Six

D U M E A

 

The trouble with men is they never grow up. Some sort of childish instinct, stubborn as a weed, seemed to cling to their nature. Yasmin had told little Noah more times than there were stars in the sky that he was not to persist with his pigeons until after his Judgment. The ceremony was only two moons away. Seven years of schooling and the boy couldn’t wait another two months for the sake of his future. But what truly annoyed her was his father, her husband Hassan. Rather than doing as he should and insisting that the boy study, he continued to indulge Noah’s hobby. Hassan: son of Nalaam, steward of the citystate of Dumea, the fourth of his line to hold the title, and yet it seemed to Yasmin that it was she, not he, who was more concerned with ensuring their eldest son grew to uphold the traditions his forefathers had walked so well before him.

She shook her head and turned from the childish pair back to the house.

It was late afternoon. The sun was low and tawny. The reapers were still collecting in the wheat. She sighed and marched away through the already scythed part of the field.

It was ridiculous Hassan could be so irresponsible. Even more ridiculous, she was stuck in this backwater of a city.

She’d been the daughter of a consul from Kaloom, far to the east, a month’s journey from here. She could still remember accompanying her father on his long journeys south to Hanesda – the City of Thrones, as he’d call it – for the annual councils and First Moon festivals. They would journey to the crown city once, sometimes twice, a year and every time she loved it. The huge white walls gleaming in the sun, the narrow clustered streets, the sharíf’s palace and royal gardens, and all the people, every one of them in a rush, each hour an event.

It was there she’d met Hassan, more than twenty years ago, at a banquet to celebrate the wedding of Játhon son of Sulamar, a prince of the house of Saliph and a kinsman of the sovereign line. Játhon had wed the young queen of Hikramesh the previous week. A particularly favourable match, Yasmin’s father had said. Játhon, as both a relation of the throne and a member of the Calapaari gentry would now join the lands of Harán, Sumeria and Calapaar together by blood, consolidating their accord and strengthening the Sovereignty. It was good, her father said, for peoples, once conquered, to feel themselves masters rather than slaves.

It was an idea Yasmin had never liked. That a woman’s affections should be no more than a tool to engineer the accords and affairs of men, that she too should be one day swallowed up in another’s plottings and manoeuvrings for power. An ornament of convenience, an elaborate currency. That was what she’d liked about Hassan. His interest in her. The way he talked to her. It had been her cousin Tobiath who’d introduced them. Even now the memory remained fresh.

“The best gardener amongst the nobility you are likely to meet,” Tobiath said, presenting him to her.

“Gardener? Is that not the work of servants?”

“My father,” Hassan answered, taking her hand in greeting, “has always taught me that he who is to govern must first know how to serve.”

“You’ll find Hassan a man of pretty words,” Tobiath explained.

“But true ones,” Hassan added, smiling as he gazed at her. “And believe me, it is no lie when I say it is a delight to meet you, Yasmin.”

She liked him instantly; the glossy shine of his black hair, his wide and kind mouth, his almond skin, his perfect height. The way his eyes – doleful, long-lashed, though a little too close together – fixed to her whenever she spoke, as if the room and its assembly of consuls and courtiers was, when compared to her, no more than an inconvenient distraction.

“Are you always so forthcoming?” Yasmin said, smiling.

“Often so. Though,” glancing at Tobiath, “my friends tell me I ought to grow out of it.” His eyes returned to her, measuring. “What do you think, Yasmin? This honesty of mine. Is it a vice or virtue?”

“I would say it has a certain charm.”

“Then a virtue it must be. For you to be charmed it could be nothing else.”

Yasmin laughed. “Well, perhaps your virtue might help us then.”

“Oh?” Hassan slid another glance to Tobiath, then back to her. “I would like nothing more.”

She drifted to Hassan’s side, goblet clasped loosely in hand, leaning at his elbow to survey the room. The space was broad and dim and filled with people. Dignitaries from the cities of Caphás and Tresán along Calapaar’s coastland reclined at low tables, wearing their typically elaborate and multicoloured flax-woven tunics. Yasmin had always loved the bold gaudiness of their designs, how lively and audacious they were. Fashions always seemed to move so quickly out there by the coast, but then they were seafaring cities after all, used to tasting of and exchanging with faraway places. And never ones to miss a celebratory occasion like this, despite the distance. A crowd of Low Easterners dominated the far end of the room, chattering loudly as was their way. Probably members of the newlywed queen’s retinue. And of course there were plenty of Sumerians too, delegates and consuls from the nearby cities of Qadesh or Tirash as well as the crown city itself, no doubt here to jockey for favour and gain the ear of this new and influential union. Yasmin lifted her chin to Hassan’s ear and motioned with her drink at the blithely peopled space. “Tell me. What do you think of them?”

