him murmured, “It begins—but it will be slow.”
“You’re finished?”
“Yes, Ab’ya.” Kammil’s voice was distant, exhausted. Alessid put his hands where he thought his son’s arm must be and held only empty air. The shadow had moved on.
They were back down at the bottom of the ditch, weaving their way through the wooden stakes, when they heard the footsteps. Kemmal and Kammil had not reported any patrols on the other nights of their working—another stupidity of a complacent, arrogant al-Ammarizzad. But footsteps there were, and Alessid froze, his sleeve a finger’s breadth from poison. He was trapped here in the lethal forest, hideously exposed and utterly helpless.
He looked over his shoulder. A single man, bent nearly double under the weight of a huge sack, trod heavy- footed to the iron door. He lowered his burden to the ground, wiped his brow, and drank from a waterskin at his belt. Alessid’s muscles began to ache with the strain of immobility and the thwarted urge to flee.
A few minutes passed. Then the door opened, silent on well-oiled hinges. A woman’s shape was limned by light from the small candle she held. The man swung the sack over the threshold as she groped in a pocket of her dark cloak for a small pouch, which she handed to him. Food, Alessid thought. Only a woman buying food for her family or for sale. With the cessation of regular delivery from the countryside for almost a month, people acquired food however they could. He watched the man shake his head and try to give back the pouch and deduced that he was a relative, perhaps a brother or cousin, unwilling to accept payment for keeping this woman and her family alive. At least the Sheyqir’s idiocy in not posting regular patrols allowed clandestine supplies to enter Hazganni. Perhaps some of the Qoundi Ammar were well-paid to ignore the traffic.
But the woman glanced over her shoulder nervously, as if worried she might be seen and caught. The man moved to close the iron door as she hunched over, grasping for a hold on the burlap. All at once she jerked convulsively, and pitched forward to sprawl across the sack.
The man stumbled, and cried out, and fell down dead, and five soldiers surged out the door, crimson cloaks swirling as the dreaded Qoundi Ammar spread out to search for other prey.
“That’s two,” a soldier said to his companion, “who’ll not be defying the Sheyqir’s orders.”
“Did they think us so stupid that we would not be watching, even when we seem not to watch?” another chuckled.
Alessid could not even tell his sons, his twin shadows, to escape. He dared not utter a sound. He found that he could not utter a sound. Yet it was not fear but anger that closed his throat and thickened his tongue within his mouth and sheened his skin with sweat. He had been as stupid as the pair now lying dead on the ground. He had put too much faith in Shagara magic to keep each and every member of the Qoundi Ammar working at the walls all night in terror of their falling down tomorrow. Instead, his enemies would fall upon him—it would be only moments before their questing eyes turned to the ditch—and his dream would die with him. His purpose, his hope, his desire, his reason for being alive, all would be gone. And without him—
He saw then the danger of investing all vision, all power, in one man. One mortal, killable man.
Over the renewed shouts within the city and the calls of the soldiers to each other and the thud of their boots on the sun-baked soil, Alessid heard a hiss of pain. An instant later he felt someone take his hand and force upon his thumb a ring that felt slick and wet. The world became darker, and the starlit edges of the stakes and the ditch and the hills beyond blurred delicately. And he saw, quite clearly, Kammil standing beside him, no longer wearing the hazzir of agate and opal and silver that rendered him invisible. The young man’s eyes were hazy with the lingering effects of his work, his face haggard, his shoulders sagging.
“Hurry—I’ll distract them.” His voice was scarcely a whisper.
“They’ll kill you—” This from Kemmal, still a shadow.
“I’m already dead.” He held out his arm, where the sleeve had been torn by a sharpened stake of poisoned wood.
Alessid never knew whether or not Kammil had grazed himself intentionally. It would be like him: a sacrifice to save father and brother, the act of a truly noble man. Alessid had time only to touch his son’s face with a shadowy hand before Kammil ran back up the slope and called out derisively to the Qoundi Ammar.
Alessid and Kemmal escaped. They reached the hills, and the encampment, and Alessid’s tent, and there Razhid was waiting. When he heard what had happened, he wept for his grandson, for in their shock and grief and exhaustion, his father and twin brother could not.
The wall fell.
Sheyqir Za’aid was slain by his own frightened and disaffected officials, who then surrendered the city to the mercy of Il-Nazzari.
Of the hundreds of Qoundi Ammar who had not managed to kill themselves for the shame of their defeat, Alessid selected ten and set the rest to replanting every single tree that Sheyqir Za’id had destroyed. When he was satisfied, he had them slaughtered. The ten, however, he sent back to Rimmal Madar. These were given hazziri to prevent them from taking their own lives because of their dishonor. Once in Dayira Azreyq, they said to Sheyqa Nizzira what Alessid had told them to say: that there was now a new, strong, united country in the world. Its name was Tza’ab Rih, for the searing, golden sand-laden storms that scoured its deserts, and for the army led by Il-Nazzari—whose true name was Alessid al-Ma’aliq, son of Azzad al-Ma’aliq.
When Nizzira raged and swore retaliation, the men told her the story of the fall of Hazganni.
Nizzira gave immediate, infuriated, inevitable orders to the qabda’ans of her army: Make ready a force sufficient to crush the al-Ma’aliq forever. The humiliated Qoundi Ammar agreed, eager to reestablish their honor. That night, the qabda’ans quietly and secretly came to a very different agreement: Enough soldiers and strength and substance had been spent on a land no one but the Sheyqa cared about. An hour before dawn, they sought out the only al-Ma’aliq remaining in Rimmal Madar in her well-protected obscurity, and they called upon her to leave her insignificant estate outside the city and become the new Sheyqa.
The precise circumstances of Nizzira al-Ammarizzad’s death remain unknown.
Sheyqa Sayyida’s first act was to declare that she and her progeny would henceforth be known as al-Ammarizzad al-Ma’aliq, in memory of her murdered forebears. Her second act was to send her eldest son to Hazganni on the fastest ship in the fleet.
Sheyqir Allim arrived two days before a magnificent springtime celebration at Hazganni and greeted Alessid as kinsman, conveying the heartfelt wish of his mother that the two nations live in peace, prosperity, and friendship, as befitted cousins bearing the same name and blood. To this, Alessid agreed—just as the qabda’ans of Rimmal Madar had hoped when they fixed on Sayyida as the only choice to take the Moonrise Throne.
Of the many gifts Sayyida’s son brought with him, one became legendary in Tza’ab Rih: the elegant little diamond-studded crown given to Ammineh el-Ma’aliq by her grandfather and worn by her on the day she wed Nizzira’s son. Saved by a loyal maidservant, given to Sayyida as a reminder of her mother, kept by her in secret, she sent it now to Alessid in token of their kinship. As it happened, this was the gift that pleased Alessid most of all.
The celebration was a gathering of representatives from every city, town, and village in the land, to witness and acknowledge the accession of the al-Ma’aliq. There was great rejoicing and feasting among the people from noon until sunset, and then the moment came. But when Alessid was summoned by the acclimations of the people into the great torchlit zocalo of Hazganni, he did not walk the flower-scattered path alone. Bareheaded, he was only the escort for his wife, in whose high-piled hair shone a delicate golden crown lavish with tiny diamonds. And that night Mirzah became Sheyqa of Tza’ab Rih.
The al-Ma’aliq left the celebrations at midnight. With Meryem and Leyliah and Razhid, the family paced in silent mourning to the place where Kammil lay buried beneath the wall he had helped to topple, securing the victory he had not lived to see.
—RAFFIQ MURAH, Deeds of Il-Nazzari, 701 
