Ludus, endlessly curious, had lingered at a street corner to watch a wolf swallowing fire—trying to decipher the trick of it—and had never caught up with the rest of them. Alvar wasn’t sure where and when he had lost Martín or how the peacock regalia that flamboyantly disguised a certain silk merchant had somehow managed to disappear. It was very late. He’d had more to drink than was good for any man.
He hadn’t seen Jehane anywhere. He’d thought earlier that he might know her by her walk, but as the night continued and the streets grew more frenzied it even became difficult at times to tell if someone passing in the dark was a man or a woman. He reminded himself that she knew his mask; that if he kept moving she might find him in the crowd to offer a greeting, share laughter. A kiss, perhaps, in this altered, wavering night. Although that was a dangerous channel for his thoughts.
There was too much license surrounding him, too charged and wanton a mood in the streets of Ragosa now. Alvar found himself almost aching with desire, and with something more complex than that.
Alone and far from home in a foreign land at night, amidst animals and birds and fabulous creatures that had never been, passing food stalls and wine sellers and musicians playing by the orange and amber light of candles and torches beneath the blue moon and the stars of spring, Alvar wandered the streets, a leather flask at one hip, and longed for comfort, for a sharing of what this difficult, mutable world offered to men and women.
He found something very different.
A leash, to be precise.
It was slipped over his eagle mask and around his neck as he stood watching dancers in a square not far from the barracks. The dancers had their hands all over each other, and the women were being lifted and swung about in a way he had never seen before. He tried to imagine himself joining in, then dismissed the thought. Not a soldier’s son from a farm in the north of Valledo.
It was in that moment that the leash was dropped over him from behind and tightened about his throat. Alvar turned quickly. A passing torch was briefly too close; he couldn’t see for a moment, and then he could.
“I will have to decide how offended I am,” said the sleek jungle cat he had seen in the street the morning before. “You were to have found me, Valledan. Instead . . .”
She wore the necklace that had come with her mask and much other jewelry. Not a great deal of clothing, however, as if to compensate. What she was wearing clung to the lines of her body. The voice beneath the mask was remarkably near to a feline purr.
“I was looking!” Alvar stammered, then flushed beneath his own disguise.
“Good,” she murmured. “That earns you some redress. Not all, mind you. I ought not to have had to be the huntress tonight.”
“How did you know me?” he asked, struggling for self-possession.
He heard her laugh. “A man of your build wearing Asharite slippers? Not hard, my northern soldier.” She paused, tugged a little on the golden leash. “You are mine now, you understand? For whatever I choose tonight.”
Alvar discovered that his mouth had gone dry. He didn’t answer. He didn’t really have to. He saw her smile, beneath the mask. She began walking and he followed her, wherever she was taking him.
In one way, it was not far at all: just around the corner, a house fronting on the same wide square as their barracks, near the palace. They passed through an imposing double doorway, crossed a torchlit courtyard and climbed a flight of stairs. It was an elegantly appointed house. Servants, dressed in black, masked as small forest creatures, watched them pass, in silence.
In another sense, though, what ensued when they came to the room where she led him—with its balcony over the square, and its enormous fireplace, and the wide, canopied bed—marked one of the longest journeys of Alvar’s life.
Jehane was alone again. She had left the four brown rabbits by the water, a little reluctantly, because they were amusing, but she wasn’t inclined to become too much a part of their visibly growing intimacy, and at one point she had simply slipped off the fishing boat where they had been, and moved quietly back to the pier and into the crowd.
She still had the wine flask the stag had left her, but she’d stopped drinking. She felt clear-headed now, almost unsettlingly so. She was discovering, as she moved through the late-night streets, that Carnival, for all its disguises, was a difficult night in which to hide from the self after all.
At one point she caught a glimpse of Husari in his spectacular mask. The silk merchant was dancing, part of a group of figures. In fact, he was in the center of a ring, turning in neat-footed movements while the laughing crowd applauded him. Jehane paused a short distance away, smiling behind her owl face, long enough to see a woman masked as a vixen step from the circle to come up to the peacock and loop her arms around his neck, careful of the feathers. They began moving together, gracefully.
Jehane watched for another moment and then moved on.
It might have seemed as if her wandering was aimless, carrying her with the swirling movements of the crowd past entertainments and food vendors, to pause outside tavern windows listening to the music floating out, or to sit for a time on the stone bench outside one of the larger homes and watch the people flowing past like a river in the night.
It wasn’t so, however. Her movements were not, in the end, random. Honest with herself, tonight and most nights, Jehane knew where her steps were drawing her, however slowly, by whatever meandering paths through the city. She couldn’t claim to be happy, or easy in her soul about this, but her heartbeat grew steadily quicker, and the doctor in her could diagnose that, at least, without difficulty.
She rose from a last bench, turned a corner and walked down a street of handsome mansions near the palace. Passing elegant, formal facades, she saw the door of one house closing behind a man and a woman. She caught a glimpse of a leash. That stirred a memory, but then it drifted away.
