“This is the fabled emirate of Bahdroc,” said Ascelin, unrolling the map to show us. “We’re well out of the Holy Land here, into a place where few westerners ever go. The last of the caliphs had his capital here a millennium ago, and the current emir continues his rule, though on a much narrower scale.”
I shaded my eyes to look at the city. In the center rose a sharp outcropping crowned with more white towers. On the far side of the city stretched a glassy lake or arm of the ocean, disappearing into the distance, the color of weathered jade.
“This city faces east, not west,” Ascelin continued, “onto the land-locked Dark Sea, but if one crosses over the Sea one comes to the edges of the true outer ocean, and to the harbors where spices and tea come in from the far East.”
“It’s not a real trading center like Xantium,” said Maffi somewhat smugly. “It’s not much more than a way-station. Here pilgrims every year start the last stage of their journey to the most holy sites of the Prophet, and here the spices of the East are transferred from ships to land transport.”
“Do they also import silk?” I asked.
Ascelin shook his head. “Silk come overland from the northern part of the East, and spices by water from the far southern parts. I don’t know of anyone who’s actually been there, but the true East must be larger than all the western kingdoms put together.”
“I know someone who’d been to the East,” put in Maffi. “He said that the men there can grow no beards, even if they try their entire lives.”
“That seems unlikely,” Hugo began, as though feeling the boy was interfering with his monopoly on specious travelers’ tales.
But he did not get a chance to finish. The king startled us all by speaking for the first time that day. “Rose bushes!”
He had his face turned up, testing the wind. We all sniffed as well and caught it, a scent completely unlike the sharp smell of desert sage that had accompanied us the last three weeks: it was the smell of roses.
King Haimeric kicked his mare forward, and the rest of us scrambled to catch up. We followed the steep stony track down to where it abruptly became a broad, smoothly-paved road, between fields where swarthy men worked. The king galloped another quarter mile, then pulled up abruptly by a low fence. Beyond was a tangle of rose bushes.
Ascelin grabbed the mare’s reins as the king leaped off. Haimeric vaulted the fence in a show of energy I had not seen in him in years and plunged between the bushes. “They may have the blue ones here!” he called back over his shoulder. “I see maroon, and lavender, even a red darker than anything I’ve ever been able to grow, and-” He broke off as a man rose slowly from the middle of the bushes.
The man had Kaz-alrhun’s bulk but was not as dark. It was not Kaz-alrhun himself, I told my wildly beating heart. He scowled down at the king, whose headdress had fallen back in his excitement. “Are you a westerner?”
“And a fellow rose-grower,” said the king with enthusiasm. “I’ve never seen colors like some of yours. We’ve heard, in the west, that someone here has been able to breed a blue rose. Might it be you?”
The chaplain and I exchanged glances and both shook our heads. King Haimeric was as excited to see an eastern rose garden as Joachim had been to see the churches of the Holy City. The king’s age and frailty had all dropped away, and his naked interest in roses was a much more powerful protection here against harm than any spell I could have cast.
The huge rose-grower’s scowl turned into a wide smile. “Come, and I shall show you what I have. I work for the emir, of course. He has roses of his own inside the palace, but there are several of us outside the city who also cultivate cuttings and do crosses for him. For two years now, he has announced to rose-growers throughout the East that he has a blue rose. And the rose he has is mine!”
Maffi tugged at my arm. “If this man really is a grower for the emir of Bahdroc,” he said in a low voice, “then he is a powerful man indeed.”
The rest of us tied our horses to the fence and made our way cautiously amidst the roses’ spiny branches. The king and the grower chattered away on topics ranging from soil acidity to aphids to crosses that just wouldn’t breed true as they slipped between the bushes, far more easily than we did.
“Now this section is what I call my blues,” the man continued from the far end of the garden. He and the king had pushed past glorious reds and yellows without slowing down. The bushes at this end seemed rather spindly to me, and the blossoms drooped in spite of a soil watered so heavily it was spongy under foot. “This was my first attempt.”
The flowers in question were more green than anything, a rather sickly shade and with an unpleasant odor.
“But then I decided to try to try to approach blue from the direction of the deep reds instead,” the man continued. He showed us several maroon blooms of the same color as ones the king had already spotted. “But we come now to the best of all.”
I don’t know what I expected, something enormous and showy probably, a sapphire blue that would take our breaths away. What we were shown instead was a rose with few and rather tattered petals, of a violet that could only be called blue if one overlooked the rather pinkish cast.
“I see,” said King Haimeric, fighting disappointment with what I considered remarkably good grace. “And this is the blue which is exciting rose growers throughout the East?”
The huge man’s smile split his face. “It is of a certainty! But I remain unsatisfied, as does the emir. We may have the first blue rose ever grown, but we want to make it better yet! You may notice it has but little scent …”
That was the least of its problems, I thought, but said nothing.
“I wonder if it would be possible to meet the emir,” said the king, his enthusiasm back as if it had never gone. “Did I mention I’m a king myself, back in the western kingdoms?” I froze, but he did not mention Yurt directly. “It would be a great honor to meet such a renowned leader and grower.”
“You are a king, are you?” said the grower with an incredulous chuckle. “Well, they do have some odd customs, I hear, out in the west. You might interest the emir at that; he says that he likes to hear or see at least one new thing each day, but it is sometimes hard for him now that he is too old to travel. This time of day he generally holds open court for plaintiffs, so I am sure he would be happy to hear you, and, I assume, your party.” He looked Ascelin up and down, gave the rest of us a glance, shrugged, paused to lock the little gate in his low wall, then led us along the palm-lined road toward the city.
III
In the fields closer to the city a tangle of rather sickly trees was being uprooted. We all stopped to stare in amazement at the creature doing the uprooting. It looked roughly like a horse with enormous, sail-like ears, but was far bigger. A very small man, or at least small by comparison, armed only with a stick, seemed to be directing it. Most surprising of all, the appendage like an arm with which the creature seized the tree trunks appeared to be its nose.
“What mage could have made-” I started to say and stopped. This wasn’t the product of magic. An aura of spells sparkled in a rather unfocused manner over the emir’s city, but this was an ordinary, living animal.
“Do you not recognize an elephant?” said Maffi loftily. “They are extremely strong and indeed enjoy work like this, but you can’t keep them alive in the depths of the desert, because it’s too dry.”
“Don’t try to pretend you know more about such creatures than we do,” said Hugo reprovingly. “You know you’ve never been out of Xantium before.”
“But I saw one once in Xantium,” the boy protested, “near the governor’s palace. I think someone sent it to him as a gift.”