Kehailan

Judith Tarr

Once upon a time, in the world of the Arabian Nights...

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

There was once in the land of Egypt a most wise and learned wazir, as renowned for his mercy as for his justice, whom even his enemies honored with the name of incorruptible. Egypt, it was said, was blessed in its sultan; the sultan was blessed in his wazir; and the wazir was blessed in his wives-and in his servants, and in a son who was the light of his eyes.

This son, the only child of his old age, was much loved and much indulged, and he was most appealing to look at, a fact of which he was all too well aware. Between his father’s love and his own great beauty, he had managed to elude all but the most ineluctable of duties, and even those had not excessively troubled his peace. For he had a mamluk, a slave taken from among the most beautiful youths of the Franks and raised in all the ways of the True Faith, who was his age to a day, and who was closer to him than any brother in blood. In one respect only did they differ: the mamluk, whose name was Khalid, was a slave as much of duty as of the wazir’s son. What his master could not or would not do, he inevitably accomplished, always with competence, and often with brilliance. The wazir’s son, it was said, was the most fortunate of men. His conscience was his slave; when it troubled him, he had but to dismiss it from his presence.

Aside from his own face, the wazir’s son gave his heart’s love to three things only: women, song, and the horses which his father had bred, which were the best in all of Egypt. A doe-eyed darling, a new song in a new mode, a foal begotten of the dawn wind—these were all his desire. For his love of the last, he had won the name al-Kehailan, which signifies the pure strain of the horses of Arabia.

On the day on which al-Kehailan began his twentieth year, he should have been as joyous as any young man could be who had all the world at his feet. He rode on a hunt in the wilds outside of Cairo. His companions were picked men of his father’s own guard, and the fairest youths of the sultan’s court; and he was the fairest and the most accomplished of them all. He bestrode the most exquisite of his mares, the Pearl of the East, who had run against the wind and left it gasping in her dust. His mamluk’s bags were bursting with the fruits of his archery; his newest slave awaited him in the seclusion of the harem, a Circassian virgin of surpassing beauty, the enjoyment of whom would crown his night as the hunt had crowned his day.

And yet, as he rode, his brows were one black line of discontent. “Duty,” he said to his mamluk. “Duty. Always duty. Do you know no other word?”

“I know one other,” said Khalid. They were, for the moment, alone; as always in such circumstances, he had forsaken the submission of. the slave for the directness of a brother. “Love. Your father loves you, Kehailan. And how do you repay him? You squander his riches in your debaucheries. You mock his wisdom with your folly. When your presence in the diwan would gladden his heart, you abandon him for the pleasures of the hunt.”

“He will feast on those pleasures tonight.”

“Surely. And will you feast with him? A Circassian. Maiden holds your heart, a Saklawi colt your mind. When you have ridden them both, you will sleep, with never a thought for your father’s sadness. He never sees you but when you would have another mount or another woman; when you have won his consent to either, you leave him, with a scant word of gratitude to ease his loneliness.”

“Loneliness?” Kehailan was not, yet, angry. He was very proud of his self-restraint. “He has all of Egypt to bear him company.”

“All of Egypt,” said Khalid, “is not his son.”

It was nothing new, this litany of Khalid’s. It was the mamluk’s besetting flaw. Not only did he do his duty, and Kehailan’s besides. He did his utmost to impress it on his master. But that the slave should dare it on this day of all days, when nothing should have marred the purity of his master’s joy, came very close to the edge of the unforgivable.

The Pearl of the East fretted gently, eager to rejoin the chase. For once he had no thought for her. “My father takes joy with me in my youth. When I am older I will be as drably dutiful as even you can desire.”

“Will your father be alive to see it?”

Kehailan was still. Even the wind had paused to marvel, so motionless did he sit. With utmost softness he said, “You are my slave. My hand holds your life and your death. Speak again of my father’s passing, and you die.”

He spoke the purest truth. Khalid bowed to it. But he said, “You hasten that passing with your profligacy.”

Kehailan swept out his sword. Khalid bowed his neck and waited, entrusting his soul to Allah; but keeping his eyes steady on his brother and his master.

With a cry of despair, Kehailan clapped spurs to the white mare’s sides. Never in her life had she known such pain. She gasped with the shock of it, stretched to her full length, and fled.

Kehailan let the mare choose her own wild path. Tears—of rage, he could hope—had blinded his eyes. He cared little where she bore him, and less what he might find there.

He heard it first: a roaring like wind, but deep as the voices of dragons. It was laughter; but laughter such as he had never heard.

The mare wheeled and shied. Kehailan battled her into trembling immobility. His eyes had cleared, and gone wide.

He had come to the heart of the wilderness. It was a wild place, a place of ruins and of greenery, such as the creatures of the air are said to love. In its center upon a shattered pavement roiled a madness of wings and horns and claws, from which rolled the laughter. It reared up, and it was an ifrit of truly miraculous hideousness, and beneath it, struggling, a woman as white as the moon. She was bound with silk and steel, her body all one great cry.

Kebailan abandoned the saddle. The ifrit’s tail lashed; its wings fanned the stench of the nether Pit. It rose over the woman. Its fangs gleamed as it laughed, fondling her with one great taloned hand, so that she writhed and tossed.

