A Wind in Cairo (8 page)

“I let him rule me. How could I do otherwise? He was my father. I thought, somehow, he knew what he was doing.” Her face twisted. “Oh, he knew! He was wielding me like a weapon. Using me to mock all his enemies. Even—even to cast his defiance in the face of God.”

She stopped. Khamsin had not moved even yet. He watched her, ears pricked. As if he could understand.

She rubbed a stiffened patch where the sweat of his labors had dried, smoothing it, centering herself on it. “I love him, Khamsin. And I hate him. His will has set me between the worlds. Now they all know it; and where am I? Twisting in the emptiness. Neither man nor woman; neither flesh nor fowl.” Her teeth ground together. Temper gusted, hot and swift. “What will he make me do next? What will I have to face? How can he
do
this to me?”

Pain stabbed. He had nipped her. His glance was as clear as words.
That,
it said,
is pure self-pity.

She hit him. But feebly, on the strong muscle of the shoulder, with flattened hand. It could have been a rough caress. It became one, as tears sprang again, lived out their season, passed.

She was hardly aware of them. “I never thought he'd do it. I really never thought… It was a whim of his, no more. It eased his grief. It gave me a freer world than I'd ever dared to hope for. If he did try to claim me in public, he'd claim me as a son. I was braced for that. I could have stopped him. But when he told the truth, all unexpected—”

She drew a quivering breath. It was almost laughter. “You should have seen their faces! All those fallen jaws. All those wagging beards. They looked like a herd of startled goats.”

Khamsin snorted. His eye was bright. Laughing.

Why not? She grinned at him. It was not too deadly difficult. “And there was I, tender little she-kid, telling them all what I thought of them. With the sultan looking on and thinking Allah knows what. He placed me under his protection.” She paused, struck. Her breathing quickened. She had had a thought. A thought of utmost wickedness. “He bound himself to accept me. And I—I think I'll play this gave to its end. I'll show my father what he's done. I'll be exactly what he says he wants me to be.”

The horse regarded her with great misgivings.

“You'll see,” she promised him. She retrieved her cap and the tangled knot of her turban, tossed them in the air, caught them lightly. Lightly then she left him.

She was a very strange woman, this mistress of his. Khamsin rolled long and deliciously and settled in the shade. In a little while he had an entourage of cats. A small dust-devil amused itself in the trampled circle of his training. He watched it, interested. How odd that he had ever thought a horse's sight less than a man's. It was less garish-glittering, but it was deeper. It saw worlds within the mortal world.

It could not see into a woman's heart, nor ever understand it. Her words when she left had been bright and bold. Her scent had been both angry and frightened. But determined. And strong.

A woman?

He fled the prospect. The devil snaked long dusty fingers into his mane, clambered onto his back. He bucked it hooting into the air.

“Jaffar?”

He started up from his mat, knife leaping into hand. Zamaniyah stood over him in her thin white nightrobe, her hair tumbling down her back, trembling with much more than the lamp's flicker. Her voice was thin and high, like a child's, not like her own at all. “Jaffar, I think—I'm afraid—”

Her eyes were strange, almost as if she dreamed; but wide and fixed on his face. Little as she could have seen of it there in the gloom, with him rising over her, gathering her in.

She was stiff and shaking. She let him hold her, but she contracted in the circle of his arms, shrinking from his touch.

He had never seen her so. It frightened him. He veiled it in soothing murmurs, in strokings that only knotted her tighter.

Fear had a way with him. It made his mind clearer. Carefully he unfolded his arms, stood back. She stared at him still. Her hands were fists. Her face was white.

“What is it?” he asked her with utmost gentleness. “A dream?”

She blinked. She shook her head, broadly, as a child will. Her lips were tight.

“A memory?” he asked. “A spirit of the night?”

She shivered, stumbling with the force of it. “I can't—I don't know—I woke, and felt—and there was—”

His eyes swept the room. Nothing, not even the shadow of a dream. A long stride brought him to her bed. A glance, and he knew.

And she—by all the gods that were, she did not.

