A Wind in Cairo (32 page)

She spoke very carefully. “Please, sir. Whoever you are. If you know my father, you know me. I fear I don't share the honor. If you would be so kind as to tell me—”

He started as if she had struck him. The last glimmer of color drained from his face.

He tried again to stand, forgetting his blanket. He fell again less catastrophically, to hands and knees. With great care he raised himself on the latter. He wobbled, but after a little he steadied. “One forgets,” he said as if to himself. “Damn you, Hajji. Couldn't you have added that one small spell?”

He caught himself, flushed. “Please, lady. I've been—I've forgotten how easy it is to talk.”

“It's easy,” she agreed. “It's much harder to say anything when one does it.”

His head drooped. “I'm sorry, lady.”

“Whatever for?” she snapped. “And stop calling me that. My name is Zamaniyah.”

“Mine—” He swallowed. He was, inexplicably, shaking. “Mine is K—Kh—Hasan.” His eyes closed, opened and met hers. “Hasan ibn Ali Mousa.”

Her head inclined itself, gracious. Her mind caught up with it and staggered. “Ibn Ali Mousa? Hasan ibn Ali Mousa?”

His nostrils flared. He looked like a frightened horse. Or, she thought, an angry one. Or both at once. “I may be a worthless layabout, my lady, but I've never been a liar.”

“But you're dead.”

“So were you.”

She sank down slowly. All at once she was very tired. “I don't understand.”

She thought he would not answer. He took time enough about it. When he did speak, he spoke softly, clearly, as if he read the story there. “You took a great wound in battle, saving my father's life. The wound was mortal. You…you died of it.

“But no one wanted you to die. One—one of us went to fetch the magus. He said that he could bring you back. For a price.”

She waited. He did not go on. “For a price?” she prodded him.

His breath shuddered as he drew it in. “A price,” he said. “Yes. Peace between our houses.”

“And?”

His eyes flashed up. “Isn't that enough?”

“It hardly explains this.” Her hand took in the tent. Hesitated. Almost touched him.

He pulled at his beard; saw what he was doing; stopped. His fingers had wound themselves in the streak of white. They recoiled.

He looked like a nervous boy. He bit his lip, closed his eyes, scowled terribly. “Damn that man,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed, all sweetness.

His head tossed. “O Allah! Yes.
Yes,
there was more. There had to be a sacrifice. Someone—someone who loved you more than life.”

“Someone…” Her voice was very far away. It could not seem to make itself mean anything. “Someone—died for me?” She was clutching at him shaking him. “Who was it?
Who was it?”

“Not who,” he said. “Strictly speaking. If you think about it.”

Babble. She cut across it with a voice like a knife's edge. “
Who?
Not my father. Tell me it's not my father.”

“It's not your father. Nor mine. Nor”—his face soured—”your pretty emir. Though to do him justice, it very nearly was.”

“Jaffar,” she whispered. “It was Jaffar. I dreamed—”

 
“Jaffar died in battle. He went before you.”

The tears ran of their own will. She let them. “Wiborada, then.”

He shook his head.

Her fist clenched. “
Tell
me, damn you.”

He did, starkly. “Khamsin.”

“Kham—” A great wail welled up. She swallowed it. It choked her. To mourn her eunuch with mere silent tears, to want to howl aloud for her horse—that was not seemly. She had loved Jaffar as her own kin.

Khamsin had been the other half of her.

He was holding her. This stranger. This enemy. This man of ill name. This warm and living presence, that let her cling, that let her cry and never tried to tell her that she was a fool.

She pulled away, raging. “You dogs. You pigs. You bastards! You killed him. Because he was only an animal. Because it was the simplest way. Because he couldn't stop you. He couldn't call you traitors. He couldn't—couldn't—”

He shook her until she stopped. His hands were strong. His face was frightening. “He could. The mage gave him the power. He offered himself.”

“You're lying.”

He let her go. He drew back, inch by careful inch. His hands were shaking, clenching and unclenching. Was he, she wondered in a dim cranny of her rage, doing his utmost to keep from hitting her? “Zamaniyah.” She snarled. How dared he speak her name? He drew a breath, spoke it again. “Zamaniyah, look at me.”

