“I find nothing amusing about any of this.”
“Of course you don’t. I haven’t explained it yet.” Then he had to admit, “I’m not sure I understand much of it myself—yet.”
Solanna regarded him as if suspecting that despite all the healing Zario had done and the precautionary talishann around his room, he’d deliberately plunged head-first into a wine vat and drunk his way out, with predictable effects on his reason.
Grinning at her, he went on, “Would it help if I told you that you were right? What you said about the Tza’ab not belonging here.”
“You’re admitting to that?”
“Of course. You were right. But what came next—you were wrong, and the Shagara here are the proof. They were strangers here once. Generations ago. In the time since, they’ve married and had children with local women and men, haven’t they? Of course they have—names like ‘Zario’ and ‘Evetta’ confirm it.”
“Just because their blood is mixed with—”
“You’re not seeing it.”
She stiffened with insult, aware that he had used that word deliberately. When he laughed again, she turned for the door.
“No, wait—you haven’t heard—”
“I have heard more than enough. And I have seen more than enough as well!”
“Have you? More than me, wallowing in wine?”
And then something else occurred to him. She had seen him old. She had seen him with—what, lines on his face? White hair? She had said scars, but couldn’t they just have been wrinkles? It didn’t matter. She had seen him old.
Old!
It meant he would succeed. It had to mean that. It must meant he would grow old the way other men grew old, and if he didn’t actually conquer death, then at least he and his kind would no longer have to die too young.
“Wallowing with your whores, you mean,” she snapped. “You were disgusting, and I don’t know why I bothered to bring you back here. Filthy from your hair to your toenails, and the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”
With difficulty he dragged his attention away from his glorious new realization. What he saw in her eyes was just as glorious. He knew that the damage of that autumn and winter was long gone. Bloodshot eyes, puffy face, thickened body—ayia, he had been ugly. But he wasn’t ugly now, and he knew it.
“Why did you bring me back here?” he asked softly. “And why do you stay?”
Her back was to him, and he spent the moments of her silence admiring the coil of pale hair at her nape and the way curling tendrils escaped down her neck.
“What else have you seen, Solanna?”
“Myself,” she whispered, not facing him. “Here. As a young woman, as I am now, and—and as a very old woman. I know what it means. I will spend most if not all my life here.” Turning, she gave an unconvincing shrug of indifference. “So it would be absurd to leave, wouldn’t it, for I will only return again. Why put myself through the bother of the long journey to my home, when I already know—”
“It’s farther to the seacoast, where I was, than it is to Cazdeyya,” he pointed out. He was enjoying this far too much, he knew, but he owed her a few moments of discomfort. Time to bring in another contender for the dominant emotion in her eyes, he told himself. “Did you see anyone with you, when you were old? Did you see me, Solanna?”
The victor turned out to be fury. He hadn’t expected that. She took the four steps separating them, slapped him full in the face, and was gone before he could do anything more than gasp.
That slap was most inconvenient to the rest of his evening. The impatient and at times fretful exploration of new and puzzling ideas was interrupted by a stinging pain every time he grinned or laughed when another suspicion became a certainty. He managed to work out quite a bit of it all the same, even while being reminded of another puzzle he had some very good ideas about how to solve. And each time he thought this, he grinned again, and laid a hand to his cheek.
What he had realized, and what became the foundation of his beliefs, was that his grandfather and great-grandfather had been correct about many things. For the thing briefly discussed with his grandsire Alessid years earlier burst into his mind, and he understood Acuyib’s meaning.
Each people, he reasoned, belonged to its own land by virtue of oneness with the soil, the air, the water, the plants and animals, becoming a part of the land and sharing in the spiritual quality unique to a particular place. Before one could truly understand and work the magic of the land, it must be in one’s blood, and one must understand it, learn its ways and moods and contours. This could take years, or generations. But it did happen, as Azzad al-Ma’aliq had come to belong to the land he served.
Kings, armies, empires—these things came and went, and they were irrelevant to the land. The round of the seasons, birth, growth, thriving, death, and rebirth—these things were the essentials. They were, as Alessid had reasoned, the balance of living in the place one knew and understood, of being part of a place and its elemental nature.
The relationship between this rich green land and its people was comparable to the correlation of the Za’ada Izim to the desert.
It remained for him to find that balance in a land new to the Tza’ab. For if his people were to endure in this new place, they must become part of the land itself.
Any recounting of the Diviner’s life that attributes to him motives other than these is a lie.
22
Over the next years Qamar discovered several things, not all of them to do with his newfound art. He learned, for example, that a man could woo a woman with exasperation instead of exuberance, and manage it quite successfully, too.
He found out that his wife’s visions of the present were spontaneous, but that to see future events required the burning of a complexity of herbs that sometimes worked and sometimes did not but that always left her helpless with exhaustion for a full day afterward. When he had refined enough of his ideas to share them with her—knowing that imprecision would only annoy her and leave him open to criticism—she commented that by this way of thinking, her susceptibility to the smoke of these herbs seemed just one more way the land provided for the people who belonged to it.
He agreed with her and added the observation to the notes he was assembling. For the most important thing of all that he discovered was that he must learn everything—everything—about this land before he could truly begin what he saw as the great work of his life. The work that would mean his life.
Upon their marriage, Qamar and Solanna were assigned three rooms on the second floor of a building overlooking the west zoqallo. It was a corner apartment, with the reception room and Qamar’s study—which he persisted in calling the maqtabba—facing south, a coveted advantage; they were given the chambers only because Zario Shagara, just before he died, asked that his rooms should become theirs as his wedding gift to them. Their bedroom window had a clear view of the western mountains. It became their habit, on clear days, to sit and watch the sunset together. Qamar both loved and dreaded that little ritual. Each nightfall meant that soon he would be in bed with Solanna—but each also meant that another day had passed without his solving more than a tiny fraction of the puzzle.