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

suppose. He lives in a run-down hovel in an alley. If he'd had designs on the throne… we'd be living in a very different city right now."

 

Adhemar turned, uncomfortably, back to his tea. The gears were turning in Sümeyra's head.

 

"It was you who hired him," she concluded.

 

"Jabril, Maziyar, and I did, on a suggestion from Maziyar's wife."

 

A dark look came over Sümeyra's face.

 

Her voice was low, freighted with suspicion: "How did Malakeh know of the sorcerer?"

 

"According to Maziyar, she told him that Destane had done a job for her parents some years back… well, I suppose the sorcerer has to pay for his food and oil somehow."

 

Sümeyra said nothing. She thought only of Malakeh, with her beautiful, imperious profile, and the way her lips had quirked in distaste – that subtle, elegant movement – in the days when Sümeyra struggled with the dialect in Agrabah, when Sümeyra had misguidedly shared anecdotes from her past as a tradesman's daughter.

 

Malakeh's thoughts on Sümeyra's roughness, so prettily suppressed when Maziyar proposed small suppers for the two couples, fluttered out easily enough when the wives were alone.

 

Yes, why shouldn't that woman know about someone as awful as Destane? Sümeyra thought bitterly.

 

"What did he do to the sultan? And his men?" she asked.

 

Adhemar again considered his response. With a heavy heart, he feared what she would think of him, when she knew exactly what he had sanctioned. Then he noticed how she sounded rather more curious than mortified or reproachful.

 

Adhemar changed tack.

 

Honestly interested, he asked his wife, "What do you think he did?"

 

This question frightened Sümeyra.

 

"I... I suppose he killed them all." She felt dirtied for having expressed this, and replied, angrily, "I don't know! You were there – you tell me!"

 

Adhemar flinched, but decided he could be candid now.

 

"He transformed the whole lot into sand and scattered them into the desert."

 

This gave Sümeyra pause.

 

"No one would ever find all of those grains…." she murmured.

 

"Exactly."

 

Adhemar waited a moment for Sümeyra to follow the trail of her thoughts. He prompted, "What do you think of that?"

 

Feeling examined again, Sümeyra fled from his gaze, dropping her eyes to her knees.  She muttered, "I can scarcely believe it.

 

Adhemar watched her.

 

Sümeyra stood up suddenly from the bed, muttering, "It's time to be getting on." She collected the tray, with sugar cubes untouched, and swept out of the bedroom.

 

The Sultan and the Hero of Agrabah

 When the bedroom was half-full with pink early daylight, Pareesa stretched pleasurably and relaxed on her pillow, contemplating the prospect of the new day.

 

She breathed in an acrid odor that was distinct from, and stranger than, the usual morning funk. Like stormy weather, but definitely less electric and more dubiously organic. She rolled over and was disturbed to find it emanating from her husband.

 

She considered waking him immediately and persuading him to wash. A flurry of domestic counter-arguments swarmed through her mind, so instead, she quickly climbed out of the sheets, threw on a loose robe, and vacated the room.

 

An hour later, when the growing light forcibly awoke Jabril, he turned to see Pareesa had gone. Pulling on a robe for modesty, he went into the sitting room, and found his wife fully dressed and groomed, reading from an anthology of poems to chubby little Hamed, who – at three years old – may or may not have been listening as he sat on the floor and played with his mother's embroidered gold slippers.

 

"Where's Dad?" Jabril asked.

 

Pareesa looked at him meaningfully. "He felt like sleeping on the roof last night. I went to help him down for breakfast, but he wanted to see you first. He wanted to make sure he had a chance to talk to you before you left in the morning."

 

Jabril experienced a sudden coldness at this news, and he turned to go access the ladder to the roof.

 

"Please…" Pareesa began, and Jabril looked at her impatiently.

 

"Please could you quickly clean up for breakfast," she continued, her nostrils flaring. "The rice is getting cold."

 

Jabril sniffed his arm, and tersely nodded before whirling out of the room.

 

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

 

Jabril pushed open the trapdoor to the roof and saw his father seated on a sleeping mat with his back to his son. He was watching the sea of city roofs and the red ridged mountains through the cool morning mist, which was quickly clarifying in the hot, rising sun. Jabril walked over and seated himself cross-legged next to his father.

 

Saddaq rested back on his wrists, one leg curled in at the knee, with his bad leg extended and relaxed. These days, in his early sixties, a significant portion of Saddaq's warrior bulk had drifted south, and in his sable hair and full beard there was a mess of gray. He looked at his son seriously.

 

"Something strange happened last night while you were out," he said.

 

"Ye-ess?" Jabril prompted impatiently, scanning his father's eyes.

 

Saddaq gestured in a few directions, with large, powerful hands. "I heard shouts coming from houses… it was there, there, there, and over there."

 

Jabril acknowledged, innocently, that it was unusual to hear unrelated shouts in a large variety of locations over such a short period of time.

 

"Could it be thieves?" Saddaq wondered.

 

Jabril shrugged. "Might be."

