A Wind in Cairo (3 page)

He paused only once. Astonished. He was the first ever to pass her gate. He broke it in exultation and cast it down. He made a woman of her.

He dropped from her at last, exhausted. She lay beside him. There was no fire left in her. He stroked her. She quivered. He smiled. “My beauty,” he said tenderly. “My beloved.”

White pain seared his cheek. He surged up in shock. She was out of his reach, pausing once in her swift flight, turning. Her eyes struck him more terribly than any slash of her nails. Black, burning, relentless hatred. But worse than that: contempt. She spat in his face.

He was up when the Hajji came, pacing, brooding on the incomprehensibility of women. Had he not offered her the greatest gift which he could offer? Had she not begged him in all but words to take her and be her lord? And what had she given him in return? Hate. Scorn. Bitter ingratitude.

“Allah be thanked,” he said, “that I was not born a woman.”

“It is a pity you were not.”

Hasan spun. He bowed as low as his hurts would allow, but his mind was not on it. His heart had shrunk and chilled. The Hajji's face was ice and stone. “I regret,” said Hasan. “Honored master, I regret my error. I thought she loved me.”

“You thought nothing but that you lusted after her.”

“She is so beautiful,” Hasan said. “How could I help it?” The Hajji's eyes were as coldly contemptuous as the woman's had been. Hasan cried out in anger and in hurt. “Why do you look at me so? She's only a slave!”

“She is not,” said the Hajji, harsh and cold. “She is my daughter.”

Hasan was struck dumb.

“Your name is known to me, Hasan al-Fahl. Hasan the Stallion, Hasan to whom all the laws of God and man are as nothing, whose only law is his own desire. You care not whom you destroy, if only you are sated.”

“She tempted me! She was alone with me. She touched me. She laid hands on my naked body.”

“We trusted you. Even you,” said the Hajji. “We thought that you were a man.”

“I am a man,” said Hasan. “Not a child or a eunuch or a stone.”

“A man rules his lusts. Only a beast would do as you have done: rise up in the mere presence of a female, and seize her, and rape her.”

“I am a man,” Hasan insisted. “A
man
.”

“A beast,” the Hajji said, immovable. “But a beast in human form, who knows the laws of hospitality, who breaks them with utter disregard for the consequences.”

“I thought she was a slave.”

“A man will touch nothing that is another's, without his master's leave. A man will ask at least a woman's name before he forces himself upon her.” The Hajji's mouth twisted in his beard, as if he choked on bile. “Why do I speak to you of humanity? You have none. I would destroy you like the dog you are, but you have eaten my bread and salt; and I, at the least, am a man. I cannot take the life of a guest. But you must pay for what you have done.”

Hasan humbled himself utterly: he bowed at the Hajji's feet. He said, “I will serve you for as long as you ask it. I will take your daughter as my wife; I will labor to atone for my fault.”

“Indeed you shall labor, but never so lightly as you many hope. As for your wedding my daughter…” The Hajji laughed. Hasan shuddered at the sound of it. There was no mirth in it, no mercy. “Even if I would bestow my sole beloved jewel upon such a creature as you are, she will not have it. Unless,” he said, “she has you as her slave.”

“But a Muslim may not—”

“And a man entire most certainly may not.” The Hajji smiled at Hasan's horrified comprehension. “No, young stallion; I think you do not wish to give yourself to my daughter.”

“Then—you will not—you will not—” Hasan was almost weeping in relief.

“I will not,” said the Hajji, “precisely.” He drew from his robe a thing most terrifying in its ordinariness: a string of beads such as the pious prayed on, ninety-nine amber droplets for the ninety-nine Names of God, and for the hundredth, the hidden Name, a bead of jade carved with the Seal of Suleiman.

The string fell upon Hasan's shoulders. It was light, as amber always was: startling to one accustomed to the weight of simpler stones. And yet it held him as with chains. His eyes could move, but no more. They looked upon a face transformed. Humble no longer, nor simple, nor ever serene.

Oh, he had erred; erred beyond hope or help. This was no mere holy pilgrim, no poor saint scraping his austere living in the City of Victories. This was a great lord of the hidden arts. A sorcerer. A magus. A master of power.

