After a few minutes had elapsed, I murmured to Tom, “I imagine he is debating with himself whether to come down and greet us at all.”
“He had better,” Tom said. “I’ve got Pensyth’s measure now. I can make quite a stink if the sheikh doesn’t cooperate.”
I did not like to think of us having to cause trouble just to get our work done. To distract myself, I occupied my time studying the courtyard. As I had not yet seen the caliphal estates outside Sarmizi, I thought this place the pinnacle of Akhian elegance; even by those standards, it was exceedingly pleasant. Detailed panels of stucco adorned the walls, some of them painted in bright colours, and jardinières edging the gallery above spilled a wealth of greenery into the air. The fountain at the center held a Nichaean figure that was either a reproduction or a relic in surprisingly good condition. Given the sheikh’s apparent status and wealth, my bet was on the latter.
Tom, however, grew steadily more restless. I think he was on the verge of speaking again, or even getting up to leave, when the sheikh emerged from an archway to our left.
He was not pleased to see us—not pleased to see me, I suspected—and made very little effort to hide this fact. He neglected the usual greetings and said to Tom, “Is it customary in your land to arrive with an unwelcome guest?”
This was a shocking breach of hospitality on his part. Tradition there holds that no guest is unwelcome: an Akhian nomad may be starving in the middle of the wastes, and he will still be expected to share his last scraps with a visitor. At the time I did not know how egregious his behaviour was, but it still rocked me back on my heels, metaphorically speaking.
Tom took it in better stride than I did. He merely said, “I beg your pardon, Hajj, but we’re here on a matter of business, and our duties to the Crown have to take precedence. I requested an audience for Dame Isabella and myself together because we’re partners in our work. Even if we weren’t, the idea we’re pursuing right now is hers. She understands far better than I do what is required. If I came here alone, I would be wasting both my time and yours.”
The sheikh looked as if he wanted to say we were still wasting his time. I wanted to cast subtlety to the wind and ask him what grievance he had against me; it was increasingly apparent that his animus went beyond the ordinary sort of prejudice I had dealt with before. But however much I boiled inside, I could not ignore the fact that I was representing the Scirling Crown, and that any action I took would reflect not only upon my own character, but upon that of my country. So instead I bit my tongue—literally, though only for an instant—and said, “Your pardon, Hajj. We will make this as quick and painless as we may.”
Perhaps he had thoughts similar to mine. He was, after all, our designated liaison with the Akhian government; his actions reflected on his people as well. With bad grace, he sat in one of the wickerwork chairs and gestured for us to do the same. “What is it, then?”
Fortunately I had spent some time preparing my reply. In as concise a manner as I could, I related to him the potential value of honeyseekers as comparative subjects, and the necessity for feeding them upon eucalyptus nectar to maintain proper health. “We are told you have some here in your gardens,” I said. “If I were permitted to see the stand for myself, I might judge whether it would provide enough sustenance for a breeding pair. Should that be the case, then we will have my honeyseekers shipped here, to supplement our research.”
During this explanation, the sheikh had been looking fixedly at the centerpiece of the fountain, with an expression that said the sight did not bring him much pleasure, but was preferable to the alternative. As I came to a close, he opened his mouth to reply—but he was forestalled by the entrance of another visitor.
I had heard this one approach as I spoke: a clatter in the courtyard, as of a horse’s hooves on the pavement, followed by a brief exchange of speech, too muffled for me to hear. But I did not realize the horseman was coming inside until the sheikh’s gaze shot to the archway through which Tom and I had entered. From behind me a voice rang out in Akhian, saying, “Brother, I have bad news.”
If Husam ibn Ramiz had disappointed my expectations of a desert nomad, this man fulfilled them. He wore the dusty, bleached-linen robe, the boots of worn camel leather, the dark cloak over it all. His headscarf flared behind him as he strode in, kept in place by its encircling cord, and he even had one corner of the scarf drawn up over his nose and mouth, to keep the dust out. He reached up to unfasten this veil as he spoke—but even before that covering dropped, I knew him.