And so it was that she found herself standing outside a very large building. There were torches set along the wall at intervals but very little ornament and the windows above were all dark save for one, and she knew that room.
Jehane stood against a rough stone wall across the street, oblivious now to the people passing by her in the square, and gazed up at the highest level of that building, towards the solitary light.
Someone was awake and alone, very late at night.
Someone was writing, on newly bought parchment. Not ransom demands; letters home. Jehane looked up past the smoke of the passing torches and those fixed in the walls, and struggled to accept and make sense of what lay within her heart. Overhead, shining along the street and down upon all the people in the square, the blue moon bathed the night in its glow. The sliver of the white moon had just risen. She had seen it by the water. She could not see it here. In the teachings of the Kindath, the white moon meant clarity; the blue one was mystery; secrets of the soul, complexities of need.
A small man, amusingly disguised beneath a blond wig and the thick yellow beard of a Karcher, staggered past her, carrying a long-legged woman in the veiled guise of a Muwardi from the desert. “Put me down!” the woman cried, unconvincingly, and laughed. They continued along the street, lit by torches and the moon, and turned the corner out of sight.
There would be a guard by the door of the barracks. Someone who had drawn one of the short straws and been posted, complaining, on duty for a part of tonight. Whoever it was, he would let her pass. They all knew her. She could identify herself and be allowed to enter. And then go up the first circling flight of stairs and then the second one, and then down a dark hallway to knock on that last door behind which a candle burned.
His voice would call out, not at all alarmed. She would say her name. There would be a silence. He would rise from his desk, from his letter home, and cross to open the door. Looking up into his grey eyes, she would step into his room and remove her mask, finally, and find, by the steady light of that candle . . . what?
Sanctuary? Shelter? A place to hide from the heart?
??s truth of tonight and all nights?
Standing alone in the street, Jehane shook her head a little and then, quite unconsciously, gave the small shrug those who knew her best could always recognize.
She squared her shoulders and drew a deep breath. It was Carnival in Ragosa. A time for hiding from others, perhaps, but not from the self. It was important to have come here, she understood. To have stood gazing up at that window and pictured herself ascending a winding stair towards the man in that room. Important to acknowledge certain truths, however difficult. And then, having done so, it was as important to turn away and move on. Truly wandering now. Alone in the frenzy of the night streets, searching again—but, more truly, waiting to be found.
If, indeed, it was to happen. If, somewhere between moon and torchlight and dark, this would be.
As she stepped away from the stone wall and turned her back on that room with its pale glow of light far above, another figure also moved, detaching from shadow, following her.
And a third figure followed that one, unnoticed in the loud streets of Ragosa, as this dance, one among so many in the whirling night and the sad, sweet world, moved towards its beginning and its end.
She was outside the palace, watching two jugglers toss wheels of flame back and forth, when the voice from behind spoke to her.
“I believe you have my wine flask.” The tones were low, muffled by a mask; even now, she wasn’t entirely certain.
She turned. It was not the stag.
A lion stood before her, golden-maned, imperial. Jehane blinked and took a step backwards, bumping into someone. She had been reaching to her hip for the leather flask, now she let it fall again.
“You are deceived,” she said. “I do have someone’s flask, but it was a stag who left it with me.”
“I have been a stag,” the lion said, in oracular tones. The voice changed, “I can assure you I will never be one again.”
Something in the inflection. Not to be mistaken. She knew, finally. And the hard, quick hammering was in her pulse.
“And why is that?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice steady. She was grateful for darkness, for fitful, passing light, for her own mask.
“Plays all havoc in doorways,” said the lion. “And I ended up collecting ridiculous things on the horns, just walking. A hat. A flask. A torch once. Almost set myself on fire.”
She laughed, in spite of herself.
The voice changed again. “It is late now, Jehane,” said this man who seemed to have found her in the night after all. “It may even be too late, but shall we walk together a while, you and I?”
“How did you know me?” she asked, not answering the question, nor asking the harder one he’d invited. Not yet. Not quite yet. Her heart was loud. She felt it as a drumbeat in the dark.
“I think,” said Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais, very slowly, “that I should know you in a pitch black room. I think I would know you anywhere near me in the world.” He paused. “Is that answer enough, Jehane? Or too much of one? Will you say?”
She heard, for the first time ever, uncertainty in his voice. And that, more than any other thing, was what made her tremble.
She asked, “Why might it be too late? The blue moon is still high. The night has a distance to run.”
He shook his head. Left a silence. She heard laughter and applause behind her. The jugglers had done something new.
Ibn Khairan said, “My dear, I have been other things in my time, besides a stag at Carnival.”
She understood. For all the wit and edge and irony, there was this grace to him, always, an allowance for her own intelligence. She said, honestly, “I know this, of course. It is a part of why I’m afraid.”
“That is what I meant,” he said simply.
All the stories. Through the years a young girl hearing, against her will, gossip by the well in Fezana, or at the shallow place by the river where the women washed their clothes. And then, a woman herself, home from studies abroad, hearing the same stories again. New names, new variations, the same man. Ibn Khairan of Aljais. Of Cartada.
