As he researched and learned and organized his findings, he realized that in hundreds of instances the Shagara here had adapted old formulas without fully understanding the additional significances of the indigenous plants. Solanna knew much of the lore her people had assembled over the years; in remote villages, lacking formally trained healers, most people learned at least the basics and usually rather more than the basics. And whereas every healer—Shagara or otherwise—knew that the poppy was used for sleep potions, Solanna told him that among her people, the white poppy brought the gift of consolation and the yellow, success. How such things had originated, no one knew. But Qamar made note of them all, and through the years had been indulged in his obsession by Miqelo and other friends who traveled for the Shagara, who brought back not just herbs and flowers but books.
In one thing he was stymied. He could not draw. There were people here who had talent and tried to teach him, but it was all quite hopeless. He didn’t dare experiment. What if he had asked someone to draw one of the climbing roses in exact detail, only with summer flowers heavy on its canes, and then added his own talishann and blood—and what if the roses changed, right in front of everyone? Temptation gnawed at him to try it, but his wife’s reaction to the little he’d shared with her cautioned otherwise.
He spent a great deal of time walking the hills near the fortress, not to collect specimens but to escape the noise and bustle that necessarily resulted when hundreds of people lived in such close proximity. He needed to think. He needed to make sense of what he had learned, what he had intuited, and what he suspected might be true. He could not act on any of it until he was sure. But there was always so much more to be discovered, so many things to compare and balance with each other.
One thing became clearer to him the more he considered it. To influence a person, that most wondrous and complex of Acuyib’s creations, a drawing would have to be not just accurate to the last detail but done in colors. The rosy flush of cheeks and lips, the dapple of freckles across a nose, the highlights of red or gold or bronze in dark hair—all these things would have to be depicted. So it was fortunate that he had turned out to be good at mixing inks. He secured a small chamber one floor down from their living quarters, stocked it with the usual and the unusual for making ink, and put to use his ever-growing knowledge. Solanna called this room the Inkwell, more than pleased that her husband’s experiments were not cluttering up her home.
Qamar spent many long hours fussing with various recipes, even though he knew that ink would never be able to capture the delicate coloring of a human face, however subtle the artist. There had to be an answer to the difficulty, and he must be the one to find it—for the rest of the Shagara could not learn that there was any difficulty at all.
Sheyqa Nizhria grew weary of waiting for replies to her letters. Her next action was to send proclamations to all parties. Those who accepted her, she would not annihilate. Those who defied her would be destroyed. These were her terms.
She received many replies this time. All of them defied her, sometimes in language that had never before been read aloud in the presence of a Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar.
The Empress of Tza’ab Rih sent no answer at all.
With the early spring, ships sailed. Landing on isolated shores, they offloaded thousands of the Sheyqa’s warriors, including a large contingent of Qoundi Ammar and their magnificent white horses. When word of the invading forces reached Joharra, Cazdeyya, Elleon, Taqlis, and the new city-state of Shagarra, men who had been training all winter in anticipation of just this event began to march.
This was precisely what the Sheyqa wanted.
Miqelo and his son Tanielo returned early and shaken from their first expedition after the snowmelt. More than half the goods loaded onto pack animals for sale in towns and cities was still securely in place, and on seeing this the crafters groaned. There would be no profits this year from the rolls of paper or the pretty tin hazziri wind chimes, the lush woven woolens or the hundreds of bottles of medicine coveted by traditional physicians. Worse, there would be no sacks of fine grains, no bolts of new cloth, no citrus fruits or dried dates or figs. The only thing Miqelo brought back with him was news. None of it was good.
For the first time in years, Qamar began to feel himself an outsider. Not just gharribeh, foreign, but dangerous. He was Tza’ab. His wife was Cazdeyyan. It had taken a long, long time for the people here to greet them as equals in the zoqallos and streets, then to speak with them, and finally to invite them into their homes for afternoon qawah or a casual meal. Yet Qamar knew that he and Solanna were still looked upon as outsiders. So he was surprised when a girl came to the Inkwell and said she had a message for him. She was a pretty little thing, so much Shagara in her looks that she might have just ridden in with her parents from the winter encampment in the wastes of Tza’ab Rih.
“Please, Sheyqir, I am to say you must be as quick as you can, please. There is an assembly—at the Khoubri.” Her eyes widened like those of a startled fawn at the array of flasks and bottles on the shelves, the tables cluttered by heating rings with iron bowls nestled in them, jars of glass stirring rods, stacks of paper, bundles of unused pens. “The Khoubri, please, Sheyqir,” she said, as if worried that the oddities had made her forget to mention it.
“I shall be there at once. Thank you.” He watched her run out the door and heard the clatter of her shoes on the stairs. A sound he would never hear his own daughter making. There would be no daughters, no sons.
Shrugging off the thought as something he could never afford to dwell on, he rinsed his ink-stained hands in a bowl of clean water and ran his wet fingers through his hair. He was thirty-eight this year, but other than a few strands of gray and some lines around his eyes from squinting at his books too much, his age rested lightly on him. Especially for a Haddiyat. He knew this wouldn’t last much longer. He dreaded every winter morning, positive that he would wake to pain in his hands, his knees, his back. Not yet, praise Acuyib. But soon.
The Khoubri was one of the oddest features of a very odd fortress. Its name was its description, for it served as a bridge between the outer wall and the building that housed the unmarried guards. At the junction, the bridge descended in a series of steps that gave out onto a large room with no windows and only one other exit. The idea, Qamar supposed, was that enemies gaining the walls would be funneled through the passage, push each other into the open, and discover they had only two choices: go forward through the single door and down the stairs, or shove their way back across the bridge and try to find another way in. Swords and spears would be waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs, of course.
Whatever the case, the room turned out to be a good place for general meetings. A speaker could stand a step or two above, to be seen more easily. The echoes in the Khoubri were annoying, but after a while one learned to deal with that.
Qamar climbed the stairs and sidled along with his back to a wall. There was no place to sit and no time to wriggle himself a space, for Miqelo was already standing on the second step, holding up his hands for quiet.
“The Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar has a new weapon. It is called a ballisda, and it need not be brought in the ships. These things can be built here in a day or two. It is a mechanical arm that throws giant stones, burning pitch, anything at all either into or over any walls.” He paused. “Even ours.”
Snorts and a few shouts of laughter greeted this. Miqelo again raised his hands.
“Listen to me! I have seen for myself what these things did to the walls of Granidiya! Nearly the height of our own, nearly as thick, and blasted in places to rubble as if Chaydann al-Mamnoua’a had directed a bolt of lightning! I saw from the nearby hills, I watched the smoke still rising from the city, and the only reason I was not here yesterday is that my son disobeyed me, and ran down to the walls, and came back the next morning with the whole story. And it is as well that he did.”