Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories Read online

  With no one performing introductions, Al-Ashmar took one knee to the empress and woman both. “I am Al-Ashmar ak Kulhadn, humble physic.”

  “The empress knows who you are,” the woman said.

  Movement pulled Al-Ashmar’s attention away from the empress. From inside the safety of the palanquin leapt a cat, Bela, the bright one, ninth and final companion to the empress Waharra before she alights for the heavens. Like the cat Al-Ashmar had just treated, Bela was long and lean, but she had the muscle tone of a cat treated well. Her smooth coat was ivory with onyx spots coating her sides and back. Stripes slid down her face, giving her an innocent but regal look. She roamed the room and croaked out a meow as if she had just woken from a long nap. She seemed wary of Al-Ashmar and Djazir, but then she slunk to the foot of the throne, curled up in a ball, and began licking one outstretched leg.

  Djazir moved to the palanquin and retrieved a crimson pillow dusted with short, white hair. He set the pillow down several paces away from the throne and then set Bela upon it.

  “Please,” Djazir said to Al-Ashmar, motioning to Bela, “tell us what you can.”

  Al-Ashmar hesitated—how rude not to introduce him to the woman!—but there was nothing for it. He couldn’t afford to insult Djazir.

  As Al-Ashmar stepped forward and knelt before the cat, he felt the empress’s eyes watching his every move. Her body may have failed her, but her mind, he was sure, was as sharp as ever. Al-Ashmar stroked Bela’s side and stomach. Bela stretched and purred.

  “Her symptoms?” he asked.

  He expected Djazir to answer, but it was the woman who spoke. “Her feces are loose and runny. She eats less, though she still eats. She’s listless much of the day.”

  Bela’s purr intensified, a rasping sound everyone in the room could hear.

  “Anything else? Anything you noticed days ago, even weeks?”

  “Her eyes started watering and crusting eight or nine days ago. But that stopped a few days back.”

  “Has her diet changed?”

  “She began eating less, but Djazir administered cream from the empress’s reserve herd, laced with fennel.”

  “She’s kept her appetite since?”

  “Somewhat, but she still seems to eat too little.”

  Al-Ashmar scratched Bela under the chin. Bela stretched her neck and squinted, but when she opened her eyes wide again, Al-Ashmar started. He leaned closer while continuing to scratch, tilting Bela’s head from side to side while doing so. Bela seemed amused, but on the inside of her iris was a raised, curling mark. It retained the golden color of the iris, but something was obviously there, just beneath the surface.

  Al-Ashmar sat upright, confused.

  But the woman... She held an expression that said she’d rather this sullied business be over and done with.

  “Do you have a name,” Al-Ashmar asked, “or shall I continue to treat you like a talking palm?”

  Was there a hint of a smile from the empress?

  “You may call me Rabiah,” the woman said crisply.

  The height of rudeness! What civilized person withholds her mother’s name?

  “Where has this cat been, Rabiah?” Al-Ashmar asked.

  Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “I asked where the empress’s cat has been, in the last month.”

  “In the palace only. She has never left.”

  “Never?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Enough, ak Kulhadn,” Djazir said. “What is it you see?”

  “Forgive me. I ask these questions because Bela—long may the sun shine on her life—has snakeworm.”

  “What?” Djazir asked. He kneeled beside Al-Ashmar and stared into Bela’s eyes.

  “Look for the raised area. There.”

  While Djazir inspected her eyes, Al-Ashmar couldn’t help but wonder how this could have happened. Snakeworm was common in his homeland, but that was far to the south, and the worm came from goats. There were caravans, of course, like Gadn’s, that brought livestock northward. It was conceivable that a cat could get it from a transplanted goat, but the worm seemed to have trouble thriving in the north. In nearly twenty years in the capital, he’d seen only three cases, and all of them had been near the caravan landings or the bazaar. How could Bela, a cat that would never be allowed away from the palace grounds, have contracted the worm?

  Al-Ashmar stood. “I can make a tonic and return tomorrow.”

  “No,” Djazir said, standing as well. “You will tell me how to make it.”

