The Diviner

The men among them, some Haddiyat and some not, were dedicated to the preservation of the ancient traditions. The women, all of whom had Haddiyat in their lines, declared themselves unwilling to see their sons ride off to war—or their gifted sons craft hazziri for death and destruction rather than to help people.

“And how,” Alessid mocked, “can they possibly help anyone, living no one knows where?”

Qamar made a face. “One suspects they intend to help only themselves. Who cares about them, anyway? Come, Ab’ya, Shayir has sired a new foal, and you must tell me what you think.”

That was how it was between them: Alessid spending himself as always in the work of ruling until Qamar beguiled him from the maqtabba or the audience chamber or the now threadbare tent in the garden. They were wellnigh inseparable, the man in his seventies and the boy not yet twenty. He could not help but recall what Leyliah had said: that Qamar had soothed his grandmother Mirzah with his resemblance to Azzad. And then he invariably recalled also that Mirzah had believed Qamar to be Haddiyat.

Nonsense. The woman had been mad.

Qamar was a scapegrace of the first order, with a hundred broken maidenheads and broken hearts already to his credit. If he had any sense of duty, it was well hidden. As for dedication—only in pursuit of pleasure. Even aware that he was a copy of Azzad, Alessid loved the boy. Perhaps, he thought, because Qamar was so like Azzad, the father Alessid had once adored.

It came Alessid’s time to die, peacefully and without too much pain. There was time to finalize certain arrangements—to further endow the hospitals that had been Mirzah’s pride, to distribute money among the poor, to order the planting of yet another small forest of trees. For each of his descendants he chose a small memento: a ring, a bracelet, a necklace, something to remember him by. In looking through the jewels given to him over a lifetime, he found the armbands given him the day he had wed Mirzah. Love and fidelity , fertility and happiness. His lip curled at the sight of the talishann carved into the metal, and he was about to toss both armbands from him when he remembered slim fingers drawing the same symbols on the corners of a letter. And a burning feather. And a thin smearing of blood.

“No,” he whispered to himself. “No. Not Qamar.”

“Al-Ma’aliq?” asked the servant who was helping him sort the jewels. “Is anything wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said, and heard his voice quiver, and said more strongly, “Nothing.”

To Qamar, who was the only one with him when he died—by Alessid’s own order, as he felt death approach—he gave the chadarang service of carnelian and jasper long ago rescued from the ashes of the house in Sihabbah, and the topaz that had belonged to Azzad, and the pearl of Bazir al-Gallidh, and the hazzir from his own breast.

He watched through dimming eyes as the boy slipped the chain over his head. If Acuyib had been so cruel as to make Qamar what Alessid was terrified to admit he might be—

No. He would not die in uncertainty. He would believe, and it would be as he believed, for had not his belief created an Empire?

And thus was extinguished the light that was Alessid al-Ma’aliq, ruler of Tza’ab Rih. His daughter Mairid ruled wisely and well for many years. After her came her Khalila, and then Numah, and Qabileh, and Yazminia, in an unbroken line of succession, mother to daughter. The Empire flourished.

So too the Shagara—both those who remained with the tribe, and those who had splintered from it to dwell in their mountain fastness, no one quite knew where.

And so did Qamar flourish as well, although in the year after his grandfather’s death it seemed to him that his life had been made a deliberate misery by his mother, who decreed that at twenty-one years old, it was time and past time for her wastrel son to learn the responsibilities of being a Sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih.

In brief, and to his horrified indignation, she made him join the army.

—RAFFIQ MURAH, Deeds of Il-Nazzari, 701

Il-Ma’anzuri 698-716

Let me tell you of him.

He was his mother’s last child and third son, indulged by all from infancy. He knew his grandfather Alessid for the first twenty-one years of his life, and was much favored by him. Handsome and spendthrift, witty and aimless, he was the image, it was said, of his great-grandfather Azzad in that great man’s youth.

No one could ever have guessed what he would become.

By Acuyib, the Wonderful and Strange, that which follows is the truth.

—HAZZIN AL-JOHARRA, Deeds of Il-Ma’anzuri, 813

18

Qamar al-Ma’aliq had never been so tired, hot, thirsty, and saddle sore in his entire life. In point of fact, he had never been any of those things before in the twenty-one pampered, privileged years of his existence. Choked by dust, wilted by heat, aching in every bone from a solid month in the saddle, he did not go to far as to curse his mother, but he did enquire forlornly of Acuyib as to why, of all the ideas for his future the Empress Mairid might have entertained, He had seen fit to put the army into her exalted head.

Qamar felt it keenly that he should have been back in Hazganni, dallying with a lissome beauty, sipping cool wine as she sang for him or told him how wonderful he was. The most wearying thing in his life should have been the choice of which robe to wear of the hundreds in his closets.

Instead, his Shagara-gold skin was sun-blistered, and his clothes were rank with sweat, and his last woman had been over a month ago, and he was convinced that life was no longer worth living.

Yet live it he did, every miserable hour of the ride, every rock-prodded minute of the nights in rough camp on this quick advance through the dry summer brownness of Ga’af Shammal, northward to Joharra. He was part of an expeditionary force sent in haste to the aid of his sister Rihana and her husband, Ra’amon al-Joharra—whose former Cazdeyyan hosts had belatedly decided to take exception to the marriage.

This circumstance was prompted by two women. One was an obscure peasant girl who had visions and heard voices that told her the Tza’ab must be evicted from all lands that believed in the Mother and Son. The holy men in the mountains of Cazdeyya, calling loudly upon their captive brethren in the south, had spread her vile spewings like a disease. But no attention would have been paid to the peasant if not for the princess. Cazdeyyan royalty had a turn for religious extremes; Princess Baetrizia’s grandfather had ended his days in a cave with a cat that spoke to him, or so he avowed, in the very voice of the Blessed Mother. In a quest for similar sanctity, Baetrizia had taken this peasant girl, Solanna Grijalva, into her household, where they prayed and fasted, sang and meditated, and emerged to exhort the King every hour of the day and night until he finally agreed to march against the Tza’ab.

Qamar found much to curse about the King of Cazdeyya, his fanatical daughter, and the simple-minded child who were all causing him so much misery. Why couldn’t they practice their silly religion in their great gray mountains, and leave the peaceful south alone? Consensus was that Chaydann Il-Mamnoua’a had instilled in them