Al-Ghazalah

Judith Tarr

There are many different kinds of love in this world — and not all are what we might expect.

A sequel to “Kehailan”

In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate!

It is related in the annals of the wise—but Allah knows all!—that once in the city of Cairo dwelt a mare of remarkable lineage. For her dam was kehailan and queenly, daughter through many mothers of the queen of the Khamsa, most blessed of the mares of the Prophet, on whose name be blessing and peace; yet through her sire she traced her line to the Prophet himself. Born and bred a man and a prince, for a space and for his sins he wore the body of a horse. And being a horse, and quite untroubled by the eunuch’s malady, he had done as any horse would choose to do, until love and an ifrit princess returned him to his former dignity.

The get of his stallionhood were numerous and of exceptional beauty, but most beautiful of all was the last of them. Al-Ghazalah, they called her, so like the gazelle was she: great of eye, slender of limb, swifter than the wind across the sand. Her color was the best of all colors, the bay that sprang first from the mind of Allah, Who made all things that are. Her mane was night and silk; her coat was silk and fire; a star shone on her brow.

Her existence, and that of her sisters, was a difficulty. The imams had settled it by fiat. What Hasan Sharif al-Kehailan had done in stallion’s shape was only what stallions were made to do. The issue were a stallion’s get, and kehailan: of the pure blood of the horses of Arabia. They did not partake of their sire’s humanity.

None of them knew what she was, and none would have cared if she had known. They lived out their lives in peace, treasured like queens, mated to kings, mothers of royal houses.

All but Ghazalah. She did not know when she first knew that she was different. She was the youngest, the last and fairest. On the day when she was foaled, her father’s wife brought forth a son: the first and, by the will of Allah Who is ever merciful, the last of the children of his human form. It was inevitable that they be brought together, the sister and the brother; it was written that there be love between them, and that al-Ghazalah be the sole and cherished mount of Shams al-Din. His beauty was the sun to the moon of hers; in spirit, in temper, in fire, each had no equal but the other.

Yet even he did not know her secret. For a long while she was not aware that she had one. It came first upon her all unlooked for, in the deep night, as she drowsed by her mother’s side. She yawned and stretched and thought of hunger, and there was strangeness in her. She looked at herself, and she was not she. She was something other. Something frail and soft and hairless, with toes where hooves should be. And hands. Humans had hands, clever for opening gates, skillful in stroking one’s tender places. She had hands. She was human.

But she was not. She reached toward the warm drowsing horseness of her mother, and something shifted. It was like pain. It was like pleasure. She was herself again, slender-legged, drowning her bafflement in her mother’s milk.

The strangeness kept coming back. In the night, always: she would wake from a dream, and she would have hands. She taught herself to walk, tottering two-legged. She listened to the humans; she learned to talk, if only to her mother. She learned that she could will herself to change. She discovered the advantages of hands on latches and bolts, and the wideness of the world beyond her stable yard.

She never shifted where anyone but her mother could see her. It was not secrecy. It was a sort of delicacy. Everyone could do this, surely; no one did it in front of everyone else; therefore it was a private thing. She wondered whether all the humans were horses in the night, or whether some were hunting dogs, or cats, or even—she knew which those would be—braying asses. Her father had been a stallion. Everyone said it, though it seemed that he was one no longer. Perhaps this was only a pleasure for one’s youth.

She would be sorry, if that was so. She liked the suppleness of human shape. She liked to talk; she loved to sing. She learned to read, from being tethered close by Shams as he endured his tutors. She heard the disputations of philosophers. She became, had she known it, most widely and deeply learned, while her brother and master yawned and groaned and took flight whenever he could. He would only hear his lessons at all when she was near, because it inconvenienced his teachers, and because she provided swift escape. They learned to ride well and swiftly, those masters of the arts, or they did not linger long in his service.

He would happily have dismissed them all. But his father was adamant. “I was a knave and a fool,” said Kehailan. “My son will learn to be wise.”

His son did not want to be wise. His son wanted to ride a-hunting, or a-drinking, or a-whoring. Shams al-Din, as his father’s mamluk observed, was in all respects his father’s child.

oOo

When both al-Ghazalah and Shams al-Din had attained their seventeenth year, Ghazalah knew that she was like no other creature in the face of God’s creation. Mares, except for Ghazalah, remained mares from birth to death. Maidens, except for Ghazalah, held that form by day as by night. It was noted that the four-footed line of Kehailan seemed to partake somewhat of the longevity of their human forebear. It was also noted that Ghazalah seemed most fully to have held to human youth: slow to reach the fullness of her growth, and slow to settle to the placidity of age. That she remained a maiden, however, she owed to Shams al-Din. She was his. No other, be he beast or man, might have her.

She was, as she thought, content. Her secret was hers to cherish. Her brother was the fairest youth in Egypt, the best horseman, the surest shot with the Turkish bow, though he was no Turk but Arab of the holy line of Mecca. If he was not also the wisest, if he lacked perhaps some essence of intelligence, that was little enough to sully her peace. She had sufficient for them both.

It is the way of mares and of educated maidens, as all the wise know, to have no patience to spare for the follies of love. Likewise it is the way of young men, and most especially of ruinously spoiled young princes, to have patience for nothing else. Shams fell in and out of love a dozen times in a day. The swiftness of his falling out, Ghazalah observed, was directly proportioned to the swiftness of his gaining his desire.

Therefore she was neither surprised nor unduly troubled when, in riding through the city of a morning, he halted abruptly and drew a long sigh. “There,” he said. “There is the love of my life.”

They had come to the fringes of the bazaar; the streets were full to bursting. But Shams had eyes for one alone. Ghazalah discerned her easily enough by the yearning of her brother’s body on her back; and she was, admittedly, noticeable. In that city of small, dark, slender people, she towered like a young tree. Her hands and the oval of her face were white as milk. Her hair under its drift of veil was the color of gold in the forge. Her eyes were as blue as the sky in winter, and bold, knowing nothing of modesty. They met Shams’ with most unmaidenly directness, measuring him as if he had been the slave and she the lord of Islam. They gave him due credit for his beauty, but reckoned his youth and his callowness and his disinclination to use what wits he had, and discarded him.

