A Tale of Two Sorcerers, Sinister Cutlass [the unexpected everything txt] 📗

Malakeh hissed, wincing.

 

Maziyar smirked. "On that occasion… did Destane cheat him in some way?" he continued.

 

Malakeh was silent.

 

Then she answered, "Yes."

 

After another odd pause, she elaborated, "Destane was not faithful to the terms of agreement, and betrayed my father's trust."

 

Malakeh carefully watched her husband's face as she said this, and she put in a bid for sympathy: "There was much bitterness on both sides… I won't forgive him for that."

 

Maziyar nodded, thoughtfully, and encircled his wife with his arm, leading her back to the house. After inhaling his strange scent again, however, Malakeh tugged on her husband's waist and forcibly led him into the kitchen, where she bade him sit. Maziyar watched as she seized the maid's big copper pot - something the elegant, soft-fingered Malakeh never touched - and marched back out into the courtyard.

 

He marveled when she returned moments later from the ornamental pond, heaving the sloshing vessel. She trembled a bit under its weight, but an insane urgency propelled her. She snatched one of the maid's cleaning cloths, and her surprised husband scrambled to unhook the buttons running down the center of his severe black robe.

 

It would have been quite reasonable for Maziyar to begin questioning the source of this unnatural zeal which drove his wife to kneel at his feet and scrub his skin, to willingly sacrifice the integrity of her fine gown and her regal bearing... especially when he could clean himself just as well.

 

But that sort of cool, dispassionate inquiry was more in Adhemar's nature than Maziyar's, and the younger brother happily gave himself to oblivion as his wife's long, wet fingers kneaded through his curls and massaged his scalp.

 

**************************

 

When Jabril arrived at his house in the dead of night, the place was silent. His wife, Pareesa, was a still mound under the sheet and a welter of black hair on the pillow. Her girlishly round cheeks and unconcerned eyebrows exuded serenity. Jabril sank onto the bed next to her, and she didn't stir; she'd been asleep for a couple of hours already. She did not sense Jabril's sweating, magic-reeking presence, so he simply lay there, with no attempt to cleanse himself, and let his thoughts wash over him instead.

 

He marveled at the night's events. He thought of his own powerful decision, so much bolder than any choice he'd made in the past. It was a pragmatic, thoughtful decision; anybody could see that. The energy and might that both freighted and flowed in the wake of that decision… he glowed with it. He had never felt so competent and respected, the way his men followed his orders, even if they objected to them or struggled against them as Adhemar had.

 

Adhemar was always so cool and collected, one who discretely conducted debate, who issued good advice only after he had thoroughly vetted it. For the vetting process and the debate to be taken out of his hands, for Adhemar to publically scrabble so frantically for it… Jabril found it a refreshing change. Maybe this humbling experience would make Adhemar more tolerable, he mused.

 

These thoughts did not help Jabril sleep; rather, they quickened the blood, inducing him to defensiveness and sending his mind along the tracks of well-practiced imagined dialogues between himself and a legion of other men. Things he should have said, things he'd like to say.

 

He could not help reflecting then on the wives and children of some of them, whom he'd visited earlier tonight, with Maziyar and Destane.

 

Due to the lateness of the hour, most of the households had retired to sleep, and Destane's arrival by their bedsides had no more registered with them than the arrival of the more benign Sandman. However, some of the wives had decided to stay up and wait for their husbands, sometimes accompanied by small sons who relished the opportunity to stay up late, like 'important' people. The women had greeted Jabril, Maziyar, and Destane with surprise and confusion: neither the sorceror nor the ambassador were known to them, and though for at least fifteen years everyone had known that the great Saddaq Halabi had a son, very few knew him personally or cared to learn what he looked like.

 

The women were discomfited, Jabril had noted, in the mundane way that women encountering men in the absence of their husbands always were. As he and Destane had persuaded themselves inside, the better to inform the women about their lately departed husbands, the discomfort had immediately bloomed into suspicion. Nevertheless, even when Destane conjured a new hourglass in front of them, they neither suspected nor preempted exactly what the sorceror would do to them.

 

Their protests and their fright had then and did now conspire to overwhelm Jabril, as he lay sleeplessly next to his wife. But as a grown man, if he didn't have the discipline and conviction to carry out his plans and achieve his goals (or worse, failed in these pursuits because of an excess of sentimentality!), then what did he have? Why should he deserve anything, why should his wife respect and honor him, if he couldn't do what all men should be able to do?

 

It was the best choice, Jabril assured himself, to do what he did to the families. They would be nothing, and be accorded no respect or kindness, without their husbands and fathers. It was better that they not be made to suffer this mortal coil in the wake of a deceased patriarch.

 

Jabril shut his eyes, but he might just as well still have been staring at the wooden boards of the floor above, for all the sweet oblivion it conferred upon him. He rolled onto his side and decided he should start restricting the coffee he drank in the evenings.

