Axeface put up his leg-of-lamb-sized hands as if frightened of Adoulla. “Hey, hey, Uncle, between you and me, you know I love you. You’d make a great husband for the mistress. But you’ve made some damned-by-God stupid choices far as that goes. Surely, man, you must see that, huh?” Axeface poked him playfully, but Adoulla wasn’t in the mood.
At all.
Seeming to sense this, Axeface straightened to his full, monstrous height. “Look, Doctor, the bottom line is, I don’t see nothin’ Mistress Miri don’t want me to see. That’s how I stay well-paid, well-fed, and smiley as a child. But if you want to see the Mistress, hold on.”
Adoulla was announced and ushered into the large greeting room. Scant sunlight made its way through high windows. Tall couches lined the wall opposite the door, and a few well-dressed men sat on them, each speaking to a woman.
Then she was there. Miri Almoussa, Seller of Silks and Sweets. Miri of the Hundred Ears. Miri. Her thick curves jiggled as she moved, and her worn hands were ablaze with henna.
“What do you want?” she asked him, a cold wind blowing beneath her words.
Adoulla’s irritation briefly eclipsed his longing. “You may recall, woman, that you asked for my help, even after your having asked me to ‘walk my big feet out of your life and never come back.’ But this is not the place for us to speak.”
Miri arched an eyebrow and said nothing, but she led him to the house’s tiny rear courtyard, sat him down at a small table, and brought him a tray with fruit nectar, little salt fish, and pickles. She sat down beside him and waited for him to speak. But for a moment Adoulla just sat there, listening to the birds chirping in the courtyard’s twin pear trees and avoiding Miri’s eyes.
He didn’t break the silence until Miri began to tap her silk-slippered foot impatiently. “I’m here, Miri, because I have learned something of your niece’s killers. But not enough yet to stop them from killing others. I would like to speak to your grandnephew again, as he may have recalled something new.”
“Faisal is not here. Some of the girls went on a workbreak trip to see the new menagerie the Khalif has set up outside the city, and I thought it a good idea for him to try and forget his pains, so I sent him with them. He won’t be back for a day or so.”
Adoulla plucked up a pickle and smiled to himself at the thought of a whores’ holiday to see strange beasts—surely Miri was the only proprietor in the city who would allow such a thing.
As happened so often, Miri seemed to read his thoughts. She did not seem amused. “All people who work deserve days away from their labor, Doullie,” she said flatly. “And whores are people, even if my business depends on letting men forget that fact.”
He would not rise to the bait. “Of course. In any case, I did not come only to speak to Faisal. I came also because Miri’s Hundred Ears are always open, sometimes to songs the rest of us don’t hear. For instance, does the name ‘Mouw Awa’ mean anything to you? Or the name ‘Orshado’? And what do you know of the case of Hadu Nawas?”
Her offended expression melted away, and she took on the look of Miri, knower-of-many-things, narrowing her smoky eyes and crinkling her nose. Miri’s face when she was trying to recall something was the same as when she was rifling through her cabinets for a particular blouse. “ ‘Orshado’… it sounds like a northern name, perhaps? I couldn’t say for sure. But Hadu Nawas… he was an enemy of the throne, yes? One of the many conspirators killed in the civil war?”
“Not quite killed, it seems,” Adoulla muttered.
Miri gave him a perplexed look but continued. “If I recall correctly, he was also rumored to be a child-killer. Now, ‘Mouw Awa’… Hm. All I could tell you is that it sounds like… like Kemeti hidden script?”
Adoulla snorted. “Indeed. Though it took me a full day to have that lock click open in my mind. Sometimes, my sweet, your erudition makes me sick with jealousy.”
“Well, even leaving aside our difference in age, I’ve been hit on the head far fewer times than you, Doullie.” She deigned to smile at him, and he felt his soul warm.
Adoulla winced theatrically, as if he’d been punched in the gut. This response to Miri’s jibes had always made her laugh in the past. But instead when she met his eyes, she let her smile slip and turned away from him.
There were a thousand things he wanted to say to her when he saw that, but none of them would do any good.
“How is your grandnephew faring?” he asked.
“How is he faring?” Her thick braid with its streak of silver whipped as she spun to give him an incredulous glare. “How is he faring!? He’s broken! How else could he be after what happened to him? You see so much of this horror that you don’t even see it for horror anymore! He is a boy, Doullie! A boy of eight! Not one of your suicidal, fanatical friends! Not some ‘foe of the Traitorous Angel’!” She bit off her next words quietly. “This—it’s this madness that drove us apart.”
This time Adoulla’s wince was not feigned. Miri had always had unhappy words for the life he led, and for the friends who shared it, but those words had never been this sharp, this scornful.
She wasn’t stopped by his pained face. “Look at the world around you, Doullie! Forty years you’ve spent in this hunting. All that death. Why? What has come of it? Is the world a safe place now? A happier place?” She sank into her chair and put her face in her hands. “Merciful God, I’m sorry. Now you’ve upset me. What I meant to say was—” But she said nothing more.
“Your niece’s killers are still out there, Miri. They… they burned my house down.”
“I heard.” Of course Miri of the Hundred Ears had heard. Yet still she had all these hard words for him. “God protect you,” she said now.
Miri and he had been closer in the days when the townhouse was new, he reflected. Much closer. She had helped him choose it. Adoulla said nothing for a long time. Then he started to speak, though he didn’t know what he was going to say. “Miri, I—”
Miri held up a silencing hand and, with her other, wiped away the beginnings of tears. She took a deep breath and looked at Adoulla. Her eyes were weary but filled with love, and she spoke softly. “I’m sorry, Doullie. I didn’t mean the things I said.”
Adoulla had never been more tired in his life, and he tried to keep the pain out of his words. “Yes, you did.”
Miri’s voice was steadier now, and she twined the end of her long braid around her hand—a habit Adoulla had noticed long ago, a sign that she was steeling herself. “Well, yes, I did, but… I do know why you do what you do, Doullie. You—” A smile spread across her face, and she started laughing, at the same time that Adoulla did.
“ ‘Why you do what you do Doullie, you’?” he said, imitating the funny sound of her words. They both laughed. And Adoulla hurt again, knowing that it would end very soon.
Why had this been his fate? Why could he not have been one of the men he often walked past in the early morning light of the markets? Selling lemonjelly cubes and going home every evening to a deliciously fat wife who drenched herself in rose oil. Laughing at stupid things and keeping one another warm when the night wind whipped through the windows. Taking the day off to be with her and losing only a few coins in his pocket. But his job—his calling—was different. When Adoulla neglected his duties, gruesome things happened in the sleep-rooms of children. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t.