It was, most emphatically, he. Kehailan checked at sight of that shaft which would have shamed an elephant. Surely the demon would not, could not accomplish what so plainly it had begun. .

Most certainly it meant to try. Kehailan leaped high in the air, and smote with all his strength.

The fine Damascus steel, child of nine forgings, treasure of his house, rebounded as if from adamant. Its edge was sorely notched. The ifrit’s hide twitched as at a stinging fly. Kehailan struck again at the base of the great bullneck, seeing Khalid in it, gaining force from his wrath. The blade broke at the hilt. The ifrit, distracted, turned its horrible head.

“Allah,” whispered Kehailan, alone and unarmed and beginning to suspect that he should be afraid. “Ya Allah.” The ifrit stiffened at the Holy Name. Kehailan, inspired with terror, raised his voice to something very like its wonted clarity. “In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the All-Knowing, and by the Seal of Suleiman, upon whose memory be prayer and peace, I command thee, begone!”

The ifrit towered against the sky. Kehailan stood straight and composed himself for death. The demon clapped its mighty wings and roared. It swelled; it smoldered; it burst in an appalling stench.

The silence was thunderous. Kehailan’s hand stung. He gripped the broken hilt of his sword, and it was as hot as if he had held it in a fire. He dropped it with an exclamation.

The woman, bound still, beseeched him with her eyes. She was even more beautiful than he. He would have fallen upon her as she was and had his will of her, but the splendor of her gaze made him pause. He bent to unbind her. If his hand escaped his will and ventured a caress, it was no fault of his; nor did she seem to take it amiss.

As the last cruel shackle fell away, her arms rose and coiled about his neck. Her lips seized his. Her eyes laughed and beckoned and were irresistible. She drew him down into her garden of delights.

Kehailan left it late and reluctantly, with many a backward glance. But the gate had closed against him. His flesh, feeble creature, was glad of it. It lay all spent, and sang of sleep. Only her fingers held him back from it, wandering in the downy thickets of his beard. “My heart,” she said, and her voice was musk and honey, “and my conqueror. I owe you more than my life.”

He stared at her, dazed and blinking. He was in love, he knew it surely. He had forgotten every graceful word he ever knew. “Come,” he stammered. “Come with me. I love you. I must have you.”

Her finger silenced him, a moth-wing brush upon his lips, more potent than any blow. Her eyes were dark with regret. “Alas,” she mourned, “I may not.”

“Who? Who is he? I will kill him!”

His passion made her smile. “You are my heart’s beloved. It is only. . .” She broke off as if she would veil a secret. She kissed him until his every muscle had loosed, and withdrew, holding him down with one slender hennaed hand. “No, my dear lord. Truly I cannot. And yet, for the horror from which you freed me, and for the delights with which you have bound me, I would give you one small gift.”

Hope sang in his heart. “You?”

She shook her head, all sadness. “I am not my own to give. But of the rest that the world may offer, I grant you your heart’s desire.”

“You are my heart’s desire.”

He drowned in the sweet sorrow of her smile. When he had come to life again, she was gone. He stood in a green solitude upon a broken pavement, and in his hand a hilt without a blade. Her voice filled his ears. “Utter the words of faith, and it is yours, whatever you wish most to possess or to be.” And even her voice was gone, and he was alone.

The silence shattered. Horns rang, bounds bayed, men shouted aloud, hot upon a scent. The hunt burst out of the wood, his own guards foremost, and leading them all, crying his name, Khalid.

A great rage surged up in him. That she was gone, and they were not. That he could never be free of them. Free as the beast of his name: child of wind and fire, swiftness made flesh, unvexed, untrammeled, untormented.

His head tossed. His heart.swelled, bursting, crying aloud its deepest desire. To escape them all. To be free. “There is no god but God,” cried Kehailan, “and Muhammad is His Prophet!”

The hunt parted to swirl about him. None of it vanished. Khalid sprang down, unslain and untransformed, even his pricking tongue intact; reaching to embrace, and to bind, and to beg pardon in his fashion that had ever been too haughty for a slave’s. Kehailan thrust away from him, cursing the falsity of women. He had nothing that he wanted, and least of all the freedom he had prayed for. From Khalid, from guilt, and from the iron bonds of duty.

Something was strange. Like an itcb, but an itch deep within. Like pain that was close to pleasure. His eyes were growing dim. But his ears unfolded wonders. And his nose…

“Allah!” Khalid’s shock was sharp in his,nostrils. “Kehailan. Kehailan!”

Kehailan threw up his head. His blood had turned all to fire. But it was not pain. It was a wonder and a splendor. He stamped: the pavement rang. He shouted his exultation: it was a stallion’s scream. He wheeled, tossing his mane. The hunt stood stock-still. He laughed at them. Some of them were wondrous sweet. Mares with languid eyes, slender necks, rumps rich and full and brimming with blessed madness.