  Al-Ashmar dipped his head until he could no longer make eye contact with Djazir. “With due respect, it cannot be taught in so short a time. The balance is tricky, and I wouldn’t wish to jeopardize Bela’s life over a formula crudely made.”

  Djazir bristled. “Then you will do it immediately and return here when it’s done.”

  “Of course, but it will take nearly a day. The ingredients are rare, and it will take me time to find those of proper quality. And then I must boil—”

  Al-Ashmar stopped at a disturbing noise coming from the empress. The sounds from her throat could hardly be construed as words, and yet Rabiah leaned over and listened attentively as if she were speaking.

  Rabiah stood. “Her Highness, Waharra sut Shahmat, wishes for Al-Ashmar to make the tonic. Alone. He will return tomorrow when it is ready, and every day after until Bela’s recovery is judged complete.”

  Djazir bowed to the empress, as did Al-Ashmar. Again, he saw a quirky smile from her lips and wondered if it could be such a thing. She had enough control still to speak to Rabiah. Could she not show amusement if she so chose?

  He supposed she could. But the real question was: Why? Why him? And why amusement?

  Al-Ashmar rose to his feet and turned to Djazir. “Anyone in close contact with Bela may have contracted the worm, so it would be wise to examine everyone, even wiser for everyone to take the same tonic as Bela will receive.”

  After Djazir nodded his assent, Al-Ashmar inspected the hulking guards, then Djazir. As he held Rabiah’s head and gazed into her irises, more than anything else he sensed the scent of jasmine and the warmth of her face through his fingertips. He had to force himself to examine her complex green eyes closely to make sure there were no signs of infection.

  Al-Ashmar knelt before the empress next. It took him a moment, for the two guards were watching him as the cobra spies the mongoose. The empress’s eyes were free of the worm, but she kept glancing toward the stack of books on the nearby marble table.

  When Al-Ashmar stepped away, he noticed the binding of the top book; it was inlaid with a cursive pattern—a pattern often used in the south, Al-Ashmar’s home. In the center of the leather cover rested a tiger eye stone with a silver, diamond-shaped setting.

  Bela, sitting beneath the table, watched him closely. It was strange how utterly human Bela looked for that brief instant.

  Al-Ashmar nodded to the empress. “Our Exalted has fine taste in books.”

  She spoke to Rabiah. Rabiah said not a word, but it was a long time before she moved to the stack of books and retrieved the top one. She held it out to Al-Ashmar.

  “My lady?” Al-Ashmar said.

  “The Blessed One wishes to gift you.”

  Al-Ashmar nearly raised his hands to refuse, but how grave an insult to reject such an offer. “The empress is too kind,” he said at last.

  Rabiah shoved it into his chest, forcing him to take it.

  And now there could be no doubt.

  The empress was smiling.

  Late that night, within his workroom, Al-Ashmar poured three heaping spoonfuls of ground black walnut husk into the boiling pot before him. The sounds of the evening meal being cleared by the children came from behind. Mia, his second youngest, sat on a stool, watching him, as she so often did. She picked up the glass phial of clove juice and removed the stopper, but immediately after recoiled from the sharp smell and wrinkled her nose.

  Al-Ashmar laughed. “
Then stop smelling it.”

  “It smells so weird.”

  “Well, weird or not, it’s the empress’s, so leave it alone.” Al-Ashmar added the minced wormwood root and mixed it thoroughly with the ground husks. That done, he flipped his hourglass over, and the sand began spilling into the empty chamber.

  Mia leaned over the table and retrieved a thin piece of coal and the papyrus scrap she’d been writing on. “How long after the bark?”

  “Four hours, covered. It will boil down, nearly to a paste.”

  She wrote chicken prints on the scroll. Al-Ashmar tried to hide his smile, for if she caught him, she always got upset. She didn’t know how to write more than a few letters, but still she created her own recipes as Al-Ashmar made things she hadn’t learned about yet.

  “Then what?”

  “I told you, the clove juice, then the elixir, then they steep.”

