Steles of the Sky (32 page)

Temur touched her arm and brushed past her gently. He crouched beside Tsering-la and Sarangerel. Sarangerel had been an active child, bright and plump even under travel conditions. Now she seemed used up, weirdly fragile, bones almost visible beneath translucent skin. But when she saw Temur’s face, her expression brightened. Her eyes, glazed and dull, focused—though it cost her an effort.

“Temur! They said you went to look for my sister.”

He nodded. “That’s true.”

“Did you find her?”

“I found where she had been,” he said. “But she’d already escaped. Edene didn’t need my help to get away.”

Sarangerel closed her eyes and smiled. Her lower lip was split; a new bead of bright blood started up in the middle of two streaks crusted dark. “Do you think she’ll come find us here, Temur?”

He laid a palm on her cheek. She felt papery, hot, and vague, as if the bones floated in a layer of smoke rather than flesh beneath her skin.

“I can’t imagine her doing anything else,” he said. “She’ll be home before you know it.”

When he said it to Sarangerel, he could almost believe it himself. He reached out, refusing to allow himself to think about it, and took her hand in his. Her flesh felt crackling and strange, as if the skin were baked and fluid had gathered beneath it. Her eyes were glossless as unpolished stones. Her fingers pressed into her palm.

Temur squeezed gently, afraid to rupture the friable envelope of her skin, and realized to his surprise that he could feel the heartbeat inside her. No, not
feel,
exactly. But sense it, as clearly as if he pressed his fingertips to the pulse in her wrist. More so, because a pulse could be fuzzy, tenuous. This was as clear and staccato as a shaman-rememberer’s drum.

What surprised him more was that he felt her illness, too. As a heat, and a tangled snare. Beneath the heartbeat, entwining it, both accelerating and dragging it, so it staggered on cramped fast painful beats like a colt entangled in thorns, still trying to run.

He didn’t know what he was supposed to do. Jurchadai was there, just across Sarangerel’s body. Temur looked up at him, shamed to feel his own eyes wide in need as if he were a child seeking succor—but Jurchadai’s gaze was kind and steady.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Temur.

“No one ever does,” Jurchadai replied. “You’ll think of something.”

Untangle it.

For a moment, Temur thought Samarkar had spoken, or perhaps Tsering-la. But when he glanced at them, they were both intent and thin-lipped. And the voice did not have a Rasani accent. If anything, it sounded like his mother—but Ashra had had an accent too, though faint. And Ashra was dead.

Untangle it,
Temur told himself, thinking of that colt in briars. As he would have with the colt, he approached slowly, examining the winds of the thorny, constricting illness. The fever had a tight hold of the girl.

All Temur could do was pick at it. Not with his hands, but with his will, his focus. His concentration, as if he followed the design in a Song puzzle-book. It had a kind of … heat, as if the fever originated from within it. It half-scorched to focus on it, as uncomfortable as staring into the sun.

Gently, Temur reached out and laid his hand against her forehead.

She squealed as if his touch were icy. She would have wrenched away if Jurchadai were not there, holding her head, keeping her in place. He muttered to her, soothing nonsense, exactly the things Temur would have said to that thorn-tangled colt and in exactly the tone.

Do it fast.

Temur imagined himself grasping the brambles, peeling them back. He imagined them coming away unbloodied, even when his mind’s eye wanted to supply the scrapes and gouges they would leave behind. He imagined the colt—the girl—clean-limbed and unscathed, her heart beating strongly, her flesh cool and smooth.

He opened his eyes, only then realizing he had closed them.

Sarangerel breathed calm and smoothly. Her eyes were closed, the muscles of her neck relaxed as if in soothed, natural sleep.

Temur held himself upright for a moment, more by moral force than physical ability. Then he slid down on the carpet on his side, and let the sharp tears wash his cheeks.

16

Ümmühan curled on the padded seat inside her pierced and latticed litter of sandalwood panels and listened to the men argue in low tones. If she peered through her louvers, she could see them: Mehmed and the chief of his war-band, Malului. They sat in folding canvas chairs dyed in bright expensive colors, the crossed legs carven from lengths of ivory that rested against the floor on their curves rather than their tips.