He, of course, was smitten to the heart. “I will have her,” he said. “I must have her. I will die if I do not have her.”

She had turned her back on him. Bravely he battled the currents of the city, following her as best he might through the rounds of the market: the bakers, the sweetsellers, the cloth merchants, the sellers of spices, and, at length, the butcher who tended the needs of Cairo’s Christians. Not a whit daunted, Shams clung to her track. It led him out of the bazaar at last, through many windings of the city, thronged always, never open to him when he would press closer, armed to speak, to touch, even, it might have been, to seize her and bear her away. Shams in love was no more to be reasoned with than a leaf in a whirlwind. It mattered nothing to him that his beloved led him ever deeper into the Christians’ quarter, or that his turban and his Arab face were far from welcome there.

The woman, turning without warning, led her company of porters through a gate in a blind wall. He spurred Ghazalah so suddenly, and with such unwonted force, that she leaped like the beast of her name. The gate was swinging shut. She hurtled through it.

Shams was out of the saddle before she had plunged to a halt, prostrate before the Frankish beauty, babbling passionate nonsense.

Ghazalah snorted at the sunlit courtyard, the astonished porters, the servants arrested in mid-stride. Shams had lost his turban; his hair, of which he was girlishly vain, was tumbled in the dust. Yet even so dimmed, it shone like jet and raven.

The Frank seemed both amused and fascinated. When he began to kiss her foot, she did not at once pull away. “What,” she inquired in passable Arabic, “is the meaning of this?”

He raised his head. His face shone. He had never been more beautiful, and for once he was not aware of it.

“Love,” he said. “It is love.”

The Frank blinked once. “Just like that?”

“Like an arrow in my heart,” cried Shams al-Din. “Like light in the darkness. Like fire, like lightning, like—”

“You are mad,” said the Frank. She clapped her hands. The porters came, big men and burly, unmoved by young ardor. They lifted Shams, one to his head and one to his feet, and tossed him lightly through the gate.

Ghazalah did not wait to be assisted. She bolted in his wake. The gate boomed shut. Bolts slid, sharp and final.

Shams picked himself up, and he was smiling like a man in bliss. “Did you see? Did you see, sister? She looked at me; she loves me.” He dusted himself off, still smiling, but sighing a little. “Of course she had to cast me out. Too many people were watching; she had no choice. Had she but been alone . . .”

Ghazalah wanted to shake him. A slave was bad enough, but a Christian slave was unconscionable.

“So beautiful,” he murmured, lost in his madness. “Lapis and gold; ivory; the merest shimmer of rose. Her feet, her hands, her perfect fingertips . . . her lips, like flowers . . .”

The wench was as tall as he was, and nigh as broad in the shoulder. Ghazalah bucked and twisted, to distract him. He barely noticed. He was lost. Utterly. Again.

She did not know why it mattered. It was not his first slave, nor even his first Christian. He had been smitten thus powerfully before, and for less cause. And yet Ghaza1ah was uneasy. The woman’s eyes when they had rested on Shams—yes, for a breath’s span they had softened. It was a strong woman indeed who could resist such beauty in a man. Yet there was more. Something strange; something awry.

Ghazalah was waiting when Shams came creeping through the night, robed in black but with splendor gleaming beneath, and on him a scent of musk and sandalwood. She suffered him to saddle and bridle her; she let him smuggle her out through the garden gate. It was not the first time they had gone so, nor the tenth. Tonight, however, she had a plot of her own, and that was not to linger docilely in the lady’s garden, nibbling grass and rose petals while her brother wooed his latest love.

He was not astonished to find that the Christian’s garden, like his own, like half the gardens in Cairo, had a hidden gate. Still less was he amazed to find it unlatched. Shams was nothing if not certain of his own attractions.

He did not see that the mare whom he had tethered to a hanging bough was gone, nor take note of the slender human shadow that flitted in his wake. With the ease of one who had done the same through many a moonlight garden, he found his cat-soft way to the center of his desire. Another gate, unlatched; a lamplit stair; a chamber bare of any heathen softness.

The Frank sat in it, alone, reading by the light of clustered lamps. She was not startled to be invaded by the madman of the morning, but she was not arrayed for any seduction Ghazalah had ever heard of. She was covered from head to foot in heavy Frankish swathings, her hair drawn back severely from a face innocent of paint or kohl. She shone amid that starkness like a diamond set in stone.

Ghazalah was hard put to conceal herself in the shadows of the passage. Shams, oblivious, had flung himself at the woman’s feet.

“You are persistent,” said the Frank.

“I am in love,” said Shams.

The woman’s lips twitched, vanishingly faint. “How can you know that? You know me not at all.”

“My heart has known you from the moment of its creation.”

“Pretty,” said the Frank. “Do you do this every day?”

“Oh no,” said Shams. “Never like this. Never so completely.”

“Not since yesterday.” Her amusement was fleeting, her eyes upon him stern. “I suffered you to come to me, only to give you warning. I am no prize for a young fool’s taking. Go now, cast your eye on gentler prey; forget that you have ever seen me.”

Ghazalah could have told her what that would avail her with Shams al-Din. He rose, he clasped her knees, he turned on her the full force of his eyes. They were beautiful eyes, and they were more than beautiful. They were his mother’s eyes, and his mother was the daughter of the Sultan of the Afarit. No woman born of man was proof against them.

The Frank was strong: she had will to resist. But her hand had moved of itself, to touch one of his perfumed curls. Only one. The one that fell, just so, athwart his brow. That guided her down round the curve of his temple, into the first new bloom of his beard.

He smiled. Her fingers tightened; her hand leaped back as if it burned. “You are mad,” she said, as she had said before.

“Mad with love.”

“I know what you are. Beautiful; fickle. Light of heart, light of mind, light of love.”

“Not for you,” said Shams al-Din. He set a kiss upon her upraised palm. “For you, I am constancy incarnate.”

The blue eyes sharpened, narrowed. “Will you swear to that? Will you swear it by your very soul?”

Ghazalah would have cried out, leaped, given her life to stop him. But she was rooted in the shadows. She could not even breathe.

