We might soon have an answer to that, I thought, if he could translate the Cataract Stone. I wondered if he was working on that even now, back in Qurrat.
Umm Azali talked a great deal about her family: not merely Suhail and his brother Husam, whom she and her husband had fostered a few years before Suhail himself, but their son Azali and all his children; their daughter Safiyya, married to one of Abu Azali’s nephews; even their son Abd as-Salaam, who had, as Umm Azali put it, “grown his beard.” It took me some time to realize this was a colloquial way of saying he had become a prayer-leader, i.e., one who no longer cut his beard or hair. He lived now in a town on the edge of the desert, in the area where the Aritat would go once the rains ended and the desert became too dry to support the herds. (As nomad tribes go, the Aritat were of middling piety: they prayed, but only twice a day, and they observed the month of fasting according to when circumstance allowed, rather than the dictates of the calendar. Some of the tribes are very nearly heathen; for example, I did not recall seeing anyone among the Banu Safr pray during my captivity. Though admittedly, I had not seen much outside that tent.)
All of this was fascinating to me—but not, I must confess, because I had any great interest in their children and grandchildren. (Apart from Shahar, I had very few dealings with Umm Azali’s kin.) Rather, I prized the way these stories built up my sense of Suhail’s world and his past: the boy he had been when he came to the desert; the ways he had become a man here; the role he had among the Aritat, as his brother’s representative in the matter of the dragons. Knowing that he had once strutted about as an imaginary Draconean prince changed my understanding of him—and I will not relate some of the other stories Umm Azali told, on the occasions when we were sitting privately with other women and the conversation became distinctly improper. He had said so little of himself when we knew one another aboard the Basilisk; all I had known was that he was estranged from his family. To meet a woman who was kin of sorts, with whom Suhail appeared to have a warmer relationship, gave him a very different appearance in my mind.
In time I reached a point where I felt safe inquiring about that estrangement. I began by asking, “Do you know how I met Suhail?”
“During his travels,” she said.
“Yes. We encountered one another by chance, not once but twice. Very happy chance indeed, from my perspective. I was sad when we had to part company—when he received word that his father had died.”
Umm Azali made a noncommittal noise. We were not in public then; we had gone into the shade of the tent, for it was the hottest part of the day, and very few people were moving about camp. Abu Azali was out with his son’s herd, and Tom and Andrew were in the sheikh’s tent, enjoying his hospitality and the masculine company to be found there. It was as good a time as any to press.
“I know very little of Suhail’s father,” I said, “save that he was sheikh before Husam ibn Ramiz, and that he and Suhail were not close.” I hesitated for a moment, considering, then added, “You have no doubt noticed my familiarity in calling Suhail by his given name alone. It is because when I knew him, he used no other; and he said once that his father would not thank him for using his name.”
This time her noise was less noncommittal—rather more of a snort. Umm Azali said, “Hajj Ramiz ibn Khalis would not have wanted his name attached to what his son was doing.”
“Why not?” Scandal had attached itself to me, and by association to Suhail; but that came well after we met. If Suhail had done anything worthy of his own scandal before our first encounter, I had not heard of it.
“Those ancient ruins,” Umm Azali said. “Abu Husam wanted his younger son to grow his beard—he was a pious man. He did not like anything associated with idolatrous pagans.”
Idolatrous pagans? The Draconeans, I presumed, once I sorted out the Akhian words she had used. “When you say he did not approve…”
Umm Azali’s lips thinned. “He threatened to lock his son up until he renounced all connection with the blasphemies of the past. Suhail ran away.”
My mouth was very dry, for reasons that had nothing to do with the desert air. I remembered once, at the age of fourteen, being tempted to say “damn the cannons” and chase after my dreams regardless of consequence. I had not done it; I had endured my grey years and gone obediently in search of a husband, with fortunate results. Suhail, it seemed, had done otherwise—for a time.
I wanted to ask whether the occasion of Suhail running away had been the same journey on which I met him—and if so, how on earth Suhail had come to be as well funded as he was, for certainly he had no shortage of money when I knew him. I doubted his father had given him coin when he ran away, especially not for the purpose of digging up Draconean ruins. But Umm Azali was clearly becoming uncomfortable with this line of conversation, and so I let it rest there for the time being.
From Abu Azali I got a rather different impression of Suhail. I should pause here to explain that among the nomads of Akhia, poetry is a highly developed art; it has the virtue of requiring no material resources and posing no burden to carry from one camp to the next. One cannot go a day among them without hearing a poem, for children recite them in their games, and men and women alike share them during work and leisure, as a distraction from their labours or a pleasant pastime. They use it to remember history, to argue about disputed points, to elicit shocked giggles when in suitably private company… and they use it to tell stories.
I said before that actions like Suhail’s—creeping into an enemy camp in the middle of the night to carry off some theft by stealth—are a thing told of in desert tales. In the more prosaic cases, it is a camel or sheep the raiders go to steal; in the more romantic ones, it is the kidnapped son of a sheikh. Such poems had not been recited much in recent times, I think, for no one among the Aritat had done anything of the sort in many generations; but they became exceedingly popular following Suhail’s exploit. It is only natural that someone would undertake to compose a new poem in honour of the occasion.
Abu Azali missed no opportunities to recite that poem. He was so proud of his foster son, I thought he might burst. It made me regret that I did not understand the nomad dialect well enough to appreciate the poetry firsthand; I gathered that it compared Suhail to a desert drake, moving in stealth through the night, with only the wink of the stars to signal his passage. (I learned rather later that it was just as well I could not understand the poem, for its description of me would have left me unsure whether I should squawk in indignation or burst out laughing. There were descriptions of my beauty that likened me to a camel—a high compliment in that society, but in my case both unfounded and not at all an aesthetic I could comprehend—and a good deal of swoony behaviour that would have been very pleasing to my childhood friend Manda Lewis, but bore very little resemblance, I hoped, to reality.)
This, then, was my second image of Suhaiclass="underline" a noble warrior, the son of a sheikh, esteemed for his learning and his courage. It struck me as both accurate and not, for while I knew Suhail’s courage very well, I did not see him as a warrior. We had ridden sea-serpents, stolen one caeliger and crashed another (by means of a sea-serpent, no less), and I had once seen him cut a man’s arm off with a single blow—but that had been done to save the man’s life, and the effects of that action had haunted Suhail for some time after.
The truth, I knew, was neither the brave raider of the poem—who owed more to the conventions of the genre than to Suhail’s own actions—nor the fanciful boy Umm Azali remembered. Nor, indeed, was it the man I had known on the Basilisk, for that man had been without context or a past. The reality of Suhail ibn Ramiz lay somewhere at the intersection of those things, and other byways besides, which I had not yet begun to discover.