Chapter 3
Sunset found me packing. Lady Salima had hired a cutter to get us to Aden as quickly as possible, but I had to meet her in
Salalah early the next morning. Speed would be of the essence in everything we did. If Salima’s fears were correct and Dunya
had been in the hands of this Frank for nearly two months, he could be long gone. My contacts were good, but the steady stream
of trade and pilgrimage ships along our coasts move people quickly. I could only pray Falco had made enough of an impression
in Aden to provoke rumors amongst its sailors and laborers.
My mother had put my clothes, my weapons, my tools—all that made me the infamous Amina al-Sirafi—into storage, and unearthing
the woman I used to be, carefully tucked and folded away by another’s hand, was disorienting. I had once delighted in color
and flash, known by reputation to traipse about in whatever royal silks, meltingly thin muslins, and silver headdresses I
had recently plundered. Part of it was about cultivating the confidence I needed to survive my chosen profession—a little
madness goes a long way in convincing men that you might stab them if they step out of line.
But the rest of it? I had been freed . It was a life of banditry born out of tragedy, yes.
But in choosing it, I had destroyed any hope of future respectability and was happy for it.
Why not wear stolen pearls and a sailor’s loincloth?
Marry an oarsman I barely knew because he was ach ingly handsome and I wanted to fuck him?
Drink stolen wine meant for a sultan across the world and fight duels at midnight?
Well. There were a great many reasons I should not have done those things, no longer did those things, and wince when I pray for forgiveness from the only One whose compassion is that encompassing. But as I
ran my fingers over a crimson robe embroidered with clashing green sunbursts, the sweeter moments returned to me. The cloth
still smelled of sea salt and oil, recalling coir ropes glistening with ocean spray, black bitumen-painted hulls, and the
melodies of sailors against the beat of a barrel drum.
Salima is paying for your discretion, remember? Not your strolling about in bloodred robes and flashing a gold-toothed grin. Reluctantly I set aside the bright garments, selecting plainer options. Then I turned my attention to far more important matters.
The hinges of my weapons trunk opened with an oiled whisper. My grandfather’s khanjar—the hooked dagger he wore until the
day he died—greeted my eye first. It was a dagger meant for a pirate, its ivory handle carved into the snarling countenance
of a ruby-eyed leopard. His career even wilder than mine, my grandfather had been known as the “Sea Leopard,” a nickname in
which he had taken pride. The two of us had made an odd pairing—the skinny little girl who couldn’t stay still and the half-blind
pirate crippled from a hard life at sea—but we’d been terribly close. My grandfather was the only one who had patience with
me, the one who’d had me jump up and down on banana leaf mats or tie endless knots of ropes when I couldn’t contain the frenetic
energy pulsing in my blood. He talked nonstop, relating not only adventure tales but teaching me everything he knew about
sailing.
It must have seemed harmless at the time—a bored old man chattering nonsense to a girl who’d never need such skills—but as I’ve grown older, I wondered if he’d seen something the rest of my family hadn’t.
If he’d watched my father struggle to break away from piracy into a more respectable position, a dream that only added to our debts, and quietly groomed me to one day step into my family’s true vocation.
I’ll never know, but thank God he did. I pressed the khanjar to my heart, murmuring a prayer for his soul. Beneath the khanjar
was my sword, a stolen Damascene beauty, and my shield, a gift from the only husband with whom I parted on good terms. They
both needed some care: polishing and new bindings on the grips. But that was work I could do while traveling to Aden, the
sight of which might disincline others from bothering me.
It was at the exact moment my arms were laden with weaponry that my mother burst in.
She took one look at me, inhaled like an arrow being drawn back, and shouted, “ Have you lost your mind? ”
I set the weapons down. “Peace be upon you, Amma.”
She glared. “Do not wish me peace and then have me arrive home to news you are off to chase Franks. What is this Marjana is
saying about a stranger from Aden hiring you?”
I sighed. Marjana’s sharp hearing and inability to engage in even the slightest duplicity was a dangerous combination. Her
father might have been the most treacherous creature I’d ever met, but Marjana cannot lie to save her life. My mother was
still standing in the doorway, dressed in black traveling clothes. Though she and Salima were likely near in age, my mother
had none of the noblewoman’s frailty. She was tall like me; thin but tough as steel, as if the years had boiled away all weakness
in a way that made her only more impressive.
