A Wind in Cairo (35 page)

“Let you!” cried the sultan. “With Syria to settle, and Egypt to see to, and a certain matter of Assassins, and a Holy War to wage? How could I let you go?”

Her throat hurt. She had not known how much it mattered, until she thought that she had given it up.

She faced her father and his enemy. But first she faced Abd al-Rahim. “I'm not the wife you need,” she said, “nor the one your heart is wanting. But I would be your friend, if you would have me.”

She held out her hand. He stared at it. At the man for whom she had forsaken him. At the sultan whose servant he was.

He was a nobleman. He bowed before he turned his back on her.

Khamsin's fingers laced with hers. It made the hurt a little less. It steeled her for the worst of it.

His father seemed almost resigned. Hers…

His eyes were fixed on their hands. His face was drawn as if with sickness; or with grief.

Her heart twisted. She left Khamsin, whose presence was a bolster at her back. She went to al-Zaman. She did not bow. She dared not touch him.

He breathed deep, shuddering. “I tried,” he said. “I tried to set you free.”

“I am, Father. Free and glad.” His face had set. She stormed it with sweetness. “If the emir had had me, I would have vanished into his harem. Now you'll never lose me.”

“I lost you long ago,” he said.

“Isn't that a father's lot? But all that he loses, he gains back tenfold.” She moved a step closer. “Father, I'm not asking you to love your enemy. Only to accept the war's ending.”

“I accept it,” said Ali Mousa. “I accept you, O my daughter. I give you my blessing.”

Easy for him, al-Zaman's glare said. He owed her his life. She had no such name as his son had, which al-Zaman must endure, and must accept, if he was to bless their coming together.

Khamsin slid past her. He kissed the carpet between his hands. With deep humility he said, “My lord, I know what I have been. I have sworn never to forget; and never to return. Your daughter is my surety. I do not ask you to bless me. Will you, for the love she bears you, bless her?”

Al-Zaman looked down at him. The silken coat; the ruddy braid. The price it cost his pride to bow until he was granted leave to rise.

“I will never,” said al-Zaman, sweeping his hand toward Ali Mousa, “embrace that man as my brother.”

“I do not ask it,” Khamsin said, still patiently, still humbly, though his hands had fisted on the carpet. “I am your daughter's servant, my lord. She asks that I be her husband. She has trained me to obedience. Would you have me break that training?”

“You would surrender your will into the hands of a woman? And you call yourself a man?”

“Hardly yet, my lord. Through a mage's art and a woman's wisdom, one day I may become one.”

Al-Zaman's jaw flexed. “Get up,” he said.

Khamsin obeyed. He did not conceal the glitter of his eyes.

Yakhuz al-Zaman was anything but blind. He knew the difference between obedience and submission. He had learned it exactly as Zamaniyah had, from the Greek who ruled his stables.

He bared his teeth. It was rather more smile than snarl. “I've never liked you,” he said. “Now I know why. God has chosen you to rob me of my daughter.”

Her anger glared, sudden and fierce. “I said that he would not—”

They both waved her to silence; which did nothing for her temper. They were doing it. Being men. Colluding in it. Shutting her out.

One of them laughed. She could not even tell which one it was. “If you harm a hair on her head,” her father said with perfect amity, “I will have you shot.”

Khamsin's head inclined a royal degree. “Ah. The old bargain. I'll hold to it. My lord.”

“See that you do.” Al-Zaman raised a hand. “Within that binding, O prince of stallions, take my blessing.”

Khamsin took it as he had been trained to take all great gifts, with grace and gratitude. But his eye rolled back to Zamaniyah, and that eye was pure Khamsin. Bright, wicked, and altogether unrepentant.

Training, she thought. Indeed.

It was going to be a very pleasant war.

The facts which underlie this fantasy are both extensive and complex; I have taken liberties mainly in the direction of simplicity. The campaigns of Salah al-Din Yusuf (whom westerners call Saladin) in Syria in A.D. 1174-5 were rather less coherent than I have shown them to be, with much shifting about from fortress to fortress and from battle to battle. I have conflated the deaths of Ayyub and of Nur al-Din and the taking of Homs and Hama, and simplified the siege of Aleppo.

The Assassins did indeed attack Saladin at the instigation of Aleppo, at the common meal as I have described, but I have set the date rather later in the year than it actually was. It was the Turkish emir, Khumartekin, who died in giving the alarm, and a second emir who prevented the attack on the sultan's person. A second attack took place a year later, in 1176, when Saladin was again fighting against Aleppo. One of the Assassins succeeded in reaching the sultan, piercing his cuirass and wounding his cheek. Saladin, angered, marched on the Assassins' stronghold of Masyaf, not far from Homs. The siege failed in considerable part because of the army's fear of their enemy; and because of renewed threats to the sultan. He withdrew before his siege was well begun, and left the Assassins to their intrigues. They, in return, did not attack his person again.