“I'm afraid,” she said in that soft strange voice. “I don't want to die. Not like this.”

“Who ever told you—” It had escaped him before he thought. He bit his tongue.

“Is it Allah, do you think? Because Father—”

Because her father, indeed. There were curses fit for him. And for the women who had never told her that one, simple, inescapable fact. And for Jaffar himself and most of all, because he had not thought to tell her. He had thought she knew. All women knew.

Jaffar found the laughter that sparked when he began to understand. He mingled it with love and set it in his voice. “Little bird,” he said. “Little fool. You're not going to die.”

“My mother did!” The air rang with the force of it.

He stilled the echoes, softly, calmly. “You are not your mother. But a woman, you most certainly are. Now your body knows it. It's telling you in the surest way it can.”

Her hand reached, tore at the sheet. “It's
blood.”

“It is life. And womanhood. And pride.”

Her head was shaking. “My mother bled. She bled and she bled, and she screamed, and they all said there was no hope for her. I watched. She screamed for a day and a night. Then she had no strength left to scream. And then she died. And they cut her, and something was alive inside her, but it died. And it was all blood. All—all—”

He seized her. he shook her until her head rattled on her neck. “
Zamaniyah!”

She stared. He glared back. “Listen to me,” he commanded her, setting in it all the force of his will. “There is something that happens to every woman. It happens with every turning of the moon. It means no more than that she is a woman. That
you
are a woman, little idiot; but I am a worse idiot by far, for thinking that you knew. Of course you didn't. Your mother dead before you were eight years old, you raised half-wild with no one to look after you, and then your father's spate of madness…how could you?”

He stopped. She was shaking. Laughing, weeping. He set his teeth and let her fight the battle for herself.

At last she stilled. Her face was streaming; she hiccoughed and nearly went off again. He had to hold her up. She clung and trembled and wept, and said, “But can't you
see?
The very day my father unmasks me in front of the whole world—that very night—”

“The gods speak as they will,” he said.

He could not have said it so to anyone but her. She accepted it for what it was: truth, and trust. “I knew there was something,” she said. “I didn't know what it was. I thought it was growing breasts. Or finding hair in odd places, or needing more time in the baths.”

“That, too,” he said steadily.

Her eyes narrowed; she paled a little, for all her bravery. “There is more?”

He shaped a careful smile. “Little more, O my mistress,” he said, “but enough. Your eyes will change. They'll see differently in some respects. Particularly when they come to rest on a man.”

Her hand flew to her face, flew away. Her cheeks were scarlet. “Do you mean like a—a mare in heat? I
won't!”

“So they always say,” he said, “in the beginning.”

She opened her mouth, closed it with a snap. Her glare was as fierce as a falcon's.

He refused to see it, though it comforted him. “You,” he said, “will bathe, and put on a clean gown, and look after yourself as I tell you. Then you will go back to sleep.”

She was obedient. Suspiciously so. He watched her warily, but she was quiet, bathing, changing her robe, doing as he bade her. When she lay clean and fresh-scented in her clean bed, she looked up into Jaffar's face. He bent to kiss her as he always did; she caught his cheeks between her palms and held him. “You're beautiful,” she said.

He straightened with dignity. “Woman's sight,” he said, “takes time to grow.”

Her fingers knotted in the bedclothes, but her face was calm. Her voice was calmer still. “I never asked for it. I don't want it. I don't want any of it.”

He looked at her who was entirely a woman: he who would never be a man. He considered wisdom and gentleness. He said, “
You
have a choice.”

She gasped. He throttled guilt, the lash of sudden pain. Her eyes were huge, like bruises. The tears that filled them refused stubbornly to fall.

He wanted to touch her, to comfort her. He clenched his fists at his sides.

“Go away,” she said.

He did not move.

Her voice rose. “Go away!” And when he would not: “
Go away!”
She flung herself at him. He caught her, let her strike him, reckless, furious, but skilled enough, and strong. He set his teeth and suffered it.

Her weight, struggling, overbalanced him. He twisted as he fell. The bed caught most of him. His body caught all of her.