But freedom was sweeter. He gathered his wonderful new body, leaped a wall of hounds, drank deep of the wind’s wine. Already he was drunken with it. He laughed and spun and sprang into flight.

oOo

Khalid lay on his face at the wazir’s feet. His garments were rent and torn; his turban was lost; his head was heaped with the ashes of his grief, that he must break the heart of the man who had been a father to him. Even before he could gather breath to speak, the wazir knew what he would say. “My son?” the old man asked, calm with the immensity of grief.

“Alive.” Khalid gasped it. “But—”

The wazir breathed a prayer of thanks, but darkened again all too swiftly. “But? He is ill? He is hurt?”

“No,” Khalid said, “O my father. But—”

“He is taken? He has fled?”

“My lord!” Khalid’s desperation silenced the litany of disaster. “Oh, my lord, I cannot speak of it. Come with me and see what you must see.”

They had lured him with his own Pearl of the East, bridled him and bound him and compelled him to return to his father’s house. In the end, for weariness, he had submitted. He stood in the court in a wary circle of men, sweating and trembling, but snorting defiance.

The wazir saw him, but only when he saw in none of the circling faces the lineaments of his son’s. He approached the stallion with respect but without fear. A more hangdog creature had seldom come to face him. Its head drooped almost to the ground; its ears flattened. It backed as far as its bonds would allow, and tried to crouch, as a hound when it is whipped, or a son when at last he has passed the limits of his father’s forbearance.

The wazir gentled him, speaking softly. “Peace, be still, O son of the wind, O dancer in the dawn, O brave in battle, great-eyed, white as the moon, thy mane a fall of sweet water, O beautiful, be still.” And he was still, but quivering, as hands learned the shape of him, his strength and his soundness, and the silk that was its covering. “Al-ashab al-marshoush,” the wazir named the color of him, a whisper, calming him: the grey that was best beloved of kings, rose-dappled, flecked with ruddy darkness, mark of the strongest and fairest of horses.

“A kehailan,” said the wazir, “of remarkable perfection. Come out now, my son; have no fear of my anger. Whatever you have paid, such beauty is well worth the price.”

The stallion gasped like a man. His body, driven to extremity, reared up. The wazir caught the bridle. His servants had begun to melt away.

Khalid prostrated himself again at the old man’s feet. “A kehailan,” he said to the stones beneath him, “and al-Kehailan. This is your son, O my lord.”

His throat closed. The silence was terrible.

“No,” the wazir said at last, quite calmly. “This is not my son. This is the fruit of his latest folly. Shame be upon him, that he has commanded his servant to spin such a tale.”

“My lord,” said Khalid. “My lord, I spin no tale. It is Kehailan. By Allah I swear to the truth of it.”

This silence was more terrible yet. Khalid ventured to raise his head. The wazir held the bridle still; he stroked the white head with its great frightened eyes. As if Khalid’s stare had waked him to what he did, he withdrew, moving slowly. His hands trembled, but his face had not changed. Only in his eyes had the blow left its mark; and that was deep, a mortal wound.

“My son,” he whispered. “O my son.” His voice rose. “How? Who has done this to him? In the name of Allah, I command you, speak!”

Khalid obeyed him. He dared do no other, though his soul quivered and sank under the weight of the wazir’s gaze. He told as much of it as he could know, and more that he could guess; nor was he so very far from the truth. “And thus after a hard chase we caught him, and we brought him back to you, my lord; but of the sorcerer who wrought this, we have found no sign. If I may have your leave, I will go, I will search—”

“You will do nothing.” Khalid shrank in upon himself. The wazir’s face, so placid in repose, so noble even in deepest grief, had stilled into a mask more deadly than any snarl of rage. His voice was terrible in its gentleness. “You have never loved him. You have always lusted after what is his. You drove him to this, you, with your serpent’s tongue, your net of truth that, woven, shaped a lie.”

Khalid shrank more tightly still. He did not venture to sift the truth from falsehood wrought of grief. His guilt loomed larger in him than any threat of death. His intemperate tongue had driven his master away, full into the sorcerous trap.

“I am called merciful,” said the wazir, “and I cannot be otherwise. I do not take your life. Ill as you have served my son,you remain his servant. If he chooses, he will slay you. It is no matter to me. I have forgotten your name.”

Khalid lay down and wept. The wazir went away. They all went away, taking Kehailan, leaving the mamluk to his sorrow.

oOo

Once the first shock of his father’s grief was past, Kehailan found again his first delight in his ensorcelment. He had all that man or beast could wish for. A stable of his own, silken-walled, deep in straw; a manger of marble and gold filled with the golden barley of Yemen, scented with spices and made rich with a leavening of mutton; a wide garden to run in, and cool water to drink, and sweet singers to beguile his ears; and the loveliest of mares in Egypt to be his wives and concubines. No one spoke to him of duty. No one vexed him with cares of state. No one compelled him to any will but his own.

Not even Khalid. Khalid had learned the virtue of silence. He served his master with mute obedience, fed him, tended him, made him beautiful for his mares and for his own pleasure.

The wazir he seldom saw. He was rather shamefully glad of it. The old man’s sorrow cut too close to the bone. It made him wish, however briefty, to be a man again. It made him remember that he had been the most credulous of fools. Khalid had told no more than the truth; Kehailan had brought all the rest upon himself.

