Chapter 12 Devotion #2
Later that night, after he had bathed and changed into his bed-clothes and dismissed the khadimuna, after Kala had begun her nightly prowl of the garden and the chambers, Faraj waited for Kamil to close his eyes from the pile of well-scratched cushions by the jali that he preferred to sleep in front of.
Several minutes later, he said, “You heard all of that, didn’t you.”
“You were standing directly behind the doors I was guarding,” Kamil agreed. The gold of his eyes shone nearly greenish in the moonlight through the jali.
“You believe that Irfan is correct, don’t you.”
“You should never need to be cruel,” Kamil told him. “When cruelty is necessary, he and I are both better suited to it.”
Faraj sighed deeply. “I would like to believe that cruelty should never be necessary.”
“That is your privilege, shahzada.”
“And I have too many privileges that others cannot share,” Faraj said, staring up into the silken canopy above his bed. “I must do more for the world with the privileges that I have been given.”
“More than the lives you save with forewarnings of floods and fires and calamity?” Kamil’s tail thumped hard against a well-clawed pillow. “The last I checked, you are still human. Tell your brother who claims himself a god to step up.”
“If cruelty is still necessary for those without my privilege, then my power has not sufficiently served my people’s needs.”
Kamil heaved a vast sigh as well. “Shahzada, I am catfolk. We enjoy hunting small prey. And we play with our food. If you ask me which of your humane upsets are not necessary, I would name your heart-rending guilt over the world’s assorted cruelties high on the list.”
With a rueful smile, Faraj asked, “How would you order your list of our human unnecessaries, then?”
“Either war or breeding tops the list,” Kamil said. “Then your guilt.”
Faraj tried not to laugh, and ended up coughing. “I’m sorry, war or breeding…?”
“May I be entirely blunt, shahzada?”
“More so than usual?” Faraj asked lightly. “Speak as you will.”
“If you’d told me how desperate you were to mate with someone of your own desire, rather than to be bred like a dog with a pedigree, I would have listened.”
“I know you would have, Kamil.” Faraj folded his hands behind his head and looked up into the drifting blue shadows of his silken bed-canopy, gently shifting in the night breeze. “Just as I know that you would have stopped me.”
“You’re not hearing me,” Kamil rumbled. “Forget the harlot for a minute. The problem isn’t the mating, the problem is the breeding. That human fixation on bloodlines and pedigrees and trait-inheritance.”
“I understand catfolk think differently about such matters. But as you say, I am, alas, merely human myself.”
“But if you didn’t have to suffer through all that courtly dog-breeding, if you were a catfolk who wanted to mate with someone, you could just do that,” Kamil said, tail lashing.
“And if you didn’t want to mate with someone, then don’t.
You wouldn’t have spent half your life fretting over all the political mess around breeding fancy humans like they’re fancy dogs, or whether or not you could force yourself to sire prophet-pups on a dam with an approved pedigree.
If your courtiers didn’t put such a steep price on defying their planned-out stud books, you could have mated with whoever you wanted years ago.
I wish you’d told me you wanted to.” In a rumble so deep it was barely audible, he added, “I’m so used to you pushing your ‘animal instincts’ aside for so long, I hadn’t realized you truly wanted someone to mate with. ”
It was easier to say this to the blue-tinged shadows, to not look at Kamil, to not see what he thought when Faraj asked, “And if I wanted to mate with someone who was terribly inappropriate…?”
“My objection was that he was a two-daniq gutter-witch in a back-alley bath-house who could have taken anyone’s coin to enchant you and ransom you,” Kamil said irritably. “It was never your desire to mate that I objected to. Just your taste. Did you even check to see whether he had a pox?”
“Kamil!” Faraj protested, wheezing with his effort not to laugh too loudly and draw Kala’s attention from her night-prowling. “My glorious companion of the evening did not have a pox.”
“You deserve better, is all I’m saying!” His tail thumped hard against the pillows. “Not because of some fancy breed-humans-like-dogs pedigree thing. Because you’re my human. And I have impeccable taste.”
“Of course you do; you are the very pinnacle of catfolk,” Faraj said fondly. “I suppose you also believe I should have accepted Irfan’s too-generous offer. He is as close as any human comes to such exacting feline taste.”
“No,” Kamil said. “Your hajib knows how to be unkind. That is a necessary skill in a guardian, but not in your lover. Your heart is very soft and easily bruised, and if he made your heart bleed, I would claw his face off. And that would be a waste.”