 

Adhemar and Sümeyra

In the bed where Sümeyra had slept, Adhemar dozed alone. Dark gold sunlight stretched yawning tendrils across the stone window sill, lightening the room like a dream. The sweat of the night had dried, leaving an all-too-evanescent coolness. There was the delicate clink of glass and a trickle of pouring water from the kitchen as Sümeyra brewed two cups of tea. A breeze glided in through the shutters, dandling her dark curls and caressing her face, but her grimace didn't lift.

 

Her husband's recent nocturnal comings and goings (little explained and of dubious purpose), coupled with his lying abed this late, made her anticipate he had something uncomfortable he needed to tell her. She was also annoyed at him, because she would not breakfast without him, and yet, this ritual preceded her walk to collect ingredients from the market. Even now, she knew, most merchants had set up their wares and were haggling with mothers and maidservants over the nice, fat eggplants and cucumbers, over the ripest pomegranates. Sümeyra faced the long task of careful selection and committed bargaining, and the shops would close at midday if she didn't get going! The man simply has no idea, she thought.

 

She placed the glasses on a tray with some small spoons and, out of habit, placed two sugar cubes by each glass. Her shoulders sagged as she exhaled. Of course, it's only natural for someone who's never cooked for himself, she thought. Sümeyra wasn't bitter; rather, she was indifferent. She retired from battles rather than throw herself into them. Reticence, grace, and thick skin were necessities for her life in Adhemar's world, as well as byproducts of it.

 

On her way to the bedroom with the etched copper tray, Sümeyra passed the sitting room. There, Mayyadah lay on her stomach on the cool wooden settee, stark naked and riffling through a book that was clearly Adhemar's. Though her daughter was just three years old, Sümeyra had seen her this past year looking at the books she had brought from her parents' home in Iznikora, many day's travel away. When Sümeyra spoke sternly, the girl looked up with wide guilty eyes.

 

"Mayyadah! Put that back before your father wakes up! And at least put on a shift; we're going to market soon."

 

On the force of her mother's mood, the girl scurried to Adhemar's study. After her, Sümeyra called more softly, "Go to your room and watch Jafar for a bit, alright?"

 

Without waiting for an answer, Sümeyra returned to her bedroom and gently shut the door behind her. On a low brass tea table at the foot of the bed, she placed the tray and went to her husband's side to prod him.

 

Blearily, Adhemar opened his lids a fraction and studied his wife, with her expectant face and the challenging jut of her jaw.

 

"There's tea," she blurted.

 

As Adhemar freed himself from the grip of sleep, Sümeyra retrieved the cups and placed the warm vessel in his hand. He sniffed the mint, his moustache twitching, and Sümeyra impatiently took a sip of her own.

 

"It's late," she said.

 

He did not look at her, while he inhaled the clean, warm vapors. "I know. I woke up at my desk in the depths of night and tried to fall asleep again in here."

 

This wasn't out of the ordinary for Adhemar, but even so, a part of Sümeyra quaked in fear as he shunned the intimacy of eye contact and grimly regarded his tea.

 

Her father, in Iznikora, would do the same thing when as a young girl she acted inconsiderately, and Sümeyra would know that quick correction was expected of her. It stung and embarrassed her. On her husband's face, when it was he - and not she - who had some explaining to do, it simply galled her.

 

"What is it, then?" she snapped.

 

Adhemar appeared to be considering the best way to frame his response, before he decided to just hang it all and drop bluntly, "We're going to be living in the palace now."

 

It sounded like a joke to Sümeyra, but her husband's body language hinted at darker implications. Alarmed, she began, "But the sultan–"

 

"–is Jabril Halabi now. He will be doing things a bit differently."

 

She could not suppress a soft gasp. She thought for a moment. "…. Last night?"

 

Adhemar nodded.

 

"…. Are you telling me," she got out, incredulously, "...that Jabril Halabi, the accountant son of Saddaq, won a duel against one of Talal's best warriors?"

 

Adhemar sipped some more mint tea. His left hand, gripping the sheet, flexed and unflexed fitfully. "There was a sorcerer," he said, staring vacantly over the glass's gold rim.

 

When this did not earn a response from Sümeyra, he finally looked at her.

 

Her face, a twisted mask of disbelief, slid reluctantly into credulity.

 

Her mud-brown eyes wide with alarm and now curiousity, she managed, "I… I didn't think they existed. I read fairy stories about them… long before we were ever married. I suppose I always wondered, but…. I never saw one."

 

Adhemar gazed at her, grateful to discuss something speculative and impersonal, if only for the moment. "You would not recognize them on sight, I think," he said. "But maybe by the smell. Their magic can be smelt. This sorcerer called himself Destane, and he smelt humid, like dirt after a rainstorm, or like a house where snakes are kept."

 

Sümeyra made a face. "You met him? And he left you… unharmed?"

 

"He's not politically ambitious," he explained. "He seems to have lived in Agrabah for quite some time,"– this earned him a look of horror from his wife – "simply practicing magic, I