During the second week of our journey south I began to worry about the king. He dismissed my concerns with a smile, but during the day I kept a surreptitious eye on him. He really was an old man, though he worked to make us forget that, and he was certainly the most frail of us in this searing and unforgiving land. He was very quiet, not talking even when Ascelin called a halt to rest and to water our horses, sometimes forgetting to take a drink himself unless Dominic reminded him.
Hugo, on the other hand, became as active in the heat as a lizard. He began strolling over to the black tents of the other travelers during our evenings in the oases and striking up conversations about his father. A small group of aristocratic western pilgrims and a red-headed mage should have been fairly conspicuous, but no one would acknowledge ever having seen them.
“We may have to appeal to the emir,” Hugo said at last. “I can’t tell if no one’s really seen them, or if these people just distrust us. What they need is a command from an important political leader. I wonder if there’s the slightest chance the emir would even be willing to see a band of westerners.”
We came down out of the stony desert hills among which we had spent three weeks and saw before us a white-walled city, the city of the mirages. It was surrounded by irrigated fields colored a fresh green we had almost forgotten existed, and orchards where both fruit and flowers grew together. Palm trees rustled in the wind along the fringes of the fields. To our right we could see a broad road coiling away to the north-west, the main route to Xantium.
“This is the fabled emirate of Bahdroc,” said Ascelin, unrolling the map to show us. “We’re well out of the Holy Land here, into a place where few westerners ever go. The last of the caliphs had his capital here a millennium ago, and the current emir continues his rule, though on a much narrower scale.”
I shaded my eyes to look at the city. In the center rose a sharp outcropping crowned with more white towers. On the far side of the city stretched a glassy lake or arm of the ocean, disappearing into the distance, the color of weathered jade.
“This city faces east, not west,” Ascelin continued, “onto the land-locked Dark Sea, but if one crosses over the Sea one comes to the edges of the true outer ocean, and to the harbors where spices and tea come in from the far East.”
“It’s not a real trading center like Xantium,” said Maffi somewhat smugly. “It’s not much more than a way- station. Here pilgrims every year start the last stage of their journey to the most holy sites of the Prophet, and here the spices of the East are transferred from ships to land transport.”
“Do they also import silk?” I asked.
Ascelin shook his head. “Silk come overland from the northern part of the East, and spices by water from the far southern parts. I don’t know of anyone who’s actually been there, but the true East must be larger than all the western kingdoms put together.”
“I know someone who’d been to the East,” put in Maffi. “He said that the men there can grow no beards, even if they try their entire lives.”
“That seems unlikely,” Hugo began, as though feeling the boy was interfering with his monopoly on specious travelers’ tales.
But he did not get a chance to finish. The king startled us all by speaking for the first time that day. “Rose bushes!”
He had his face turned up, testing the wind. We all sniffed as well and caught it, a scent completely unlike the sharp smell of desert sage that had accompanied us the last three weeks: it was the smell of roses.
King Haimeric kicked his mare forward, and the rest of us scrambled to catch up. We followed the steep stony track down to where it abruptly became a broad, smoothly-paved road, between fields where swarthy men worked. The king galloped another quarter mile, then pulled up abruptly by a low fence. Beyond was a tangle of rose bushes.
Ascelin grabbed the mare’s reins as the king leaped off. Haimeric vaulted the fence in a show of energy I had not seen in him in years and plunged between the bushes. “They may have the blue ones here!” he called back over his shoulder. “I see maroon, and lavender, even a red darker than anything I’ve ever been able to grow, and-” He broke off as a man rose slowly from the middle of the bushes.
The man had Kaz-alrhun’s bulk but was not as dark. It was
“And a fellow rose-grower,” said the king with enthusiasm. “I’ve never seen colors like some of yours. We’ve heard, in the west, that someone here has been able to breed a blue rose. Might it be you?”
The chaplain and I exchanged glances and both shook our heads. King Haimeric was as excited to see an eastern rose garden as Joachim had been to see the churches of the Holy City. The king’s age and frailty had all dropped away, and his naked interest in roses was a much more powerful protection here against harm than any spell I could have cast.
The huge rose-grower’s scowl turned into a wide smile. “Come, and I shall show you what I have. I work for the emir, of course. He has roses of his own inside the palace, but there are several of us outside the city who also cultivate cuttings and do crosses for him. For two years now, he has announced to rose-growers throughout the East that he has a blue rose. And the rose he has is mine!”
Maffi tugged at my arm. “If this man really is a grower for the emir of Bahdroc,” he said in a low voice, “then he is a powerful man indeed.”
The rest of us tied our horses to the fence and made our way cautiously amidst the roses’ spiny branches. The king and the grower chattered away on topics ranging from soil acidity to aphids to crosses that just wouldn’t breed true as they slipped between the bushes, far more easily than we did.
“Now this section is what I call my blues,” the man continued from the far end of the garden. He and the king had pushed past glorious reds and yellows without slowing down. The bushes at this end seemed rather spindly to me, and the blossoms drooped in spite of a soil watered so heavily it was spongy under foot. “This was my first attempt.”
The flowers in question were more green than anything, a rather sickly shade and with an unpleasant odor.
“But then I decided to try to try to approach blue from the direction of the deep reds instead,” the man continued. He showed us several maroon blooms of the same color as ones the king had already spotted. “But we come now to the best of all.”
I don’t know what I expected, something enormous and showy probably, a sapphire blue that would take our breaths away. What we were shown instead was a rose with few and rather tattered petals, of a violet that could only be called blue if one overlooked the rather pinkish cast.
“I see,” said King Haimeric, fighting disappointment with what I considered remarkably good grace. “And this is the blue which is exciting rose growers throughout the East?”
The huge man’s smile split his face. “It is of a certainty! But I remain unsatisfied, as does the emir. We may have the first blue rose ever grown, but we want to make it better yet! You may notice it has but little scent …”
That was the least of its problems, I thought, but said nothing.
“I wonder if it would be possible to meet the emir,” said the king, his enthusiasm back as if it had never gone. “Did I mention I’m a king myself, back in the western kingdoms?” I froze, but he did not mention Yurt directly. “It would be a great honor to meet such a renowned leader and grower.”
“You are a king, are you?” said the grower with an incredulous chuckle. “Well, they do have some odd customs, I hear, out in the west. You might interest the emir at that; he says that he likes to hear or see at least one new thing each day, but it is sometimes hard for him now that he is too old to travel. This time of day he generally holds open court for plaintiffs, so I am sure he would be happy to hear you, and, I assume, your party.” He looked Ascelin up and down, gave the rest of us a glance, shrugged, paused to lock the little gate in his low wall, then led us along the palm-lined road toward the city.
III