“By my very soul,” said Shams, “I swear to you, I shall love you and no other while yet there is breath in this body. “

The Frank’s head bowed. For the first time, faintly, she smiled. “How passionate you are! and how beautiful. And how very much in danger. I am a prisoner here. If my jailer discovers you, he will destroy you.”

“Nothing can harm me while I have my love for you.”

She touched his cheek again, lightly. He closed his eyes and shivered in delight. “Go now. Come tomorrow, as you came tonight. Remember what you have sworn.”

“In Allah’s name, I shall never forget.”

She shuddered at that most holy of names, but she did not gainsay it. “Tomorrow,” she said.

oOo

And tomorrow, and tomorrow. Ghazalah had never seen Shams so faithful, or so wondrous content. “There is no one like her in the world,” he said. “She reads, Ghazalah. She thinks; she questions everything. She wants to know all I know of the Faith; she tells me of her own. She is a princess in her own country. Because she would not wed the man her kinsmen chose for her, and dared to run away, she was taken prisoner. When she strove to escape, they bound and trammeled her in the guise of a slave, spirited her away, entrusted her to the cruel mercies of a sorcerer. He guards her, but he fears her. He is but a master of magic. She is Melisende.”

Melisende, Melisende. He wandered off, singing her name.

Ghazalah’s heart had gone cold. A magician. And Shams, lovely, fickle Shams, had sworn an oath on his soul. Oh, indeed, she knew how this would end.

And what could she do? She was only his mare. She had no magic to match a Christian master’s, only her twofold shape and a cantrip or two.

Time passed as it must in this world which Allah has made, and Shams passed it as he must, since he was Shams. After the first intoxicating night or six, he sang his lady’s name somewhat less often. There came a night, inevitably, when he could not escape a duty before the time allotted for his tryst. He made up for it with redoubled passion. And thus again a second night, and a third. He began to notice women in the bazaar. He began to pause when a singular beauty passed him by; then to smile; then to essay a word or two. One bright afternoon, he lost the whole of himself in a pair of kohl-dark eyes. They were only eyes, and their bearer was only an hour’s dalliance; he knew no guilt that Ghazalah could perceive.

He went that night as he had promised, lightly enough if without his former eagerness. He left Ghazalah in her accustomed place in the garden: a little sward, a fountain, a bower of roses in full and scarlet bloom. She had not followed him since that first night, but now she waited only until he had passed beneath the arbor, to put on her second shape.

The chamber was the same, but the lady had altered immeasurably. Her hair was like a fall of gold; her body bloomed in the sheerest of silk. She smiled as he came, and stretched out her arms. Shams fell into them with as good a will as he had ever had.

Ghazalah saw enough and more than enough to prove her misgivings all unfounded. She retreated with burning cheeks, taking refuge in the cool of the night, the sweetness. of the roses, the solace of her native form. Of course her brother had nothing to fear. His eyes had conquered yet again. The lady was his beyond any dread of treachery.

oOo

Ghazalah had known, as a mare will, that this house had a stable, and that there were horses in it: a mare or two, a gelding, a stallion. The stallion was given to bursts of clamorous temper, and to beating down the walls of his prison.

Tonight, for a wonder, the stable was silent. Perhaps at last they had. sold or slain the stallion. Ghazalah was most pleased that she need not suffer again that nightly uproar, and yet she found herself hoping that he was not dead: that he was alive, and free at last of his hated captivity. She knew what madness a locked stall could be, for a creature born to run under the open sky.

She drank a little from the fountain, nibbled a bit of grass. All was well with Shams and his lady. She had seen how very well it was. Yet she could not hold still. She found herself slipping from mare to woman, and back to mare again. She circled the fountain; she ate a rose. She pawed a furrow in the grass.

He was on her before she knew it: a crushing weight, a battering of hooves, the closing of great stallion teeth in her tender nape. She screamed in rage and pain. His forelegs pinned her; his teeth clamped tighter.

The worst of it—the very worst—was that her body yielded. It opened itself. It bowed to his power.

With the last remnant of her will, she twisted. Hands clutched the great neck, knotted in the waterfal1 of mane. The stallion crashed down in shock and startlement. She fell with him, scrambling, straddling his neck.

He lay half-stunned. He was thunder-dark, but his eye was grey as glass. It rolled back, white-rimmed. She cursed him with every curse she knew, and a few that she had only then conceived of. They were not idle curses. She wove them into his forelock, binding him to her will.

“Lady.” It was not a man’s voice, and it was weak with the weight of her on his windpipe, but it was Arabic. “Lady, I beg you—”

She was beyond astonishment. She was in the white realm of wrath, where anything could be, even a stallion who spoke pure Arabic. “What right have you to beg anything?”

A stallion could shrug, after a fashion. Even if his speech had not been proof enough, something in that shrug hinted that his native shape was not the one he wore. Something in the way his eye rested on her nakedness proved it beyond doubting. “You are very beautiful, lady. In both your semblances.”

“That does not excuse rape.”

“It does not,” he said, which was more than a human man would have done. “It is only . . . I saw you under the moon, and your beauty smote my heart. When you changed, you startled me. I lost all good sense; I thought only of your beauty, that I must have it, and you, and any love which you could spare for me.”

She snorted. The lust, at least, she could believe.

It was not comfortable, crouching there on his neck. He was bound by her spell in his forelock; she was safe enough to rise, to let him scramble to his feet. Small wonder that her back ached with the remembered weight of him. He was huge beside her, huge as a Frankish charger, deep-chested, great-necked, heavier of head than a stallion of Arabia, but fine for all of that, and spirited. If he yielded to her sorcery, she suspected that he did so as much because he chose, as because she had any power over him.

His words proved it. “I would make amends, O moon of beauty. Only free me from your spell, and I will serve you as I may.”

She narrowed her eyes. His own were a little too bright for her comfort, a little too careful in fixing on her face and not on the body below it. “This is not the shape you were born in.”

He bowed before her. “O percipient! Indeed it is not. Al-Barak am I, Jinni of the line of Iblis. My father is a great lord of the Jinn; my mother is a spirit of ice, a daughter of the north wind, whose essence embodies itself in a white mare. The master of this house found me grazing among mortal mares, for this semblance comes easily to me, with all that accompanies it, and I have been most fond of it. He seized me, bound me with magics, brought me here to serve his will.” The lean ears flattened; the strong teeth bared. “Such service as I would give, even bespelled. Had he not caught me in the act of mounting a mare, he would never have touched me. He is but mortal. I am a prince of the Jinn.”

