wondered if she knew what had happened to Ishak ben Yonannon, if Almalik had ever told her. That led to another unexpected thought.
“You really did love the king, didn’t you?” he asked at length, uncharacteristically awkward. He didn’t feel entirely in control of this situation. Murdering someone left you vulnerable to certain things; he had almost forgotten that lesson over the course of fifteen years. How was one to proceed with the lover of a man one had slain?
“You know I did,” she said calmly. “That isn’t a difficult or even a real question, Ammar.” She turned and stood facing him for the first time. “The difficult truth is that you loved him as well.”
And that he had not expected.
He shook his head quickly. “No. I respected him, I admired his strength, I enjoyed the subtlety of his mind. His foresight, his cunning. I had hopes of the son, as well. In a way, I still do.”
“Otherwise your teaching was wasted?”
“Otherwise my teaching was wasted.”
“It was,” said Zabira flatly. “You’ll see, soon enough. And though I heard a denial of love, I am afraid I do not believe it.”
She set down her empty glass and looked up at him thoughtfully, standing very near. “Tell me something else,” she said, her voice changing timbre. “You suggested the new king was not immune to enticement. Are you, Ammar?”
He was, perhaps, the least easily startled man in Al-Rassan, but this, following hard upon the last remarks, was entirely unexpected. Hilarity, intense and swift, rose within him and as swiftly subsided. He had killed her lover that morning. The father of her children. The hope of her future.
“I have been accused of many things, but never that,” he said, parrying for time.
She granted him none. “Good, then,” said Zabira of Cartada, and rising on her toes, she kissed him upon the lips, slowly and with considerable expertise.
Someone else did this to me, not long ago, ibn Khairan thought, before all such associations were chased away. The woman on the terrace with him stepped back, but only to begin—silk sleeves falling away to reveal the white skin of her arms—unbinding her black hair.
He stared, mesmerized, words and thoughts scattering in disarray. He watched her hands descend to the pearl buttons of her overtunic. She undid two of them, and paused. It was not an overtunic. She wore nothing beneath. In the extremely clear, soft light he glimpsed the pale, pear-like curves of her breasts.
His throat was suddenly dry. His voice husky in his own ears, ibn Khairan said, “My rooms are just here.”
“Good,” she said again. “Show me.”
It did occur to him just then that she might have come here to kill him.
It did not occur to him to do anything about it. He had, truly, never been accused of being immune to enticement. He lifted her up; she was small-boned and slender, no real weight at all. The scent of her surrounded him, dizzying for a moment. He felt her mouth at the lobe of one ear. Her fingers were about his neck. His blood loud within him, ibn Khairan carried her through a doorway and into his bedchamber.
Is it the possibility of dying that does this? he wondered, his first and last such clear thought for some time. Is that what excites me so?
His bed, in a large room hung with Serian tapestries, was low to the ground, covered with cushions and pillows in a diversity of shapes and sizes, as much for love-play as for color and texture. Crimson-dyed squares of silk hung from copper rings on the wall above the bed and set into the carved wooden foot. Ammar preferred freedom of movement in his lovemaking, the slide and traverse of bodies, but there had been those among his guests in this room who derived their keenest pleasures otherwise, and over the years he had earned a reputation as a host solicitous of all of his guests’ desires.
Even so, even with almost twenty years of nuanced experience in erotic play, ibn Khairan was swiftly made aware—though not, in truth, with any great surprise—that a woman trained as Zabira had been knew some things he did not. Even, it began to emerge, things about his own nature and responses.
Unclothed among the pillows some time later, he felt her fingers teasing and exploring him, winced at a bite and felt his sex grow even more rigid amid the growing shadows of the room as her mouth came back to his ear and she whispered something quite shocking in the exquisite, celebrated voice. Then his eyes grew wide in the darkness as she proceeded to perform precisely what she had just described.
All the training mistresses and castrates of Almalik’s court had come over the wide seas from the homelands of the east, where such skills had been part of courtly life for hundreds of years before Ashar’s ascetic vigil in the desert. It was possible, Ammar’s drifting thoughts essayed, that a journey to Soriyya might have more to offer than he’d imagined. He felt a breathless laugh escape him.
Zabira slipped further downward, her scented skin gliding along his, her fingernails offering counterpoint where they touched. Ibn Khairan heard a sigh of helpless pleasure and realized that, improbably, he had made that sound himself. He attempted to rise then, to turn, to begin the sharing, the flowing back-and-forth of love but he felt her hands, delicately insistent, pushing him down. He surrendered, closed his eyes, let her begin, her voice exclaiming in delight or murmuring in commentary, to mini
ster to him as he had ministered to so many people in this room.
It went on, astonishingly varied and inventive, for some time. The sun had set. The room was encased in darkness—they had paused to light no candles here—before his sensibilities began, as a swimmer rises from green depths of the sea, to reassert themselves. And slowly, feeling almost drugged with desire, ibn Khairan came to understand something.
She was beside him just then, having turned him on his side. One of her legs was wrapped about his body, she had him enclosed within her sex, and her movements were indeed those of sea tides in their insistent, unwavering rise and fall.
He brushed a nipple with his tongue, testing his new thought. Without pause in her rhythm—which was, intuitively, his own deepest rhythm—she caressed his head and tilted it away.
“Zabira,” he whispered, his voice distant and difficult.
“Hush,” she murmured, a tongue to his ear again. “Oh, hush. Let me carry you away.”
“Zabira,” he tried again.
She shifted then, sinuous and smooth, and was above him now, more urgently, his manhood still within her, sheathed in liquescence. Her mouth descended, covered his. Her breath was scented with mint, her kisses a kind of threading fire. She stopped his speech, her tongue like a hummingbird. Her nails raked downward along his side. He gasped.
And turned his head away.
He lifted his hands then, with some effort, and grasped her by the arms; gently, but so she could not twist away again. In the darkness he tried to see her eyes but could discern only the heartshaped shadow of her face and the curtain of her black hair.
“Zabira,” he said, an utterly unexpected kind of pain within him, “you need not punish yourself, or hold back sorrow. It is all right to mourn. It is allowed.”
She went stiff with shock, as if slapped. Her body arched backwards in the first uncontrolled movement she had made all evening. For a long moment she remained that way, rigid, motionless, and then, with real grief and a simultaneous relief, Ammar heard her make one harsh, unnatural sound as if something had been torn in her throat, or in her heart.