“It is you who drove Mirzah mad—your use of her sons and grandsons and the magic she gave them—you used them to make war.”
Alessid said nothing.
“Be advised, al-Ma’aliq, that there are those among the Shagara who oppose you. While Leyliah lived, they kept silent. I kept silent. But now—”
“Now you will rebel?” He laughed without humor. “Look around you, Abb Shagara. The Za’aba Izim, the Qayshi, the Ibranyanzans, the Joharrans, the Granidiyans—half a million people look to me for law, protection, governance. Your handful of rebellious Shagara are nothing to me—magic or no magic.”
“They are angry,” he warned. “So am I.”
“And so am I! You accuse me of misusing the Haddiyat—and yet they supported me like everyone else when I made Tza’ab Rih into a nation. No one denounced me then! Not when I was making the Shagara into the most powerful and revered tribe in all the country! And now you say it was I who caused the madness of my wife. Do you know, Abb Shagara, that many years ago she refused me her bed—me, her husband, father of her children—she denied me any more children, because she did not want any more Haddiyat sons. A Shagara woman bears Haddiyat proudly and rejoices in them. Mirzah did not. And because of it, she went mad. How can I be held responsible for this? I cannot. And you and your dissident Shagara know it.”
“She—”
“Silence! Take your anger to the most obscure corner of my Empire and trouble me no more with it. Be assured that if I hear anything about dissension, I will treat the Shagara as I would treat any traitors to Tza’ab Rih.”
Abb Shagara sucked in a breath. “You would not dare!”
“Would I not? Get out!”
A year or so later, he heard that Abb Shagara had died. Not that he was Abb Shagara when it happened, He had renounced the honor, a thing that had never been done before, and with a score of like-minded cousins, both male and female, set out to find a new home. He died along the way. The rest of the group established a small community, no one knew exactly where. They sent word back to the Shagara tents that they were safe, and anyone who wished to join them could come back with the messenger. Some did, finding the prospect of solitude and study appealing.
The men among them, some Haddiyat and some not, were dedicated to the preservation of the ancient traditions. The women, all of whom had Haddiyat in their lines, declared themselves unwilling to see their sons ride off to war—or their gifted sons craft hazziri for death and destruction rather than to help people.
“And how,” Alessid mocked, “can they possibly help anyone, living no one knows where?”
Qamar made a face. “One suspects they intend to help only themselves. Who cares about them, anyway? Come, Ab’ya, Shayir has sired a new foal, and you must tell me what you think.”
That was how it was between them: Alessid spending himself as always in the work of ruling until Qamar beguiled him from the maqtabba or the audience chamber or the now threadbare tent in the garden. They were wellnigh inseparable, the man in his seventies and the boy not yet twenty. He could not help but recall what Leyliah had said: that Qamar had soothed his grandmother Mirzah with his resemblance to Azzad. And then he invariably recalled also that Mirzah had believed Qamar to be Haddiyat.
Nonsense. The woman had been mad.
Qamar was a scapegrace of the first order, with a hundred broken maidenheads and broken hearts already to his credit. If he had any sense of duty, it was well hidden. As for dedication—only in pursuit of pleasure. Even aware that he was a copy of Azzad, Alessid loved the boy. Perhaps, he thought, because Qamar was so like Azzad, the father Alessid had once adored.
It came Alessid’s time to die, peacefully and without too much pain. There was time to finalize certain arrangements—to further endow the hospitals that had been Mirzah’s pride, to distribute money among the poor, to order the planting of yet another small forest of trees. For each of his descendants he chose a small memento: a ring, a bracelet, a necklace, something to remember him by. In looking through the jewels given to him over a lifetime, he found the armbands given him the day he had wed Mirzah. Love and fidelity , fertility and happiness. His lip curled at the sight of the talishann carved into the metal, and he was about to toss both armbands from him when he remembered slim fingers drawing the same symbols on the corners of a letter. And a burning feather. And a thin smearing of blood.
“No,” he whispered to himself. “No. Not Qamar.”
“Al-Ma’aliq?” asked the servant who was helping him sort the jewels. “Is anything wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said, and heard his voice quiver, and said more strongly, “Nothing.”
To Qamar, who was the only one with him when he died—by Alessid’s own order, as he felt death approach—he gave the chadarang service of carnelian and jasper long ago rescued from the ashes of the house in Sihabbah, and the topaz that had belonged to Azzad, and the pearl of Bazir al-Gallidh, and the hazzir from his own breast.
He watched through dimming eyes as the boy slipped the chain over his head. If Acuyib had been so cruel as to make Qamar what Alessid was terrified to admit he might be—
No. He would not die in uncertainty. He would believe, and it would be as he believed, for had not his belief created an Empire?
And thus was extinguished the light that was Alessid al-Ma’aliq, ruler of Tza’ab Rih. His daughter Mairid ruled wisely and well for many years. After her came her Khalila, and then Numah, and Qabileh, and Yazminia, in an unbroken line of succession, mother to daughter. The Empire flourished.
So too the Shagara—both those who remained with the tribe, and those who had splintered from it to dwell in their mountain fastness, no one quite knew where.
And so did Qamar flourish as well, although in the year after his grandfather’s death it seemed to him that his life had been made a deliberate misery by his mother, who decreed that at twenty-one years old, it was time and past time for her wastrel son to learn the responsibilities of being a Sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih.
In brief, and to his horrified indignation, she made him join the army.
Il-Ma’anzuri
698-716
Let me tell you of him.
He was his mother’s last child and third son, indulged by all from infancy. He knew his grandfather Alessid for the first twenty-one years of his life, and was much favored by him. Handsome and spendthrift, witty and aimless, he was the image, it was said, of his great-grandfather Azzad in that great man’s youth.
No one could ever have guessed what he would become.
By Acuyib, the Wonderful and Strange, that which follows is the truth.
18
Qamar al-Ma’aliq had never been so tired, hot, thirsty, and saddle sore in his entire life. In point of fact, he had never been any of those things before in the twenty-one pampered, privileged years of his existence. Choked by dust, wilted by heat, aching in every bone from a solid month in the saddle, he did not go to far as to curse his mother, but he did enquire forlornly of Acuyib as to why, of all the ideas for his future the Empress Mairid might have entertained, He had seen fit to put the army into her exalted head.