Amtullah, the sort of place he did not like walking around in at night and liked living in even less. He worked fourteen-hour days, six days a week, and came back to the buggy room he rented smelling of sour cabbage and vinegar. The other three days of the week he spent at the local boxing gym looking for real work—magician’s work —something that made his blood sing.
And every day, six times a day, he prayed. He submitted all that he was, this life, everything, to God.
He was pinched and spit on at work and on the street. His overseers were Heidian women, mostly indifferent, but the patrons were a mixed group, largely Nasheenian, and when he walked among them uncovered he was jostled and cursed and jeered. Retaliation would have meant the loss of his job. A few women, it was true, were disinterested—some were even kind—but the daily indignities of being a Chenjan man in Nasheen began to wear him down. He spent less time at the boxing gyms looking for work. He spent most nights with his forehead and palms pressed to the floor, wondering if his father had cursed him not to death but to hell.
One late night, he decided to walk home from work down a street that would take him to the local mosque in time for midnight prayer. The streets were quiet that night, and the air tasted metallic, like rain. Or blood.
A group of four or five women walked toward him on the other side of the street. He paid them no attention until they crossed over to his side of the empty road and called out to him.
“You have the time?” one of them asked, and as they neared he could smell the liquor on them. They were young women.
“I’m sorry, I do not,” he said. “It is near evening prayer.”
“The fuck’s that accent?” one of them said.
Rhys picked up his pace.
“Hey, man, I said, what’s that accent?”
The tallest girl pulled at his burnous. She was stronger than she looked. The tattered clasp of his burnous snapped, and it pulled his hood free. He staggered.
“Fuck, you’re kidding me!” the tall one said.
They started to crowd him. Like all Nasheenian women, they seemed suddenly larger there together, in the dark along the empty street. And they spoke in loud voices. Always too loud. Overwhelming.
“That’s a fucking Chenjan!”
“Smells like a pisser, though. You a cabbage-eater, Chenjan man?”
“Look at that face! Not a day at the fucking front.”
He made to push through them, but their hands were on him now, and their liquored breaths were in his face. He raised one arm to call a swarm of wasps. One of the girls grabbed his arm, twisted it behind him. The pain blinded him.
“Where you going, black man?”
“You know what Chenjans do in the street after dark?”
“Fucking terrorist.”
He didn’t know which of them threw the first punch. Despite their belligerence, he hadn’t expected it. He never expected violence from women, even after all this time in Nasheen.
She caught him on the side of the head, and a burst of blackness jarred his vision. He stumbled. Someone else hit him and he was on the ground, curled up like a child while they kicked him.
“Turn him over!”
“Get that off!”
One of them had a knife, and they cut his clothes from him. They cut a good deal more of him.
The midnight call to prayer sounded across Amtullah.
Rhys recited the ninety-nine names of God.
Rhys took what was left of his money and his ravaged body and shared a bakkie with eight other hard-luck passengers to Rioja, a northern city, closer to the sea. Towering above Rioja was the Alhambra, a fortress of steel, stone, and ancient organic matting built at the top of a jagged thrust of rock of the same name. Rhys painted portraits in the cobbled square that lay in the shadow of the Alhambra. He sold them for ten cents apiece. At night, he slept in the steep, narrow streets among creepers, black market grocers, and junk dealers. When he was cold, he called swarms of roaches and scarab beetles to cover him. When he ran out of money for canvas and paint, he sold bugs to creepers and the local magicians’ gym. And when he was too poor to eat—or the creepers were no longer buying—he ate the bugs that made his blood sing, the bugs that tied him to the world.
He dreamed of his father. Of his house in Chenja. The smell of oranges.
A woman threw a coin at him one morning while he sat huddled in a doorway in his stained, tattered burnous.
“Find yourself a woman,” she said. She wore sandals and loose trousers, and her face had the smooth, well- fed look of the rich.
“I used to dance for Chenjan mullahs,” Rhys said.
The woman paused. The morning was cool and misty; winter in Rioja. Damp wet her face, beaded her dark hair. He suddenly wanted this strong, capable woman to hold him, Nasheenian or not. He wanted her strength, her certainty.
“But you don’t dance for them anymore,” the woman said. “Let me tell you, boy: Whatever you were in your past life, you aren’t that any longer.”
She continued up the narrow street.
In the end, it was not so hard to return to Yah Reza.
Rhys walked to the magicians’ gym in Rioja and asked for her at the door. He waited on the street in front of the dark doorway for some time while they found her there, somewhere within the bowels of the twisted magicians’ quarters, the world with so many doors.
When she entered the doorway, she was wearing her yellow trousers and chewing sen, unchanged though it had been well over a year since he last saw her.
“Hello, baby doll,” Yah Reza said.
“Sanctuary,” Rhys said.
Yah Reza smiled and spit. “I put on some tea for you.”
She gave him some tea and sent him to Yah Tayyib.
Yah Tayyib dewormed him and cut out the old scars from his assault in Amtullah. He did not ask about what had happened.
“I have seen far worse,” Yah Tayyib told him. “You were lucky they just cut flesh and not entire body parts —though I have plenty of those to spare as well.”
Rhys ate his grubs and gravy. After a time, he no longer urinated blood, and his persistent cough eased. One morning he found himself in the locker room the outriders used, and he stood there in the doorway thinking about the little dog-faced girl and her beautiful, imperfect hands. The old stale smell of sweat and leather filled the room.
Soon he would go back to teaching magic to Nasheenian children. He would lose himself again to the dark bowels of this prison. Hell on Umayma. But was it any worse than the hell outside these walls?
“Rhys?” Yah Tayyib asked.
Rhys turned and saw the old man approaching from the direction of the gym.
“I need you to wrap a woman for me.”
“You don’t wish to do it?”
Yah Tayyib pinched his mouth in distaste. “I have no time for her.”
Rhys walked out into the boxing gym. He saw Husayn in the ring, surely on her last legs as a magician- sponsored fighter. The last year had not been kind to her either. She was well past thirty, too old to make much more money for the magicians. She was gloved and warming up.
It was the other woman who caught his attention. She stood in the near corner of the ring, and she turned as he entered. She was as tall as he was, broad in the shoulders, and heavy in the chest and hips. She wore a breast binding, loose trousers, and sandals. Her hair was jet black, braided, and belled. It hung down her back in one long, knotted tail. She put both hands on the ropes and leaned forward, looking him straight in the face. The boldness of the look stopped him in his tracks. He didn’t know if she wanted to cut him or kiss him.
“I know you,” she said.
“You’re a bel dame,” he said. He knew it the same way he’d known the dog-faced girl had a bad hand, the