He rose up in the mantle of it, august, suddenly terrible. He spoke names not meant for mortal ears to hear. He summoned beings whose very presence was madness. He wielded powers such as Hasan had never dared to dream of. He raised a tower of light above Hasan's shrinking soul, and he called a mighty tribunal to judge this one who had sinned so grievously against him. Hasan's eyelids were no defense. Faces out of dream and out of blackest nightmare branded themselves upon his brain. They were above even scorn. They were justice wholly, untempered with human weakness. They judged, they deliberated, they pronounced sentence.

“What your soul is,” the Hajji said, “what your deeds have made you, be.” He laid his hand on Hasan's head. Light as air, weighty as worlds. “But lest you find contentment in the shape which is your soul, let this geas lie upon you. As all your life women have submitted to you, now shall you be fated to submit your inmost self to the will of a woman. Mute you must be, as a beast is mute, but once and only once, in true and potent need, may you speak with the voice of a man; and you shall die before you live again in that form in which you were born. In the Name of Allah, in the name of Muhammad who is His Prophet, in the name of Suleiman who ruled the races of men and Jinn, by all the power that has been granted me, so let it be.
Inshallah!”

Every teller of tales in the bazaar told of magics such as this. None had ever warned that there was pain. He was torn asunder down to the very soul and made anew, and every bone that was reforged, he traced in lines of fire. He burned, he itched, he throbbed like one drawn on a rack. And he could not even scream. He had no mouth. His voice was air and agony.

Light smote him. He reeled, slipping, staggering. His feet clattered on tiles. He struggled to rise. His head struck stone. He toppled, crying out in fear that touched the edge of madness. No human voice smote his ears, but the scream of a stallion.

He lay gasping. The world was dim, distorted; there was too much of it all around him, and yet not quite enough. Twilight sight: flat, indistinct, such colors as there were muted or gone strange. But ears and nose took in wonders. He could hear the very rush of blood in his veins; drink scents for which there was no human name. The stone of the floor breathed an air of…red, with brown, a little gold. The wall was silvered gold, with earth and lead and something dusty-sweet. The carpet…

Again he staggered. He was erect, but not erect. His hand stretched. A hoof pawed the carpet. His eyes peered down a long nose, a stream of white in dark-but-not-black. Red. Its scent was red. Like cedarwood: the color that was half of its essence. His head swung as no man's could ever swing. Long mane, long body, red, all red.
Horse,
said the scent of it.
Stallion. Stark and screaming terror.
He fled. It followed, stumbling, tangling slender legs, skidding on stone, crashing into the wall. He leaned against it and trembled.

The man was sound and scent far more than sight. Soft tread, the whisper of a robe, the acrid catch in the throat that was humanity. To the eye he was a shadow filled with light, shimmering with magery.

Rage boiled. Hasan lunged.

He struck a wall of light. Bonds of light fell upon him. A hand settled burning between his eyes. “Peace,” said the Hajji in a voice as soft as wind in grass. Hasan's wrath sank down. His body bowed to the will of the magus. To halter and lead that bade him follow; to magic that granted him grace to walk as a stallion should walk, and not to stumble like a newborn foal.

Enchanted, he could only accept. He could not marvel; no more could he rebel. The Hajji led him through the streets of his own city, and he found in them nothing that he knew. Something brushed his haunches; he had lashed out before he thought. The magus' touch deepened the spell upon him. He drifted all but witless through a world of shadow and of sudden light.

His nostrils flared. Horses. A fragrance of paradise: mares. Far below thought where no spell could reach, he began to be afraid. This place at least he knew. The long lines of tethered horses; the awnings spread to shelter the elect of men and beasts. The horse-market of Cairo.

Meek, placid, harmless, he stood in a dealer's circle while men who stank of commerce ran hard hands over his body, thrust fingers in his mouth, peered at his feet.

“He is young,” the Hajji said, “and he has been ill trained. His master made a pet of him; he has never known bit or saddle.”

“That's easy enough to remedy,” said the rankest of the men. “And his breeding?”

“Princely,” replied the Hajji. “But not, alas, pure. His dam is of Circassian stock.”