After the battle of the Horns of Hama, Saladin marched to Aleppo. He celebrated the Id al-Fitr, the feast of the end of Ramadan, outside the city; there he concluded a pact with his onetime enemies. Mosul agreed to a truce and a withdrawal. Prince al-Salih Ismail retained Aleppo and a portion of the north of Syria; he died in Aleppo, still resisting Saladin, in 1181. He was not yet twenty years old, and much beloved of his followers.

Saladin, for his part, was now de facto lord of both Egypt and Syria, In 1176 he took to wife Ismat al-Din Khatun, the widow of Nur al-din. He spent the next decade securing his power and sparring with the Franks. At last, in 1187, he destroyed the massed chivalry of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the battle of the Horns of Hattin. Before the year was ended, he had captured Jerusalem. No Crusade thereafter succeeded in winning it back. The sultan died in Damascus in 1193, leaving his realm to his son al-Afdal.

I should note here that Saladin did not actually take the title of sultan. He was al-Malik al-Nasir, the king, the protector. His biographers, however, including those who knew him, refer to him as the sultan. Since the title of king bears strong and perhaps misleading connotations, I have followed the biographers' example.

Of the voluminous literature on Saladin and on the Crusades, I am most indebted to M.C. Lyons and D.E.P. Jackson,
Saladin: the Politics of the Holy War
(Cambridge, 1982). For wealth of detail, for rigor of research, and for precision of presentation, no other single volume compares with it.

There was not, to my knowledge, a hidden school of horsemanship in Greece or in any medieval country. There was, however, a very old tradition of equestrian training, exemplified by the treatise on the art of riding by the ancient Greek historian, Xenophon. His principles were revived in the riding schools of the European Renaissance and refined by later masters in the high and complex art which is called, aptly enough, classical dressage. Its most noted modern representatives are the Lipizzan stallions of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna.

Although the tradition—as in this novel—is primarily oral, significant portions have been set down in writing in, for example, Colonel Alois Podhajsky's
The Complete Training of Horse and Rider in the Principles of Classical Horsemanship
(New York, 1967).

There was, further, a Muslim tradition of equestrian art, oriented, as was classical dressage at its inception, toward the training of horses for war. The basic principles are remarkably similar. I have been interested to note that the snaffle bit, which Zamaniyah uses on Khamsin and which modern teachers favor for all but the most advanced horses, seems to have been in common use in the West in the very early Middle Ages; the more brutal curb bit—though not quite as brutal as the ancient Greek bit, which was a straightforward instrument of torture—was introduced from Asia, probably through Islam, for use on warhorses.

The Arabian breed is renowned as the oldest continuously domesticated breed of horses. Its origins are shrouded in legend, but are said to go back at least to the second millennium B.C. The pedigree of a horse who is
kehailan
or
asil,
of the pure blood, will vanish into the desert, into the oral history of the Bedouin; it culminates in the
Khamsa,
the five mares chosen (some say by the Prophet, others by a much older authority) to be the foremothers of their breed. My
saqla
mare has no place in the legend, but one very like her gave her name to one of the nobler lines of Arabian horses, the lineage of the Saklawi Jedran Ibn Sudan. Judith Forbis, in
The Classic Arabian Horse (
New York, 1976), details concisely and completely both the legends and the facts of the breed, and most particularly of the breed as developed in Egypt. Forbis notes that the horses of the Pharaohs as depicted in ancient art often bear a remarkable resemblance to the animals bred in Egypt in this century. As, no doubt, to those of the time of Saladin.

Judith Tarr is the author of three dozen novels in a number of genres including fantasy, historical fantasy, and mainstream historical. She holds degrees from Mount Holyoke College and Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from Yale. She wrote
A Wind in Cairo
in memory of a very special horse, the Arabian gelding Sheik Nishan. She lives near Tucson, Arizona, where she raises and trains Lipizzan horses. She also writes books about horses (including
The Mountain's Call
and the forthcoming
House of the Star
) under the name Caitlin Brennan.

For more information about Judith's novels and short fiction, as well as her horses, visit her website at
http://www.sff.net/people/Judith-Tarr
. A wide selection of her short fiction is available for free on her Bookshelf at Book View Café:
http://www.bookviewcafe.com/index.php/Judith-Tarr-ss-Bookshelf/

She can be found blogging at
http://dancinghorse.livejournal.com
, and she appears on Twitter as dancinghorse and on Facebook as Judith Tarr.

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