A Wind in Cairo (11 page)

Khamsin never needed to be reminded. He had wounded her again in his heedlessness; she had forgiven him again, as she breathed, because she could do no other. He could have hated her for that.

She rubbed the tender place beneath his jaw, leaning lightly against his neck. “Do you know what I think? I think I'm carrying it off.”

He did not know why she should be surprised. She was like no one else he had ever heard of.

She walked with him from stable to practice ground to garden, idling in the heavy heat. He was bred to it, horse and man. She had no love for it. Her hair clung damply to her forehead; even in light loose clothing she suffered.

They paused by the pool. Khamsin had schooled himself to endure what he saw there; if not, yet, to accept it. He drank, ruffling the image. Zamaniyah sat on the pool's edge and trailed her hand in the water. She bent her head, laved her face. Khamsin nibbled grass beside her foot.

She stood suddenly, startling him. She knotted his lead about his neck; and as he watched, astonished, she dropped her every garment. Shock held him rooted. Had she no modesty at all?

She slid into the cool water. She was as supple as the bright fish that fled before her, and no more shamefast, never knowing what manner of creature stood and stared and forgot the grass cloying upon his tongue.

It hurt that she did not know. Even though, if she had, she would never in all the world have done as she did now, lain on her back in the water's embrace, offering herself to the sky. He would have given kingdoms for a hand to touch her, there, where bruises marred the fine brown skin, and there, where bandages bound her poor wounded ribs; for a human tongue, to tell her—

To tell her what? That he was her bitter enemy? That he had been the scourge of the women of Cairo? He might have sired a child, or two, or three. He could not remember. He had never cared enough to care.

She rose, streaming water, enfolding him in a cool wet embrace. Her breasts burned against his neck. Her laughter rippled in his ear. “Oh, you marvel! You never moved.”

He had had no power to.

She wrung out her hair, drew on her garments one by one, reluctant, sighing. But no more reluctant than he. He wanted to count her bruises. To trace the thin lines of scars—such as he had never had, who had evaded all but the barest inescapable beginnings of the arts of war. He had set himself to master other arts. Drinking. Roistering. Whoring.

Zamaniyah led him back to the place he had won for himself. She went away as she always did, free in her humanity. “Tomorrow,” she promised as she left him. She did not ask him if he was content with it. The world was not so ordered that a woman need respect the wishes of a beast.

The messenger was waiting when Zamaniyah came to the harem: a eunuch, old and august and redolent of ambergris, with a pair of languid pages. Even in the sultan's livery they had a look of the caliph's palace. They bore a gift for her, which they spread before her widening eyes: shimmering beauty, silk the color of a peacock's fan, sewn into a robe for a queen.

“My lord the sultan, Salah al-Din who is mighty in salvation, bids you accept this small token of his goodwill,” said the eunuch in a voice as high and fluting as a bird's.

The pages were on her before she could stop them, setting the robe over her worn and rumpled shirt, bowing at her feet.

She stammered something. It must have sufficed: they bowed again, all three, and took their leave in a cloud of ambergris.

She sneezed. The robe slipped. She caught it, stared at it. “It's too beautiful for me,” she said.

“Nonsense,” said Jaffar. He swept it out of her hands. “Now,” he said, “for once you obey me.”

He kept to the letter of her father's law. He clothed her in nothing that was not her own; he adorned her with neither scent nor paint. But he freed her hair and combed it until it rippled free and silken down her back. He set her jeweled cap upon her head and her jeweled slippers on her feet; all between he covered in white, with the splendid robe cast over it. Then at last he led her to the mirror which she had always, and studiously, avoided. It was nigh as tall as she: a Frankish shield beaten flat and sheathed in silver. It hung in a room of its own, much frequented by the women, and heavy with their scent and their presence.

Her coming chilled and silenced them. She was used to that, but it hurt still, as old scars can. She held herself straighter and lifted her chin.

Jaffar led her to meet a stranger, a slender creature with great eyes like a gazelle's, and beautiful hair. Even her face was pleasing to see, its sharpness softened by the alchemy of freed hair and shimmering robe. She raised a hand to it: fingers less thin now than slender, their brownness more than comely against the splendor that was blue and green and gold and silver all together.

