* * *
The caliph was a man—no longer young but not by any means frail—whose dark eyes blazed out from bruised hollows. A few steel-colored hairs stippled his brows and beard, but a filet-bound linen cloth edged in indigo and crimson embroidery concealed his hair, so Samarkar could not see if the signs of age progressed further. Veins and tendons stood out in the backs of hands like saddle leather, incongruous as they cradled an eggshell-porcelain coffee cup.
Upon an elevated platform he sat, not enthroned but rather upon a sort of chair consisting of a brocade sling between crossed wooden supports. The richness of his raiment half-concealed it. At his right hand, a veiled and shrouded woman crouched upon cushions, motionless as if carved. She supported the tray from which the caliph must have lifted his coffee cup. Three well-dressed men, whom Samarkar assumed to be heralds or viziers or advisors of some sort, were arranged seated behind and below the caliph’s chair.
The caliph looked up as Ato Tesefahun’s little band was brought before him, but he did not speak. The slave poetess sang still.
She must be concealed in the louvered sandalwood box just big enough to comfortably enclose a standing woman that had been placed at the base of the caliph’s dais. It must have been cunningly constructed to augment sound, because the poet’s voice rang as clearly as if she stood at the focus of any amphitheater.
Samarkar could now make out most of the words of her chant, though the dialect was archaic and the diction formal. Still, that was the way of court language everywhere, and Samarkar had been raised and bred to it.
The poem was a young girl’s plaint of grief, a plea for a husband gone to war to return safe and soon. It might have seemed simple, Samarkar thought—and on the surface it was. A ballad, with the end-rhyming lines that marked Uthman poetry—but the naïveté of the poem’s construction and topic was underlain by darker threads. The poem might be written in the voice of a young girl, but it marked a mature woman’s understanding of inevitability, and it was shot through with a sense of futility and loss and wasted youth that made Samarkar think that the robed silhouette visible only as flickers of movement through the slats of the blind was no girl, but a poet of experience and grief. Samarkar would have hoped that Temur’s shaky Uthman was insufficient for him to understand the gist of the song, but a glance at his face disabused her. His eyes bright, his expression blank … she knew without asking that he was thinking of Edene.
The song dropped away to a whisper, a falling air of shadows undermining the narrator’s lingering words of hope and loyalty. Only when the echoes had died did Samarkar, transfixed, notice that Hrahima too showed every sign of being in the grip of some tremendous emotion: ears forward and whiskers fluffed. Her claws had popped from their sheaths to draw creases in the striped fur of her thighs.
Samarkar laid the back of her hand against the Cho-tse’s arm and leaned in close to whisper, “Does she speak for you too?”
Hrahima looked down at Samarkar. Tigers did not weep, but Samarkar did not think anyone could look into those mottled eyes, like heat-crazed tourmalines, and deny that a Cho-tse could grieve.
“The Sun Within links us all,” Hrahima rumbled. “No cub or mate can ever truly be lost.”
But you deny the Sun Within, Samarkar would have argued, had she not seen the amused, arch look the caliph turned on her and Hrahima. Thus did the Wizard Samarkar comprehend the genius of the interlocking sky of domes and Ato Tesefahun’s unprecedented architecture. It was a whispering vault. The caliph could hear any word spoken in his audience chamber, no matter how low the voice was pitched.
And Samarkar and Hrahima had been muttering in Uthman.
Samarkar winced a quick apology before she remembered the helm that entirely concealed her face. Instead, she bowed low, boiled leather creaking, and heard the rustles and scrapes and rattles as her companions echoed the gesture.
A pointed silence dragged on while they waited for the caliph’s acknowledgment. Samarkar heard the patter of bare feet moving with the lightest of steps over stone, the oiled slide of long poles through locks, as if someone shipped oars. The sandalwood box, she realized, a moment before bearers silently lifted it up—slave poetess and all—and bore it away.
Like a songbird in a cage. Samarkar wondered grimly if Ümmühan was ever suffered to leave it, and was grateful for her helm once again.
Her back ached with the depth of her obeisance and the weight of her armor before someone cleared his throat and said, “Grandfather architect! That is quite a menagerie you’ve captured.”
“Your serene Excellency,” said Ato Tesefahun, with the air of one sidestepping confrontation. “May I present Re Temur Khanzadeh. His father was Otgonbayar Khanzadeh. He is the grandson of Re Temusan Khagan. His traveling companions are Samarkar-la, a Wizard of Tsarepheth and sister to the Rasan emperor; Brother Hsiung, of the Wretched Mountain Temple Brotherhood; and Hrahima, a warrior of the Cho-tse. They have come with grave news from afar and to offer an alliance with your serene Excellency.”