 

Saddaq laid a hand, weighted with righteousness, on Jabril's arm. "Jabril," he said. "It pains me no end, but I can't protect your wife and son the way I ought to be able to. I think we should discuss our strategy in case of–"

 

"It wasn't thieves, Saddaq," Jabril suddenly snapped, jerking away his arm.

 

He bristled at his father's assumption that any man other than Pareesa's husband should protect Pareesa and Hamed, and at his father's failure to recognize this assertion as offensive.

 

A shade behind Saddaq's eyes slammed down, and he waited grimly for an explanation. A small, ancient part of Jabril began quaking at this look in his father's eyes. But Jabril wasn't a boy anymore, he reminded himself, and he pressed forward.

 

"It was the sorcerer, Destane, and I was with him."

 

Saddaq's eyes expanded in rage.

 

"Why were you assisting such a deviant in his evil works?!" he cried.

 

Jabril forced himself to stay stone cold and articulate. "Because we were doing what needed to be done."

 

"You had better explain," Saddaq whispered dangerously.

 

"Gladly. With Destane's assistance, my team of twelve has wrested the sultanate from Talal Sayegh and disposed of him and his most loyal supporters. What you heard was Destane dealing with the families in like fashion."

 

Saddaq just stared at his son.

 

"Destane has transformed them into sand, and released them into the desert," Jabril continued. "I will reward him richly for his services with some property in Ahsa Asmara. He will always have the Halabi to thank: you for his city, and me for his home."

 

Saddaq seemed to have lost the ability to speak.

 

"Father!" Jabril demanded, his eyes fierce. "Have I not finally achieved something in this world that is worthy of the son of General Halabi, the Conqueror?!"

 

Saddaq looked away, snorting derisively.

 

Jabril was floored by this response.

 

"What more would you have me do, oh great one?!" he cried incredulously. "Your son controls the empire, and your grandson will never know a life in which he was not destined to rule. Stories of our family will go down in the annals of history!"

 

Saddaq looked pityingly at his son.

 

A stranger receiving this glance from Saddaq might for an instant expect the old warrior to enfold him in a sympathetic embrace, but Jabril had long ago learned to see his father's expression as laced with condescension.

 

Saddaq sighed ponderously, and explained, "You've committed treason, and in doing so, you've stooped to using those beastly men who exercise without moral compunction a set of powers outstripping all acceptable limits. If you can't understand what is wrong with this, then you have learned nothing."

 

Jabril stared stonily at his father.

 

"You've made a mockery of fair combat," Saddaq went on. "As a consequence, your 'achievement' means nothing."

 

A moment passed in which the warrior's discharged gift of profundity expanded like a balloon in the still morning air, filling up the cracks in Jabril's consciousness, threatening resistant tendrils of thought with suffocation.

 

Jabril sighed heavily, and clambered to his feet. He looked down his nose at his gravely disappointed father, earthbound by his injury. "You can lay out a dish of platitudes if you want, but I'm your son, and I understand you. I have no doubt that when you were conducting your campaigns you would have happily hired a sorcerer if you thought he would provide a tactical advantage," he spat. (Or, Jabril thought, if you'd even known where to find one...)

 

Jabril percieved that, after this accusation, Saddaq couldn't possibly have stored up an honest argument sufficient to sustain his air of unflappable moral authority.

 

However, he never saw so much as a crack appear in his father's mask of solemn condemnation. He only caught a flicker of defensive posturing in Saddaq's calculating, evaluating, deep brown eyes.

 

Jabril scoffed.

 

In frustraton, he turned on his heel and strode back over to the trapdoor. Saddaq still said nothing, allowing Jabril's argument the indignity of disregard. This tactic does not in general win arguments, except when used by a father.

 

"If you are expecting me to express remorse, or to glory in self-abasement at your feet…." Jabril sneered, lifting up the trapdoor, "… Then you need to wake up."

 

He gave a little mocking bow, and indicated the interior of the house. "Wake up and have some breakfast, why don't you?"

 

With that, Jabril descended the ladder and slammed the door shut on his father.

 

Pareesa tried to complain as Jabril swept out of the house and turned toward the palace, but he stonewalled her.

 

Pareesa didn't have the energy for fuming.

 

Resigned, she went to climb the ladder and assist Jabril's father.

 

Whispers in the Marketplace (Part 1)

 Adhemar emerged from his bedroom to find Sümeyra pouring her tea over one of the curling green plants she kept. When she met his eyes, all creatures would have run from her stare.

 

Her husband quickly averted his eyes, straightened his green bisht, and exited the house.

 

Sümeyra went to the room where her children slept. There were two bare bottoms on the cool stone floor, and there was a continuous babble as Mayyadah taught her brother to pick up the dried dates when she bounced a ball.

 

Sümeyra was too deeply mired in disappointment for the sight to charm her. She noted that, as often happened, her daughter showed the maturity to watch after her brother, but failed to complete much simpler tasks.

 

"I tell you to get dressed, Mayya, and you go and double the number of undressed