In the fields closer to the city a tangle of rather sickly trees was being uprooted. We all stopped to stare in amazement at the creature doing the uprooting. It looked roughly like a horse with enormous, sail-like ears, but was far bigger. A very small man, or at least small by comparison, armed only with a stick, seemed to be directing it. Most surprising of all, the appendage like an arm with which the creature seized the tree trunks appeared to be its nose.
“What mage could have made-” I started to say and stopped. This wasn’t the product of magic. An aura of spells sparkled in a rather unfocused manner over the emir’s city, but this was an ordinary, living animal.
“Do you not recognize an elephant?” said Maffi loftily. “They are extremely strong and indeed enjoy work like this, but you can’t keep them alive in the depths of the desert, because it’s too dry.”
“Don’t try to pretend you know more about such creatures than we do,” said Hugo reprovingly. “You know you’ve never been out of Xantium before.”
“But I saw one once in Xantium,” the boy protested, “near the governor’s palace. I think someone sent it to him as a gift.”
Just outside the emir’s city we had to retreat to the edge of the road as a great mass of armed men emerged through the gates. The one in the lead carried, unsheathed, the most enormous sword I had even seen. In the center of a crush of turbaned heads I saw one man who walked bare-headed. His eyes passed over us, but he did not see us. Hugo stared at him as though fearing it might be his father, realized what he was doing, and looked away.
“A condemned criminal, of course,” said the rose-grower in response to a question from the king. “He will be beheaded out at the edge of the desert, where the desert wind will come, cleanse away the blood with blown sand, and repurify. Do you not have a similar custom in the west?”
The king didn’t answer, and we followed our guide on through the city gates. Our route took us past the spice warehouses, where sharp mixed smells, both savory and sweet, struck us on every side. The iron doors were guarded both by armed men and by shadowy forms that reeked of magic, but the grower led us at too rapid a pace for me to probe properly. At a small open-air market, set between unwindowed bulks of warehouses, a ragged, dark-haired woman was buying for a single coin a bag of peppercorns that would have cost her a year’s wages back in the west. The cooking smells that greeted us when we emerged into the residential part of town indicated that all cooks here used spices enthusiastically.
The emir’s palace was in the very center of the city, built on a steep rocky pinnacle that rose above the crowded streets. We had to leave our horses at the bottom, in what appeared to be stables reserved for those visiting the emir, and climb narrow, white-washed stairs built half into the rock itself. Maffi gave Hugo a low, running commentary on the history of Bahdroc as we climbed, but I missed most of it.
At the top, a vizier gorgeously robed in satin met us and started to demand our business, but after a few words with the grower he motioned us on through open gates. The grower led us without hesitation down a maze of airy arcades. Men with curved swords eyed but did not challenge us. I tried without success to keep track of the turnings and glanced back at Ascelin, who from the concentration on his face was trying to do the same thing.
We emerged at last into a sunny courtyard with a fish pond in the center. A campaign chair, empty, stood in the center. Both floor and pool were paved with gleaming white marble. Swords, spears, and shields hung from white marble walls. No one was there, and the grower kept walking. “This is the courtyard of the emir’s youth,” he said over his shoulder.
But when he noticed that I had stopped he stopped as well. I stood staring into the pond where brilliant red, blue, and gold fish, unlike anything I had ever seen before, swam about. They looked at me almost imploringly- maybe they wanted to be fed. But I was not particularly interested in the fish. I stared instead at a shadowy figure at the bottom of the pool, something low and flat with a number of legs. The legs were scrubbing busily at the marble, getting off the algae.
“It’s a magic creature,” I said to no one in particular, “but I’ve never seen anything like it before. What is it? It moves as though it was alive, but a mage must have created it.”
The creature finished cleaning the marble and crawled out. It was a uniform gray and no more recognizable in full sunlight than it was in the depth of the pool. It went, dripping, across the courtyard and settled itself into the corner.
“It’s an automaton, of course,” said Maffi. “Don’t you have them where you come from? You saw Kaz-alrhun’s ebony horse.”
“But I didn’t realize a mage could make something that didn’t even
“Well, it’s modern magic, of course,” said Maffi good-naturedly. “I know you’re a little old-fashioned in the west.”
And I had thought the east old-fashioned! The rose grower led us on through another series of arcades to a second courtyard.
Here stood an enormous throne, sheltered by striped awnings. I expected to see the emir at last, but this courtyard too was empty, and as we watched a white peacock hopped up onto the throne’s stone seat and gave a shriek. Trees and bushes with flowers the color of blood grew all around. I saw birds hopping in the branches, and was caught by the metallic gleam from the feathers. One fixed me with a jewel eye.
“More automatons?” I asked as casually as I could.
“Of course,” said the grower. “This is the courtyard of the emir’s maturity, where he commanded great armies and reveled in great luxury.” As we headed out the far side, the automaton birds behind us began to sing, a song of such intense sweetness that I stumbled.
But the grower kept on walking. I had completely lost track of the turnings. Finally we reached a third courtyard, also open to the sky but lined on three sides with shady arcades. More flowers bloomed riotously in the center. In the distance beyond the lower, fourth wall we could see sunlight glinting on the Dark Sea. Here fountains played and an old man, turbaned and dressed in dazzling white, sat on a bench by the fountains, watching us approach.
It was not precisely the image of the East I had had back in Yurt, but it was close. Another of the strange automaton shapes, radiating magic, stood behind the old man. The rose grower knelt before him and kissed the pavement between his hands. “Oh, glorious one, live forever! I have brought you something new and strange, a great wonder, travelers from a distant land who say that they have heard of your blue roses! One of them is a normal boy, but the rest claim to be westerners. Their skin may be pale and their accents strange, but their enthusiasm for roses is unfeigned.”
I had thought that our skin had become quite dark after months of travel, but we could still not match the swarthiness of the men here. The emir motioned with one hand. When he moved I could see that his white robes were sewn all over with pearls.
I got a better look at the automaton behind him, shadowed by an arcade. As I watched, and indeed the entire time we were in the courtyard, it spun about very slowly and deliberately, and without a sound. It had five sides, five eyes, and five arms, and each of its five hands clutched a long knife to protect the emir. Two enormous spotted cats on leashes, real animals these, reclined beside him. They gave us bored looks and looked away.
“These do indeed appear to be something both new and strange,” said the emir, although I would have thought we rather paled in comparison. “Approach, then, travelers from afar!”
There were rose bushes growing in the courtyard, but a surreptitious glance found no blue flowers. The king stepped forward at once, but Ascelin gripped my arm. “Something’s wrong,” he hissed into my ear.
The others were following the king forward. “You’ve been doing this ever since we reached Arnulf’s house,” I hissed back. “If you don’t want to be here, fine, go back to the horses, but we can’t let the king miss his opportunity to find his rose, or probably for Hugo to find his father.”
Ascelin bit his lip and flashed me a look from blue eyes that I had to admit looked surprisingly strange when the eyes of everyone around us were black. But he took a long, slow breath and stepped forward as well, without enough hesitation to provoke comment.
Since King Haimeric knelt before the emir, the rest of us did too. “This one says he is a western king,” commented the rose-grower.
“But I come to you not as someone claiming equality,” said the king, sitting back carefully on his heels, his first movement in the last hour that looked as though it might pain him. “Rather, I come as a suppliant. I have