Instinct alone kept me from whispering, “Suhail.”
He was in a bad temper; that was obvious from the jarring motion of his stride. Dismay overwrote this as he realized the sheikh was not alone: his momentum faltered just past the threshold, and he said, “My apologies. I didn’t realize you had guests.”
I had put my own scarf across my face in deference to the sheikh; now I turned my head, so that even my eyes were concealed. My heart was beating triple-time. Gears clicked together in my head, fitting together with the precision of clockwork. I no longer needed to ask why the sheikh detested me so, for I knew the troubles I had experienced with my own family, those members of it who disapproved of my life and my actions. And I knew that my behaviour in these next few moments—mine and Suhail’s—would leave an indelible stamp on all that followed.
“You,” the sheikh said in a tone fit to freeze water, “are supposed to be in the desert.”
“I know,” Suhail said. “The Banu Safr—Wait.” He changed to Scirling. “Wilker, is that you?”
Tom rose awkwardly from his chair. “It is. I—did not expect to see you here.”
I almost laughed. I had imagined that trying to find Suhail would be like looking for one grain of sand in the desert. He could have been anywhere in Akhia, or nowhere in the country at all. Instead he was the brother of the very man with whom our duties required us to work.
Suhail sounded baffled, as well he might. “Nor I. What brings you to Akhia?”
I could not continue staring at the tiles of the courtyard floor forever, however complex and fascinating their design. I lifted my head, gazing at a spot just to Suhail’s right, and gave him a polite nod. “Peace be upon you, sir.”
He stared at me. My face was half concealed, but surely he must recognize my voice, as I had his. And what other Scirling woman would be sitting here with Tom Wilker?
I could read nothing from his expression, so blank had it become. Perhaps he did not recall me after all. Then he drew in a breath and gave me a brief nod, not touching his heart as he might have done. “And upon you, peace.” He directed his attention once more to Tom. “Let me guess. You are Lord Tavenor’s successor.”
Whether Tom missed his choice of singular noun or simply chose to disregard it, I cannot say. All I know is that for once, I wished him to be less energetic in defending my status. “Yes, Isabella and myself both. We didn’t realize you were involved.”
“I’m not, really,” Suhail said carelessly. “My duties are out in the desert.” He reverted to Akhian, turning once more to the sheikh. “But I’m interrupting—I do apologize. Brother, when you have a moment, we should talk.”
His disinterest in speaking with us was palpable. Tom cleared his throat awkwardly and said, “We are only here to see the eucalyptus trees in the garden. Hajj, if it pleases you, a servant could show us what we need. That way we won’t keep you from your business any longer.”
This suited the sheikh very well, who was calling for a servant almost before Tom was done speaking. Suhail did not wait around for us to be handed off, but vanished through one of the archways. I waited in my chair, with what I hoped looked like demureness, until someone came to guide us to the garden, but what kept echoing through my mind was: Suhail ibn Ramiz ibn Khalis al-Aritati.
It would have meant nothing to me three years ago, when I first met Suhail. I was not sufficiently au courant to name the influential families of Thiessin, let alone Akhia. But he was the
younger brother of a sheikh, the scion of a tribe that had helped put the current caliph on the caliphal throne. Oh, I could imagine how his brother had seethed to hear the rumours about our conduct as we traveled the world together. Did anyone on the Scirling side of things know my archaeological companion was the sheikh’s brother? Or had Hajj Husam kept that connection sufficiently hidden? The latter, I suspected, or someone would have thrown this in Tom’s face when he insisted on the Crown hiring us both.
I saw nothing of the gardens as we walked through, though in hindsight I can say they were magnificent. Only my awareness of duty made me capable of focusing on the eucalyptus trees, when they were put in front of me. It was a luxuriant stand, capable of supporting at least a dozen honeyseekers, let alone my little pair. “Yes, this will do,” I said, and then: “Let us get back to work, Tom. We don’t want to distract the sheikh any more than we must.”