Abruptly she was still. She breathed hard, sobbing. Very gently he began to stroke her hair.

For a long while she made no move. Then her arms crept about him. She shifted, coiling childlike, burying her face in his torn shirt. He rocked her, murmuring what came to him. A cradle song. His mother's voice had crooned it long ago.

Long after, when she was deep asleep, he wondered that his cheeks were wet. He remembered nothing of tears.

Khamsin had forgotten how wide the world was. His courtyard had begun to suffice for all of it; and he had not even thought to care, until Zamaniyah led him out of it. Briefly in the beginning, testing. He danced at first for startlement and then for the exhilaration of a different air. He filled his lungs with it. He called to every horse he saw and heard and scented. Many called back. It was not words, precisely, and yet it was speech. A mare's loneliness. A stallion's challenge. A weanling's piteous plaint.

Zamaniyah's hand was small and warm on his neck, on his cheek, on his nose. Her scent had changed of late. Deepened, sweetened. It was almost like a mare's: the same splendor, for all its tang of humanity. For it, and for her, he suffered the ignominy of halter and lead. When he danced, he danced within a finger's breadth of the utmost end. She always grinned then, boyish-wide, understanding.

He would never have been as lenient with a horse as she was. He would have scorned her, had he been Hasan still. He would have hated her.

She led him everywhere a horse could go, though never beyond the walls of her father's house. In the pool of its garden he saw for the first time what he had become.

Imperfect. Narrow before, weak behind. His tail lacked that perfect arch which marked the best stock of Arabia. He would have discarded himself as unworthy of his notice.

Alone in his prison, he brooded. Beautiful, but imperfect. Fiery, but imperfect. Beloved, but imperfect.

Hasan had had no flaw. Hasan had been unmatched in his beauty. His hair, thick and richly curling, red as cedarwood. His eyes, great and dark beneath the arches of his brows. His lips full, his teeth white and even, his chin cleft just so, his neck, his shoulders, his breast…

He pawed the sand, tossing his head. His mane swung, heavy, tangling on his neck. The Hajji had done this. Made him worse than beast. Made him unbeautiful.

Made him mute; reft him even of tears.

An itch pricked his side. His teeth tore viciously at it. He spun, cursing. His stallion-voice was shrill and hideous.

Abruptly he stopped. He could not weep; no more could he laugh. So much to suffer, for a few moments' folly. He could not even remember her face. Her body, remembered, woke nothing of desire.

The boy came with water, barley, fodder. Khamsin ate because he could see no profit in hunger. His mood, he knew with perfect clarity, was vile. He did not care.

An oddity of the air, a whisper of scent, led him from the manger to the wall. The door was always barred. He butted it, aimlessly, for simple ill-temper.

And started, snorting. It yielded; it swung ajar. He thrust his nose against it. It opened, rebounded from the wall.

He froze.

No sound of feet; no cry of alarm.

Slowly, as softly as a hoofed creature could, he ventured into the passage. No one came to stop him. He sensed no humanity at all, anywhere within reach.

The stable was quiet. Its dwellers drowsed in their stalls. Now and then one would stamp, snort, shake off a fly. Jaws ground languidly, pondering the sweetness of fodder, the last hoarded grains of barley.

The stallions dwelt apart with their noise and their tempers. These were all mares, one or two with late foals beside them. His nostrils flared and quivered, drinking in so much beauty all at once, so rich and so varied. A deep rumble swelled in his throat.

They paid no heed to him. He was only a male, and they were not in season. He was beneath their queenly notice.

His neck ached, but pleasurably. It raised all of itself, arched, swelled. His tail lifted over his back. He trod lightly, proudly, drunk on mare-scent. He had forgotten that he was flawed. He was all male, and all beautiful.

One royal lady deigned to see him: a red queen with a star on her brow, breathing the perfumes of paradise. Her time was on her, and he was her heart's desire. She summoned him with aching tenderness.

The stallion would have battered down her door. The man knew greater subtlety. The latch was simplicity itself, even to a horse's lips and questing teeth. Disdainfully he flicked the door aside.