Hassan raised an eyebrow, took a sip of his wine and shrugged. “Well, at a glance, some portly, some less so. Though, on the whole, finely attired.”

Yasmin smiled and shook her head. “No.” She leaned in a little, waited for Hassan to return his attention to her, and then pointed with her eyes and a nod. “I mean them… Játhon and his new wife. What’s her name again?”

“Satyana,” Tobiath supplied in a murmur.

“Yes… Satyana.”

Satyana, queen of Harán’s largest city, Hikramesh, and daughter to king Jashar of Harán. Tall, elegant and swarthy – she stood at the shoulder of her husband as he talked with a rose-cheeked and heavily bearded man – Játhon whispering, the bearded man guffawing, Satyana silent.

“What do you think?” Yasmin asked as they watched. “Are they well matched or no?”

“How could they be anything other? They are wed after all. As all this lovely wine testifies.”

“Does that make them matched?”

“I suspect you have your own feeling on the matter.”

“Yes. As does Tobiath, though our feelings differ, and so I ask…”

Again Hassan took a thoughtful sip of his wine. “I suppose it’s no secret that agreement between Sumeria and Harán is often… well, difficult,” he said. “That Satyana belongs to the house of Najir may remedy this. Everyone knows the sharíf desires a highway from Tirash to Hikramesh to better take advantage of their ports. It’s not hard to see how he may profit.”

“Mhm. An apt price for the building of a road then, a marriage?”

“For some.”

“And what about for you?”

“Me?”

“Yes. What would be your price, Hassan?” Yasmin said, testing the sound of his name on her lips as he had hers. “Why would you marry? For duty? Or devotion?”

Hassan turned from the party and looked directly at her. “Who’s to say the two cannot be one?”

They married less than a year later. They began a family, built a home, and, Yasmin felt, were to build something more. But that was before Hassan’s father died. Before Hassan took up the stewardship of Dumea. Before the light in his eyes that had first drawn her began to wane and the man she knew withdrew. Now Hassan laughed less. Talked less. Worked more. And then, just days ago, there’d come the news about Yasmin’s estranged older brother, Zaqeem, the governor of Qadesh and one of Hassan’s oldest friends – found dead by an altar in a Sumerian forest. Hassan hadn’t slept or eaten well since, but for Yasmin it was different. Her father had disowned Zaqeem before Yasmin knew how to walk or talk, exiling him for what had apparently become an unseemly preoccupation with the outlawed traditions of the Magi. Which Yasmin had always found strange. Nearly a hundred priestly orders, as many as ten thousand men and women, had been destroyed by Sharíf Karel in the Cull three centuries ago when the Sovereignty began, with the few who survived fleeing to Súnam. Why would anyone risk their life and those of their loved ones to pursue the very practices their sovereign’s forebears had fought to eradicate? It made no sense. And yet that was what Zaqeem had done. And now he was dead.

To Yasmin, the news felt strange and vague, a thing she was meant to feel but couldn’t. And so that evening she gazed mutely from the corner of the decree court as the harvest festivities began. She watched the colourfully festooned drapes marking the square and the smiling people who filled it, feeling like a stranger. Like she didn’t belong.

“So glad to see you, sister.”

She looked up to find Bilyana approaching from the crowd, waving as she came. The festival was small, but Bilyana had come dressed in rich blue-dyed cotton as fine as any found in the high bazaars of Qalqaliman. She was dressed fit for a king’s table, her arms braced with twin armlets of polished bronze. Yasmin smiled despite herself. “A fair sight you are, Bilyana, for a fair evening.”

“Is it? You must be yet to taste the wine, sister.”

“A mistake you have not made.”

“A mistake I shall never make. What else is a feast for if not wine?”

“Quite.”

“Mock all you like, but in this place we must scrounge for our delights wherever we can find them. Though I admit, this time ‘delight’ is no way to describe the wine. Perhaps gutterwash or dregs. A right-minded man would not offer it even to his oxen.”

“A right-minded man would not offer any wine to his oxen.”

“Well, perhaps he ought. They may work harder knowing how poor the end of their labour has been.”

“Oxen till for crops, Bilyana, not wine.”

“What? Oh. Well, then useless beasts they are. I’d always wondered why they seem so glum. But at least they have an excuse. You, on the other hand…”

Yasmin balked, frowning, and looked at the other woman. “You are not kind, Bilyana.”

“And never aim to be. Its charm is thought too much of, you know. Now honesty, honesty is a better way, kinder than kindness. Are they not the words of some poet or scribe? Anyway, you are glum, and without excuse, having not endured the wine.”