He kept his mouth closed until we were well clear of the house. Finally he said, “That was surprisingly cold.”
“It had to be.” I stopped and leaned against the wall of a shop, because I could not face threading through the crowds while my thoughts were in such turmoil. “Duties in the desert, indeed. Tom, I believe the sheikh has gone to some effort to keep me from encountering Suhail, and vice versa. Now that has blown up under his feet.”
“You think Suhail was pretending, then?”
The question put a chill in my stomach. That I had read the sheikh’s intentions correctly, I was sure; it explained his animosity toward me, his refusal to acknowledge me except when necessity forced it upon him. But what if his fears were unfounded? What if his brother did not care that I had come to Akhia?
I could not believe that. Even if the warmth of our friendship had faded utterly from Suhail’s mind, he would not have been so cool toward me. Indeed, the very fact of his coolness told me he had not forgotten: he would only act so if he needed to persuade his brother that nothing untoward would occur.
“He did not even ask after Jake,” I said. My son had grown exceedingly fond of Suhail during our travels, the two of them bonding over a shared love of the ocean. “Yes, I am sure it was pretense.”
Tom did not argue. “What now, then?”
A very good question. I had put more time than I should admit into imagining what might happen when I encountered Suhail again … but none of it had accounted for the possibility that our meeting would not be as free and easy as our previous interactions.
There was only one answer I could give.
“I will do my work,” I said, and pushed off the wall. It would have been better had we been returning to the House of Dragons, rather than our lodgings in the Segulist Quarter. Then I might have distracted myself properly. “I will not give anyone cause to say it was a mistake to send me here.”
But even as I spoke those words, I knew them for a lie. I had in my desk at Shimon and Aviva’s house a folded piece of paper, and I would see it in Suhail’s hands if I had to climb the walls of the sheikh’s house to do it.
FIVE
A favour from my brother—Our routine—We lose Prima—A new arrival—Dragon wrangling
Alas—or perhaps I should say “fortunately”—climbing the walls of the sheikh’s house would not have done me any good.
I had the sense to turn for aid to someone I trusted not to make the problem worse: my brother, Andrew. That he might laugh at me was entirely possible, but I could admit my conflicted position to him without fear of it rebounding upon my public reputation. (Tom I trusted even more, but any action he took would be read in light of the stories told about the two of us.)
When Andrew walked me home the next day, I invited him to the courtyard, where we might converse in relative privacy. “I was wondering if I might ask a favour of you,” I said.
“Of course,” Andrew said without hesitation. Then he grinned. “Am I going to regret saying that?”
“There is no reason why you should. It is not dangerous—oh, don’t look so disappointed,” I said, laughing. “It has to do with the sheikh’s family. As it happens, his younger brother Suhail was our traveling companion during my time aboard the Basilisk.”
“I see,” Andrew said, and then: “Oh. I see.”
As separate as we had been these past few years, he still knew the rumours. No doubt he had some of them from our mother. “The tales are stuff and nonsense,” I assured him. “Suhail is only a friend, and a respectable scholar. But it seems the sheikh disapproves of our association, and I do not wish to antagonize him by doing anything that might be seen as forward. I was wondering if you might carry a message for me—nothing inappropriate, you have my word. Merely that I have acquired a piece of research material, which I think would be of interest to Suhail.”
Andrew forbore to mention that I referred to Suhail by his given name alone. It was habit, left over from our time on the Basilisk, when I had not known any more of his name than that, nor any title to gild it. “You want me to take the research to him? Or should I just tell him you have it?”
“I should like to give it to him myself, if I can,” I admitted. “Though if that fails, then yes, I would like you to convey it on my behalf.”
My brother shrugged. “Very well. I’ll see what I can do.”
What he could do, unfortunately, was to inform me the next evening that Suhail was already gone from Qurrat. “Back to the desert,” Andrew said. “The sheikh doesn’t go out there very often himself, so he’s got his brother acting as his representative with the nomads.”
