Chapter 5
Fez, Morocco
For several weeks Samira had remained close to home as her father wished, but the seclusion and increased presence of guards was becoming stifling. She was four-and-twenty, and restless to be out amongst the people again.
The other reason was she could not put off her saffron trade any longer.
Trading in saffron was a side venture her father did not know about.
She kept her own ledgers and contracts and negotiated with vendors.
She had started it to prove she could run her own trading house someday. It had since become quite lucrative.
That is why she decided it was time to see to her business and sneak out without escort.
"You are certain of this," Tiziri murmured as they slipped out through the laundress's gate wrapped in plain undyed haiks.
"I am certain that Ismail the supplier will not wait any longer." Samira drew the cloth close about her face. "One hour. I close with Ismail and we come home before the noon prayer. My father is at the customs house until dusk."
Tiziri did not look reassured. But she came.
Ismail was a lean man with a beard gone gray at the point and the flat eyes of a man who had been cheated once in his youth and never again.
He had held her goods aside as promised, and there were two other buyers crouched before him when she arrived, which meant he had let the price be pushed up in her absence to see what she would do.
She lowered herself to the mat as though the other two were not there.
"Peace be upon you, Ismail. You have let these good men warm your stall for me." She did not look at them. "I offered you thirteen a week ago. You will tell me now it is fifteen."
"It is fifteen. There is a Venetian coming this afternoon."
"There is always a Venetian coming." She let the smile reach her voice.
"And when he comes and sees your goods still unsold at noon, he will offer you twelve, and you will take it, because I will have gone home and these good men to the harbor.
You will have spent your whole day earning less than I offer you now. In gold. Before the sun is high."
One of the buyers understood he had lost, muttered, and rose and went.
"Thirteen and a half," Ismail said, "and you are robbing me."
"Thirteen and a half, and I send the next three men who ask me for goods to your stall and not the souk gate." She held out her palm over the scales. "And they will heed me because of my good name."
He sighed, nodded his head and the deal was done.
As she waited for him to gather the supplies, she overheard a conversation between two men one stall over, looking over ivory.
She had marked them without seeming to when she sat down.
Two foreigners. She deduced them as al-Habasha, perhaps Zagwe or Axumite from the manner of clothes and weaponry.
The first was very tall, lean and dark, with a warrior's stillness.
The second was closer to her age. He was fairer, his skin a burnished copper-gold.
He wore fine plain cotton but his bearing was unmistakable.
Both men had shotel swords at their side.
But Samira deduced this was a personal guard and his high-born charge.
They thought no one near them understood their tongue, so they spoke freely. It was not Arabic, nor Berber. Then it struck her. They were speaking Amharic. She caught more of their conversation.
"We have been too long at this stall," the guard said. "You said we would look and leave. You are still looking and moving like an old man."
"I am considering my choices carefully."
"Can you consider faster before we melt in this heat?"
"Patience, Ajani." The younger man said. "Was it not you who taught me to reflect deeply before making rash decisions?"
"I meant in life and death matters, Li'uli Kato, but not over an ivory comb or leather purse!"
"But what if the comb is not of good quality and my grandmother is displeased with the gift?"
"Our nigi?iti will be thrilled with whatever you choose, as long as it comes from you. What she will not be pleased about is if you are discovered hiding in the souk. Come away."
A silence. Then the younger man, lighter now: "You worry like an old woman, Ajani."
"I worry like a man who wishes to keep his head on his shoulders. Come."
Samira kept her eyes on the scales and her breathing even. She could not believe Prince Kato, the son of Queen Gudit, was indeed walking through the marketplace dressed like a common trader. But she could not dwell too long; she had to be back at the house before her father returned.
Samira sealed her goods under her own mark for the porter, rose with her knees stiff, and did not look at the two men again. When she gathered Tiziri and turned for the gate, the two men had already gone the other way.
She put them out of her mind. She had a longer walk than she liked and the morning was growing hotter.
They were halfway to the tanners' gate before the mark on her wrist began to burn and itch.
Samira did not break her stride. She adjusted her haik, and kept one hand firmly on her dagger, but in the turning of her head she caught him.
A man in a gray djellaba, hood raised though the day was warm, standing at the mouth of a lane they had already passed.
Not buying. Not looking at any of the hundred things a man might look at in a crowded street.
Looking directly at her.
"Tiziri. Do not look. We are being followed."
Tiziri's breath caught. "The gray robe. He was at Ismail's corner."
"You saw him too?" Samira asked.
"He was there when you closed the deal, Sayyida. He has been with us since the souk," Tiziri replied.
Since the souk. He had not found them by chance. He had known where she would be. The cold in her belly became something close to terror, because it meant that whatever her father feared already knew more of her than it had any right to know.
"Walk," she breathed. "Not too fast."
They walked. Behind them, patient, keeping to the edge of the crowd, the gray robe followed.
She took them down a different route, not toward the tanners' gate but away from it, into the coppersmiths' din where a person could not hear her own feet.
Samira turned again, down a lane hung with dyed wool, and stopped hard against a doorway and drew Tiziri in beside her and waited, one breath, two.
The gray robe rounded the corner and checked his stride when he did not see them, and turned his hooded head slowly along the lane, searching, and she knew then past any doubt that it was her he wanted and no other.
She did not wait for him to find them.