She stroked the silk as if it had been a living thing. For no reason in the world, she wanted to weep. Therefore she smiled valiantly at all the staring faces, and pirouetted. “Do you like my robe?” she asked them.

They startled her. They nodded. Some even smiled. One actually spoke. “I like it very much,” said the newest one, the Frank who was all that Zamaniyah was not: a pure and alien beauty, skin as white as milk, hair the color of wheat in the sun, eyes as blue as the Middle Sea. Her Arabic was laughable, but Zamaniyah was not minded to laugh. “Was it the king who sent it to you?”

“The sultan,” said Zamaniyah.

The Frankish woman drew close. She had learned, by force, to be clean; her fingers were light on the silk, her eyes wide with wonder. “You are honored,” she said. “He likes you, no? He lets you ride with him.”

She sounded wistful. Frankish women were scandalous, Zamaniyah had heard. They were not kept in honorable seclusion. They knew nothing of proper Muslim modesty.

“Do you like to ride?” she heard herself ask.

The woman—Nahar, she was called, for her strange beauty—drew a breath that said all she ever needed to say. Her hands had clenched into fists. “Yes,” she whispered. “
Yes!”

A demon had possessed Zamaniyah's wits. She leaned close and lowered her voice. “There is a way. Are you brave?”

The blue eyes flashed up. “My father died at Damietta. I was with him. I killed an infidel.”

A Muslim, she meant. Zamaniyah stared at those white hands, soft as they were, clenched at silken sides. That was hate that burned in the beautiful eyes, that hardened the lovely flower-face.

“You are brave,” said Zamaniyah. The others were closing in, alert to conspiracy. Her whisper lowered, quickened. “Talk to me tonight. Late. After the lamps are out.”

Her name, she insisted, was Wiborada. Zamaniyah struggled to say it. It helped that she knew Greek: her tongue knew what if was to shape outlandish names. Wiborada was not, precisely, amicable. She had not accepted Islam; she had not surrendered to the will of Allah. She was a wild thing in chains of silk.

“You understand,” Zamaniyah said. “This is not a road to escape. You belong to my father; I don't intend to alter that. If you mean to betray me, be warned: I can do worse than shoot you down. I can give you over to your master.”

Wiborada did not flinch where Zamaniyah could see. She lay back on Zamaniyah's bed, sleek as a golden cat, and laughed a rich alien laugh. Abruptly she straightened, coiled, leaned forward. Her eyes were level. “I understand. I see no escape from here. Too many people. Too many infidels. I make a pact. You give me air to breathe, and sky. I give you honor. No escape while I ride with you.”

“Fair enough,” said Zamaniyah.

She had done it. It was the sultan's robe, and the pain of her twice-cracked ribs, and the shock of knowing that she had, after all, some small claim to comeliness. Her father's Frankish concubine had always shunned her—or was it she who had shunned them all? Bound by al-Zaman's command, caught up in her loneliness, finding rejection because she expected to find it.

Never trust a Frank
, people said.

Between women, perhaps, it could be different. Zamaniyah had never been one, to know. Jaffar would not presume to judge, which meant that he did not approve. It was not his office to approve.

“Sometimes,” she said to him, “you are too dutiful for words. Unless they be curses.”

He came perilously close to a smile, for which she came perilously close to hitting him.

It was simple enough to manage. Wiborada was tall and, for all her cultivated softness, robust. She made a passable mamluk, from a distance, with her headcloth drawn across her face to guard it from the sun; and she could sit a horse well, for a Frank. Al'zan, whom Zamaniyah did not even try to deceive, honored her. He held his tongue, and he mounted her on the gelding which he had been training for himself.

Zamaniyah made sure that her companion would not be questioned: she provided a diversion. She began to ride Khamsin beyond the walls of the house.

Wiborada was enchanted with him. If he had been a man, Zamaniyah would have said that he was enraptured with her. He made himself beautiful for her: arched his neck, flared his great nostrils, danced until she clapped her hands in delight.

