“Love is a dream worth chasing.”
Ismai had been born under a red sky two moons too early, and six years too late. The awkward younger son in a family of strong women, it often seemed that the only time he was noticed was when one of his female relations tripped over him.
The art and curse of being invisible often worked in his favor. When a tray of sweets was left unattended, for instance, or when heavier chores were being assigned to the younglings. As he walked along a low arched tunnel that led into the lower balconies overlooking the Madraj, laden with a pilfered cask of beer and a whole roast fish stuffed with rice and wrapped in fig leaves, it occurred to him that this might be one of those times.
The air was so ripe with wine and beer, spiced meats and fish stew that a boy could just about open his mouth and lick it. The hearthmothers and hearthmasters had been preparing for this feast as ardently as the Ja’Akari prepared for battle.
As if they could feed us back to the glory days, he thought. They think if they can fill our bellies, they will fill the Madraj once more with life. He was willing to eat his share, though, if it would make them feel better.
Although so few of the seats were occupied, what the people lacked in numbers they made up for in color. The modest sky-blue touar of the Ja’Sajani complimented the bright silks of the Mothers, and the Ja’Akari watched over them all, proud headdresses proclaiming their deeds for the world to see. Ismai shook his head at the impractical clothing worn by the outlanders. Their heavy layered robes dragged in the sand and made their faces drip with sweat. These unwanted visitors sat huddled together at the far end of the Madraj, disdaining the company and even the food of the people.
Their rudeness seemed to know no bounds. Ismai saw one man in striped robes leer at a passing warrior and reach out a grasping hand. Fortunately for him, the man’s gold-masked companion grabbed his arm and the girl passed without insult. Apparently they had no warriors in the outlands.
Or perhaps the man had no need of his hand.
The mask glittered as it turned toward Ismai, and he stepped deeper into the shadows with a shiver. Bound neck-to-ankle in strips of black leather, faces hidden from the sun under smooth gold, those men made him feel as if spiders were crawling over his skin. If the man was suffering from the heat, he did not show it. None of them did. They stood in the sun with their blood-red cloaks gathered about them, staring out at the world through their heavy masks, strangers in a strange land. They never spoke, from what Ismai had heard, they never ate. And they were never far from the side of the outlander king’s son.
The tall red-haired man whose arrival had caused such a stir sat at Sulema’s side, laughing when she spoke, touching her shoulder with his. He wore a short, straight, brutal-looking sword at his waist, a heavy torc of enameled gold at his throat and a fancy golden circlet upon his brow. It was gross, the way he flexed and twitched a new set of muscles with every breath, but Sulema did not seem to mind. She touched the gilded stranger on his arm and laughed as if they had been friends forever.
Ismai had known Sulema his entire life, and she had never once looked at him like that.
Sometimes, being invisible was as much fun as having sand in your pants.
Ismai sighed and settled down cross-legged to enjoy his stolen feast. He was skinnier than a tarbok, as his mother reminded him constantly, and fish was good for building muscle. He would eat a whole river serpent, if that would help him gain favor in Sulema’s eyes.
It was the second day of Hajra-Khai, and the youngest would-be Ja’Akari were playing a perilously disorganized game of aklashi. The game was near its end. Several riders had lost their mounts, one was screaming at the top of her five-year-old lungs with outrage, and the sheep’s head was starting to fall apart. The horses were having as much fun as their small riders, snorting and blowing and flagging their tails like a bunch of silly yearlings.
If he craned his neck Ismai could just see the First Warden and First Warrior, a few elders, and the mistresses and masters of craft. They stood with the Mothers in grim-faced splendor beneath the feasting-tents. Above them, silk tassels danced in a breeze that did not reach Ismai, a thousand little hands waving gaily to their favorite contestants.
His own mother, Nurati, sat on high, draped in the many-colored silks of the First Mother of the Zeeranim. Glossy black curls were piled atop her head, braided and belled, with a few long ringlets left to curl disingenuously along her slender neck. Her formidable laugh rang out across the stones like a war-horn. He smiled to see her reclining like a queen upon a low divan, surrounded by a flock of little girls all trying to tempt her palate with fruits and sweets and horns of water sweetened with juice.
Umm Nurati was heavy with her sixth child, when so few women bore even one, and she was venerated by the people. She looked tired and thin, aside from her gourd-round belly. Paraja, the sleek vash’ai who called her kithren, stretched along the front of the divan and fixed her yellow eyes on any who ventured too near. No other vash’ai were in evidence on the high dais. Paraja was a jealous queen.