His tale spread as all such tales must. His father’s guards kept the importunate at bay; when one or two enterprising persons breached the wall of the garden and began to conduct the curious therein for a high price, their quartered bodies appeared without, for the education of their imitators.

But some, the wazir himself admitted. Imams intoned the Qur’an over Kehailan, and invoked the Holy Name, and prayed day and night about his stable. The Khalifah himself sent his personal saint; the emirs of Alexandria sent a sibyl in a bottle; the syndics of Cairo dispatched three mullahs and three masters of the art of magic. Kehailan received the prayers with proper devotion and the incantations with proper awe, but with no slightest alteration of his enchanted shape.

The magi cast endless horoscopes. The rabbis droned over their Kabbalah. Even a Christian exorcist wheedled and groveled his way into Kehailan’s garden, fouled its sweetness with his unspeakable incense, wailed his backward prayers and danced his twisted dances and cast out not even the shadow of an imp. But a demon came at the climax of his rite, and bore him gibbering away.

The philosophers fared no better. The Platonists informed him that his form was a shadow of the true Form, and that he must reconcile the two through the exercise of his will. The Pythagoreans reminded him that he had fallen down the ladder of creation; he must restore himself, or he would be reborn as a creature lower still: a dog, or an ape, or worse. He was appropriately horrified, but he remained a man in a stallion’s body. The Aristotelians endeavored to disenchant him with invocations of purest logic; the Epicureans intrigued him with the doctrine of life as the simple pursuit of pleasure, while the Stoics instructed him to suffer in silence. The Sophists tangled him in nets of persuasion, the theosophists in webs of mysticism. He learned that he was an illusion; that the world was a dance of atoms in the void; that all was nothing and nothing was all, and philosophy was merely another name for windy nonsense.

When the rival schools began to come to blows in his garden, he watched the spectacle until it palled; then he drove them out.

Scarcely had he recovered his equanimity, when the doctors fell upon him. They stabbed him with needles. They bled him and purged him and dosed him with potions. Milk of the nightmare. Mares’ nests powdered and steeped in hippocras. Water from the Hippocrene; coltsfoot, horsetails, horse chestnuts, leaves of bay; herbs distilled in arrak and kumiss and -concoctions viler yet. He went mad on hippomanes, and might have died, but for the mercy of Allah and the aid of Khalid’s swift hand. The mamluk struck down the poisoner and cast out all the man’s cohorts; and he did battle with the maddened beast, sang to him, stroked him, nursed him back to trembling sanity.

The women were, Kehailan conceded, mpre pleasant to look at than the pack of learned tormentors. Sweeter to the ear and to the nose, and much gentler upon his body. They pleased him as a brisk brushing pleased him, and no more. They did not shatter his spell with human lust. Not with his mares dropping great-eyed foals who would be gray when they were grown, and coming into. the foal-heat, and casting him into perfect paroxysms of desire.

And yet, Kehailan had begun to think, stallianhood was rather less than bliss. It was not the vexation of all the attempts to restore him to humanity. Beyond and about them lay vast expanses of sheer and deadly boredom. No. one would presume to ride him. He could not converse; his speech was stallion speech, and sorely limited. Music was only half of itself when he could do no more than listen; and what was fair to human ears, all too often was a torment to his more-than-human senses.

Even his mares were losing their power to beguile him. They were not like human women. Unless it was their season, they had no care for love; and they were most emphatic in expressing it.

Humanity began almost to seem appealing. He wondered what had transpired in the court. He found himself remembering what little of the diwan he had ever harkened to, and running through passages of the Hadith, and pondering obscure points of law.

All of that was lost to him; and perhaps, he told himself until he was certain that he believed it, well lost. He had a cure for memory: to mount a willing mare, or to race the wind in his garden, or to linger by the pool to marvel at his own, luminous beauty.

oOo

A year to the day after Kahailan’s ensorcelment began, Khalid approached Kehailan in his garden. The mamluk bowed dawn and kissed the earth between his hands. Kehailan left off his desultory grazing. “O my master,” said Khalid. Kehailan waited prick-eared, knowing that tone from of old, and bearing in mind the power of hooves and teeth. “O my master, it is now a year since you fell under this deplorable enchantment. Many have begun to despair of your walking again as a man. Even your father—” Khalid’s voice wavered. “Even your honored father has forgotten the sweetness of hope.”

Abruptly and most astonishingly, the slave gave way to tears. Kehailan nipped his arm to. make him stop.

He raised his head. His face was as Kehailan had never seen it, raw and ravaged with grief. “Yes, O my master. Your father is dying. Little as it matters to you, whose only care has ever been your own comfort. He has provided for you and for your get. You need suffer nothing for his passing.”

Kehailan tossed his head. He was too shocked for anger. Of course his father was not dying. Why, only yesterday…

The day before? A fortnight ago? A month? Or perhaps, a season?

The old man could not bear to see him. That was all. He understood it. He forgave it.

“He has taken to his bed,” said Khalid. “He has arranged for the disposition af his property; he has laid aside his office and composed himself for death. Because,” said Khalid, “without you to be the comfort of his old age, he sees no profit in living.”