Zamaniyah realized, startled, that she was jealous. Wiborada had the grace at least not to ask if she could ride him; perhaps his bright wild eye deterred her, or the saddle. Al'zan had had it made for training, on a Persian model, but altered out of recognition: light and almost flat, without ornament, nor ever with the height before and behind that secured a Frank on the back of his charger.

“But what keeps you there?” Wiborada asked.

“Balance,” replied Zamaniyah, “and milord's assent.”

Wiborada had seen how milord flinched from the touch of hand on his back, and edged away from the saddle itself; and bucked when Zamaniyah settled there, not to dislodge her, simply to remind her that he was Khamsin. The Frankish woman was well and visibly content with the bay gelding, whose spirit was tempered with plain good sense.

She was an excellent companion. She rode quietly, without chatter. She kept her mount out of the way of Khamsin's restless heels, but she rode close enough to hold off the press of people on the road to the south gate.

Zamaniyah stopped watching her and centered herself on Khamsin. He was remarkably calm, but he was very far from quiet. He danced with excitement; he snorted at every shadow. Once she shifted too abruptly and nearly lost her seat altogether.

“Red horses,” said Wiborada, “are for fire, no?”

“And for war.” Zamaniyah was surprised. “How did you know that?”

“I listen,” Wiborada said. Her eyes were bright between headcloth and veil, taking in all that there was to see: Cairo's rising walls, and the splendid new gate, and the roar and seethe of the city.

It was louder than Zamaniyah remembered, and wilder. Khamsin altered it by being so new to it; and Wiborada whose presence would enrage al-Zaman if he learned of it. She was being twice a fool, and knowing it, and refusing to give way to the knowing.

Jaffar's mule drew level with her, ignoring Khamsin's flattened ears. “Best we turn back,” the eunuch said.

Anger sparked, heated with guilt. “What for? We've hardly started.”

They both had almost to shout to be heard. Jaffar's mouth opened. Zamaniyah clapped heels to Khamsin's sides. He shot forward, bucking in outrage. A flood of people swirled between. They were moving together, shouting. Something flew: a stone.

Her body knew before her mind. Riot. She snatched the reins. Too late. Khamsin had the bit in his teeth. She armed all her strength to haul his head about. He tossed it; the reins burned through her fingers. The flood caught him, carried him.

Grimly she set herself to guide him. Not thinking, not daring to think, who he was and what he was, and how little she dared to trust him. He heeded her command, or seemed to; breasted the current, angled slightly away from it, slanting with painful slowness toward its edge.

She was not the only rider within sight. She was the only one on a horse and not a mule or a camel. The others likewise struggled to escape the press. Their faces twisted as they cursed; they flogged their beasts, which brayed and balked. One tall mule swerved broadside, kicking.

Above the featureless roar, a new sound went up: a sound hideously like a snarl. It had words in it.
Turk! Filthy Turk!

Zamaniyah watched. She could not do otherwise. She was trapped. She saw the mule go down; saw hands stretch, claw, tearing.

Khamsin squealed and snapped. Faces blurred, stretched out of all humanity, howling, hating. Bodies buffeted them both. Fingers tore at her coat, her belt. She snatched her swordhilt; but her hand froze there.
Never,
Jaffar had taught her.
Never draw steel in a mob. Better to taunt the buffalo.
He
kills quickly.

Helpless, helpless. Something plucked at one of the plaits that hung below her turban. A voice shrilled. “Turk!
Turk!”

Khamsin went mad. She clung blindly to mane, saddle, sides. A small cold creature sat behind her terror and smiled.
This,
it decreed,
is a warhorse.

Shame smote her to the bone. Her fingers twitched, frightened. The whip which she carried looped to her wrist stung her thigh. She seized the haft of it, swung. Aiming for eyes, heeding nothing but that, and staying astride, and escaping from the mob.

A black face loomed over her own. She caught her blow at the utmost instant. Jaffar pulled her down into the blessed, numbing quiet of an alleyway. Wiborada was with him. Zamaniyah clung to him and strove with all her strength not to burst into tears.

She thrust away. There was no safety here: it was a cul-de-sac, scarcely deeper than it was wide. The course of the mob had slowed and begun to eddy. The shopkeepers who had been slow to bar their doors were suffering for it now.