“You are a captive,” she reminded him. “Or you were. Has he deigned to grant you the freedom of his house? Or were you escaping?”

His head tossed; he stamped. “I had won free. I was seeking a gate.”

“You found me.” Her glance was heavy with irony. “It is written, it would seem, that mares shall ever be your downfall.”

He looked as abashed as a stallion could. “But you are so beautiful.”

There was no accounting for the idiocy of males. Ghazalah snatched his forelock, tugged it free of the spell, pointed. “There is the gate. Now go, before the hunt comes after you.”

He did not move. “Come with me. Be my love. All the sky shall be our marriage bed.”

“How public,” she said. She set hands to his shoulder and pushed. “Go. Or do you want to be a slave again?”

He nuzzled the warm space between her breasts. “We have time. The sorcerer is occupied. Very well, when I looked, and very thoroughly.”

She slapped him away. “He’ll not be distracted long, once he knows that you’ve escaped.”

He nibbled her hair. “Ah, no. He has another toy tonight. A prettier one than I. I, after all, was only mounting his mare. This one had mounted his princess.”

She froze. He babbled on oblivious. “She was to be kept untainted for the one whom he calls his master. How he raged when he found that she had been taking her nightly pleasure with a silken witling of a boy!”

Ghazalah’s feet had mastered her numbed intelligence. She bolted toward the shadow of the house.

She had wits enough to bolt in silence, from darkness to darkness. She passed the door and the stair. She hid herself in her accustomed shadow.

oOo

The lady stood against the wall, a robe clutched about her. Shams was cast down on his back. A man stood over him, a very large man in mail that glittered in the lamplight’s flicker, with a bone-white cross upon his breast. His sword was naked in his hand; the point rested with utmost delicacy on Shams’ most precious jewels.

“Shall I cut?” the man inquired. He did not sound angry. If anything, he seemed amused.

The lady drew a sharp breath. She was neither fearful nor defiant, but whitely furious. When she spoke, it was not to the man with the sword. “Oh, you lying fool! To swear as you swore, and to come to me as you came, reeking still from another’s embrace.”

“It was nothing, I tell you!” Shams’ breath caught as the blade pricked, but he persisted. “It’s you I love.”

“What did you call the other? A gallop in the grass?”

He nodded eagerly. “That’s all it was. That’s all it would ever be. I came straight to you after. She was nothing to what you are.”

She spat at him. “You are vile. I should let him cut you to the bone. I should do it with my own hands.”

Shams blanched. The man smiled. “So, my lady. Was he worth the price you must pay?”

“Yes!” She had startled them all, even Ghazalah crouched beyond the door. “He is a liar and a simpleton, but for a little while he loved me.”

“Delusion,” said the sorcerer.

“Better that than the one which you prepared for me.” She held out her hands. “Take me now. Do your will. I knew what I did, and I knew how I would pay. I regret only that this child’s stupidity ended it so soon.”

Now at last Ghazalah saw anger in the sorcerer’s eyes. “A fool and a fool are well matched. See, now, for what you squandered your honor and your purity.” He wound his fingers in Shams’ hair, dragging him struggling to his feet. A poor creature the boy looked, slender as he was, fair-skinned as a girl, with a girl’s tumbled curls. But he was man enough to fling himself at his captor, snarling in rage.

The man held him off with contemptuous ease. “A vicious little cur. Has he teeth?” Shams snapped; the sorcerer laughed. “So, then! You choose your destiny. By the angels of hell, so mote it be.” He smote his hands together. Shams dwindled between them, darkened, and shrank. His snarling never abated. He sank his teeth in the sorcerer’s foot.

The sorcerer cursed and kicked him loose. He lunged.

Melisende caught him before he could impale himself on the sorcerer’s sword, and held him wriggling and struggling, half mad still with rage. His snarling rose to a crescendo and died. He stilled, panting, lips wrinkled over sharp white teeth.

He was a very pretty dog, for all of that. A pup, still, but well grown. His coat was glossy black, long and curling. His eyes were large and brown and growing frightened as the truth sank through his temper.

“A definite improvement,” said the sorcerer, “and I think, an acceptable compromise. You may keep him if you choose. He should be rather more faithful in this shape than in the other.”

Melisende’s face wore no expression at all. She set the pup down with care, and drew back from him. “This is unspeakable,” she said.

“It is just.”

“Not to a Muslim.”

The sorcerer shrugged. “He chose it, not I. Do you want him? Or shall I turn him out?”

Ghazalah poised to spring. Melisende struck the sorcerer with all her force. While he reeled, astonished, she knelt in front of Shams. “I refuse to pity you,” she said. “You earned it too well. But I would not see you torn to pieces by the dogs of Cairo.” She gathered him up and rose. “Take us,” she bade the sorcerer.

oOo

Ghazalah stumbled into the chamber, It was empty of aught but air, and that air acrid with the stench of brimstone. Of her brother, of his ladylove, of the Christian sorcerer, not even a shadow remained.

She circled slowly. Feet hardened to hooves. She stamped; the floor rang. She cried her rage in a mare’s piercing scream.

“Lady,” said a voice. “Lady, what—”

She wheeled, half rearing.

The stranger bowed before her, as a prince would, with grace that touched her even in her madness. He was young, and he was larger by far than men were wont to be in Egypt. His hair was dark but his skin was fair; his face was more strong than delicate, and yet in its way it was very good to look at. He looked the very image of a Frank.

He leaped from the path of her lunge. She veered, skidding, and toppled down the stair.

Bruised, winded, and unwillingly human, she lay at the bottom and struggled to gather her wits. The young man bent over her, deeply concerned and not at all surprised. He did not mar his manly beauty as most Franks did, by shaving his beard; it was cut becomingly short. His eyes were grey as glass. “Lady,” he said, and his voice was a man’s, and yet she knew it. “You frightened me.”

Painfully she sat up. His hands aided her; she suffered them. “I thought you were one of them,” she said.