And intimidating—even to her fully grown former pirate of a daughter. I glanced past her shoulder. “Where is Mustafa?”
“Back in Salalah. Hala was not feeling well, so they decided to spend the night with her parents.”
A small blessing. I did not wish ill-health on my pregnant sister-in-law but knew my little brother well enough to know he
would have sided with our mother in the battle to come.
My mother crossed her arms over her chest, casting a meaningful glance at the packed saddlebag and pile of weapons. “Explain yourself, daughter.”
I made—I will always claim—a valiant effort to do so.
“The stranger from Aden is the mother of one of my late crewmen. Her son sailed on the Marawati for many years, and we were close. She came because she needs my help...” Not wanting to worry my family, I decided against
mentioning that Salima had originally threatened me, instead offering the least worrisome version of a Frankish kidnapping
I could manage. “All the Sayyida requests is that I return with her to Aden and ask some questions of my old contacts.”
“Ask questions about the whereabouts of one of the butchers of Palestine and Syria, a foreign mercenary who has managed to
make his way to our land?” Genuine fear colored my mother’s face. “Absolutely not. The Franks are animals, Amina. Animals
who leave nothing but slaughter and ash in their wake.”
I’d feared this sort of reaction. My mother did stay up-to-date on politics, and she had very strong, very personal opinions on the wars in the north. She’d been a girl
when Jerusalem fell, and stories of Frankish atrocities and pleas for assistance from survivors and refugees had carried far
in the scholarly and religious circles her family frequented. Indeed, they’d struck such a note that her beloved elder brother
had been moved to answer the call for jihad. He’d been in Palestine less than a year before he was killed—not while saving
Muslim lives, but as a pawn in a local power struggle between so-called Muslim princes taking advantage of the chaos to expand
their own territories. (See? This is why I don’t trust politicians.)
On my part, I had never met a Frank; theirs was a world far away from mine. Highbrow sorts often spoke of them as backward
barbarians, and I knew their attacks made northerners nervous because those attacks were increasing.
Nearly every local merchant with a far-flung family had stories of relatives forced to flee Frankish incursions.
First, cities in al-Andalus began to fall.
Then Sicily. Their various marches through the land of the Rum, past Constantinople and into the House of Islam for a city the Franks claimed was theirs.
A land they said Muslims, Jews, and misguided local Christians had profaned, as though it wasn’t filled with families shortly to be erased by their bloody hands.
Now, I am not ignorant of war, of conquest. Kingdoms rise and fall and are swallowed and spit out in different shapes so often
that at times, I am genuinely uncertain to whom I would owe taxes if I cared about such a thing. But the people typically
remain. Why would we not? There is more profit to be made in us living and paying tribute and trading all the nice luxury
goods new rulers desire. It is not clean. There is death, almost always paid by those who have no choice, and there is sacking.
But as a people, we endure.
That is not what happened when the Franks arrived.
The first invasion was decades ago, and the bloodletting in Jerusalem and Antioch remains of a scale that still haunts. Their
leaders were not content to take over as figureheads; instead, their armies put to the sword entire surrendered populations
and roasted women and children on spits. The Franks were said to have barricaded the Jewish population in their temple, where
they prayed to God and brought their babies, and set it ablaze; to trail Muslim blood in the Haram al-Sharif and host pigs
in its sacred corridors. There are even whispers they tortured and ate the victims of Maarat al-Numan when that city finally
fell.
It is a brutality I do not care to try to understand.
Not at the hands of anyone. Maybe it’s because I’m a criminal with no political loyalties.
.. or maybe it’s because I come from the class of people who’d be left to die while their leaders fled.
I have no doubt in their faraway homelands, lands rumored to be harsh and cold and unforgiving, there are thousands of people who are concerned only with putting food in their children’s bellies, people who would be horrified to learn what those of their creed did.
I have traveled widely enough that I take everything written about “foreigners” with doubt and know better than to judge a community by their worst individuals.