In truth, Bilyana, of course, was not Yasmin’s sister but rather the wife of her cousin, Tobiath, who, after fostering as a boy with Hassan and Zaqeem at the home of the crown city’s scribe, had elected to follow Hassan here and serve in the schools and library rather than remain in Hanesda. A decision that had built in Bilyana – whose affection for the crown city mirrored Yasmin’s – a sort of wry boredom, but one she wore well, or at least better than Yasmin managed to, tempered by wine and food.

Bilyana sniffed diffidently, her nose ring shivering, and turned her square pudgy hips to glance around at the gathering.

“So,” she persisted, bullish from the wine, “what is it? Your face is longer than a mule’s.”

Yasmin thought about her argument with Hassan that morning. “Noah,” she lied. “The Judgment is so close now. Not that one would know it to see him. All day long he is with those pigeons. It is not good for him. He doesn’t study. He rarely even speaks with the other children.”

“I’d not speak with them either; good-for-nothings all of them. You should leave him to his way.”

“Easily said.”

“Easily done.”

“For you perhaps.”

Bilyana only paused but it was enough to make Yasmin regret the words. Bilyana’s barrenness was the other reason for her taste for wine.

“Yes. Well,” she replied, before Yasmin could pity her with apology. “We all have our troubles… Which reminds me. I have a favour to ask.”

Yasmin nodded meekly, stung by her own callousness.

“It’s my brother, Zíyaf,” Bilyana said, leaning in conspiratorially.

“Is he well?”

“Hm, well, the answer to that is less than simple…” She stopped abruptly and smiled, waving at someone in the crowd. “Old hag,” she muttered to herself, still smiling as she waved. “Smiles to my face and then preens and coos whenever Tobiath is around, laughs like a hyena at all his jokes. A drunken hyena. As though she could be any less subtle. I mean, fathers bless him, your cousin’s a good man but he’s as much wit as a mayfly… Anyway. Zíyaf.”

“Is he alright?”

“Well. He’s taken with a Súnamite, some woman he came upon when your husband sent him down there to collect a Saori staff for the library.”

“Came upon?”

“He likes her… well… is convinced she ought to be his wife.”

“His wife?”

A goblet of the offending wine had somehow appeared in Bilyana’s hand. She sipped it and nodded, the tiny bauble of her nose ring dangling vigorously.

“I see.”

“No, sister, you do not. This Súnamite, it happens she is the daughter of a chieftain.”

Yasmin grimaced.

“Yes,” Bilyana replied. “Exactly. You know our situation.”

And Yasmin did. The reason for Bilyana’s willingness to follow Tobiath to Dumea in the first place had been the fall of her own house and the debts it had crippled her and her brother with. The humiliation of coming to Dumea had been a welcome choice compared to the unforgiving ire of their creditors.

“You’re worried about the dowry.”

“I’m worried about all of it. The visit, we have none to speak for him. Tobiath and I, we are too young, and we have no titles… But Hassan,” she said hopefully. “Well, he is steward of Dumea.”

“Oh, no–”

“They would receive him, Yasmin. He could sit and talk with their elders, decide the brideprice.”

“Bilyana, Hassan is very busy.”

“I know. I know he is. But if he could do this…”

“I doubt he would be willing. The journey alone, there and back, is at least two weeks, likely three with the rainy season just beginning. And the heat…”

“Yes, I know, but there would be good reason for him to.”

“What reason? We have Noah’s Judgment, after that we are at court in Hanesda. I see no way he could–”

“Governor Zaqeem,” Bilyana said suddenly.

Yasmin frowned. The name of her dead brother hung in the space between them. Somewhere a minstrel and strings had begun to play. The crowd were starting to clap. Yasmin stared at the other woman. “That is not funny, Bilyana.”

“And I play no game, sister.” She leaned in further. “What if I told you I knew things, about Governor Zaqeem, about why he died?”

“Zaqeem died because he tried to have a pair of orphan girls put to death on an altar like goats. Should it be any surprise he was come upon by robbers? Everyone knows raiders always seek those disgusting gatherings, all the gold to be had there, and–”

Bilyana touched her arm, gave a short sad smile. “No, dear sister. That wasn’t why. Speak to Hassan. Tell him what I have said. He will understand. Then ask him to favour my brother. He listens to you, Yasmin.” Bilyana finished the wine in her goblet and glanced back to the crowd. “Now, I have to go. I can see Tobiath trying to leave. We have so few parties in this wretched place and always he seeks to leave. To go where, I ask?”

With that, Bilyana briskly walked away. She turned once and offered another tight nervous smile, mouthing the words he listens to you, before disappearing into the shallow throng of people without looking back.