His head came up; his nostrils flared. Still, he laughed, if not altogether in mirth. “My mother’s face is my blessing and my curse. Yet surely I do not smell like a Frank.”

“You smell like a stallion.” With him to lean on, she could rise. She had harmed nothing of consequence.

She knew of modesty; she had learned the uses of garments in nocturnal wanderings. Now she began to understand what it was that made women strive so endlessly to cover their bodies. His eyes made her think of Ramadan. A bitter fast, a purging of the soul. And after it, all the sweeter for the month’s denial, a feast.

Stallions never had enough of what they were created for. Even stallions who were born to princedoms of the Jinn. She snatched the cloak from about his shoulders and wrapped herself in it, and set foot again upon the stair.

His hand stopped her. “Where are you going?”

“Back,” she said.

“To what? The sorcerer is gone. In his absence I am free to wear my native shape. And you, O pearl of beauty . . .”

Had she been a mare, she would have kicked him. “You are a fool. Where is the freedom which you so yearned for?”

“All about me,” he answered her. “The Seal of Suleiman ibn Daoud—may he rest in peace eternal and far from any of the Jinn—is broken above my stall, as clever as I was in tricking the stableboy to knock down the bat’s nest behind it. There remains a little matter of revenge upon a sorcerer, but that is nothing; he will wait until I please to take him. You, however, O light of my heart—”

She seized him with force enough to stagger him. “You know? You know where he is?”

His arms were delighted to find themselves about her. “How not?” He bent his head to steal a kiss.

She bit him. “Where? Where is he?”

He licked the bright ichor from his lip and smiled. “O spirited! What does he matter to you? He is but a dog of an infidel.”

She laid him flat. While he sprawled, astonished, she sat on him and seized his beard. “Where is the sorcerer?”

“Such fire,” he sighed. Her fingers tightened; he winced. “Lady, have pity on a poor lover! He is nowhere that can matter to you.” A twist won a yelp, and taught him the beginning of wisdom. “He is in Syria, in the fortress called Krak.”

She frowned. “Krak?”

“Krak des Chevaliers, they call it: Krak of the Knights of the Hospital of Jerusalem. Did you not know? He wore the eight-pointed cross often enough within these walls. He is a master of the darker arts, but he has a master of his own; it was to that one that he went. He seemed most pleased, despite the failure of his guardianship.” Barak did his best to look engaging, even with her fist in his beard. “Can it be that you had a hand in it? Or, perhaps, a hoof?”

She glared at him. “I am not an idiot. My brother, on the other hand. . . .” It smote her with the fullness of its force. “O Allah, our father will die of the shame!”

“Your—” He seemed, for once, surprised. “That poppet was your brother?”

He howled. She hauled him up by his wounded chin and backed him to the wall. “That poppet,” she spat at him, “is the creature I love best in the world. Go, mount your mares, futter your doxies. I have battles to fight.”

“Against every mage in Krak?”

“Against every mage who ever was, if so God wills it.” She dropped his cloak and her humanity, and left him to his foolishness.

Hooves thundered behind her. She lashed out with heels and teeth, but al-Barak had set himself well out of reach of either. “Lady!” he cried. “Lady, will you wait?” She had no time, and being a mortal mare and no Jinniyah, no voice to speak. She eyed the garden wall. High, even for her desperation. Perhaps, after all, the gate . . .

He was there, barring it, dark in the dawn. “O beautiful,” he said, “do you forget what I am? I have magics beyond the measure of men. I lay them at your feet.”

Feet, indeed, since she needed human speech to curse him.

He shook her curses from his mane. “O pearl of my desire, I mean no less than I say. My magics are yours. Speak, and I shall serve you.”

“At what price?”

“Price?” Even as a stallion, he could look exactly like a merchant in the bazaar: the image of innocence impugned. “Did I speak of prices? I love you. I desire only to give you joy.”

And to get his teeth into her nape, and another portion of his anatomy into another part of her altogether. Her shoulders twitched at the thought. “Only that, my lord?”

“With all my heart,” he said.

“All males are idiots,” she observed. He regarded her, unoffended, all perfectly besotted. “A bargain, then, O prince of fools. Help me to win back my brother. In return—” His ears pricked; his body yearned toward her. “In return, you have your vengeance on the sorcerer, and my leave to seek my favor.”

He snorted; his ears flicked back. “Only to seek your favor? Lady, you are cruel.”

“I do not haggle,” she said. “There is the bargain. Take it or leave me. Time is passing.”

Slowly he bowed his head. “I will aid you, if through it I may woo you, O heart of stone and fire.”

The voice that spoke the last was a man’s. He cast his robe about her; he spoke a word of power. The world whirled away.

oOo

Even in dreams Ghazalah could not have conceived of Krak. There had never been another fortress like it, nor would ever be again. It reared from its bleak and barren crag, a mountain of stone raised up as by the hands of giants, vast beyond imagining. She looked up at its sheer walls and despaired.

She turned on Barak. “Why are we here? Why are we not within?”

He looked, when she paused to notice, rather paler than his wont. He lay back against the rock of their concealment, and essayed a smile. Her glare quelled him. His eyes lowered; he bit his lip. For all his size and his palpable power, he seemed suddenly very young.

“Well?” she snapped. “Out with it!”

He looked almost abashed. “It seems. . . I am strong, my lady, have no doubt of that. It seems that these of the Hospital, taken together, are stronger than I. There are walls of magic as well as of stone; they rise to keep out any stroke of sorcery.”

She looked up again. The walls stared down, impregnable. “Of course,” she said to them, “you would be guarded.” She considered herself, with ample help from a pair of cloud-grey eyes. “You can, I hope,” she said to their owner, “clothe me as befits a guest in a sorcerer’s hall.”

He stared at her, for once without desire. “In— Lady! Are you mad?”

“I have to get in,” she said. “What better way than direct?”

“They will kill you.”

“Allah will defend me.” She rose, shaking out her tangled hair. “Clothe me,” she commanded him.

