Samarkar stumbled on the smooth stone. “This was built … in your lifetime?”
He smiled. “In yours, granddaughter, if I estimate your age accurately.”
Samarkar was too stunned by the courtesy he did her—granddaughter?—to fill the pause he left her. She knew Aezin folk used family endearments as a sign of respect to unrelated friends—but she also knew they never did it casually.
After a moment, he continued. “Though the thought behind it commenced some fifty years ago, when I was a very young, very conceited man. Knowing what I know now, I might not plot quite so boldly again.”
Hrahima chuffed: her feline laughter. Samarkar noticed how many of the bustling slaves and functionaries who zipped from place to place across the beautiful atrium deviated from their line long enough to nod to Ato Tesefahun in his threadbare, expensive robes—though none of them paused to pass a word, and neither did he seem so inclined.
“I thought—” She glanced from side to side, and lowered her voice, and spoke in the Qersnyk tongue. “I had been given to understand, Ato, that you were not a great supporter of the caliphate.”
He looked at her, wide-eyed, guileless. A simple old man. “Because I am Aezin, or because I make my home in Ctesifon … when I have not been called to Asitaneh on business? Both Aezin and Ctesifon, as you know, are loyal vassals of the caliphate, rendering tribute willingly to the representative of the Scholar-God’s hegemony on earth.”
Samarkar heard Temur’s foot scuff the floor like that of a chastened child. For was he not—had he not been?—the soldier of still another conqueror? Was not Samarkar the daughter of such a one? She met Ato Tesefahun’s eyes through the slots of the helm, for a moment forgetting the modesty expected of a woman here. Ato Tesefahun winked into her regard.
It was Samarkar who looked down. In order to keep from shaking her head continually in amazement, she asked, “The singing. A eunuch?”
“A slave poetess,” Ato Tesefahun said.
“But a woman—”
“Oh,” he said, as if apprehending her confusion. As if the source of it were not new to him, and he had made this explanation many times before. “Women are reflections of the Scholar-God and Her Prophet, after all. They are to be encouraged to study the natural histories, or literature, or medicine. For them to do so is like holding a diamond before the lamplight of the Scholar-God’s grace and glory.”
Samarkar touched her mask. “But how can you study science—how can you exist as a colleague—when a man can’t look upon your face? Or speak to you?” She gestured to the air. “How can this poet perform in a public place if she is forbidden to speak to men?”
“She sings from behind a screen,” said Ato Tesefahun. “Or from within a veil. That is Ümmühan, one of the city’s greatest slave poetesses. Is she not fine?”
“Ümmühan,” Samarkar said dubiously. “‘The Illiterate?’” Her voice was pure and powerful enough that Samarkar could have believed it to have belonged to a eunuch.
“Their performers,” said Hrahima, “are given stage names by their patrons or owners, and the more humble the name—so as not to affront the Scholar-God—the more prestige usually attached to the performer.”
“I see,” said Samarkar finally, a little forlornly. The worst of it was, she did.
She tugged her helm down a little more snugly over the cushion of her hair and squared her shoulders as Ato Tesefahun led their little party across the word-wrought stones. They progressed toward an area beneath the great dome that was segregated from the common atrium by pierced stone screens and ranks of kapikulu, fanatical slave mercenary guards in skirted coats of cerulean blue.
The kapikulu were legendary for their loyalty and fierceness, and Samarkar knew they served all over the realms claimed by the Scholar-God. But they were not the only holy warriors sworn to the caliph’s service. Arranged among the kapikulu were the royal guards, the so-called Dead Men, whose presence supplied another hint to the caliph’s location.
They numbered a dozen. They stood arrayed in elaborate reproductions of Uthman grave robes wrought from rich fabrics, the wide sleeves decorated with artful, layered tatters of dust-colored linen and silk, the hoods dropped down their backs. Each robe was belted with a crimson sash through which was thrust a sword, but otherwise left to hang open-fronted over silver-bright mail. Like the robes, shaven heads and eyebrows indicated that these Dead Men no longer belonged to the world.
They had no families outside the caliph’s household. They were chosen from among the orphans of the street, ceremonially beheaded and reborn into the caliph’s family and raised up as warrior priests. The caliph’s household provided everything for them: education (or perhaps indoctrination would be the better-chosen word), training, wives, wealth, care for their children, the assurance of Heaven. There were said to be no more pious, no more incorruptible swordsmen in the world. There were certainly few better trained, if the reports of Samarkar’s father’s intelligencers could be believed.