The Diviner

He sent his sons to help the herdsmen if help should be needed this night, and he returned to Mirzah’s tent. The girls were asleep. Mirzah should have been packing for the move tomorrow. Instead, she huddled on a pile of rolled and rope-tied carpets, weeping in silence.

“Wife, what is this?” Alessid knelt beside her, and was astonished when she jerked away from his hand. “Mirzah, what’s wrong?” She refused to look at him. “You must not cry. It’s bad for the child.”

Her head snapped up. “What about my other children?”

“Mirzah—” He rocked back on his heels. “Quickly, tell me, is something wrong with the girls?”

“Ayia! By Chaydann al-Mamnoua’a, you are a fool!” She gave him a look of pure venom. “A mother should not outlive her sons!”

Alessid stared at her.

“I suspected—perhaps I even knew—but Abb Shagara came to me this morning and—” She pounded her fists on her thighs. “He made it real, Alessid!”

“Real?” he echoed stupidly.

“He said the testing was finished, and my boys—” She choked. “He told me what an honor it was—how pleased I should be! Of course he’d say so—he’s Haddiyat himself! He doesn’t understand!”

It came to him then, as it had not even when looking his sons in the eyes. Handsome, strong, obedient sons . . . young men who would grow old swiftly, as Fadhil had, and die before the age of forty-five, as Fadhil had.

Among the Shagara, being Haddiyat was the greatest honor a man could know. For the women who had birthed them . . .

Compassion ached within him—an unfamiliar emotion. He sought to gather his wife into his embrace. She once more shook him off.

“When you are busy killing,” she said in the coldest voice he had ever heard from her, “when you are taking back what the al-Ammarad stole, remember who it was who gave you the tools you will use until they are used up. Remember that they are my sons. Mine. Remember whose blood it is that made the blood they will bleed for you until they have no blood left.”

For the first time in his life, Alessid went onto his knees before another human being; he bowed his head down to the carpet and whispered, “Forgive me.”

Mirzah was silent a long time; he could feel her watching him. Then there was a murmur of thin silk as she got to her feet, and her voice came from very high over his head.

“Never.”

He remained there, having abased himself to no purpose, until long after she had left her tent.

They rode out in the early evening, the wagons and the warriors. It was midsummer and very hot even at night, and a breeze blew up from the Barrens that could sear the skin on a man’s face. It was a miserable time for travel, but travel they did, northeast toward the mountains.

At midnight, on the salt flats, at a crossroads only a desert dweller could have identified, the tribe divided. Fifty young men on swift horses stayed with the wagons to guard and warn. The rest went with Alessid: three hundred riders cloaked in pale desert colors, arrayed for battle, gleaming with hazziri, eager for the deaths of their enemies.

And as they parted from their parents and children and friends, the tribe began to chant. Alessid, having kissed his daughters—and bowed much lower to Mirzah than most men ever did, even to a woman, even to his own wife—rode to the head of the group and glanced back over his shoulder once when first he heard it. A tiny smile touched his mouth beneath the protective scarf over the lower half of his face. He showed no other reaction, and did not look back again. But he heard the chanting long after, and all the way to the village of Ouaraqqa:

“Ah-less-eed! Ah-less-eed! Ah-less-eed!”

His people were truly his. Though he had not been born one of them, he had taken their most prized daughter to wife and sired upon her three daughters and three sons, two of them Haddiyat. He had shown the Shagara a new strength in their most ancient ways. And he would soon give them power in this land equal to the power they had bestowed on him.

Self-critical, self-analytical, Alessid knew precisely why he was doing this. For himself, primarily—which caused him not the slightest shame. He did it to make sure the name al-Ma’aliq was not spoken in the same breath as failure, as disgrace. To regain what belonged to him. To provide for his sons and daughters a heritage unequaled in the history of this land. To give the death blow to Sheyqa Nizzira, who slumped in wheezing decay on the Moonrise Throne, watching with rheumy eyes as those who remained of her offspring who were still men plotted all around her.

To prove that, unlike his father Azzad, Alessid was not a fool.

He led his cavalry northward, glancing every so often at the toppled columns and shattered statues strewn over the hilltops. Long ago the Qarrik had been the conquerors here, building temples to their false gods in the towns from which they ruled—for a time, and not so very long a time at that. The people had rebelled, and the Qarrik, who had overreached themselves, had been vanquished. Then had come the Hrumman, fiercer and more warlike, thicker of muscle and more proficient at arms, marching across the land to take what the Qarrik had lost, reconstructing the shrines and reestablishing foreign rule. But in time the Hrumman had also been expelled. All that remained to mark the mastery here of either barbarian nation were a few fallen stones, a few headless statues.

So would the al-Ammarizzad fall, by Acuyib’s Will. Alessid would be His right hand, and the Shagara would be the sword in Alessid’s hand. But as much as he would use the Shagara and their magic—and his own sons—for his ends, in the same measure he felt bound to bring them to the prominence they deserved. What other people could do what they did? How dared anyone threaten them or the tribes allied to them?

A hundred and fifty years ago, other barbarians had come, this time from the north, and conquered—for a time even briefer than the Qarrik or Hrumman. The Shagara had been the key to their defeat. As he listened to the cadence of the hooves behind him, Alessid knew that representatives of all the Za’aba Izim rode with him, protecting the Shagara, who in turn protected them. It was a relationship as timeless as the wastes they lived in and as balanced. With their silence, the tribes defended the Shagara, who defended them against sickness, injury, and death. All Alessid had done was show them a new way of defense, necessary because his father had brought them new dangers by being a fool.

In many ways, he was doing this to apologize.

When the Qarrik and then the Hrumman and then the northern barbarians had been driven from the land, no one had thought to unite the tribes with the towns and form a true nation. No one had been given the vision given to Alessid by Acuyib: a united country, strong and safe and invulnerable.

It required the Shagara to accomplish it and, moreover, the Shagara in a position of prominence such as they had never before known. Alessid knew this must be so; Abb Shagara was of a different opinion. But, like all Haddiyat, Abb Shagara had grown rapidly old; he was thirty-seven and by the look of him would not reach forty. Though less than half Sheyqa Nizzira’s age, he was just as feeble and even more inconsequential to events—as irrelevant as the ancient broken columns and demolished statues littering these hills.

On the third evening, twenty miles from the town of Ouaraqqa, Alessid halted his cavalry for a quick and early meal. They would don dark cloaks and ride again when darkness fell, and circle the garrison by midnight. The Haddiyat had been heroically busy these last months, creating things they had never before been asked to create, with splendid results. Every rider wore a special hazzir, made of silver for magical strength, set with hematite for protection in battle and garnet for protection from wounds, and inscribed with four owls that gave patience, watchfulness, wisdom, and—most importantly in this endeavor—the ability to see in the dark.

But the subtleties of belief among his warriors affected the hazziri in strange ways. Those who had absolute faith (the Shagara, of course, and some others of the Za’aba Izim) were protected against everything but their own reckless folly. And Alessid did not allow stupid men to ride with him, whether they trusted Haddiyat skills or not. In previous skirmishes—he did not delude himself that these were true battles—the hazziri had protected the uncertain to a lesser extent than those who believed. The openly skeptical had taken a few wounds, which had not promoted certitude in their hearts. So this time, when the hazziri were given out, he let it be known that these were merely for luck. The Shagara, who knew better, kept silent. Alessid’s thought was that ignorance of the true power of these hazziri would prevent specific disbelief and therefore would protect even the men who doubted.