His lips set. He rose unsteadily, drew a breath, stretched out his hands. She tensed to slap them away, but paused. A breath of wind caressed her, distant kin to the whirlwind that had brought them here. Warmth followed it, the caress of silk, the touch of unseen hands upon her hair. She looked down in wonder. He hadclothed her like a queen, in robes of sublimest splendor, sunset-colored, broidered with gold, sparked with pearls and the fire of opal. She touched the pearl-woven coils of her hair; she turned her wrist to marvel at the many bracelets of gold. She essayed a step, and started. Bells tinkled as she moved. She spun.

The bells sang; silk billowed, whispering. She laughed for pure delight.

Barak looked like a man smitten with a mace. His wits, however, had not abandoned him entirely: the dark robes with which his magic clothed him had melted into air. He wore the livery of a mamluk, a soldier-slave in mail and sunset silk, and on his breast a stallion rampant.

He would do, if he could keep his eyes to himself. She tossed her head, imperious. “Come,” she said.

She gave her heart no time to falter. She set foot upon the steep and stone-paved road; she walked up it with all the pride of a queen and all the lightness of an Arab mare.

The walls loomed above her, poised.as if to fall. The sky was pitiless. Only her courage sustained her; her courage, and the silent presence at her back.

There were guards at the gate, men as large as Barak, larger yet in mail and helms, blazoned with the cross of the infidels. The power that breathed forth from them was cold and strange, like a wind from a tomb.

Ghazalah stumbled. Barak was there, catching her, lingering even here, before the faceless helms. She withered him with a glance and strode forward anew. The air seemed to cling, to drag her back, to tangle in her laboring feet.

She set her teeth and persevered. Barak’s breath was loud behind her. He felt it more than she, or bore it with less fortitude, but he uttered no complaint, clinging grimly to his place.

The gate was open, the portcullis raised. She knew a trap when it gaped to swallow her: a trap of her own choosing. She faced that maw with its fangs of iron, and raised her voice. It was high, but it carried, ringing in the cavern of the gate. “Peace be upon this house and all who dwell in it!”

The guards did not move. The portcullis did not come crashing down. Bravely, but with a twitching in the center of her back, Ghazalah entered into Krak.

When mailed men closed in about her, she was almost glad. They did not touch her, nor did they compel. They simply guided. Through court and hall and court again, deeper and ever deeper into the stronghold’s heart. No gardens grew here, no green, no hint of softness. It was all stone, all silent but for the ring of mail-shod feet, and the sweet song of the bells about her ankles, and far away a deep-voiced chanting.

Ghazalah was not afraid. She had gone beyond it. The sun had set on a creature of sublime simplicity, a mare who on occasion could walk as a woman. In one night all that simplicity was shattered. And here was she, in the heart of the unbelievers’ magic, and at her back a Jinni prince.

Shams al-Din had a great deal to answer for. When she found him again; if she could win him back to human form.

Fired with both love and temper, she pierced the heart of Krak. There, perforce, she halted. A long cold hall, all stone. Rank on rank of mailed men with crosses on their breasts. A weight of power and of enmity that bore her down and down, crushing her to the earth.

She straightened her back; she faced the one who sat in a chair of stone unmarred by any ornament. No splendor marked him; no seal of power distinguished him from his fellows. He was older than many, gaunt with the rigors of his office, yet mighty in his power. His eyes were dark and cold and still.

She bowed to him as if she had been a queen. No flicker acknowledged her, and yet she knew that she was noticed.

“Master,” she said directly, as Franks were said to do, as came most easily to her nature, “you hold captive what belongs to me.”

The Grand Master of the Hospitallers looked down from his eminence. His nostrils flared the merest fraction; his brows raised by a hair’s height, as if he deigned at last to credit that what he saw was no delusion. A woman, and a woman of Islam, addressing him in Arabic, in his own hall, before the gathering of his knights.

His cold eyes passed from the unspeakable to the merely unbearable. A mamluk, but a mamluk with a Frankish face, and Frankish bulk, and Frankish arrogance. He spoke in his own tongue, cold words, meant to chill Ghazalah into silence.

“He says,” said Barak with the ease of one who is either royal or a fool, “that I might prefer conversion to the death reserved for defilers of his sanctuary.”

“Would you?” asked Ghazalah, not looking back, not taking her eyes from the Grand Master’s face.

She could sense Barak’s smile, warm as sunlight on her back. “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God. “

The air shuddered and shrank. The massed knights rocked at the Truth that to them was blasphemy, and signed themselves with their false god’s cross. Swords leaped from sheaths; men growled in their throats.

The Grand Master raised a hand. His servants subsided into wary stillness. This time he spoke in Arabic, if not to .Ghazalah. “Do not speak those words again under my roof.”

“Certainly,” she said, “if you will give me back my brother.”

“We hold no infidels hostage here.”

She had won a victory: she had pricked him into addressing her. “You hold a woman of your own people. She has a companion. Surely you can scent the sorcery in him.”

Her scorn did not touch him. “The dog? It is an infidel? That is apt.”

“He is my brother. I will have him back. Will you give him freely, or shall I take him?”

“Can you take him?”

“I love him.”

“Indeed,” said the Grand Master. “But does he love you?”

“Does that matter?”

“To his freedom,” said the Hospitaller, “yes.”

She stood with her head up, striving valiantly not to tremble. Barak was no help to her. He was not human; he did not know this folly that was human love. No more did she. She was only half a woman.

“If he loves you,” the Hospitaller said, “loves you truly, as a brother should love his dearest sister, then I will give him to you, and set you free.”

“And if he does not?” she asked with admirable steadiness.

“Then we keep him.”

“And I?”

“You may go where you will, if only it be out of Krak. Your mamluk,” the Hospitaller added, “we keep. It was not wise of him to enter here where Jinn and demons are not welcome save as slaves. In whatever form they come to us.”

Barak started. If he would have spoken, he never began. He stood again in stallion’s shape; even as he gathered himself to rear, a man leaped, flinging a bridle over his head. Its headstall was wrought of jewels set in iron, and every gem carved with the Seal of Suleiman. Barak bowed under it, though his ears had flattened to his head, though his lips had drawn back from his teeth. He could not speak: the bit forbade, carved all about with signs of silence.

Ghazalah had not known that she could be so angry. “That was unwarranted!”

“What, do your people mete no punishment to a slave who has escaped his master’s vigilance?”