Kehailan raised his voice to its utmost, a ringing scream of rage and denial. Khalid fell back, hands clapped to his ears. Kehailan beat dawn the gate of his garden.

His hooves clattered on tiled floors. Servants fluttered, squawked, and fled. One bold soul with a rope leaped aside from his headlong assault. “Make way!” Khalid called out behind him. “Let him pass!”

The last door fell open before him. Carpets eased his pasage. He was nearly blind in the dimness. Voices were praying. The air was heavy; it choked him.

The man in the bed bore his father’s scent, but could not be his father. Not this feeble creature, wasted to a shadow, too weak even to whisper a greeting. His father was the wisest and strangest of men. His father would live forever.

For the first time he yearned truly for hands. For arms to lift that body, and throat and tongue and lips to utter human words.

He could not bow down in prayer as a good Muslim must do. He could not even weep.

He wanted to be a man. He wanted it, at last, with all that was in him.

His body mocked him: kehailan of perfect beauty, and perfect heedlessness, and perfect idiocy. He had fled humanity, with all the troubles that beset it. Now he had nowhere to flee. Wherever he turned was death’s bloodless grin, and the black shadow that was his own impenetrable folly.

oOo

Khalid left the son beside his father’s bed. Out of all the gathered futilities of doctors and sorcerers and philosophers, he had distilled one dram of wisdom. Someone had laid the spell; that someone had not come forward to lift it; and Kehailan’s will alone could not set him free.

Khalid had not been idle, knowing what he knew. His searches had discovered nothing. His spies had revealed that the wazir’s enemies rejoiced in their rival’s pain, but that they had had no part in it. This plot ran deeper, if plot it was, and not the caprice of some prankster of the jinn.

While Kehailan faced himself and saw a mortal fool, Khalid slipped out of the palace and the city. A guard or two was richer for his passing; one honest man slept and would wake, Khalid hoped, with no more than an aching head.

The creatures of the night made revel under the moon. Khalid passed among them in the armor of his faith. He was not without fear. His bowels had loosened with it; more than once he halted to grant them their sovereignty. But love drove him on; the Name of Allah preserved him from harm. The wings of afarit did no more than brush the summit of his turban. The imps of the empty places mocked him and danced about him and wove knots in his mare’s mane, but laid no hand upon his body.

Cold, shaking, his mare near collapse with terror, Khalid came to the heart of the wilderness. The moon had cast upon it a mighty enchantment. Above the fallen stones floated a palace of air with walls of light, a vision of beauty without mortal substance. Khalid’s hand, brushing a column, passed through it, sensing only a breath of coolness, a memory of fire.

The Sultan of the Afarit held high court within the walls of light, seated on a throne of air and fire, hearing the pleas of his subjects and receiving their tribute. Khalid gasped at the riches which the spirits of the air laid at their master’s feet. The barest tithe of them would have rivaled the wealth of Suleiman; the full count was almost inconceivable in its splendor.

Amid such perfect beauty, the court of the afarit was appalling in its ugliness. Demon forms flapped and writhed and screeched. The bodies of beautiful women bore the heads of snarling beasts. Faces of surpassing comeliness shone above the shapes of nightmare. Monsters out of blackest dreams promenaded in silk and jewels, chattering the airy chatter of courtiers.

Most hideous of them all was the Sultan of the Afarit. It dawned slowly upon Khalid that the expression on the demon’s face, which in a man would have been a grimace of most horrible rage, was a smile of purest contentment. When he smote his hands together in delight, thunder rolled. The dance of lightning was a tribute to his joy.

Khalid tethered his mare in shadowed safety and crept closer to the palace of air. The demons’ clamor came clear to him, telling in many guises the tale of their sultan’s gladness. The worst of his enemies and the greatest rival for his throne, Muammar of the line of Iblis, had fallen into the depths of the nether realm. “In the very act of ravishing our lord’s daughter, he fell,” said an ifritah close by Khalid. “Aye, our own dear Princess Subhiyah, whom the Queen of the Indies bore to our lord, and whom he loves as his dearest self. A mortal man came upon the monster at his labors, and felled him with the Name of Allah, Who wrought both men and jinn. Great is his honor who freed us from that scourge, human creature though he be.”

“Surely,” said the ifrit beside her, “our princess gave him fair recompense.”

She laughed and tossed her snaky hair. “More than fair! He had his heart’s desire. But he could not have our princess. She is meant for the son of the sultan of the jinn that dwell under the earth.”

“But I hear tell,” said another ifritah, whose closest kin seemed to be the wild boar, “that she gave her savior somewhat more than her intended might be pleased to know of.”

“Mortal blood will call to mortal blood,” sighed her scaly sister, not entirely in scorn. “Puny creatures as they are, with scarce a drop of magic in them, still they have a certain…something. When they are good to look on, they are very good indeed.”

“And quite accomplished, in their way.” The tusked ifritah smiled and tweaked the ifrit’s mighty yard, turning his scowl to an expression of sheerest outrage. He roared and snatched. The two females laughed and let him seize them, and together bore him down, making amends for their presumption in every way they knew.