Mehmed, no ascetic, certainly didn’t mind the comforts associated with the caliphate.

The men were arguing about Ümmühan. They thought they had their voices low enough that she could not overhear, but what few besides Ümmühan and the wizard who had engineered her litter knew was that it did not only amplify and support the sounds she made when she sang, it also picked up the voices of those around her, and made it possible for her to eavesdrop on all sorts of things Kara Mehmed would have preferred she not overhear.

She had asked him for permission to visit the Hasitani. Malului had objected, and now the men were arguing.

Once curled in position on her bench, Ümmühan was ever-careful not to move behind her louvers. The shadow would show, and they would know she was watching—although if they didn’t expect it, they were even bigger fools than she thought.

The argument had gone on for a little time now, and was coming to a head. Malului hunched forward, his spine bowed, his elbows on his knees. In a harsh whisper, hissed between teeth, he said, “I wouldn’t permit my woman to roam about the countryside, associating with those unnatural creatures!”

Ümmühan bristled. Those unnatural creatures, as Malului called the Hasitani, were priestesses of the Scholar-God in Her aspect as creator. They studied the world She had made, the rules and natural sciences that bound it together. They glorified the Scholar-God with their books and their inquiries. They were the most holy of the Scholar-God’s priesthoods, and it was from their ranks that Ysmat of the Beads had risen, of all the prophets the most touched by God. Ümmühan’s small fist knotted inside her silken sleeve, and only with an effort did she make it smooth again.

As smooth as Mehmed’s voice as he said, “You know that’s blasphemy.”

“Caliph—”

“No,” said Mehmed. “The Hasitani honor the Scholar-God as do any of us, and it is they who are the keepers of the records of Asitaneh. My Ümmühan is a poetess. She needs access to their files for the histories she studies for inspiration, in her own way to glorify the Scholar-God.”

Ümmühan was only half-listening. In her head, she was composing a mocking, anonymous song about Malului’s masculine endowments. It wouldn’t have his name in it, of course, but anyone who knew him could hardly miss the pencil-thin line of his moustache and his obsessively oiled curls, so fussed with that he draped a linen cloth across the shoulders of his robes to catch the stains. She had faith he’d recognize himself when it came to his ear.

She was trying to think of a suitable rhyme for “lentils” when Kara Mehmed stood, snapping the front of his embroidered overrobe to make the fabric hang smooth. He stomped down a flight of steps to pause by Ümmühan’s birdcage.

“You may go,” he said. “You will bring your litter-bearers with you, and they will go armed through the city.”

Ümmühan smiled behind her veils, which she had drawn across her face even in the close confines of her performer’s litter. “Yes, my lord,” she said.

Mehmed, left to his own devices, might have refused her request. Mehmed being pushed by Malului would become contrary. He did not like to feel that his choices had been influenced—and because of this, he became strikingly easy to influence.

“Thank you,” she said. “My lord.”

*   *   *

The stronghold of the Hasitani was a red stone building, like so many in Asitaneh. Unlike many in Asitaneh, it had not burned. It occupied a western neighborhood of fading gentility, clustered with booksellers conspicuously exiled from the university district. Female scholars only mingled with the male in a few carefully chaperoned circumstances.

Ümmühan’s litter-bearers were eunuchs, which was the only reason they did not have to wait outside. Instead, they were admitted to within the portico, where wrought-iron gates kept them from proceeding farther. They set Ümmühan’s litter down and handed her out of it, and within moments she had been swept away by the porter.

He was also a eunuch, as strapping as her litter-bearers but some thirty summers older. He led her through the corridors to the abbess’s office and there left her in the antechamber, watched over by a young Hasitana garbed in green trousers and a smock.

Ümmühan was expected. She had sent a letter ahead, and she did not think she would have long to wait. What little time she had to spare, she spent in observing the young Hasitana. She stood behind a sand table writing out some complicated equation with frequent consultations to the wax tablet in her left hand. Once she glanced up at Ümmühan and asked, “May I do something to increase your comfort, poetess?”

“I am well,” Ümmühan said. She smiled at the young woman. It warmed her still, after all these years, to be called
poetess
.