She would not answer that. In a moment, she could not. Mailed guards had come, leading within their circle a familiar figure, and in her arms the creature that was Shams al-Din.

The Lady Melisende regarded the stallion with recognition and the woman with interest, stroking Shams’ long black-curled ears. He seemed content, as a beast is, without will to alter what is done to it.

The Grand Master spoke to the lady, and his voice was shocking, for it was almost gentle. “Come here, sister-daughter.”

She obeyed him without undue reluctance. She seemed to bear him no rancor, although he held her prisoner.

“My niece,” said the Grand Master, and again he was haughty and cold, “owes this pup of yours a debt. He has taught her what she would hear from none of us, that fidelity is more to be prized than passion, and that a woman may master a man if she keeps her wits about her. She has agreed to the alliance which once she spurned, for the man is royal, and gentle, and constant in his affections; and if he cannot equal her intelligence, at least he will value it for the treasure that it is.”

“He sounds a paragon,” Ghazalah said.

“He has a face like a frog,” said Melisende. “But I have seen what beauty is. In the end, since I must choose, I know which I prefer.”

Shams huddled in her arms. At her words, he whined, barely to be heard. His eyes were huge with hurt.

Ghazalah knew wisdom when she heard it, but Shams was her brother. “Are you any better than he? He loved you for as long as it was in him to do. You but used him for your pleasure.”

“I never swore an oath,” said Melisende.

Ghazalah met that cold blue gaze until it dropped. “I pity your husband,” she said. “Still more do I pity you. Shams is young, and inclined to foolishness, but his heart is steel beneath the fire. Yours is naught but ice and air.”

“Ah,” said the Grand Master, “but does he love you, woman of Islam?”

At her uncle’s bidding, Melisende set Shams upon the floor. He gazed up at her, bewildered. His tail wagged timidly; he licked her foot. She pushed him away, not ungently. “Why do you fawn on me? There is your sister. Go to her, if you would set yourself free.”

He turned to look, and Ghazalah’s heart sank. Of course he did not know her. He had never seen her as a woman.

She gathered her will, shaping the shift from maiden to mare. And nothing came. Where her true self had been was only emptiness.

She met the Hospitaller’s eye and knew. He had trapped her as he had trapped Barak, though far less openly.

“Brother,” she said as strongly as she could. “Brother, it is I, Ghazalah.”

He did not believe her. He knew what Ghazalah was: his long-maned beauty with the star on her brow. He turned his back on her and sought refuge in Melisende’s skirts.

Ghazalah rounded on the Grand Master. “This proves nothing! Love is more than a dog’s acknowledgment of his mistress.”

The Grand Master bowed his head a fraction. “So it is. Puppy!”

Shams came at that call, though he came trembling, snarling, snapping at air.

“Puppy,” said the Hospitaller, “I offer you a choice. There is the woman whom you loved, however fleetingly. There behind you is your sister. Your lover will suffer your presence if you desire it, and cherish you more deeply, it may be, than any who walks in the shape of a man. Your sister will take you back to your kin, away forever from the Lady Melisende.”

Shams stiffened at the mention of his kin, his body a cry of startled joy. But it did not endure. He sank down shivering.

“In your own form,” said Ghazalah, soothing him.

“That was not in the bargain,” the Hospitaller said.

Ghazalah could not even rage. Shams for once had seen more than she was willing to see. and comprehended it. All of it. There was the test. Life here, enchanted, but in his lady’s company, more intimate than any man. Or life in Cairo, enchanted, bound in the shape of that beast which all in Islam despised as unclean: a shame and a curse, and a mockery of his father’s name. Al-Kehailan had only been a fool. Shams al-Din had been a fool and a breaker of faith.

“O Allah!” cried Ghazalah, though the castle shuddered at the Name. “What does it matter if he loves me, if he pays for it in pain?”

She never heard the answer, if answer indeed there was. Barak had broken free. The bridle was on him still, but the reins hung loose and frayed. She caught them without thinking, braced as he twisted against her. The bridle fell. He reared up, trumpeting his freedom, and hurtled down.

Shams was there beneath his feet, motionless, eyes on those merciless hooves. Death was in them, and he knew it. He waited for it to take him.

She leaped too late, struck too late, cursed far too late. Even through the stallion’s cry, she heard the crack of bone. The great hooves battered her brother to a bloody rag.

She had gone mad, she knew it: she watched herself, she watched Barak. He stood still, unmoving as she flogged him with the tatters of his bridle. He did not flinch, even when the blood sprang, immortal blood, too fiery brilliant for any creature born of earth. His eyes were the color of rain.

“Ghazalah! Ghazalah!”

Her arm sank down of its own accord. It would ache, when she deigned to notice it. That voice . . . she knew. . .

She had lost even the little wits she had. She thought she heard her brother calling her, saw him standing on the grey stone, real and solid and desperate with fear for her. “Ghazalah!”

She could not fling herself into the arms of a ghost. No more could she tear her eyes from him. Even to beg forgiveness of the one who had freed him.

Shams’s fine dark brows had knotted. “You are Ghazalah? Whose spell did you run afoul of?”

“Our father’s,” her voice answered for her. Her hand stretched out. He was real. Alive. Unmarred by any wound. And quite as bare as he was born. She had never known that he had a beauty mark on the point of his hip, precisely where she bore its twin.

“You look like me,” said Shams. He seemed surprised, but pleasurably so. Until he frowned. “You’ve always been . . . ?”

She nodded.

His lips thinned. “You never told me. Never once. I shared everything with you. And you—you kept a secret.”

“It was never time.”

He tossed his head. “Oh, indeed! I was closer to you than—than—”

He was hurt, and angry, and as oblivious as she to useless modesty. She looked at him and knew her heart would break. Lovely, shallow, light-witted Shams. He could not even care that he was here. He knew only that his possession had kept a secret to herself.

“Perhaps,” said the Grand Master, “I should have demanded that you love him.”

Shams was startled. “What—”

He seemed at last to become aware of the hall, the knights, the weight of eyes on her slender frame. Some of them were avid.

He barely paused. He set himself before Ghazalah and glared at them all. “If you touch her—if you even think of it—”

It would have been ridiculous, if she had not wanted to weep.