An ifrit, it is said, is terrible in copulation. Khalid .crawled away, bruised and buffeted and most astonishingly enlightened.

oOo

From another and less lascivious assemblage be learned that the Princess Subhiyah was present, and that her father intended that very night to proclaim her betrothal to the Prince of the Jinn. His emissaries bowed even now before the sultan, offering gifts that as far outshone the rest as the sun outshines the moon. Khalid turned his face away lest he be blinded, and his mind lest he forget why he had come.

It was written that he must come here on this night of all nights. Surely also it was written that this princess was the one whom he sought. His heart raised a prayer to the All-Seeing; his eyes cast among that unearthly throng for a female as appalling as the sultan himself. Each seemed more ghastly than the last. None was as ghastly as he.

And yet, Khalid reflected as despair rose to darken his eyes, rumor had joined her in congress with her savior. Kehailan had been a mighty warrior of the bedchamber, but he had been and remained the most fastidious of stallions. He would not have sullied his white body with a tusked and taloned horror.

Close by the sultan stood a figure which Khalid had taken for a slave: a handmaiden, perhaps, of no more than mortal stature, demurely and modestly veiled. Now that Khalid paused to examine her, she was not so ill to look on. Her garments were of surpassing richness, even in this realm of supernal wealth. Her jewels were dazzling in their profusion. Yet they paled before the splendor of her eyes. The hand that held her veil before her face was slender and graceful and white as milk. One midnight curl had escaped to kiss the satin of her forehead, where between her brows’ black arches burned a ruby like an eye of fire.

Khalid’s manhood rose to sing her praises. His heart sang the descant. It is she. It must be she!

Before his mind could rouse to counsel prudence, Khalid had flung himself at the sultan’s feet. The clamor of the court was stilled. Demon eyes burned wide; demon talons stretched. The Grand Wazir of the Jinn swept out a sword as long as a man, with an edge of adamant.

“In the Name of Allah!” gasped Khalid. “Sultan of Sultans, Prince of the Princes of the Air, have mercy upon my humanity!”

There was a mighty silence. Khalid could not still his trembling. Great as his terror had been, it was nothing to what racked him now.

The sultan spoke. His voice was as deep as thunder in the mountains of the moon. “In the Name of Allah,” he said, “and of Muhammad His Prophet, upon whom be prayer and peace. What madness brings you here, O mortal man, where no mortal may trespass and live?”

“A madness, O sultan,” Khalid replied, “of love and loyalty.” Khalid’s back tightened, awaiting the rending of talons.

“Love?” The sultan seemed bemused. “What knows your kind of love?”

“You know it also?” Khalid bit back too late his burst of insolence. No blade struck off his head; he mustered courage to continue. “O sultan, love is the creation of Allah; its expression is His creation through mankind. I have a master whom I love, who is more than a brother to me. He has a father whom I love, who is more than a father to me. For their sakes I come to you, O lord of lords of the line of Iblis.”

“Men do not lie within my dominion,” said the sultan.

Khalid stole a glance under his turban. The demon king was inscrutable in his hideousness. “O sultan, hear my tale, and judge whether your mightiness may deign to end it.”

“I hear,” said the sultan.

Khalid nearly swooned, so mighty was his relief, so immeasurable his fear. He bent all his will to the telling of the tale, omitting only the speculation of the court, that Kehailan had had more than his heart’s desire in recompense for his banishment of the ifrit.

When he ended, he was weeping; and many of the court wept with him, moved to deepest compassion by his tale of the wazir’s decline. Through that storm of wailing and sobbing, he barely heard the voice that spoke above him. It was not the sultan’s. It was musk and honey; it was as beautiful as the princess herself. “Rise, O most valiant of servants. Let us look upon your face. “

Khalid could not do other than obey. He dared not raise his eyes. Her feet, he perceived, were of enchanting smallness.

“A fair face,” said the princess, “and an honest face, and a face that cannot choose between the lily and the rose. Surely, O my father, he should live, if only to complete his choosing.”

“He is much too lovely to die.” It was a demons’ chorus, woman-shrill. The sounds of grief had faded. They were all about him, marveling, abandoning sorrow in the beauty of his face. Hands stroked him; some were soft as sleep, and some were wicked with claws. They searched out his every secret.

They knew nothing of sacred shame.

“Roses!” they cried in high delight. “Roses win the victory!” Khalid would happily have died. But the mercy of Allah is imponderable. He lived, and suffered, and could not even swoon.

The princess of the afarit. took his burning face in hands as light and cool as wind. Only she could have done such a thing, and done it without sacrifice of modesty. He had to look at her; he could not help himself. Her beauty weakened his knees. Her smile all but slew him.

“O my father,” she said, “such bravery demands its tribute. For love and loyalty he dared even your wrath that shakes the sky. Surely you will condescend to give him what he seeks?”

“The spell is not mine to break,” said the sultan.

“But,” she said, “it is mine, and it is his upon whom I laid it. Together we may end it. If, O my father, you grant me leave to go to him.”