  “Oh,” she said while writing more, “I forgot.” She sat up then and fixed him with a child’s most-serious expression. “Doesn’t she have people to heal cats in the palace?”

  Al-Ashmar found himself hiding another smile. He often told his seven children about his day over their evening meal, but Mia was the one who listened most often. “She does, Mia, but they rarely see such things.”

  “Snakeworm?”

  “Yes.”

  “From where you and memma came from.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how did it get here?”

  Al-Ashmar shrugged. He still hadn’t been able to piece together a plausible story. “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me about the woman again. She sounded pretty.”

  “I told you, pet, she wasn’t pretty. She was mean.”

  Mia shrugged, and tugged the empress’s book closer. “She sounded pretty to me.” She flipped through the pages, pretending to read each one. “What’s this?”

  “A gift, from the empress,” Al-Ashmar said.

  “What does it teach?”

  Al-Ashmar smiled. It was a retelling of several fables from his homeland—four of them, all simple tales of the spirits of the southern lands and how they helped or harmed wayward travelers.

  “Nothing,” he finally said. “Now off to bed.”

  Mia ignored him, as she often did on his first warning. “What’s this?”

  Al-Ashmar snatched the book away and stared at the scribbles Mia had been looking at. He hadn’t noticed it earlier. He’d had too much to do, and since it had seemed so innocuous, he’d left it until he had more time to sift through its pages. On the last page were the words save her written in an appalling, jittery hand. The letters were oversized as well, as if writing any smaller was either impossible or would have rendered the final text unreadable.

  The empress, surely. But why? Save who?

  And from what?

  Mia dropped from her stool and fought next to him for a view. “Enough, Mia. To bed.”

  After tucking the children in for the night, Al-Ashmar stayed up, nursing the tonic, and thinking. Save her. Save Bela? But that made no sense. He had already been summoned, had already been directed to heal the empress’s cat. Why write a note for that?

  Then again, there was no logical reason that the cat would have the worm. Coincidence was too unlikely. So it had to have been intentional. But who would dare infect the empress’s cat? Did the empress fear that the next attempt would be bolder? Was something afoot even now?

  Bela, after all, was the empress’s ninth cat—her last—and when she died, so would the empress, and her closest servants with her. That might explain Djazir’s tense mood, might even explain Rabiah’s sullenness. But it wouldn’t explain the smile on the empress’s lips. For whatever reason, it seemed most logical that the empress had arranged this.

  Al-Ashmar paged through the tale in which the jagged words had been written. It was a tale of a child that had wandered too far, and was destined to die alone in the mountains. But then a legendary shepherd found her and brought her to live with him—him and his eighty-nine children, others who’d been found wandering in the same manner.

  Hours later, Al-Ashmar added the clove juice and a honey-ginger elixir to the tonic and left it to steep. After his mind struggled through a thousand dead-end possibilities, Father Sleep finally found him.

  The following day, Al-Ashmar was led to the empress’s garden. Strands of wispy clouds marked the blue sky as a pleasant breeze rattled the palm leaves. Bela sat at the foot of the empress’s throne, which had been moved from inside the cold and empty room. The cat lapped at the cream laced with the tonic.

  Odd, Al-Ashmar thought. Cats usually detested the remedy no matter how carefully it was hidden. Al-Ashmar’s other patients, however, were not so pliant. Nearby, Rabiah took a deep breath and downed the last of her phial. The eunuchs, thank goodness, had swallowed theirs at a word from Rabiah.

  “Bela will need two more doses today,” Al-Ashmar said, “and three more tomorrow.”

  Djazir stared at his half-empty phial, a look of complete disgust on his face.

  “Please,” Al-Ashmar said to Djazir, “I know it is distasteful, but you need to drink the entire phial.”

  “I will drink it, Physic, but we will not subject the empress to such a thing.”

  Al-Ashmar hid his eyes from Djazir. “Of course you know best, but if the empress has the worm, the effects will only worsen.”

  The empress spoke to Rabiah. Al-Ashmar, listening more closely than the day before, could still understand not a single word.

  “Of course, Exalted,” Rabiah said, and she retrieved the phial meant for the empress.