One of those who drew Paraja’s hot yellow glare was the cat-eyed girl from Atualon. She had the smoothest, darkest skin Ismai had ever seen, true-black like the night sky. She wore her hair in locks like Hafsa Azeina, but where the sorceress stared out from beneath an eagle’s nest of white-gold tangles, this girl had even, oiled locks drawn back from her exotic face and fastened with bands of hammered gold wide enough to circle his forearm. She wore gold at her wrists and ankles, and kept her fascinating curves swathed in jade silk the same color as her strange and beautiful eyes.
Those cat-slit eyes had looked straight through him earlier, as he stood near the mango vendor’s tent with juice dripping from his chin, feeling like a six-year-old child faced with a real Dae princess. She was not as flashy as Sulema, he decided, nor as beautiful as his mother, but it was hard to keep his eyes from her. He stared, the people stared—though they tried to do so discreetly—and Paraja stared, but the night-skinned girl ate figs from a clay bowl in tidy, neat bites, and ignored them all.
If the girl with jade eyes was a moons-lit night, the man at her side was the shadows between stars. A mountain of a man, bald and shiny as if he had been carved of a single piece of obsidian and set with gemstones. His oiled skin was bound from scalp to waist with a symmetrical pattern of delicate scars, as if a spider’s web had been draped over him and had burned itself into his skin. This web was studded with tiny gemstones, so that the man glittered like a starlit night every time he moved. Eyes like a pale blue morning, cat-slit like the girl’s, curved into half-moons as he bared his big white teeth and laughed at the children playing aklashi. He was clad in a brief garment of bright red, and his broad feet were bare. He wore no jewels besides his skin, bore no weapons that Ismai could see.
Several steps higher and not far from Sulema sat Ismai’s elder brother, Tammas. He was, as usual, surrounded by a colorful flock of women and girls. Tammas was the one who had inherited their father’s dimpled face and powerful build. Worse, he was bouncing their youngest sister, four-year-old Rudya, on his knees. The females in his immediate vicinity were all mentally braiding stud-right beads into his hair. Many of them had petitioned Nurati for the chance to bear his child, and none of them bothered to hide it.
Ismai sighed to the soles of his feet, wondering whether there were enough fish in the river to pack that kind of muscle onto his light frame. He had gotten their mother’s fine-boned and delicate looks, and that paired awkwardly with Father’s enormous hands and feet. When he was a small boy, he had thought it a fine thing to be fussed over by all the Mothers for his thick lashes and pretty looks.
At fifteen, it was nearly unbearable.
Their far-cousin Hannei, sword-sister to Sulema, was one of Tammas’s admirers. Her shorn scalp was still paler than the skin of her face and shone with sisli oil. She wore a warrior’s vest hung with small brass bells, and trousers rolled up almost to her knees. Bells flashed at her wrists and bare ankles as well, and upon the dainty chain that dangled from nose-ring to earring, caressing her soft cheek. She was a poet’s vision of saghaani, pure desert beauty on the hunt for her first lover. It seemed to Ismai that, although his brother handed out smiles to the women like flowers, his eyes loved her best. It was known that Tammas Ja’Sajani had never surrendered his dignity to a girl during Ayyam Binat. Perhaps this would be the year.
Ismai sighed again, and ate a mouthful of fish. The skin was perfectly crisp, lemony and salty and spicy all at once. He told himself that he was not envious of his brother’s horde of admirers. In truth, he would be content with one.
The sheep’s head split in two and both halves went sailing into the stands, much to the delight of everyone who was not sprayed with gore.
First Warrior Sareta was up on the high dais near Ismai’s mother, smiling as if the two of them had never been rivals. She stood beside the dreamshifter and Istaza Ani, and the three of them watched the younglings’ game. The pride’s highest-ranking warrior stood head-and-shoulders taller than the sorceress and was more finely muscled than the youthmistress. Her temples were smooth as old leather, and a hundred braids fell behind her magnificent lionsnake-plume headdress in a black-and-gray waterfall nearly to her knees. She wore the traditional trousers and bead-and-bone vest of the warrior, and a graceful golden shamsi, prized sunblade of the desert, gleamed at her side.
She was old, older even than Istaza Ani, and her face had been tempered by time and sun, by blade and wind. Her laughing hawk’s eyes were fixed upon the field. Judging the prospects, he was sure, tallying every strength and weakness of tomorrow’s little warriors.
See me, he urged her with all his might. Find me worthy. Ismai dreamed not of tallying herds and taking census and keeping the borders secure, but of riding a proud war mare across the golden sands with his face bared to the glory of Akari Sun Dragon. In the old stories, Iftallan had ridden at the side of Zula Din, a warrior in his own right. He had not covered his head with the blue touar and stayed home to father babies and tend sheep.
