The Diviner

Her back was to him, and he spent the moments of her silence admiring the coil of pale hair at her nape and the way curling tendrils escaped down her neck.

“What else have you seen, Solanna?”

“Myself,” she whispered, not facing him. “Here. As a young woman, as I am now, and—and as a very old woman. I know what it means. I will spend most if not all my life here.” Turning, she gave an unconvincing shrug of indifference. “So it would be absurd to leave, wouldn’t it, for I will only return again. Why put myself through the bother of the long journey to my home, when I already know—”

“It’s farther to the seacoast, where I was, than it is to Cazdeyya,” he pointed out. He was enjoying this far too much, he knew, but he owed her a few moments of discomfort. Time to bring in another contender for the dominant emotion in her eyes, he told himself. “Did you see anyone with you, when you were old? Did you see me, Solanna?”

The victor turned out to be fury. He hadn’t expected that. She took the four steps separating them, slapped him full in the face, and was gone before he could do anything more than gasp.

That slap was most inconvenient to the rest of his evening. The impatient and at times fretful exploration of new and puzzling ideas was interrupted by a stinging pain every time he grinned or laughed when another suspicion became a certainty. He managed to work out quite a bit of it all the same, even while being reminded of another puzzle he had some very good ideas about how to solve. And each time he thought this, he grinned again, and laid a hand to his cheek.

What he had realized, and what became the foundation of his beliefs, was that his grandfather and great-grandfather had been correct about many things. For the thing briefly discussed with his grandsire Alessid years earlier burst into his mind, and he understood Acuyib’s meaning.

Each people, he reasoned, belonged to its own land by virtue of oneness with the soil, the air, the water, the plants and animals, becoming a part of the land and sharing in the spiritual quality unique to a particular place. Before one could truly understand and work the magic of the land, it must be in one’s blood, and one must understand it, learn its ways and moods and contours. This could take years, or generations. But it did happen, as Azzad al-Ma’aliq had come to belong to the land he served.

Kings, armies, empires—these things came and went, and they were irrelevant to the land. The round of the seasons, birth, growth, thriving, death, and rebirth—these things were the essentials. They were, as Alessid had reasoned, the balance of living in the place one knew and understood, of being part of a place and its elemental nature.

The relationship between this rich green land and its people was comparable to the correlation of the Za’ada Izim to the desert.

It remained for him to find that balance in a land new to the Tza’ab. For if his people were to endure in this new place, they must become part of the land itself.

Any recounting of the Diviner’s life that attributes to him motives other than these is a lie.

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

22

Over the next years Qamar discovered several things, not all of them to do with his newfound art. He learned, for example, that a man could woo a woman with exasperation instead of exuberance, and manage it quite successfully, too.

He found out that his wife’s visions of the present were spontaneous, but that to see future events required the burning of a complexity of herbs that sometimes worked and sometimes did not but that always left her helpless with exhaustion for a full day afterward. When he had refined enough of his ideas to share them with her —knowing that imprecision would only annoy her and leave him open to criticism—she commented that by this way of thinking, her susceptibility to the smoke of these herbs seemed just one more way the land provided for the people who belonged to it.

He agreed with her and added the observation to the notes he was assembling. For the most important thing of all that he discovered was that he must learn everything—everything—about this land before he could truly begin what he saw as the great work of his life. The work that would mean his life.

Upon their marriage, Qamar and Solanna were assigned three rooms on the second floor of a building overlooking the west zoqallo. It was a corner apartment, with the reception room and Qamar’s study—which he persisted in calling the maqtabba—facing south, a coveted advantage; they were given the chambers only because Zario Shagara, just before he died, asked that his rooms should become theirs as his wedding gift to them. Their bedroom window had a clear view of the western mountains. It became their habit, on clear days, to sit and watch the sunset together. Qamar both loved and dreaded that little ritual. Each nightfall meant that soon he would be in bed with Solanna—but each also meant that another day had passed without his solving more than a tiny fraction of the puzzle.

They had also inherited all of Zario’s books. These included volumes that were relics of the exile, made of parchment in thin, light leather covers, bound in the outdated method of sewing together the tops of the pages. These days books were assembled with the stitching on the left. It was a small, eccentric collection, mainly poetry, and included the collected works of Sheyqir Reihan al-Ammarizzad.

“It’s easy to tell which poems he wrote before, and which after,” Solanna remarked one night. He had been teaching her to read and write the more ceremonial version of his language, the style used in all poetry. “I expect you have no need to ask‘Before and after what?’”

“None at all.” He did not look up from drawing acorns. A dozen types of oak trees grew in the foothills, and he was discovering that each had subtly different properties.

“Neither do you feel any remorse for what your great-grandfather did to him.”

“None at all,” he said again.

“Using Shagara magic to help him do it.”

He set down his pen. He recognized that note in her voice, the one that meant she would pursue the topic until he answered in a way that either satisfied her or angered her so much that she left the room. “Would you like me to write him a letter of apology? He’s dead. What happened is what happened. Nothing I can do, say, think, or feel can possibly make any difference.”

“It might, if you knew what his kinswoman has it in mind to do.”

Frowning, he stoppered his ink bottle—he would get no more work done this afternoon—and said, “What have you heard?”

“Miqelo returned from Joharra yesterday.”

She put the book aside and began pushing hairpins back into the coil at her nape. It was a very hot summer day, one of the few each year when Qamar regretted the south-facing windows that were exposed to fierce sunlight from dawn to twilight. The heat rarely bothered him, but Solanna suffered terribly on days such as these. Not that she would countenance a change of clothing to the practical silks and tunics worn in Tza’ab Rih; that would be conceding to those she considered her enemies. Qamar never quite understood how she could love him, seeing as how he was technically her enemy—but he never said a word about it. His mother would have told him he was learning wisdom, and about time, too.

“What does Miqelo have to say?” he asked.

“That there is a new Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar.”

“New? Kerrima is dead?”

“This winter. Someone called Nizhria sits on the Moonrise Throne now. A cousin of yours in some way, but I’m not sure how.”

“Kerrima’s younger sister. And before you say it, I am quite sure the death was not a natural one. They’re