“So that we are entirely clear,” Faraj said, “Kamil, you should never claw the face off anyone who injures my heart. It is, as you say, quite easily bruised, and that is not a cause for bloodshed.”
“And for Sahar’s sake?”
“I would much rather protect her than avenge her,” Faraj said.
“Of course you would,” Kamil said. “You are made for protecting.”
“I believe I recall a popular saying about the crow and the raven’s wing?”
“You are made for protecting. I am made to protect.”
With a tremulous sigh, Faraj said, “My soft human heart would very much like to pet you, just a bit, if you wouldn’t mind too much.”
“Hrrmph.” Kamil would never deign to be found in Faraj’s human bed, which was full of silken sheets that could trap claws and snarl a lunge, and which had too many temptingly lurkable and pounceable shadows underneath it.
But he made an elaborate show of yawning and stretching and shifting around in his pillow-pile, and he oh-so-casually ended up with his chin propped in the crook of his elbow on the edge of Faraj’s bed, so that his velvet-soft and lynx-sharp ears were just a few inches from Faraj’s fingertips.
Faraj really had meant to soothe Kamil to sleep, and then to sneak over to Sahar’s kitten-nursery to make sure all was well with her through the night. But stroking Kamil’s soft ears and feeling the deep rumble of his purr lulled his own eyes into drifting closed, too.
The feeling of cat paws walking on his face an hour before dawn was both almost entirely novel and just familiar enough that for a brief moment Faraj thought he was still dreaming, until a cat stuck a cold wet nose in his ear and sneezed.
“Gaaaaah,” Faraj said, coming wide awake with a lurch that nearly toppled him off his bed and onto Kamil.
….Kamil was still beside the bed.
Faraj was still reeling from the abrupt and unexpected awakening, so he thought perhaps he could be forgiven for taking a moment to realize that Sahar was the cat who had sneezed in his ear to wake him up to demand her breakfast.
…Sahar, whose kitten-nursery had been safely latched the night before, and — as he untangled his feet from the bedsheets and padded barefoot into his study to examine the wooden lattice-door enclosing the jharokha — yes, it was still safely latched this morning.
Sahar was supposed to have been on the other side of that door.
Sitting primly in the middle of his pillows and grooming her paw, Sahar gave him the clear mental image of a porcelain bowl with neatly sliced cubes of fish in it.
“Oh, dear,” Faraj said.
“Mrrt,” Sahar said, and nibbled delicately between her claws.
In hindsight, Faraj had to wonder how many of the years of trouble-foresights tangled around the vision of Master Asharan’s hand tending that beautiful jasmine plant in the window had been due not to Master Asharan himself, but to Sahar.
And even Master Asharan, who’d presumably known his Nehal for some time, had struggled to persuade Sahar to choose an acceptable basket.
She was very fond of gentle scritching of her chin and behind her ears.
She seemed attentive to the sound of his voice as he quietly but urgently explained to her the importance of staying safe within the jharokha.
She permitted him to lift her into his arms and carry her into the jharokha, she sniffed at the bowl of Esha’s dried and flaked fish that he refilled for her, and she purred when he petted her until she closed her sleepy, slow-blinking eyes.
He eased the mashrabiya lattice closed as quietly as he could and tied it with three silk ribbons well above even a cat’s stretch-height.
Five minutes later, while he was sitting at his desk trying to compose a casual-and-not-too-demanding-but-still-princely-sounding note to the kitchens, she shoved her damp nose into the crook of his knee and thought very firmly, Fish.
“O most plush-velveted and opinionated of queens,” Faraj said a bit helplessly, “I fear my Chamberlain will not be persuaded by the argument that no sorcerer can use you against me simply because no one can convince you to do anything.”
Fish.
(The fish in her vision were fresh and gleaming and set in a white porcelain bowl edged with playful, sparkling waves. Faraj had no idea whether the kitchens even had such a pattern.)
“You were never this difficult,” Faraj said to Kamil, whose whiskers were twitching vigorously in his attempt not to laugh.
“Have you entirely forgotten how we met?”
“I knew you didn’t actually want to kill me, or at least you wouldn’t by the time I’d explained enough,” Faraj told him. “But more to the point, explaining helped.”
“From her point of view, she is explaining,” Kamil said, nose crinkled.
“…Yes, I suppose she has explained that fresh fish are required immediately.”
Fish, Sahar agreed, purring.
“If you would deign to settle into your basket, my dear, I could carry you to the kitchens to fetch the fish of your choice?”
The basket suddenly appeared on his desktop, and Sahar mewed her imperative from within the basket, thumping the pillow with her tail.