The al-Ma’aliq left the celebrations at midnight. With Meryem and Leyliah and Razhid, the family paced in silent mourning to the place where Kammil lay buried beneath the wall he had helped to topple, securing the victory he had not lived to see.
15
“Aqq Allim, my friend!” Alessid rose to welcome his kinsman into his private maqtabba. “What brings you all the way here from Dayira Azreyq?”
Allim grinned. “The squalling of my newborn son. I swear to you, I was three days out to sea before the echoes faded and I could finally get some sleep.” Tall and handsome like all the al-Ma’aliq men, he could have passed for the younger brother Alessid had named him. Only the cleft in his rounded chin was anomalous to their family, legacy of his late grandmother, Sheyqa Nizzira.
“My congratulations to his mother and to you—and to Oushta Sayyida. How fares she?”
Alessid served qawah with his own hands and settled with his cousin on piled pillows. He had two offices; this one inside the palace had a proper work table and chairs but also carpets and cushions to remind those who came here of his youth in the wilderness. The other maqtabba was a tent in the palace’s vast gardens, where he met with the Za’aba Izim. In it, there were no reminders of the city.
“The name of al-Ma’aliq was enough to conciliate the northern tribes,” Allim said. “They trust us, as they did not trust Nizzira. I am glad to report that Rimmal Madar knows a peace such as has not been known within living memory.”
“This pleases me greatly,” Alessid replied, nodding. Sheyqa Sayyida was a shrewd woman; the qabda’ans had been thinking of the immediate problem of Tza’ab Rih when they invited her to succeed her grandmother, but Sayyida had much more to offer with her al-Ma’aliq heritage. Peace with Alessid, to be sure—that was what the qabda’ans had wanted, and they got it. But there was peace with mettlesome northern tribes as well. Now both Rimmal Madar and Tza’ab Rih were free of disputes, free to thrive. Trade had doubled and tripled in the last two years, and everyone was growing very rich.
Allim sipped his qawah and suggested, “I would imagine you find the al-Ma’aliq name almost as helpful as my mother does? True, here it does not have the same long history as in Rimmal Madar, but your father was greatly loved, and his memory is yet green.”
Alessid made the required smile and nod: the former for the pun on his father’s nickname, the latter for the compliment. Allim then hesitated, as if about to lead into the topic he had come across the sea to discuss. But Alessid wanted to hear more about Rimmal Madar first—because he had a very good idea of what Sayyida had sent Allim to ask.
So he diverted the conversation by saying, “But have I heard something about your mother’s kin?”
Allim grimaced. “Chaydann al-Mamnoua’a has afflicted my mother with twenty-nine pestilences who are most unfortunately related to her by blood. I would not honor them with the term kin.”
Of the fifty offspring of Nizzira al-Ammarizzad, children and grandchildren, one sat on the Moonrise Throne. Sixteen were dead of various causes: war against the northern tribes, illness, accident, suicide—including poetic Reihan. The others who had been with Reihan lived in seclusion far from the court. That left twenty-nine relatives of Sheyqa Sayyida to plague her.
“My own mother is a gentle, quiet woman,” Allim continued, “who wishes only to tend her family and her country in peace.”
“Admirable.” Though it was of course a bald-faced lie; Sayyida would not have survived to inherit the Moonrise Throne had she been gentle and quiet.
“In fact—”
Ayia, here it was.
“—deeply as my mother loves my father, she often laments that he is not the kind of man who can rule a family the size of ours.” Another grimace. “Three of my brothers married al-Ammarizzad. They are quite despicably prolific.”
Sayyida had used those marriages to ensure her own survival in the years before her grandmother’s death. Presumably the time was not yet propitious for divorces, or perhaps the young men had grown fond of the ladies and Sayyida did not wish to make her sons unhappy and therefore dangerous. Alessid understood perfectly, however, that because the Sheyqa was without daughters of her own, daughters-in-law were the only candidates for the succession until granddaughters came of age. Another al-Ammarizzad ruling Rimmal Madar? Unthinkable. And unnecessary.
“With so many to be ruled,” mused Alessid, “it would be troublesome for even the cleverest man. More qawah?”
“Thank you. My mother,” Allim persisted, “to be quite frank, envies you your daughters.”
“And she wants to marry one of her sons to one of them, so that her grandchildren are doubly al-Ma’aliq—and have Tza’ab Rih doubly for an ally.”
Allim’s jaw dropped a little. Alessid smiled.
“Ayia, my friend and brother, it was not so very hard to guess. Sayyida is an astute woman. It is as well that you have no sisters, for I have no sons to send—one of them was divorced and no woman wants another woman’s leavings. My other son is happily married, with two children, and I would have every Azwadh in the country at my throat were I even to hint at a divorce from their adored Black Rose.”
Allim had recovered and said feelingly, for he had met the lady on a previous visit, “Any man who asked a divorce of Ka’arli Azwadh would be too stupid to find his own nose in a mirror.”
“Besides this, Oushta Sayyida requires an intelligent young woman who can keep her informed.”
“That is precisely her thinking. Would you consider it?”
Alessid pretended to do so, from politeness. At length he shook his head. “Ra’abi is the only one of an age to marry. Jemilha is but thirteen, Za’arifa ten, and Mairid only two. But I believe that even Ra’abi is too young to leave her home and marry a man she has never met and live in a place strange to her.”
“My brother Zaqir would of course come to Hazganni, so that she may see him before any betrothal is contemplated.” Blandly, he added, “It may be advisable for him to linger here. . .perhaps for several years.”
Alessid nodded with equal composure. Sayyida had waited many patient years to become Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar; all her sons presumably also knew how to wait. Allim, however, seemed determined to make sure one of his brothers did his waiting a long, long way from home.
“Zaqir is the youngest,” Allim went on, “and—though our mother pretends otherwise—quite her favorite.”
A tidy way of saying that Sayyida was already disposed to look upon this son’s daughters more favorably than the others.
Alessid mused, “I would actually consider sending her to Rimmal Madar, much as I would miss her—” He hid a grin as Allim’s eyebrows twitched. “—but for one thing. The Sheyqa Mirzah is Shagara. Though special leave was given for my sons and daughters to be called by my own name, they remain Shagara in all that matters.” Especially in the matter of the daughters who might bear Haddiyat sons. He had not the slightest intention of gifting his dear cousin, friend, and fellow al-Ma’aliq Sayyida with Shagara magic in the form of one of Ra’abi’s sons. “In that tribe, it is the men who marry outside the tents, not the women.”
“I am aware of this oddity,” Allim answered. “But as an exception has been made in the name they bear, surely a similar exception—”
Alessid shook his head. “I am sorry, but this is impossible. I greatly desire an even closer connection with Rimmal Madar. But my wife would divorce me if I sent him one of our daughters.”