Jehane looked at the man in the lion mask and felt something lodge, hard and painful, in the place where her heart was drumming.
He had killed the last khalif of Al-Rassan.
Behind the mask, in the flickering passage of torches all around where they were, she could just glimpse his eyes. They would be blue if he removed the disguise, if they stood in brighter light. She became aware that he was waiting for her to speak.
“Ought I to be afraid?” she asked, finally.
And he said, gravely, “No more than I, Jehane, in this.”
Which was what she had needed to hear. Exactly what she needed, and Jehane, still wondering, still incredulous, took his hand in hers, saying, “Let us walk.”
“Where would you like to go?” he asked, carefully, adjusting his stride to her pace.
“Where we can be alone,” she said steadily, her grip firm, coming home at last to where her heart had been waiting since a summer’s day in Fezana. “Where we can set aside owl and lion, apt as they might be, and be what we are.”
“Flawed as we might be?” he asked.
“How otherwise?” she replied, discovering with surprise that her heartbeat had slowed the moment she had taken his hand. Something occurred to her, unexpectedly. She hesitated, and then, being what she was, asked, “Were you with me earlier, when I stopped outside the barracks?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. At length he said, “Cleverest of women, you do your father and mother proud with every word you speak. Yes, I was there. I had already decided I could not approach you tonight before you made that choice on your own.”
She shook her head, and gripped his hand more tightly. A thread of fear; she might so easily have gone up those stairs. “It wasn’t the choice you may have thought it. It was a matter of hiding, or not.”
“I know,” he said. “Forgive me, my dear, but I know that.”
His own honesty, risking her ruffled pride. But she did forgive him this, because the hiding had ended now, on a night of masks, and it was all right that he understood this. He had approached. He had found her.
They came to the house he leased. It was nearer the palace than the quarters she shared with Velaz. He opened the door to the street with his own key: the steward and servants had been dismissed for the night to their pleasures. They went inside.
On the street behind them, a figure watched them enter. He had been following Jehane, and he knew who the lion was. He hesitated, then decided it was all right to leave her now. He considered staying out for a while longer but decided against that. He was tired, and wasn’t at all sure how he felt about the alleged delights of Carnival.
Ziri went back to the barracks, spoke briefly with the man on duty in the doorway, then went into the dormitory and to bed. He was asleep almost immediately, alone in the large room. All the others were still in the streets.
In Ammar ibn Khairan’s house, the servants had left two torches burning to light the entrance hall, and there were candles in the wall sconces. Before going up the stairs they removed their masks and set them aside and Jehane saw his eyes by the burning of those lights.
This time it was he who stepped towards her and this time, when they kissed, it was not the same—not at all the same—as it had been in her father’s room, by the open window the summer before.
And so she discovered that her heartbeat, which had steadied and slowed while they walked, wasn’t quite so steady any longer, and the trembling had returned.
They went up the stairs, and they kissed again, slowly, outside his bedroom door, where a spill of candlelight showed in a line along the floor. She felt his hands around her, strong and sure, drawing her close. Desire was within her, an ache of need, deep and wide and strong as a river rising in the dark.
His mouth moved from hers, and went to one ear. Softly he whispered, “There is someone in my room. The candles would not have been left burning there.?
??
Her heart thudded once, and seemed actually to stop for a moment before starting to beat again.
They had been silent ascending the stairs, and now here. Anyone in the bedroom would have heard the front door open, though, and known Ammar was in the house, alone or accompanied. She asked the question with her eyes only. His mouth came back to her ear. “They want me to know they’re here. I have no idea. To be safe, go along to the next room. There’s a balcony, shared with mine. Listen there. Be careful.”
She nodded. “And you,” she murmured, no more than a breath. “I want you healthy, after.”
She felt his soundless laughter.
Afterwards, she would remember that: how utterly unafraid he had been. Diverted, intrigued, challenged, perhaps. But not at all frightened, or even disconcerted. She wondered what woman he had thought might be waiting. Or what man.
She went along the corridor. Opened the next door, silently passed within into a dark bedchamber. Just before she closed the door behind her, she heard Ammar call out, raising his voice, “Who is here? Why are you in my house?”
And then she heard the reply.
The door to the street would have been easy enough to unlock, and with the servants gone and candles helpfully burning it must have been no trick to find his bedroom.
Ibn Khairan, all his senses still oriented towards the feel and scent of the woman who had just slipped down the corridor, called out to the intruder, his mind struggling to sort through possibilities. Too many. Tonight and all nights there were too many people who might be waiting for him in his room.
Even so, even with twenty years of experience in such mysteries, he was not, in fact, prepared.
The door swung open, almost as soon as he called out. A man stood there, unmasked, in the spill of candlelight from the room.
“Finally,” said King Almalik II of Cartada, smiling. “I had begun to fear a journey wasted.”
It took an extreme effort, all his celebrated poise, but ibn Khairan managed a return smile, and then a bow. “Good evening, ’Malik. My lord king. This is a surprise. A long journey, it must have been.”