'Come on,' Raf said and turned to Hani. Only to stop at the sight of her face.
The child had her legs set apart, her heels dug deep into the grit of the path. Everything about her body language roared defiance except for the hurt in her eyes. Raf recognized that, the exploding bleakness, which wasn't the same as remembering it. Though he remembered well how hard he'd had to learn to forget.
'We need to move,' Raf said softly.
Hani shook her head. No question of compromise.
'Hani.'
Heads flicked round at Lady Jalila's rebuke, until most of the mourners were gazing at the child. There was something hungry about the gathering. Lady Jalila held out her hand to Hani and waited.
Nobody moved.
'You lead,' Raf suggested, taking in the crowd of strangers and knowing they listened to his every word. 'You were her closest friend and you found her. Besides, you can see the child is terrified.'
He dropped to his knees on the gravel path. 'We're staying here, aren't we?'
Night-black eyes stared back at him, then arms thin as sticks fastened themselves tight round his neck as Hani clung to him and her butterfly trembling exploded into full-blown shakes. Sobs shook her body but Raf had no need to look to know the child was crying: the tears were trickling into the collar of his shirt.
When he looked up, a good half of the onlookers were gazing sympathetically at them both. The Minister of Police even had a sad, tolerant smile on his face.
'If you insist.' Something ghost-like flitted across the face of Lady Jalila as she turned to face the mausoleum door. And she walked away without waiting for her husband.
'Poor child,' said Mushin Bey sadly. 'Such a loss.' Raf figured the Minister of Police was talking about Hani and not his wife, but it was hard to tell.
One by one, the other mourners followed Lady Jalila and the body until they were all swallowed by darkness and the necropolis suddenly felt empty. From a nearby bush came the bubbling call of a common bulbul and beyond a high wall cars could be heard grinding gears at distant traffic lights.
'About bloody time,' said Felix, with feeling. The flask was out, flicked open and tucked safely back in the fat man's jacket in an instant. 'Needs must,' he said, looking oddly shamefaced. 'It's either grab the odd refuel or not turn up at all ..." He glanced towards Hani — folded into Raf's arms, her eyes screwed tight, her face buried in his shoulder — and nodded thoughtfully. 'Good man,' said Felix softly. 'Now find out what she really knows ...'
The al-Mansur mausoleum was elegantly simple. Its very simplicity a sign of the design's antiquity, which easily predated both the city's invasion by Napoleon in 1798 and an earlier seventeenth-century plague that had swept the streets of life and briefly reduced Isk to a handful of dilapidated dwellings occupied by obese rats.
A low door, cut into the side of a marble base, led down to a deep crypt. Rising up from the square base, basalt pillars at each corner supported a roof that rose, in its turn, to meet at a point in the very centre. A short metal spine that jutted from this point ended in a simple crescent. Though it was difficult to see from the ground what material the crescent had been hammered from, as winter storms had weathered the metal to a deep black.
Under this roof, centred on the base itself, was a simple memorial. A rough-hewn slab of stone, balanced on its side and apparently held upright at either end by a short square pillar, one of which had once been broken and repaired with stone of a slightly poorer quality.
'What are you doing?'
'Looking at the building,' said Raf, slowly stroking the child's hair. She didn't quite pull away, so he stroked again, more slowly still. Years back that had worked for a different animal, a wounded one, when no other boy at his school could get near it.
'It's a kiosk,' Hani said. She nodded to the mausoleum. 'And that thing's a cenotaph and those are stelae.' The upward jerk to her chin told him she was talking about the narrow pillars.
'Yesterday I was as you, tomorrow you will be like me ...' Hani recited from memory the inscription on the base. 'How old do you think it is?'
Raf looked round at other, more ornate tombs. A few of which had similar square roofs, though most had little domes, cupolas of stone decorated either with starburst motifs, herringbone patterns or intricate, intertwined arabesques. Even the newest ones looked as if they'd been there for centuries.
'I've no idea,' he said, 'tell me.'
Hani's lips twisted. 'Twenty years ... Donna told me. My aunt built it for her husband. The pillar broke in the first year and she made the builders replace it for nothing.'
'But the site ..." Raf scanned the necrotic jumble that crowded in on itself, bent by age and gravity, some of the funerary monuments so close to collapse they looked as though they were trying to shoulder neighbouring tombs out of the way.
'Bought an old tomb and pulled it down.' The child shrugged. 'Of course, she had to pay someone to carry away the old bodies.'
'Of course...'Raf nodded at a heavily bent cork tree nearby. 'It's too bright for me,' he said. 'Are you all right with moving?'
They walked over to the shade together, Hani never once releasing her grip on his hand. She'd been holding on without break from the point they stepped into Rue Cif and climbed into the back of Felix's open-top car. Quite what she thought would happen to her if she let go Raf had no idea, but it was equally obvious Hani didn't intend to find out.
Just getting her out onto the street had been difficult enough. Getting the kid into the car had taken a major miracle. Though it wasn't until Hani had appeared in a dress, her straight black hair carefully tied back, that Raf even realized he had a problem.
She'd walked easily enough from the qaa through the courtyard, and less easily from there into the oven-like heat of the covered garden, which was already beginning to wilt after only one day without Lady Nafìsa's attention. But by the time she'd reached the madersa's final squat passage out onto Rue Cif, Hani was shaking with fear.
'Come on,' Raf had said, tugging slightly on her hand. Her answering yank almost took his arm out of its socket. And as he stared down to where her face was setting into a mask of stubbornness made flesh, realization hit.
He didn't hear her whisper first time so she said it again.
'I've never ...' Hani's voice trailed away into silence.
'You've never left the house?'
The truth was confirmed in the eyes of the old Sudanese porter who stood watching the anxious girl stand frozen on his doorstep. Self-imposed boxes, that was what life produced, thought Raf bleakly. Simple and basic or complex and jewelled, it made little difference. Prison was still prison and exile was exile, internal or not.
'Are you afraid?' he asked Hani.
Her answer was a fierce scowl.
'Well,' said Raf, 'are you?'
'No. Of course not.' She bunched her fingers into fists and pressed her hands hard at her side. 'I'm never afraid.'
He would be. Nine years without leaving the madersa where she'd been born. Without stepping beyond the rear door into Rue Cif, never mind using the carved front portal that led from the house to the busy mayhem that was Rue Sherif. Not that anyone still used the Rue Sherif portal, of course. The sun-blasted street doors might remain in place, but the actual archway behind them had been bricked up ten years before Hani was even born, on Lady Nafisa's orders. The few visitors Lady Nafisa had allowed into the madersa since her husband's death use the entrance in Rue Cif.
Dropping to one knee, Raf forgot about his new suit. 'Not afraid?' he said. 'Everyone's afraid ..." He was aware of Felix watching him from the waiting Cadillac. 'It's what keeps us alive.' He'd almost said human.