A moment later, and the door to the abbess’s private chamber opened. She stood framed in it, a tall broad-shouldered woman in white, soft around the middle, her graying hair caught back in dozens of woolly, elaborate braids above her veil. Her dark eyes snapped in a face made all the more striking by its contrast to her white veil. The only lines Ümmühan could see were the ones beside her eyes—lines of laughter and concentration.

Not a native of Asitaneh by her skin and hair. But the worship of the Scholar-God reached south beyond Aezin and west past Messaline. It was significant that one could rise to such heights in the face of all prejudice, however. It bespoke both great ability and great strength of purpose, that thing that in men was called character. There was no word for it in women, not in the Uthman tongue.

Ümmühan never forgot it, no matter how many times the abbess extended her palm for Ümmühan to kiss, as Ümmühan kissed it now. Red lines of henna scribed the Prophet’s words across the abbess’s palm, reminding Ümmühan of the tattooed hands of the Nameless, al-Sepehr.

“What have you come for today, daughter?” the abbess asked.

Ümmühan straightened up. She didn’t miss the older woman’s glance at her midsection. That she had not chosen to give her order a daughter was a rope of contention between them, but it was Ümmühan’s womb, and she would not be moved across the line. She might be a concubine, but she would choose to be a barren one. The order could find its daughters elsewhere, and men like Kara Mehmed could elsewhere find their sons.

“I need the libraries,” she said. “And the assistance of a research sister.”

“A new poem?” Even the abbess sounded excited at the prospect, which did nothing to lower her standing with Ümmühan.

Ümmühan held out a sheaf of papers, covered in her own delicate, ciphered handwriting. “This is a report on all that has befallen me since I learned of Kara Mehmed’s intent to overthrow the old caliph,” she said. “There is much here of import. And … I have learned the name of a djinn.”

*   *   *

The libraries of the Hasitani were temples, as it was right they should be—or perhaps it would be truer to say that their temples were libraries. The one Ümmühan was led into now was not one she had visited before. She had studied history and poetry and the natural sciences, it was true, and she had studied theology—when she was a young girl, a student, before she chose to go out into the world and minister to those the Sisters could not otherwise reach.

But she had not studied, in particular, occult history. And that was the room to which she was now brought, under the auspices of a research sister who wore the gray of her calling and moved with a gliding silence, though she was as tall and broad-shouldered as many men. Ümmühan did not ask her name: The Hasitani were not like the desert witches, who sold their names for power. But they kept them as secrets, and used only titles. It was a similar sort of worship to that exemplified by Ümmühan’s own epithet, without the belittling.

This library was a tower building. Every inch of the inside walls was covered in racks, and every curved finger-width of the racks was covered or hung with books. Bound books in the sensible, familiar, Uthman and Messaline style stood on edge between their end boards in arc-shaped shelving, arranged so that anyone walking past could read the spines. Song-style board books sat loose in their ornate boxes on tables, or were put away in drawers. Some, which had been pierced and strung like fans, hung from hooks in space that might be otherwise wasted. Scrolls in scroll-cases hung in racks like bottles of spirit.

The shelves stretched to four times Ümmühan’s height. Two ladders were fixed to tracks at the top and rolled on wheels at the bottom, through a path in the wooden floor that was kept clear of carpets. They looked flimsy, too steep. Ümmühan hoped the catches that held them to their tracks, above, were strong.

Around the library were arrayed leather-covered couches, low tables, narrow-drawered cabinets to hold fan books, maps, or scrolls. A series of torchères stood ready to light the center of the room when night should fall. Ümmühan realized that there would be sufficient candles, at least in that small space, to enable one to read and write with ease even after sunset. A staggering luxury—and one that was not even necessary, as a row of white glass globes suspended over the tables cast the clean, soft light of divine favor over everything below.

The whole of the space was spotlessly clean.

“Do you dust this?”

“Yes,” said the research sister. “How else could I be sure that everything was in its place, and be sure that I knew what that place was?”

Ümmühan took a moment, as the research sister paused before her, to just lift her head until her spine popped straight. She breathed in the sweet density of information. Then the sister said, “Would you like to see something very special?” and led her into the library.