“Fadhil—”
“I would rather speak of the Shagara who has disguised himself as an al-Ammarad—for can you doubt, from the description, that this is what he is?”
“Fadhil!”
A long, quiet sigh. “Very well. How old are you this year, Azzad?”
“Thirty-nine—and don’t remind me! The gray hairs in my head and beard—caused by my children, I swear it by Great Acuyib!—my age sneers at me from every mirror!”
“Would you like some of what I use to hide mine?” Fadhil gave him a sidelong smile. “No danger to one’s hair, unlike that awful stuff Yaminna tried—”
“What?” Azzad stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
Fadhil kicked at a stone in the path. “Among the Shagara, such cosmetics are not necessary. We know. We understand. But here—ayia, no one would believe that I am two years your junior if I did not dye my hair and beard. I am afraid, though, that in the last year or two, the lines on my face have betrayed me.” He glanced over at Azzad with another tiny smile. “There is no hiding
“Betrayed you?”
“Yes. They show what I am.”
“Everyone knows you’re Shagara—”
“There are Shagara and Shagara, as you know. At least, you know a part of it.” He held a pine branch out of Azzad’s way.
Azzad stopped, staring at his friend. “You mean about not being able to sire children?”
“That is an aspect of it. In the next year, my shoulder and my back will not be my only aches. I am fortunate in that my hands remain strong and free of pain.” He let the branch drop, and sighed again. “How old do you think Chal Kabir was when he died in 614?”
Recalling the tabbib’s appearance the year before, when Azzad had taken Farrasha and Haddid to the Shagara camp, he said, “More than seventy, less than eighty.”
“He was forty-one.”
Azzad felt his jaw fall open.
“Forty-one,” Fadhil repeated softly. “You have not seen Abb Shagara in many years, Azzad. He is my age— we were born almost on the same day. When I visited last summer, I saw what the cares of being Abb Shagara can do. His hair and beard are now almost completely white.”
“Ayia!” Azzad breathed. “Then you—and Abb Shagara, and those like you—”
“Within the tribe, we are called Haddiyat.”
“You use yourselves up in service to others,” Azzad heard himself say, the words coming from the instinctive place that was wiser than his conscious mind. Grief and guilt crushed his heart. “The cares of caring for us—what you’ve done for me and mine, especially since last spring—all the hazziri, and your blood in the paints—all the things that keep us safe from the Geysh Dushann—”
“Do not, Aqq Azzad,” Fadhil said swiftly, his fine, strong hands clasping Azzad’s shoulders. “It would happen wherever I lived, whatever I did. Some of the Haddiyat spend themselves in making hazziri for strangers, in healing strangers. I have been singularly blessed by Acuyib, because my work is done for people I love, for a woman and children I cherish as if they were my own—and a man who is my brother more than any Shagara could have been. How better should I spend myself than for love of you and yours, who are also in some ways mine?”
Azzad had no words now. He embraced Fadhil, remembering at the last moment not to grasp too strongly lest he cause pain. They had been young together, and Azzad had always assumed they would grow old the same way. He could not imagine growing old without Fadhil at his side.
“How long?” Azzad grated. “How long will you—”
Fadhil deliberately misunderstood him. “I will work as long as I can.”
“
This time he did not pretend. He sighed quietly against Azzad’s shoulder. “Do not grieve over me yet, my friend. I am alive and as well as any Haddiyat can expect to be at my age. I have never regretted what I am. And Acuyib has favored me beyond human reckoning. I have a good life, and it is not yet over.” He drew back a little, to smile into Azzad’s stricken face. Lines there were on his golden skin, and the frail dry wrinkles of a man half again his age, and a depth of weariness to him that now frightened Azzad. “Another secret to keep, to be locked away with all the others.”
“I won’t tell Jemilha,” he said thickly, letting Fadhil go. “Or the children.”
“I didn’t think you would.” His gentle smile widened to a grin. “Only please, Azzad, do take that pitiful expression from your face before we get home! Jemilha is no fool—and neither are your children.”
“But Sheyqa Nizzira is,” another voice said behind them. Both men whirled to confront a man unknown to them: young, perhaps twenty-two years of age, with a scanty beard and a reddish glint to his thick black hair. “You don’t recognize me, I suppose, Chal Fadhil. I was only a child when you left the Shagara tents. My name is Haffiz, son of Murrah, and I have come to warn you.”
“Warn of what?” Azzad asked warily.
“May we speak of this in a place more private?”
They walked on in silence, to a side path leading to a rocky promontory overlooking the valley. It had been one of Jemilha’s favorite sites since childhood; she had herself built the knee-high pebble castle, endearingly lopsided, next to a bench put there for her father and uncle. Azzad sat on the bench now, with a glance for the shadows sliding across the hills. Soon the nightly promise of Acuyib’s Glory that was the sunset would paint the land in fabulous colors, intimations of the splendor that awaited the faithful after death. A few hundred feet below, clinging to the side of the mountains, was Sihabbah; below it was the estate still known as the House of al-Gallidh. All at once Azzad felt the threat to its peace deep in his bones, an ache like unto the pain Fadhil had finally admitted today. Fadhil stood behind him, watchful and silent, as Haffiz turned his back on the valley and faced them to tell his tale. He had recently journeyed to the coast, with hazziri for the zouqs in several towns there. In one place, he heard of a party of al-Ammarad merchants, also there for trade, and put himself by way of observing them.
“But if they were merchants,” he said flatly, “I am the next Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar.”
“Geysh Dushann?” Azzad asked.
Haffiz nodded. “The same. And with much time to spare before their assigned kill, or so I thought, for they were drinking like horses ridden hard for three days. I disguised myself, as you see—” He gestured to his hair. “— and pretended to be an Ammarad trader, long resident in this land. They drank, and I drank, but I was wearing this to protect me from drunkenness.” He held up his left first finger, encircled by a silver ring set with an amethyst. “What I heard when we all stumbled back to their lodgings is what I will tell you now.”
“Which is?” Fadhil prompted.
“Nizzira is sending an army. Five hundred of the Qoundi Ammar, supported by Acuyib only knows how many foot soldiers. Their orders are to lay waste to all that Azzad al-Ma’aliq possesses.”
Azzad shrugged. “Nizzira cannot spare so many from Rimmal Madar and hope to keep the country in her palm. Her soldiers are her fingers, and the northern tribes will take advantage of her loosened hold.”
“I know nothing of this,” Haffiz replied. “I know only what I heard that night. The failure of the Geysh Dushann weighs heavily upon them—they are to meet this army when it comes ashore and guide it first to Hazganni and then here to Sihabbah. This is why they drank, to drown the voices of reproach in their heads for their failure to kill you all these many years. That night, they were angry. What they will do to the people of this land when they are both angry and sober does not bear considering.”
“Is this possible, Azzad?” Fadhil asked quietly, his voice hushed in the deepening shadows. “You know this Sheyqa. Would she do this?”
Azzad rubbed his beard. “The Geysh Dushann have known nothing but failure, as Haffiz has said. Nizzira could be that desperate. If my agent in Dayira Azreyq knows what happened to the sheyqirs, then others must— and such a thing cannot go unavenged.”
“As we have seen.” Fadhil paced a few steps from behind the bench to the cliff’s edge, then turned. “They have been preparing over these last months, then. Gathering themselves elsewhere. That is why there have been no attacks.”
Azzad nodded his agreement with this estimation. “And this is what I feared, my friend, when Abb Shagara
