Compressing her lips, she nodded briefly. He was always scrupulously polite about the fiction that she ruled Tza’ab Rih’s exterior as well as interior affairs. He knew she hated him for it.
“We are not just neighbors but kinsmen, if I am not mistaken,” he said. “There is more than one al-Arroun in the al-Gallidh line of my mother, is there not?”
“Perhaps another marriage can be arranged,” Mirzah said cuttingly. “We have one or two daughters yet unwed, do we not, husband?”
Alessid forced a noncommittal smile onto his face. Mirzah seemed to care less and less about the manners she showed him.
Al-Arroun’s eyes—dark green, legacy no doubt of some invading barbarian ancestor he was ashamed to acknowledge—had rounded like dinner plates with the prospect of alliance with the al-Ma’aliq. “It would not need that,” he said hastily, “to bind our loyalty. We have all of us talked long and worriedly about this. There are those who dislike the prospect of becoming part of your realm—no insult to Your Highnesses intended. But they dislike even more seeing their houses burned and their work destroyed and their sons carrying swords. If it is agreeable to you, we would welcome you as our Sheyqa.”
And so it was that Mirzah went to Ga’af Shammal, and met her new people, and set with her own hands the boundary stones that marked the borders. Alessid and five hundred of his cavalry went with her, and two hundred laborers to construct barracks in ten different locations, and ten Haddiyat of the Shagara to work the runes and icons that would seal the safety of Tza’ab Rih on this new borderland.
Some weeks after their return to their palace in Hazganni, a curious incident occurred. The chattering fountain in the chambers Alessid had created for Mirzah, and which she never used or even visited, suddenly stopped working. This was due, said the annoyed Master of the Household, to little Sheyqir Zakim, youngest of Alessid’s grandsons. An energetic toddler, he was into everything and usually able to get himself out of it. This time, however, he had decided to bathe his puppy in the shallow fountain pool, and the resulting combination of soap, fur, and a brush that shed most of its bristles had proved fatal to the delicate mechanism. The trouble was that the specifications had been lost, and the artisan who had designed the fountain was long dead. The waters would never play in the same fashion as before.
“Don’t distress yourself,” Alessid reassured him. “It doesn’t really matter exactly how the water dribbles, does it?”
“But, al-Ma’aliq, there is the commission!” When Alessid looked a question at him, he went on, “From Sheyqa Ra’abi, to make for her husband’s exalted mother a book of pictures showing the whole of the palace. It is for the anniversary of the Sheyqa’s ascent to the Moonrise Throne, and it must be finished, it must!” He paced the carpets of Alessid’s maqtabba and fretted as if the fountain had deliberately betrayed him. “Al-Ma’aliq, I appeal to you!”
Alessid knew who must be doing the drawings: Mirzah’s brother Fadhil. He was Haddiyat like the man he had been named for, and at forty-two years old, Acuyib had been kind to him: His age showed not in stiffened joints or wrinkled skin but only in the pure white of his hair and a slight impairment of his hearing. Otherwise, he looked nearly the same as on that long-ago day when he had taken Alessid to Mirzah’s tent to be married. Still, Alessid could not help but contrast Fadhil’s age with his own vigorous prime, though he was only a year the younger. In the spring of last year Fadhil had given over governance of the seaside dawa’an sheymma to a younger healer, retiring not to his tribe’s tents but to his sister’s palace. And in his comparative idleness—there were always sniffles and scrapes and strains and sprains to be treated among the hundreds living here—he had learned from Jemilha how to draw.
She was very good. He was even better. Her work was careful and deliberate. His was instinctive, as if the pen and ink had been waiting for him and him alone. Discovery of this new talent so late in his life was a delightful surprise, and he had taken the likenesses of all the family, illustrated books for the children, and begun a series of landscape studies. He was the natural choice to prepare this very personal gift for Sheyqa Sayyida.
Fadhil laughed when Alessid told him of the Master’s anguish. “I was saving all the fountains for last, you know,” he confided as he opened the leather case containing his drawings. “Water at play is difficult. I’d almost rather draw each grain of sand in a storm! But I think I recall enough of how that one danced.”
The illustrations were exquisite. Every leaf on every tree; each smooth cobble in the courtyards; all the delicate shadows and radiant light caught like an indrawn breath of delight on paper.
The drawing of pictures was not a Shagara art. Indeed, such impulses had always found expression in abstract pattern and ornamentation rather than faithful depiction of scenes or people. Signs and symbols, and the graceful script of The Lessons, these things were common decoration in the homes of Tza’ab Rih. Leyliah had considered this and in typical fashion had decided why it was so.
“If it is not small and portable, the Seven Names have no use for it,” she told Alessid. “Look at that huge leather book my son is assembling! Can you imagine every family lugging something like that from camp to camp, adding to it, creating others through the generations? No, such things are for people who settle in towns, and have money to pay for them, and leisure to contemplate them, and don’t have to pack them up and carry them!”
“But—”
“Yes, I know,” she said before Alessid could fully form the thought, let alone voice it. “My answer to that is that in the distant past all the Names in this land—not just the Seven remaining in the desert, but all of them, Alessid—everyone lived according to the old ways. Some of them decided to stay in one place or another, and that was how Sihabbah and Hazganni and all the other towns were established. But people obviously retained the habits of travel, even though they traveled no longer. Besides, there is the question of materials. Parchment can be written on and scraped clean over and over—and Acuyib knows there are enough sheep and goats to provide it. But paper? Hideously expensive.” She eyed him with the sudden sparkle of a smile that made her look half her age. “Fadhil is lucky that his sister is so very rich that when he makes a mistake or is dissatisfied with his work, he has only to rip the paper up or toss it in the fire.”
Recalling his days of schooling—the tedium of having to scrape his faulty script off a parchment page so he could correct his mistakes was equal to the embarrassment of knowing that the action brayed his errors—Alessid was pleased all over again that he had made so wise a trade agreement with the barbarian realm of Qaysh. An enviable land, Qaysh was so lushly forested that trees could heedlessly be harvested for the production of paper.
A few days after Fadhil started on his depictions of the various fountains, he came to dinner one night with a bandage around his hand. “I was in my rooms, sharpening the pen to get the finer lines right, and the knife slipped,” he explained. “I’m afraid I bled all over the drawing of that fountain in the tiled garden. But don’t worry, I made another.”
“I shall be interested to see it,” Mirzah said at once, with a poisonously sweet sidelong glance at Alessid. “I’ve forgotten how many years it’s been since I was in that part of the palace.”
The next morning it was discovered that the broken fountain had sprung back to life. But the morning after that it was silent and still once more. No one noticed, except for the Master of the Household and the workers he shouted at—for Fadhil had unexpectedly died during the night.