Look, no. Glare, yes. In pure and killing hate. “You did. You. You killed him.”

“Yes, I killed him!” The force of it rocked her even in her wrath. “I killed myself.”

“Obviously,” she said with vicious sweetness. “Was it a bargain, as in the market? Two miracles for a single spell?”

He tossed his improbable mane and stamped. “He killed me. For the sacrifice. I was Khamsin. I was your stallion!”

It was horrible. Because it was mad. Because it was impossible. Because he
looked
like Khamsin.

Her head shook hard. “You can't be,” she said.

“I was.” He held out his hands. Long, strong, very human hands. “I was, Zamaniyah. Shall I tell you how you bought me? How you trained me? How you rode me to war?”

She closed her eyes against him. His hair that was the precise, cedar red of Khamsin's coat. His beard with its strange blaze that wandered right of center, widening as it spread over his chest. “Anyone in the army could tell me that.”

“Can anyone tell you where the
saqla
mare got her foal? It was easy, mistress. The bolt of her door—”

“Don't call me ‘mistress'!”

“You bought me,” he said. “I belong to you.”

“I bought a horse. I wanted a horse. I want him. I want—” She was crying, sobbing like a child. Knowing how blackly shameful it was. Helpless to stop.

He held her again. He kept holding her. She kept letting him.

If he was. If, in truth, he was. The things she had said to him, not knowing he understood. The secrets she had told him. Opening her heart to him, laying herself bare.

Her hands were knotted in his mane. It was finer than a stallion's. Human. It tangled in the same places, with the same indomitable persistence.

She pried herself free. “How?”

“Magic.”

She glared. “Oh, indeed; who'd ever have thought it?” His silence rebuked her. She flushed a little; then more than a little, as anger rallied. “Why?”

“The Hajji's daughter.”

“Not who, damn you. I asked you—why—” Her throat closed. Her eyes dimmed. Bile rose to choke her. She backed to the wall. “It was
you?”

She had seen eyes like his. In men who were dying in great and hopeless pain.

Her jaw set. She measured each word with meticulous care. “Do you know what you did to her?”

His voice was low. “I know.” Lower still, barely to be heard: “You told me.”

She flinched. “I didn't know—” She bit her tongue.

“I didn't want you to.” Tears fell unheeded down his cheeks. “I wish I had never come back. I wish I had died. Or lived as I was. I wish I could be your Khamsin again.”

“I wish you had never been born.”

He gasped. She snatched. They froze, hand clutching hand, eye to wild eye.

Her free hand reached, touched the streak of white, the brand that had been Khamsin's. “Did you—the mare—”

“
She
was willing.”

His voice was bitter beyond enduring. Her hand rose to his cheek. It was rigid, trembling invisibly.

She began to laugh. It was worse than cruel. She could not stop.

Until she saw his eyes. She struggled to speak. “It's not—it's not you. It's… He left us here. Knowing what you were; what his magic would do.” Laughter gusted again. She throttled it. “He trusted you.”

“Allah knows why.”

She glared at him. “And you don't? Maybe you've earned it. Maybe he thinks you've grown a little. You died for me, didn't you?”

He blushed. It dawned on her, ages too late, how very young he was, and how very deeply she had hurt him. Her voice softened. “You gave your life for me. And I've given you nothing but hard words and the back of my hand. Can you even begin to forgive me?”

His answer was so faint that she had to strain to hear it. “I could forgive you anything.”

Her hand was still on his cheek. She watched it wander down to his shoulder. He shivered slightly, away from it.

It fell. Her cheeks were hot with shame. Her heart was cold. “Please. Pardon me. I keep—you're so beautiful. And I—”

“I look like a wild man.”

A smile twitched, fled. “A very handsome one,” she said. “At first I thought you were a Frank.”

He did not smile back. “Please. Don't— I earned the name they gave me.”

“Yes; you had an eye for beauty. And a hand, and anything else you could bring to bear. It's lucky, isn't it, that I'm nothing to tempt you.”

