The Diviner

and Azwadh and Tallib marriages. He’s smart, and he’s watched you govern all these years, just as I have, so it isn’t as if I’d have to teach him anything. He’s a brilliant war leader—having proved that at your side time and again—and the troops trust and love him. Just as important, the barbarians in the north have been defeated by him personally, so they’ll know not to make trouble.” She paused, and for the first time a powerful emotion shone in her eyes. “And I love him.”

Alessid felt the air leave his lungs in a rush. She had thought it all through, like the Empress she would one day be—but she was also a young girl in love. He had never denied her anything, but he had to deny her this. Because it hurt him to do so, his voice was rough as he said, “Your feelings have nothing to do with it. You will not marry Jefar Shagara.”

Suddenly she was no future Empress. Her jaw jutted, her eyes ignited, and her fists balled at her sides. “I will marry him! You can’t stop me!” And with that she ran out of the tent.

Alessid jumped up and followed her. “Mairid!” he shouted, aware that it was undignified to be racing through the gardens after his wayward daughter. The workers were trying not to stare. “Mairid!”

She vanished into the stables. Cursing, he went after her, and in the noise and bustle of a hundred splendid horses and their grooms and trainers, he lost her. Grabbing a grizzled veteran of the war against Za’aid al- Ammarizzad, he demanded to know where Sheyqa Mairid had gone. The old man dropped the saddle in his arms, trembling with nerves at this furious aspect of the usually self-possessed al-Ma’aliq. Nothing came out of the aged veteran’s mouth but panicky mumblings. Alessid abandoned him and strode along the alley between stalls. Beneath lofty rafters, magnificent stallions and noble mares looked curiously at him, many of them with Khamsin’s eyes. He reached the last stalls, where Mairid’s favorite filly, munching contentedly on oats, glanced around curiously when Alessid began a string of lurid curses.

Pushing through the back door into the sunlight, Alessid swore anew as he saw a slight figure on horseback galloping across the small paddock toward a fence. She had gone into the stables only to snatch a bridle from the tack room. Tempted to do the same and follow her, Alessid abruptly recalled days in his childhood when he had behaved exactly as Mairid did now. Frustrated, angry, unhappy, or simply bored, how often had he leaped onto a horse and ridden out of Sihabbah, putting speed and wind between him and his troubles?

He had done the same on that horrible night when his father and mother and sisters and brother had died. Escape—was there truly such a thing?

She was like him, his Mairid. She would return when she was ready. She would flee into the croplands, and then the forested hills, but eventually the horse would tire, and she would be back by nightfall. It wasn’t like when he was a boy, and his mother worried about the Geysh Dushann. There were no such dangers in Tza’ab Rih, especially not to its ruler’s favorite daughter.

Mairid did not come back by nightfall. Alessid worried, but told himself that a night spent sleeping on the hard ground wouldn’t do her any harm. She would have sense enough to return home when morning came.

But morning did not come. Instead there blew in from the Barrens to the south a thick, choking wind, laden not with fine white-gold sand but with heavy black grit, thick and sticky. To go outside was madness, yet the daily life of Hazganni demanded that people indeed go outside—bundled in cloaks and veiled in silk and scarcely able to see.

Jefar Shagara went outside, draped from head to foot, his horse protected by thin silk over eyes and nostrils. Alessid waited for him to return with Mairid. He sat in his maqtabba, listening to the whining dark wind, his gaze shifting slowly from lamp to glowing lamp by which he was supposed to be tending the business of his Empire.

At last a servant came in. “Al-Ma’aliq, they’re back.”

Alessid went to the windows that overlooked the courtyard, but of course they were tightly shuttered. Even had they been open he would have seen nothing for the obscuring dirt. He stared grimly at the bubble-distorted glass and the carved screens beyond it, and said, “Send her to her rooms. Let no one see her but the servant who draws her bath and brings her food. If she is hurt, send her grandmother Leyliah to her. But no one else. And she is not to leave her chambers for three days.”

The dark wind died down that night. Windows were gratefully opened to fresh air. Brooms wore out sweeping streets and zoqalos free of dirt. And everyone prayed to Acuyib for a swift rain to wash Hazganni clean.

When Mairid did not emerge from her rooms after the prescribed three days, Alessid surmised she was sulking. She was willful and stubborn, but so was he. Still, he called into his presence the servant who brought her food and water.

“What does she say when you leave her meals at her door?”

“Nothing, al-Ma’aliq. She has not come to the door to accept the food herself. The plates are left outside, and only the water is taken in.”

Scorning him by starving herself was the action of a spoiled child. Mirzah was right; he had given Mairid her own way for too long. But when the fourth day passed and no one saw her, his anger was such that he went upstairs to her rooms and flung open the door, bellowing her name.

She lay on the flowered carpet, a frail little figure in a white nightrobe soaked with sweat and stained with vomit.

When Leyliah saw her—tucked up in bed, mumbling with fever—she turned white to the lips.

Alessid, who sat at his daughter’s side holding her hand, felt his heart stop. “What?” he rasped. “What is this?”

“I cannot be sure,” Leyliah whispered, suddenly looking every one of her seventy-four years.

Mirzah, seated on the other side of the bed, wrung out another cool rag and bathed Mairid’s brow. “No, Mother. You are sure. Tell us.”

Sinking into a chair, the old woman drew in a shaky breath. “Shagara legend tells of a burning dark wind that killed hundreds of our people.”

“When their tents fell on them in the storm,” Alessid reasoned.

“No. It was a disease. Hundreds died—the very old and the very young at first, then—”

“But some survived it.”

Leyliah would not look at him. “Of every ten, four died.”

“Mairid will live.”

“Alessid—”

“She will live.” He stared Leyliah down. “Summon Kemmal. He will make hazziri for his sister. She will live.”

A spark of hope shone in Leyliah’s beautiful eyes. “In that time long ago, there were no Haddiyat—” She stopped, and wonderment spread over her face. “Of the Shagara who survived, within a generation—”

“Then it’s not inevitably fatal. Mairid will live.” He looked at Mirzah. She nodded slightly. For that scant moment, they were in complete harmony.

“Yes. She will live.” Mirzah’s lips tightened as if to hold back other words, but within a moment they escaped, cold and bitter. “Al-Ma’aliq has decreed it.”

At first the illness was confined to the poorer quarters, and people who tended animals, and those who worked in the fields. Not everyone took sick of having been outside, but there was no pattern to immunity. And soon the disease spread, and with it fear as more and more died.

The initial fever was followed by violent purging, as if the body tried desperately to rid itself of sickness. But this only weakened the victim, so that when the fever returned there was no defense. The tongue turned black, and death followed within hours.

Shagara healers were overwhelmed. Alessid sent to their summer encampment for others, but the disease had struck in the wilderness, too.The Haddiyat forsook their usual fine craftsmanship to make hundreds of crude hazziri, and after a time the specific combination of gems, metals, and talishann was discovered that could see a victim through the disease—although the work of some was more effective than the work of others.

But this took many weeks, and all the while people were dying.

—RAFFIQ MURAH, Deeds of Il-Nazzari, 701