The Diviner

narrowing trail up into the mountains.

He did not understand then, of course. He still did not believe. Thirty days later, he was living in the town of Sihabbah. He found lodging for himself and the noble Khamsin, and employment caring for a rich man’s horses and donkeys, having decided to hoard the pearls until he could travel to the great city of Hazganni in the spring.

It was on the thirty-first day, with but three days until the new year of 612, when the young woman and her father and brothers and uncles and cousins came to Sihabbah, that he finally began to comprehend what the friendship and protection of the Shagara truly meant.

—FERRHAN MUALEEF, Deeds of Il-Kadiri, 654

5

Angry voices outside in the stable yard made Azzad swing around and squint into the sudden sunlight flooding the stable. Shadows loomed in the doorway, darkening the cobbles and his dazzled eyes. As his vision adjusted, the rake in his hands clattered to the stones.

“He is the one who despoiled my wife’s only daughter! Seize him!”

So startled that he didn’t even have time to think about running, Azzad found his arms wrenched painfully behind his back. His feet were kicked out from under him and his body unceremoniously lugged out into the stable yard. There they were: the father, the brothers, and eleven other men—five old, six young, all furious, all armed with knives, all righteously intent on shedding his blood over the flagstones he himself kept clean. The girl huddled by the water trough, wearing an ugly brown cloak, weeping.

Azzad was deposited ungently on the ground. He lay there, flat on his back, wondering dazedly how this could have happened. This mountainside town was not Bayyid Qarhia—it was nowhere near Bayyid Qarhia. He’d made sure of it before he decided to tarry the winter here. And yet here they were, practically slavering at the mouth now that they’d found him.

The girl had bungled it. He saw it in her reddened eyes when she dared a glance at him. Somehow, despite his excellent instructions, she’d said the wrong thing, and her father had fixed on Azzad as the malefactor. And now Azzad was sprawling in a stable yard like a calf at a gelding party, with all her male relations holding carving knives.

The village elder, Abb Ferrhan, and Azzad’s own employer, Bazir al-Gallidh, respectfully invited the father to explain why the peace of Sihabbah had been invaded by knife-wielding strangers. With every word more and more people crowded around; this was the best entertainment since a vagabond troupe of acrobats and mimes had come through at the last harvest festival.

“And then what did she do,” cried the father, “when her mother asked if she’d been with him, but weep and cry out that she had not?”

“A woman protecting her lover,” said Abb Ferrhan, stroking his scraggly white beard, “as plain as the sun in the sky.”

“Or a woman telling the truth,” mused Bazir al-Gallidh, whose family was the richest in Sihabbah and whose name was a byword for exquisite manners. “If he were the guilty one and if she wanted him for her husband, would she not admit to his name?”

“It could have been no one else, I tell you!” the father raged, unable in his fury to accord the nobleman proper respect.

“You could wait and see if the child looks like him!” someone in the crowd called out, to general laughter and the wronged family’s increased humiliation.

“Better like him than like the mother,” muttered Mazzud, one of the stable hands, who had no manners at all and had never seen the need for any that Azzad could tell.

“Ayia, Azzad?” asked Bazir. “Did you sire this woman’s child?”

“No!” He struggled to sit up and repeated, “No! By my hope for Acuyib’s Light and Glory when I die, I did not.”

“Liar!” shrieked her father. He and his kinsmen had to be physically restrained from slicing into Azzad. Some of them had brought two knives.

“What’s all this?” demanded a new voice. “Brother, what goes on here?”

“Zellim,” said Bazir, “you are come at the right moment, as always. We have need of a legal turn of mind.”

The situation was explained to the eminent mou’ammi, who practiced law in faraway Hazganni. Zellim al- Gallidh listened, eyed Azzad and then the girl, pursed his lips, and shrugged elegant shoulders beneath a snowy white robe.

The father folded his arms across his chest. “Now that you have heard all, you must agree—they will marry at once!”

The girl burst into renewed tears. Zellim—not quite so polite as his brother—winced at the volume. The father, belatedly realizing the foolishness of annoying the most important people he had ever met, snarled at her to be silent.

“Stop that!” Azzad ordered before he could think about it.

“You see? You see? He protects her! Defends her! He is her lover!”

“What I see,” said Zellim in forbidding tones that had resounded in the law courts of Hazganni for thirty years, “is a man objecting to abuse of a woman. This is only right and decent.” Approaching the girl, he bowed his head as if to a noble lady and said, “What is your claim in this matter, Lady?”

She sobbed louder.

“Azzad, stand up,” said Bazir.

He did, with a helping hand from Mazzud, and brushed stable yard debris from his clothing. As he bent to pick straw off his trousers, he reflected sourly that no one would recognize the famously fastidious Azzad al-Ma’aliq in the unkempt, threadbare stable hand he had become. Not only was he reduced to poverty and namelessness, he was about to be forced into marrying a fool of a girl who couldn’t even do what all other women did as easily as they breathed: lie about a lover.

“I ask again,” Bazir al-Gallidh said. “Did you get this lady with child?”

“No, I did not,” he replied, flicking a last bit of goat-dung from his knee. As he straightened, the Shagara charm about his neck swung free of his torn shirt. Bazir’s dark eyes narrowed; this was the only reaction Azzad saw. But within moments murmurs circulated through the crowd.

“He tells the truth—”

“He is not the father—”

“There is a liar here, but it is not Azzad—”

Abb Ferrhan held up a quelling hand. Everyone was silent—Azzad most profoundly of all. He knew he was telling the truth, but why did they think so? They had no reason to believe him—and yet they did.

“I find he speaks truth,” said Abb Ferrhan. “He is not the father of the child.”

“What?” roared the father, rounding on his weeping daughter.

“I tried to tell you!” the girl gasped, flinching back. “It was our cousin, in the tents one night—”

“But how can this be?”

“In the way of a young woman with a young man, I should think,” the lawyer Zellim observed dryly. “Azzad, what have you to say of this?”

Bazir al-Gallidh was still looking at him strangely. Azzad addressed his employer with humility, as was fitting. None except Azzad knew that deference for the nobleman was coupled with profound gratitude for the miraculous ways of Acuyib.

And, he was realizing, the Shagara.