"Now," she whispered, and pulled Tiziri out the far side of the doorway into a covered passage, and they went quickly, not running, running would bring every eye in the street around, but quickly, through the passage and a curtained arch and out into a lane she knew and he could not.
This was her city. She had walked these lanes her whole life.
She took them through a grain-seller's back room with a coin pressed into the woman's hand, up a stair to a rooftop where washing hung, along the roof and down the far side into a street that doubled back on itself, and at every turn she looked, and at every turn the gray robe was not there, and still the mark on her wrist would not cool.
They came to the tanners' gate by a way no stranger would have found it. Samira did not slow until the laundress's gate was bolted behind them and the sound of the street shut out.
Only then did Tiziri sag against the wall, both hands pressed to her chest. "We lost him. Sayyida, we lost him."
"Yes." Samira stood very still in the cool of the courtyard, the gold heavy in her purse, and listened to her own heart slow. The burning on her wrist had begun, at last, to fade. "Say nothing of this to my father. Nothing. Do you understand?"
Tiziri nodded, still trembling.
But Samira did not move for a long moment.
Because losing a man in the lanes told her nothing of how many there had been, or how long they had watched her.
Now the caution her father and Zohra had asserted became all the more real.
They were hiding something from her, far more than they let on, and Samira would need to remain vigilant.
***
Andalusian Quarter, Fez
THAT NIGHT, SAMIRA'S father, Dawud, waited until the house had gone quiet and his daughter's lamp had guttered out behind her door before he sent for transport and had himself carried down through the Andalusian quarter to the modest house two streets from the tanners'.
Zohra's house sat two streets from the tanners', modest on the outside, though nothing modest lived within it.
Carpets from Córdoba, a library that rivaled Dawud's own.
The weapons master and ex-royal guard had made a great deal of coin from her skill to afford such a life.
But at this moment her first priority was the same as it had been for twenty-four years: the safety of the woman she had mentored in combat since childhood.
She received him in the training room, wiping the last of the oil from a blade with a cloth, her sleeves still pushed back from the forearms of a woman who worked for her living.
She did not rise, and she did not stop what she was doing.
She did not ask why he had come at such an hour.
She had known him thirty years. She knew the weight a man carried by the way he crossed a threshold.
"Someone is watching her," Dawud said. He did not sit. "A man kept your gate today. And there was another at the edge of the souk these past few mornings."
Zohra's hands went still on the blade.
"You are certain it was watching, and not wanting?" she asked. "She is a beautiful woman. Men look."
"I know the difference between a man who covets and a man who counts.
" Dawud's voice was low. "This one was counting.
Her comings, her goings, the doors she uses.
" He drew the broken document from his sleeve and set it on the table between them, though he did not need to; she could not read the language it was written in, and he knew it.
It was the gesture he needed, not the words.
"And now this. They have found the trail again, Zohra.
After twenty-four years. The Brotherhood has not forgotten what her mother carried out of the desert, and they have not stopped looking for it. "
Zohra set the sword down and looked at the document a long moment. Then she looked up at him.
"Then it is as we always knew it would be," she said. "The amulet cannot stay hidden forever. It was never meant to. A thing like that has its own will, Dawud, and its own hour, and I have felt for a season now that its hour draws close."
"The Almoravids press up from the south.
" Dawud pressed his fingers to his brow.
"I could bear that alone. Cities fall and rise; a merchant learns to bend with it.
But this, the two of them together, the sword at the gate and the hand at the door reaching for what is hers, I cannot hold both. I am an old man."
"You were never meant to hold it. Only to keep it until the keeping passed to her.
" Zohra crossed the room and set the blade in its place on the wall.
"Everything we have done, you and I, from the day her mother put her in our care, was for this.
To see the bloodline survive and the prophecy answered.
That is the whole of it. The price of survival was never going to be small.
Samira's destiny lies beyond the beyond, Dawud.
You have always known this. It was written on her skin before she drew her first breath, and neither your walls nor my blades were ever going to keep her within them.
We were only ever meant to make her ready for the road, not to keep her from it. "
For a long moment the old merchant said nothing. When he spoke again his voice had thinned.
"I have taught her everything I know. You have taught her the blade. She reads the sky like her mother did and she misses nothing." He shook his head slowly. "And still, I lie awake and wonder if it will be enough. Whether we have prepared her."
"We have prepared her as well as two mortal hands can prepare anything.
" Zohra's gaze did not waver. "The rest is not ours to decide.
We agreed we would wait for the signs before we spoke to her of any of it.
Now the signs are here." She was quiet a moment.
"One thing has always been certain. The order of things will change.
When it changes the pendant cannot stay where it lies.
It will have to pass elsewhere for safekeeping, so that the balance of the world holds. That was always the way of it."
"You will show her," Dawud said at last. Not quite a question.
"Yes, it is time. You must give her what is hers. The chest. The pendant. Her mother's things. She cannot walk the road half-blind to what she carries and why they hunt her for it."
"Perhaps we can delay a little longer," Dawud said.
"A truth withheld too long wounds worse than any lie. It is time she knew everything about her mother and what her future holds, and why you never prepared a marriage contract for her."
"I had hoped to keep her safe and bundled in cloth for far longer. But I fear we have run out of time. I await word from the Abbess. My contacts at each port have been tracking movement from the North."
"We have to let her go."
"I know, and that saddens me most."
Dawud left as quietly as he had come. Behind him, the weapons master sat alone in the lamplight and prepared.
***