“Unfortunate,” the horsedealer said.

“And yet he has beauty, and he can perhaps be sold to one who has more care for the beast himself than for his breeding.”

“There are such,” the horsedealer conceded. “Franks, maybe. They like our beauties for their ladies; they seldom know enough to mark a cull.”

“He is hardly that,” said the Hajji.

They chaffered long over him. The Hajji was more than magus and saint; he was a merchant of no little cunning. He drove a hard bargain. And yet at last he struck it. The dealer feigned mighty howls of rage and loss, but his scent was most content. “He must, of course, be gelded,” he said as he parted from the Hajji. “Since he is not
kehailan,
of the pure blood, and since a stallion is no fit mount for a lady…you understand.”

“I understand,” said the Hajji, without a glance at the one he had thus betrayed.

They tethered Hasan in a place of little enough honor, well apart from the mares, hobbling him front and rear and binding his head. He was given fodder, which he would not touch, and water, which he barely tasted. He could neither struggle or escape, but he could will himself to death. Surely Allah would understand.

The hours stretched. No gelder came. The sun beat down upon him. He let it. Flies beset him. He did not heed them. He was a thing, a possession. He had will for nothing, except to die.

With infinite slowness a new truth dawned. The spell was fading. His senses were coming clear again.

All the worse for him when the knife began to cut: that he would feel the pain.

Night fell, passed. He slept. In dreams he was a man again, doing what a man could do. Small things. Counting on his fingers. Putting on his drawers after he had bathed. Bowing in prayer.

He woke, and waking was the dream. His bonds and his bondage. His rough beast-shape.

The muezzin's cry called all good Muslims to the prayer of the dawn. He could not purify himself. He could not bow toward Mecca. He could scarcely move at all. And yet his heart, child of habit that it was, intoned the prayers.

His body scented mares, dawn, urgency. A man strode toward him. No knife was in his hand
,
and yet Hasan recoiled from him in blind revulsion. He loosed the hobbles, caught the lead, wrenching brutally at Hasan's head. Astonished, taken aback, Hasan was conquered before he knew it, trotting at the man's side.

The horse-fair was in an uproar. A caravan gathered in the square. Hasan found himself part of it, tethered to the saddle of a haughty and flatulent camel. There were other stallions, ridden and led; more geldings than he cared to contemplate; a herd of mares guarded like queens.

Words came in snatches through the tumult. They were meant for Damascus, most of these horses, all of these laden mules and camels. Time was pressing. This caravan like many others skirted the edge of the law, taking the shorter way through Frankish lands; but bribes and threats and promises lived little longer than water in the desert. To pass in safety, they must pass swiftly or not at all.

To him, for this little while, this alone mattered: no knife would touch him while his master had need of speed.

No. He had no master. He had only captors.

The caravan began to move. Perforce he moved with it. He found that he could pace just short of the lead's farthest extent, and breathe air that was almost clean, and raise his head a little above the dust of the caravan's passing.

He found himself dancing, because it was easier than walking. His belly was hollow. He regretted now that he had not drunk more deeply of the water which had been so plentiful for his taking.

Foolishness. He wanted to die.

His body had a mind of its own. It wanted to live. It wanted to live and be whole.

With every ounce of will he had, he made himself plod like the gentlest nag in the caravan. No one took overmuch notice of him. He was tethered and he was docile. The mares had all the guards to themselves: some, barely more than foals, were given to straying.

The whole long line of them wound out of the horse-market up the broad expanse of the Palace Way to the Gate of the North that looked upon Arabia. They passed beneath its echoing arch, out under the blue vault of the sky. Away westward glittered the Nile, broad as a sea, and beyond it the white splendor of those works of Jinn and giants, the Pyramids of ancient Giza.

Desert besieged all that country, but here the river was lord. The earth was black and rich beneath Hasan's feet, Nile earth, bursting with fruitfulness. A myriad of green scents entranced his nostrils. Grass grew near the road, tantalizing for that he could not reach it. Fellahin toiled in the fields that ran down to the river; water birds cried in the rushes there, and somewhere far away roared a bull of the Nile.