The Grand Wazir of the Jinn whirled his great sword about his head. “Outrage!” he roared. “Conspiracy! She seeks a mortal lover. She spurns our mighty prince.”

The princess knelt in supplication at her father’s feet. “O lord of air and fire, your will has ever been my own. Yet in this I cry you mercy. I spoke no word against this marriage, for that I dared not; and when I was abducted by Muammar your enemy, I learned the name of fate, and I saw a new face of love. He was beautiful, my savior, but of flaws he had sufficient; he did not sate me with perfection. I took him, O my father. I chose him for my husband.”

The jinn drew together, snarling in their throats. Afarit closed in about them.

“Peace!” cried the princess, flinging wide her arms. “Hear me out, I beg of you. I am a halfling, of mortal woman born. My arts are potent, but they are not the arts of the afarit. I am a woman and a sorceress; my substance is mortal substance, partaking but little of the subtlety of air. Am I a fit mate for the prince of the spirits of the earth? His blood is unimpeachable in its purity. His form is a terrible beauty. His virility is a legend among the insatiable jinn. How may I hope to be worthy of him?”

“No mortal man is worthy of you,” said the sultan. “And a mortal man whose heart’s desire resides in the mounting of mares—”

“He chose the shape, O my father, than which there is no fairer. Is not the horse blessed of Allah? Did not Suleiman, upon whom be prayer and peace, forget to pray to Allah, so rapt was he in contemplation of his horses? Do not the Bedawi of the desert grant their greatest joy to three things: the birth of a boy, the emergence of a poet among them, and the foaling of a mare? Did not the Prophet himself, upon whom be prayer and peace, say unto his mares, ‘Blessed be ye, O daughters of the wind’? What shame therefore need stain my lover’s name, that he dwells for a space in the body of a stallion? The spell was a testing, and a teaching, and a waking of his wisdom. If truly he has learned to be wise, he will stand again upon the feet of a man.”

“And if he does not?” The sultan’s voice was terrible to hear. “If you go to him, you cannot return. So was it written in the hour of your birth. Will you accept the full burden of mortality, if your chosen mate remains a brute beast?”

“Whatever shape he bears,” the princess said, “I love him.”

“And we?” thundered the Grand Wazir of the Jinn. “Are we to endure this mockery?”

Khalid knew the scent of war as it smolders into flame. “O sultan!” he called out with reckless daring. “O lords of the jinn. O pearl of beauty. Is there no recourse? Is there no princess of the afarit, save this one alone? Surely, had she a sister of the pure blood, that sister would rejoice to be united with so splendid a husband as the Prince of the Jinn.”

The mamluk stood quivering in an awful silence. If in his ignorance he had erred, then he had erred unpardonably.

“I have,” said the sultan, “nine hundred daughters.” He stroked his tusks, pondering.

Only the Princess Subhiyah- ventured to disturb his reflection. “Aisha, O my father, is as beautiful as the moon. She wept when I was chosen for the prince; she loves the very rumor of him. She would be transported with joy, were you to summon her now and confirm her betrothal. And,” said the princess, “her blood is the purest blood of the children of Iblis. She is altogether worthy of so puissant a prince.”

The jinn had begun to be mollified: the more so when the maiden herself was brought, and she was wondrous fair. Her wings were silk; her skin was cream; her talons were finest ivory. ‘

But the sultan did not speak the word that would set the halfling princess free. He looked at her, and from those terrible eyes, great tears began to fall.

She wept with him, but she said, “O my father, it is written. Will you deny the will of Allah?”

“Allahu akbar,” said the sultan. “He is great; He is ever merciful. I am the slave of His slaves.” He rose, and he was as tall as the sky. His wings veiled the night. “Go,” he commanded in the roar of the thunder. “Go in His Name.” His arms swept up. His hands smote together; lightnings leaped into the heavens. In a roaring of wings, the afarit rose up.

Khalid lay on the cold earth, with the dawn swelling grey about him. Painfully he stood. The palace was empty and broken, its walls vanished with the moon. His own black mare stood by him, and with her a fine blood bay, and on its back a figure wrapped in veils.

Khalid mounted without a word, with scarcely a glance. He dared none, or he would break. The bay led the black toward the walls of Cairo.

oOo

The wazir was sinking into the stillness of death. Kehailan looked fain to die with him, lying prostrate by his bed, given up to grief. At the coming of the Princess Subhiyah he scarcely stirred. His sisters bad come and gone; this, surely, was another of them, veiled before the doctors and the mullahs. He took notice only of her silence, which was a blessing after so many choruses of lamentation.

She bent over him and laid her hand upon his brow. She gave him no greeting. Her scent was—almost—intoxicating. “Would you be a man again?” she asked of him.

He surged up in startlement. He knew that .voice. But what he knew, he could not remember.

“Follow me,” she said.

He heard, and he obeyed.

oOo

In his garden Khalid waited, all white and worn, as if he had fought a bitter battle and won, as yet, no victory. The Pearl of the East stood beside him, with her foal dancing about her, and a splendor on her that comes only to a mare who is ripe for her stallion’s taking.

Kehailan gathered to leap upon her, but a light small hand held him fast. “Would you be a man?” the stranger asked again.