Every spring, girls who would be warriors dropped little clay tablets inscribed with their names into a clay pot set before the First Warrior’s tent. This year, his had been among them. It was a foolish dream. But as Theotara herself had said, “Where there is life, there is room for foolishness.” His heart, young and strong, urged him to folly.
The dreamshifter turned her face and peered directly at him through the thornbush tangle of her pale locked hair. She stared at him, golden eyes hot on his face even across the distance, weighing and measuring him as if he was a fish she might bring home from the market.
The mouthful of food he had just chewed stuck in his throat. He took a long swallow of beer, but sputtered and choked as it went down the wrong way.
Hafsa Azeina smiled slightly and turned to her odd young apprentice, Daru, who was tugging at her hem. Ismai stared down at his tunic in dismay, wondering which was more foolish—spitting beer down his front under the eyes of the sorceress, or falling in love with her daughter.
Sulema laughed. Ismai looked up just in time to see her kiss the flame-haired stranger on his cheek. They were holding hands. She had found her hayatani, then. She had chosen a man to be her first lover. Ismai stood to leave, swallowed the last bitter dregs of beer, tore off his best tunic—ruined now—and threw it on the ground, beside the remains of his meal.
Four Ja’Sajani stepped into the arena, brought the shofarot to their lips, and blew, signaling that the game was over.
A stinging slap of wind filled his eyes with sand and tears. Ismai turned and ran from the arena, too full of fish and noise and bright things he could not have for his own. His shoulder scraped against rock and he stumbled, then tripped over his stiff new sandals and fell headlong into the hard-packed sand. He slid a short way, leaving a considerable bit of face behind, and when he came to a stop he simply lay there, childish tears dripping down his skinned nose and turning the dirt to reddish mud. His knees hurt, the palms of his hands stung, and his face burned, but none of that could eclipse the agony of his heart.
Something in the tunnel growled, a low rumbling song that turned his innards to water and chased away all thought of pain. The scrape of claw on stone, the hush of hot air as a greater predator passed. He held his breath, straining to listen around the drumming of blood in his ears, every muscle strung tight as he tried to blend into the ground. The older tunnels were known to be haunted by all manner of kith and kin, and though the Ja’Sajani cleared them out as best they could before Hajra-Khai, they had been known to miss a beast or two.
There it was again—a low grunt, a heavy breath, a heavy mind pressing against his, hungry and sharp and bright as a new-forged sunblade. One of the greater predators, then, and a boy like him would be not much more than a snack before the midsun meal. Ismai supposed he would taste of fish and beer.
He wondered whether Sulema would notice his absence.
Hello.
He froze from the inside out. The sounds and smells of Hajra-Khai faded until there was nothing left but him, the gritty dirt of the tunnel floor, and an amused presence in his mind. He lifted his head, slowly, and watched open-mouthed as the shadows danced themselves into a recognizable shape. She was smoke and bronze mirrors, midnight moons and found gold. Her eyes were the bright blue-green of gemstones in the river, and her short tusks flashed ivory in an open-mouthed grin.
I said hello. He had not imagined it. She was laughing at him.
Ismai drew himself up into a crouch, and then sat heavily back on his haunches. His mind groped for hers, and it was every bit as awkward as the first kiss he had shared with Kalani, a month past when they had both drunk too much jiinberry wine.
Much as Kalani had, she reached out and showed him what to do.
Like this.
It was beautiful. She was beautiful. She was…
Ruh’ayya. The name came to him, though it was less a name than the idea of the end of a song in the hour just before midnight, when one moon hangs golden in the sky and the other is hidden in darkness. I am Ruh’ayya. You are mine. She sat half-in and half-out of the shadows, he could see her clearly now. She was nearly black, very young, and obviously pleased with herself.
“We are…” …too young to bond, he protested, and you are beautiful, and I am Ismai, though his name came across as laughter in the morning sunlight just before the spring rains. “I love you.”
“Rrrrrrr,” she disagreed, mocking his voice. She detached herself from the shadows and he could see how very young she was, and how lean. It had been a hard winter with nothing bigger than tarbok to eat and one plumed serpent washed up on the beach, rank and good to roll in, and she had smelled the fish he was eating and had wanted a share but decided she would have him instead, but not to eat. He was scrawnier than a tarbok but they would grow together and the pride would simply have to accept it and Khurra’an was her sire and she loved him, too.
I am in love, he said.
Foolish cub. Love is a dream, she chided.
Yes. But it is a dream worth chasing.
She rumbled, a purr, a growl, and knocked him over with her huge head so that she could scrape the rest of his face off with her rough tongue. Ismai laughed, twined his hands in the sparse mane of his Ruh’ayya, and let go of everything he had imagined himself to be.