His eyes opened wide. They were angry.

“Oh, come,” she said. “I'm not insulted. I'm used to it.”

“You,” he said, “are a babbling idiot.” And as she choked on that, he stretched out his hand. He tipped up her chin. It came before she knew what it was doing. “Do you know what you look like to me?”

“Thin, brown, and tasteless.”

She did not know how he did it, but he looked as if he had laid back his ears. “Tasteless, never. You've a bite to you. And under it,” he said, his voice going soft and wondrous deep, “honey sweetness.”

Her teeth clenched. “So I'm soft under the thorns. And you're a poet. And I don't need to hear it. I set you free. I forsake all claim to you. Now are you content? Now will you go and leave me in peace?”

“No.”

That startled her speechless.

“I don't know,” he said, “how it is possible for one human being to be so utterly, maddeningly, exasperatingly obtuse.” He drew a sharp breath, spat it out again. “Damn it, woman, can't you see? You're beautiful.”

“I am not.”

He threw up his hands. “A curse on my name! If I were a prancing Persian beauty you'd believe me.”

“Abd al-Rahim is not—” She tottered on the brink of the trap. Damned it, and him. Let it swallow her. “He's in love with me.”

“And I'm not?”

She choked on air. “You were a horse.”

“That should have made a difference?”

“But you can't— You can't. I can't let you.”

“You let him.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You're jealous.”

“He's not good enough for you.”

“And you are?”

“Of course not!”

“You bit me. To keep me away from him.” She throttled rising, and perilous, hilarity. “Can you imagine the tale people will tell? Two rivals and their beloved. Beautiful as a brown mouse, she was. And she wore a turban, and one of them wore a bridle, and with his teeth and his heels he won her.”

“I haven't.”

She blinked.

“I haven't won you. You hate me. I appall you. What I am, what I did, what I was—I'm a monster. You can hardly bear the sight of me.”

“I can?” She was losing her wits. “You're wonderfully easy to look at.” And to touch. This time he did not try to slide away. He let her trace the line of his shoulder. He raised a trembling hand to her cheek.

“Don't,” he said. “Don't let me—”

“I could stop you?”

“With a word.”

She believed him. She did not say it. She was rapt in the wonder of him.

Fear was far away, and sense, and prudence. They were out of the world. They had come to the far shores of death.

Words shrank and fell away. So many, they had spoken, and so few of them mattered. He was the other half of her.

Her heart mourned what he had been, what he would never be again. Her swift charger. Her wind of the desert.

“Khamsin,” she said in the midst of him. “Khamsin.”

She named him anew, and it was true naming. He felt it swell in him. The fire; the swiftness. The fierce elation.
She loves me. She loves
me.

He ruled himself with all the will he had. This body, this shape more strange than familiar, was at once more amenable than the stallion's and less. It could not grow drunk on her scent. Not quite. But it could drown in her eyes.

His senses were all strange. His memory was flawed. Some of them, surely, should have been duller than they were. Those that should have been keen were keen almost to pain.

Magic. He cursed it. Though it had given him this. Beyond hope; beyond anything he had ever dared dream of.

Now at last he could bury his face in her hair. Kiss her eyelids, her lips, her throat. Fill his hands with her breasts. She was smaller than he had conceived of her in that other shape, and sweeter. He wanted to savor every inch of her.

Part of him was astonished. Hasan al-Fahl, savor anything? Far more like him to fall upon it and devour it.

Hasan al-Fahl was dead.

Thanks be to Allah.

Her fingers wandered in his beard. That, by the Prophet's own, was going. Soon. When the world broke upon them.

And then?

With tearing reluctance he drew back. His voice came faint and breathless. “Lady. I think… Do you hear…?”

She raised her head. “I don't hear anything.”

“Yes.”

She had worked her slow delightful way to his middle. She was coming, with mighty courage, to what rose tall and proud there. She did not want to know what he was saying.

He sat up. It hurt. He wanted to lie forever, and love and be loved, and forget that they had ever come back from Paradise.