And when, I wondered, had that practice begun? After Suhail came home following the death of his father? Or when word came that Tom and I would be assuming Lord Tavenor’s duties?
Either way, it put Suhail quite neatly beyond my reach: a most frustrating situation. I could only hope that he came back to Qurrat soon, or Tom and I received permission to go out into the desert ourselves. As Andrew had said, he was the sheikh’s representative to the Aritat, and they were the ones providing us with our eggs and live drakes. He should not be terribly difficult to find.
Neither of those things happened right away, however, and in the meanwhile I had my work to keep me busy.
Dar al-Tannaneen had its own rhythm, established under Lord Tavenor’s oversight. The beasts must be fed, their enclosures cleaned, their health monitored. On Eromer the Scirling soldiers took up the burden of these tasks, so the Akhians could go to their prayer courts; on Cromer the Akhians returned the favour. (Our soldiers largely spent the resulting time idling about rather than reading Scripture. There were no Assembly-Houses in Qurrat, only Bayitist tabernacles; and Andrew told me the piety of his fellows varied in direct proportion to how much danger their lives were in.)
Tom and I spent those weeks familiarizing ourselves with things: the procedures of Dar al-Tannaneen, Lord Tavenor’s records of what he had done there, and of course the drakes themselves, with whom I became acquainted to a degree wholly unlike any I had experienced before.
Always we had been chasing them in the wild, watching them from cover, ordinarily getting close observation only once our subjects were dead. In Akhia, by contrast, I came to know the dragons as individuals. Quartus was lazy, seeming content to idle about in his enclosure, some days rousing no further than the minimum necessary to gulp down his meal. Quinta was fretful, and the reason the enclosures had been deepened partway through Lord Tavenor’s tenure, for she had almost escaped her pit on several occasions. The juvenile we called Sniffer had endless curiosity, and would play with objects we threw into his cage as toys.
None of that was immediately useful to our task, and I confined my notes on such matters to a private book, rather than the official records of Dar al-Tannaneen. This was the sort of thing Tom and I wanted to publish, separately from the business that had brought us here: it added to our store of knowledge about desert drakes, if not our ability to breed them. But we were not going to rush anything into print, regardless of military oversight. We needed to know more.
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I knew perfectly well what was said about me around the compound. Tom had insisted I work at his side; this fed all the rumours that he and I had been lovers for years. I suspect, but do not know for certain, that Andrew got into fistfights in defense of my honour. Certainly Pensyth disciplined him for something, and more than once. I never asked why. Eventually the gossip among the Scirlings stopped. Whether it continued among the Akhians, I did not know, and did not want to.
Despite such vexations, it was a comfortable routine, and continued for nearly a month. And then, as they so often do, things seemed to happen all at once.
* * *
It began with Prima dying. She had been the first adult drake brought to the House of Dragons, and her health had been failing her for some time; but she was a tough old thing, and clung to life long after our assistants expected her to go. In the end, however, the trials of captivity won out, and she passed away.
The loss troubled me. It felt like a failure on my part and Tom’s, even though Prima had begun to sicken well before we arrived in Akhia. It did, however, afford us a chance to examine her quite thoroughly, which was of great benefit. We dissected the carcass from muzzle to tail, handed off the bones to be preserved—nothing here would be wasted—and studied the remaining matter in detail. I spent an entire day doing nothing but sketching the intricate lace of blood vessels that covered the underside of her wing, which, along with similar structures on the underside of the ruff, assist in the regulation of body temperature.
Mere days after the loss of Prima, however, we received word that the Aritat had captured another dragon, and were in the process of bringing it to Qurrat. “Another female,” Tom said with relief when he read the message. “Her tendons have been cut and her throat cauterized, and they say she’s healing well.” We had discussed more possibilities for keeping the dragons un-maimed, but the truth was that even if we could devise suitable pens for them—something the drakes could not melt their way out of—transporting them to said pens would still be problematic.