“Hush,” said Shams, turning to hold her, patting her with remarkable competence. “Hush. I’m here. I won’t let them hurt you.”

“You had better not.”

A stallion speaking had no power to startle Shams. They glared at each other with fine fierce rivalry, until she struck them both. “Just exactly who is it who needs protecting?” She stepped from between them to face the Grand Master. “I count my bargain won.”

“I do not.” The Hospitaller met her wrath with icy calm. “This is not love; this is merely ownership. Bid the young pup choose.”

“What is there to choose?” demanded Shams. “I’ll be no lady’s lapdog.”

“Would you be her lover?”

Shams stilled to stone, but stone that breathed. His eyes had found Melisende of their own accord. Light had dawned in them; he whispered her name.

Cold she might be, but she was a woman, and he was Shams al-Din. She half raised a hand.

Ghazalah would not cling or beg. Shams was Shams again; the rest did not matter. Much. Would it kill her father to lose his son to a Christian?

He shivered. It was cold here for a naked man. He turned away from Melisende. “Ghazalah,” he said. He sounded angry, or impatient, or ready to weep. “Will you bear me away from here, or must I walk?”

“But—” she said. She had never felt so blankly stupid. “But you—she—”

“She is not my sister.” He set his fists on his hips. “Well?”

She could have cried aloud. It was haughty, and it was Shams; but it was most indubitably a choice.

The whole of her was there, full and rounded for her shaping. Shams’ wonder was sweet, his gladness sweeter yet, though he masked it with temper. In mounting he managed, for an instant, to embrace her. His weight made her complete. She danced: she could not help it. No more could he help his gust of laughter.

She wheeled at the touch of hand and heel, and sprang into flight. No one moved to stop them. One thing only of all that was there would linger, and come back to her after in memory or in dreams: the Grand Master’s face. It had not warmed or softened, and yet it bore no anger. It had lost no more than it was willing to lose, and gained more perhaps than any Muslim knew.

An honorable enemy, an honorable battle; and a victory well won.

oOo

The gate was open. Two sets of hooves woke the echoes beneath it. They burst into sunlight and clean air and stones that bore no taint of Christian magic.

But of Muslim magic, enough and more than enough. Ghazalah had half expected the rising of the whirlwind. Shams shouted his astonishment.

Cairo embraced them with a mother’s arms. They breathed its blessed air; they turned their faces to its blessed, brazen sky.

Not so blessed the place in which they found themselves. Sunlight altered it. The grass was searingly green, the roses red as blood. .

Shams spoke for his sister as for himself. “Why have you brought us here?”

“Convenience.” Barak’s tail switched a fly from his flank. His eye on Ghazalah was wickedly bright. “You need not fear a new captivity. The house is empty; the servants have departed. No one here can be appalled at our spectacle.”

Shams glanced down at himself and blushed. Ghazalah’s garments had followed her through her transformations; she gave him her mantle to wrap himself in. There were advantages, it seemed, in Jinni magic. “O prince of enchanters,” she said, “you have our profoundest gratitude. And, now that by your working we are free, our leave to go where you will.”

The Jinni smiled, as human in shape now as she, but no less wicked of eye. “Why, lady, I have done exactly that. Here is where I will to be. Have you forgotten the whole of your bargaining?”

She had not. She had hoped that he would.

Males were never idiots when one wanted them to be.

“Bargaining?” growled Shams.

“Bargaining,” said Barak, smiling sweetly. “I agreed to aid her in her freeing of you. Surely you will grant that I have fulfilled my side of the bargain. In return . . .”

“I never said that he could have me. I only said that he could court me.”

Why was she talking to Shams? Barak was laughing. Shams was struck dumb.

Barak did not remind Shams that he stood here, on feet and not on paws, because Barak had known the sole and single remedy for his enchantment. And more than known it: administered it. And thereby spared Ghazalah the anguish of slaying her brother that he might live again.

“But,” said Shams, “she is mine.”

Mares and women were made to be bought and sold. Ghazalah knew that. Her temper, unfortunately, did not. “I am my own. I choose for myself.”

If she had startled Shams, Shams startled both of them. His eyes lowered. “You are,” he said, subdued. “You’re all new to me. I keep forgetting.” He paused. “What the HospitaIler said . . . Do you hate me, Ghazalah? Was it for that, that you never showed me all that you were?”

She snorted. “Hate you? Idiot. For hatred I would never have faced the Master of Krak. Nor,” she added, eyes sliding sidewise, “made a bargain with that nape-nipper yonder.”

“Do you want to be free of it?”

She glanced at Barak, who had the grace not to speak. “No,” she said, and she had said it before she thought. When she did think, she knew that she meant it. “No, I don’t want to be free of it. It was a fair bargain. He was only to court me, after all.”

“You know where courting leads,” Shams said darkly.

“Only where the lady wishes,” said Barak.

He meant to guide her if he could. She showed him her teeth, lest he forget who ruled where mares and stallions met.

He bowed to memory. The flash of his eyes was for what he hoped would be. “If Allah wills,” he said, “and you, O light of my desire.”

She tensed to shake her head, found that she shrugged instead. “Maybe,” said Ghazalah.

oOo

Of what followed thereafter, Allah knows best, and Ghazalah who was a mare before she was a woman. She chose as she willed to choose, and found thereby both delight and joy, and of peace, little enough. Yet that was as she willed it. Al-Barak, after all, was a spirit of wind and sky, and a stallion of his will and choosing, and peace is not a stallion’s virtue. No more is it a mare’s. They had light and fire, and many a fine battle, and children that were the wonder of mortals and of Jinn.

As for Shams, whose folly had brought about their meeting, he had learned to swear no oaths he could not keep. Constancy in love would never be his nature. Yet good faith he could manage, and did, and when in time he took wives of beauty and of lineage, he pleased them as well as any man can please a woman. With that, in the end, even his sister professed herself content.

Such is the tale that is told in the annals of the wise, of al-Ghazalah the beautiful, and Shams al-Din, and al-Barak the prince of the Jinn who dwell under the earth. Praise be to Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate, to Whom are known all things that were, and all that are, and all that are to be!

Copyright © 1989 by Judith Tarr

First published: Arabesques 2, ed. Susan Shwartz