Mirzah refused to leave her chambers. Alessid knew she mourned not just her brother but her remaining Haddiyat son, even though Kemmal was still alive and well and strong. Impatient with her obstinate determination to suffer, Alessid left her to it. She could accomplish her goal much better without him.
The morning after Fadhil’s death, Leyliah prepared to take her son’s body back to the desert. She invited Alessid to help her sort through Fadhil’s possessions for remembrances to distribute among those he loved.
“I don’t know why it happened,” she fretted, folding and refolding tunics, shirts, trousers. “He was always well, wasn’t he? A healthy little boy, and even as he grew older it never seemed as though he was growing old.”
Alessid busied himself packing books that would be added to his own libraries—for the Shagara did not haul books from camp to camp any more than they did big leatherbound folders of artwork. He said nothing to Leyliah, but he was thinking that with the death of her adored son, she seemed all at once to have grown old.
“Something hidden,” she went on broodingly, “something without symptoms . . . such things are not unknown, of course, but I wish I knew . . . I wish I had been here with him . . .”
He glanced around, astonished to hear tears in her voice. But she was dry-eyed, self-disciplined as always. He wished Mirzah could summon up the same control. Ra’abi had told him that her weeping was the worried talk of the palace.
To Leyliah he murmured, “It was very quick, I was told. A servant had brought qawah only moments before and hadn’t even reached the stairs before she met a messenger in the hallway.” What he didn’t mention was that however swiftly death had come upon Fadhil, it had not been painless. The messenger, receiving no answer to his knock, had debated a moment whether or not to enter. A cry and a clatter from within decided him. Sprawled before the blazing hearth was Fadhil, already dead, an expression of appalling agony on his face. “And the oddest thing, al-Ma’aliq—I didn’t like to talk of this, either, not in front of his mother and the Sheyqa, but—” The messenger twisted his fingers together. “Both his hands were reaching toward the fire—like claws, as a heat-maddened man would grope his way toward water in the desert.”
Why there had been a fire in the hearth in late summer was obvious to Alessid now. There were scraps of paper in the grate. Fadhil had been cleaning out his sketches, tossing into the flames those he didn’t like or couldn’t use. As Leyliah went through her son’s jewelry coffer, Alessid crouched down and picked up the few remaining bits of scorched paper. A horse’s head and part of the neck, the windblown mane much drawn-over, as if he couldn’t get it quite right. The flow of a curtain drawn again and again, each one different, as if recording the shift of the breeze against the silk. The first tiled tiers of a fountain pool, which Alessid reluctantly recognized, a few stray droplets caught gleaming, the paper discolored by some brownish stain. A man’s and a woman’s clasped hands, with the beginning of a verse from The Lessons scrawled below (“Let the woman and the man live with and for each other—”). Alessid could not help but note the tenderness of that drawing, and wondered all at once if Fadhil had ever loved a woman. If he had ever regretted not having a child.
“What are those?” Leyliah asked.
She was standing right beside him, and only a lifetime of self-control prevented him from flinching his startlement. He showed her the little handful of half-burned drawings. “He was talented,” he murmured. “Very talented.”
“Yes.” She glanced through them, lingering over the partial depiction of the fountain. Plucking it from his fingers, she said, “This must be the one he spoiled by bleeding on it. I must look through the finished pieces, to see if he managed to do a fair drawing for Sheyqa Sayyida.”
She turned away, the blood-stained drawing still in her hand, and opened the leather book. Muttering something about better light, she swung the book around on the table, and put her back to him. Only when her shoulders began to tremble did he understand. He tossed the remnants of Fadhil’s art back onto the hearth and let himself silently out of the room.
With her surviving children well married—all but Mairid, and Kemmal who had long been divorced—the Sheqya Mirzah applied herself more and more to governance of a realm that now stretched from the Barrens to the sea. Al-Ma’aliq turned his own attentions to study of the barbarian lands, for he wished to increase trade and make Tza’ab Rih even wealthier.
Qaysh, for example, was a land north of Ga’af Shammal, known to al-Ma’aliq primarily for its fine paper. Ruled since the departure of the Hrumman by the “Iron Kings” (for their name, do’Ferro, meant iron in the barbarian language), the land lay along the coast of the Ma’ashatar, the great western ocean. Blessed by Acuyib with abundance in fish, vines, forests, and grain, the people of Qaysh lived an easy, pleasant life—the kind of settled life that allowed what Leyliah had called the leisure for contemplation.
Al-Ma’aliq soon learned, though, that such leisure also made for political friction and personal mischief, which on occasion were one and the same thing.
16
“No, Jefar. I will see no one,” Alessid snapped. “I will not receive people I don’t know, who have the impertinence to come here—uninvited!—during a time of mourning. How you can even suggest it is beyond my comprehension.”
The younger man bowed nearly double. “Forgive me, al-Ma’aliq.”
Alessid was instantly ashamed of himself. His own sorrow for the death of Meryem Shagara was deep; Jefar was hurting, too, for he had recently lost his young wife in childbed. So Alessid gave him words rarely thought, let alone spoken. “I am sorry, my friend. That was selfish of me.”
Jefar straightened up, gesturing away Alessid’s concern. “The apology must be mine, al-Ma’aliq, for disturbing you. But what I have heard, together with what little this man has told me, made me believe you would wish to see him.”
“Who is he?” Alessid rose from the paper-strewn table where he had spent the last futile hour trying to lose his grief in work. Meryem, one of the mainstays of his life—and one of the few who still remembered his father, Azzad. It irked him that this latter thought occurred to him over and over again. “What does he want?”
“He calls himself Baron Zandro do’Gortova, an emissary from Count Garza do’Joharra.”
“Oh. A barbarian.”
“Ayia, yes,” Jefar replied casually, “but with a tale to tell of King Orturro of Qaysh, and—”
Interest sparked. “The one with the daughter?”
“Yes.” Jefar paused. “The intriguing thing is that I have had a report from a border garrison that an emissary from the King of Qaysh crossed into Tza’ab Rih a day behind this man who would speak for Count do’Joharra.”
Alessid paced the carpet for a few moments, then turned to Jefar with a smile. “Then the rumors are true, and the girl is with child.”
“So it would seem, al-Ma’aliq.” Jefar had a golden Shagara face of the type that would only grow more handsome as he entered his thirties and forties, but his eyes at that moment might have been those of a naughty little boy contemplating mischief with unholy glee. “Qaysh and Joharra are evenly matched, they say.”
“The reason for the proposed marriage alliance. Precisely. I think I would very much enjoy meeting these barbarians, don’t you?”