He turned his head. Even her eyes were hidden in veils. She was a voice and a perfume, and a hand upon his neck.

“You must choose,” said Khalid. “The mare or the woman. Your choice is your fate. You have only the one; once it is made, you cannot change it.”

That was the voice of his conscience, soft and level and implacable. Kehailan shivered; snorted, stamped, tossed his head.

Khalid said nothing. The veiled woman waited in silence.

The mare called softly. She was his love and his delight, his queen, the mother of his son. She yearned to bear him another.

The hand left his neck. He was free. The mare beckoned with all her body.

A flicker of movement caught his eye. He glanced at it, and held. The veils lay fallen in the grass. The moon had risen in the clear daylight, and overcome it. He knew her, the richness of her, slender where she must be slender, deep-curved where beauty willed it, and all her secrets open at last to his memory.

She smiled, shy and bold together. “Yes,” she said, “O my heart’s delight. It is I. What heretofore I could not give, I have won for you, if still you wish to take it.”

His nostrils flared. The sight of her would wake desire in a stone.

Khalid had hidden his face from it. But he said, “Your father, my lord and my brother. Remember.”

Kehailan bucked, protesting. The Pearl of the East nipped his flank. Her eyes were pools to drown in. Her body was moonlit madness. She offered fire and peace, simplicity, the forgetfulness of the beast.

His body knew what it would have. It was a stallion. It took no delight in human flesh.

The woman stroked his neck. Her hands were silken pleasure. Her eyes were a gazelle’s; her lips were honeyed roses; her breasts were goblets brimful of sweetness.

His hooves would batter her flower-softness; his great stallion maleness would rend her human frailty. He turned from her to the one who could endure the full and thunderous force of his passion.

She clasped her arms about his neck. Her limbs were serpent-supple. Her voice whispered in his ear, words of love, tantalizing, promising all Paradise. “A man,” she said to him. “Be a man, O beautiful, my love and my lord.”

He stumbled back. He could not. He was bound in this shape; he could not will to be free of it.

“For me,” said the Princess of the Afarit. “For your father whom you love. For your brother who dared death and worse than death to win this choice for you. Be a man.”

He lunged toward the Pearl of the East; he wheeled away. Khalid huddled on the grass. The lady stood shining in the morning. She held out her arms.

A shudder racked him. In one eye shone the mare; in the other, the woman. They blurred, and drifted, and melded together. They were all one image of sweetest madness. Man, stallion, both and neither, he flung himself upon them. He mounted a white mare. He mounted a white woman. He paused and poised and knew, in that instant of choiceless choosing, that one alone would walk the long road back with him from the garden of desire. And if it were the mare, Kehailan the man would die with all his dreads and doubts and dullnesses. But if it were the woman…

He opened his eyes on splendor. He breathed in musk and honey. He wept with purely human grief, and purely human joy, and purely human terror.

oOo

His son’s voice brought the wazir back from the gates of death; his son’s face healed him more swiftly than any physic. He rose from his deathbed to take up all that he had laid down, but first, to weep upon his son’s blessedly human neck.

With his .father’s joyous consent, Kehailan took to wife the Princess Subhiyah, who had given up her immortality for the sake of his perfect imperfection. If his ensorcelment had not made a wise man of him, it had taught him at least the beginnings of wisdom. With his father and his wife to guide him, and with his own will marred only on occasion by a lapse into his old folly, he rose high among the sultan’s most valued servants.

When at length and at a great age the wazir passed into the embrace of Allah, al-Kehailan took up his office, and held it in as great honor as his father had held it before him. It was said of him that he never failed to temper justice with mercy; that he could scent a lie as unerringly as a stallion scents a jackal among his mares; and that whenever he was tempted to fall short of his duty, he betook himself to his stables, where the children of his hooved children grew strong and wise and beautiful under his watchful care. Their blood lives yet among the horses of Egypt. There is none fairer or more valiant, or less enduring of human arrogance.

As for Khalid, whose tongue began it all and whose spur of wisdom had earned for him the name of his master’s conscience, when the wazir had come to himself again, he forgave the mamluk with all his heart, and set him free. In reparation for his sufferings he gained the fairest of the wazir’s daughters for his wife, whom he had loved since they were children together; and the wazir made him brother to Kehailan in name and in law as he had always been in heart and deed.

That the brothers lived in perfect amity is, perhaps, too simple an ending for their tale. They lived in love, and for the most part in peace. And if Kehailan had learned to be the wiser in pursuit of his duty, Khalid in his turn had learned to curb his tongue in the curbing of his brother’s folly. When Kehailan rose to his father’s wazirate, Khalid rose with him, to stand at his right hand and to be, as ever, the better half of his self. And thus they lived in wealth and in gladness until the book of their lives was written, and, as they had passed in the same hour into the wilderness of the world, so did they pass together into the hands of Allah. Praise be to Him, Lord of the Worlds, the Beneficent, the Merciful, in Whom are the beginning and the end of all tales!

Copyright 1988 by Judith Tarr

First published: Arabesques: More Tales of the Arabian Nights, ed. Susan Shwartz (Avon)