“Then we understand each other.” Abb Harirri stretched widely, his brown silk robe glinting by moonlight with a delicate tracery of gold embroidery. “Tomorrow will be a strenuous day, I think. Discussions begin early. I will retire now.”
“Sururi annam,” Alessid said, and watched him return to the tents. For himself, he walked for a while longer in the fragrant night, considering this new information.
Neither Kemmal nor Kammil had sired a child. Alessid now was certain that they never would. And whereas he wished they could have given him grandchildren, they were of even more use to him for what they had proven: that the Shagara blood was strong in his line. The twins’ infertility was proof that Mirzah had borne two Haddiyat sons. When one of her daughters bore one as well, Alessid’s position with the Shagara would be secured. It would mean that the bloodline ran true.
But he could not wait for his girls to grow up and marry and have sons— and then wait for the sons to grow up and marry and be divorced. The time was now. He was thirty-three this summer. He had already waited nineteen years for his vengeance—the same amount of time Azzad al-Ma’aliq had waited. But Alessid had put those years to much better use than had his frivolous, charming father. Where Azzad had created an empire of trade, Alessid would create an Empire.
He walked slowly back to his wife’s tent. A little ways from it, he encountered Meryem. He would have nodded a good night, but what he had just heard from Abb Harirri and what he would do and say on the morrow made him stop.
“Challa Meryem,” he said formally, “I have just discovered that my two eldest sons are almost certainly Haddiyat. I think it might be time for me to learn precisely what this means.”
She was silent for a long while. Then: “I think you are right, Alessid.” And she led the way to her own tent, where she talked and he listened until dawn.
13
It was a clear, bright summer’s night when Alessid watched his son Addad, qabda’an now of his own hundred warriors, ride away to return to his wife’s tent at the Azwadh camp. The twins, Kemmal and Kammil, stayed.
“You know now what you are,” Alessid told his sons, who walked beside him through the sparse grassland where flocks grazed. Washed gray and silver by starshine, the shadows shifted with the intricacies of the breeze. “The first year, you did not suspect. The second year, perhaps you thought about it. But it is nearly the third year, and your wives have borne no children.”
He paused beneath a wool awning set up for the comfort of those who watched the goats and sheep. All the herders were out gathering the animals for the move tomorrow to a more remote location, the better to evade Sheyqir Za’aid’s soldiers. Two hundred of them had been reported at Ouaraqqa, the last town before the wastes began. Once all the Shagara wagons were safely distant . . .
Seating himself on a firm leather cushion, he put aside his plans for his enemies in favor of his plans for his sons. He took out his waterskin and drank briefly, then passed it to them. Their faces were impassive, and entirely identical but for the tiny scar above Kammel’s right eyebrow, memento of the only time he had ever fallen off a horse. Their skin was not quite as golden as Mirzah’s, but they had inherited the subtle eyes of her father Razhid. For the rest, their long noses, long limbs, and wide mouths were al-Ma’aliq. Handsome youths, sought in marriage by many girls, had they not been Haddiyat, they would have fathered many children.
Had they loved their wives? Would they miss the girls they had married? He did not know. He guessed it might be painful for them if he asked. So he decided he would never ask.
“Neither of you has any aptitude for medicine, nor are you skilled in the crafting of hazziri. The best I ever saw either of you do was pound out a reasonably round pair of copper cups for your mother’s birthday.” He smiled a little, partly to show their lack of skill did not trouble him, partly to show his affection for them, and partly because Mirzah treasured those cups as if they had been set with jewels by Abb Shagara himself. Wobbly, comically dented, the talishann for
“Abb Shagara has told me he is waiting for the results of certain tests. We know what those results will be, you and I. The usual work of the Haddiyat is neither to your aptitude nor to your liking. So it may appear to you that your gift is no gift at all, and useless to the tribe. But I tell you now, my sons, you are absolutely essential to me.”
Kemmal wrapped his arms around his knees and swayed slightly back and forth. Alessid recognized it as a habit of childhood when he was thinking very hard. “You want us to work hazziri of a special, particular kind, a kind that Abb Shagara would probably not approve.”
“I do.”
Kammil was nodding slowly. With the measured style of speech of the noblemen he descended from, he said, “This summer we have reviewed with the mouallimas the lessons of long ago. What we did not fully remember took us but a short time to relearn. They have taught us more, and more esoteric, knowledge. Give us leave, Ab’ya, to consult with each other for a day, and we will tell you what can be done and not done.”
“You have that leave. Shall I tell you what I need, or will you be able to guess?”
Both young men smiled, and Alessid was content. They had grown in confidence and knowledge during their three years away from the Shagara, and now that they knew what they were, there was a new dignity and consciousness of worth. Whereas it had been difficult at first for him to meet them as men and not as his little boys, now he was glad he had chosen marriage for them instead of the other path.
The son of a Shagara mother with Haddiyat men in her line had two alternatives on reaching fourteen years of age: try to father a child on a Shagara girl who had chosen to give a baby to the tribe before she married (which many girls did), or wait another year and marry. If, after three years, no child had come of the marriage, the young man was divorced. There were formal tests to determine whether he was truly Haddiyat, but cases where infertility was the woman’s fault were rare.
The advantage to the marriage option was that a bond was formed with another tribe, the young man saw something of the world outside the Shagara tents, and when he returned to them, he was still only eighteen years old, with another twenty or so years of service ahead of him. The disadvantage was, perhaps, that he spent three years hoping in vain for a child. But every son of a Shagara mother with Haddiyat men in her line knew from childhood that his future might not include offspring.
All Shagara children were taught to read and write by the age of seven. The boys learned how to work with metals and alloys and jewels and to craft simple hazziri for the Haddiyat to inscribe. Those who showed a gift for the forge, for design, or for cutting or setting gems were apprenticed to special mouallimas, whether they turned out to be Haddiyat or not. The ones who were gifted, however—these were the treasures of the Shagara. When magic was mated with craft, the result was not only true art but true power.
Alessid had no interest in art.