  Djazir gritted his jaw as Rabiah tilted the phial into the empress’s mouth. The empress’s eyes watered, and she coughed, causing some of it to spill onto Rabiah’s hands.

  “Be careful of her eyes,” Al-Ashmar said, stepping forward. “The tonic will sting horribly for quite some time—”

  But Rabiah waved him away. At least she took more care how she supported the empress’s head as she dispensed the liquid. The empress’s coughing slowed the process to a crawl, but eventually the ordeal was over.

  Djazir took Al-Ashmar by the elbow, ready to lead him from the garden and out of the palace.

  “I wonder if we might speak,” Al-Ashmar said. “Alone, so as not to disturb the empress.”

  Djazir seemed doubtful, but he released Al-Ashmar’s elbow. “What about?”

  “A few questions only, in order to narrow down the source of the worms. If we cannot find it, the infection may simply recur.”

  Djazir brought him up a set of stairs to a railed patio on the roof of the palace. Around them the entire city sprawled over the land for miles. The river glistened as it crawled like the snakeworm through the flesh of the city until reaching the glittering sea several miles away.

  Al-Ashmar spoke, asking questions about Bela’s activities, the empress’s, even Rabiah’s, but this was all a ruse. He’d wanted to get Djazir to agree to questioning simply so he could ask the same of Rabiah. He had to get her alone, for only in her did he have a chance of unwrapping this riddle.

  Djazir agreed to send Rabiah up to speak to him as well, and several minutes later, she came and stood a safe distance away from him, staring out over the city. It took him a moment, but Al-Ashmar realized that Rabiah was staring at the fourteen spires standing at attention along the shore. Thirteen empresses lay buried beneath thirteen obelisks, and the fourteenth stood empty, waiting. Al-Ashmar thought at first she was simply ignoring him, but there was so much anxiety on her face as she stared at the obelisk.

  “She won’t die from the worm, my lady. We’ve caught it in time.”

  Rabiah turned to him and nodded, her face blank now. “I know, Physic.”

  Then realization struck. Rabiah wasn’t afraid because of the worm, never had been. She was afraid for something else, something much more serious. Like riddles within riddles the answer to this one simple curiosity led to a host of answers he’d struggled with late into th
e night.

  He hesitated to voice his thoughts—they were thoughts that could get one killed—but he had no true choice. He could no more bury this question than he could have denied any of his children a home when they’d needed it.

  “How much longer?”

  A muscle twitched along Rabiah’s neck. She turned away from him and stared out over the sharp, rolling landscape. For a long, long time the only sound he heard was the call of a lone gull and the pounding of stone hammers in the distance.

  “Months, perhaps,” she said, “but I fear it will be less.”

  “You know what she’s asking of me, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Physic, but you will do nothing of the sort. I will die with her. I will help her on the other shore as I have helped her here.”

  This was ludicrous, Al-Ashmar thought. He jeopardized his entire family with this one conversation. He should leave. He should instruct Djazir in the creation of the tonic, heal Bela, and be done with this foul mess.

  But as he stared at Rabiah, he realized how lost she was. She would die the day after the empress did, would be buried in the empress’s tomb, which waited beneath the newest obelisk along the shores of the Dengkut.

  The ways of the empresses had always seemed strange when he’d been growing up in the southlands, and little had changed his mind when he’d come to the capital to find his fortune. In fact, the opposite had happened. Each year found him more and more confused.

  But that was him. His opinion mattered little. What mattered was why the empress would go against tradition and ask him to save Rabiah from her fate.

  The answer, Al-Ashmar realized, could be found by looking no further than his adopted children. Rabiah had cared for the empress, most likely day and night, ever since her attacks had left her stricken. Rabiah would have become part daughter, part mother. And when the empress died, Rabiah’s bright young life would be forfeit. How could the empress not try to protect her?

  Al-Ashmar regarded Rabiah with new eyes. She had cared for the empress in life, and she was willing to do so in death, no matter what it might mean for her personally.

  “You are noble,” Al-Ashmar said.