Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Read Online Free Page B

many-layered skirts. White beards frighten her.
    “What would you hear, your highness?” I ask.
    “You hold your head tilted back,” Fakr-ad-Din observes lightly. “You wore a tantoura when you learned to play.”
    “Conversion is permitted, O Prince of the Druze.”
    “This Prince of the Druze only wonders if the talented Zahara knows any verses of the Koran.”
    “Yes. Of course.”
    I begin to play, with the risha I made from my husband’s breastbone, and to sing, with a voice that the Sunnis would say is heretical. To them, the voice of a woman is the voice of temptation. And not just to them; Hisham’s sister Rafqa is Christian, but she never passes up a chance to declare to me that my singing is a sin and a scandal.
    The Muwahhidun, on the other hand, do not care, so long as the songs are not sung to outsiders.
    Until al-Hakim returns,
I think,
the curtain is drawn, the door closed, the ink has dried up in the inkwell, and the pen is broken.
    At first, I think the howling is the howling of my husband as the demons torture him in the Cave of the Mad. Then I realise it is Ghalya.
    “No!” she scolds, little fists on my back. “Aunty Rafqa says God wishes women to be silent. You must not sing God’s songs, Mama!”
    “Ghalya,” I hiss. “You are angering the prince! Be quiet or I shall slap you, hard!”
    But the prince is smiling.
    “Never mind,” he says. “Hush, child. Hush, Zahara. It was wrong of me to ask. You are a Christian woman now. I only thought to distract myself from dark thoughts with prayers from my childhood. They make me feel a boy again, playing warlord in my father’s jeweled costumes.”
    I understand with a thrill that this is the key to my new song. The black, unshelled kernel of his grief. If he will only show it to me, I can weave it into my protective music. Then all I will have to do is steal one of his son’s bones for my new risha, and Ghalya will be safe.
    No pine nut was ever shelled without first hitting it with a rock.
    “Did your son dress in your robes, as a boy?” I ask with false hesitancy, my heart galloping.
    “Yes, he did,” Fakr-ad-Din says hoarsely.
    “In your castle by the sea?”
    “No. In the Palace of the Moon. He laughed, even when he grew tangled in them and fell. He cut his lip. Kept laughing, even as he bled.”
    “Is that where you buried him?” I prompt softly, dangerously.
    But Fakr-ad-Din’s gaze is vacant. He travels along the river of his grief. I must put my waterwheel into that flow. I must harness the power of it.
    The Prince’s nephew returns and the moment is lost. He guides me out of the Prince’s inner sanctum and pays me for the food in gold coins I can never use, never show to anyone. I carry them back down the cliff face with my dangle-legged daughter, my oud, and my frustration. I am so close.
    Next time. Next time, he will tell me.
    When I get back to the stone hut in the pine forest, half my goats have been trussed and slaughtered. My jars of flour and oil have been loaded onto donkeys for transport to the town.
    Bristling with edged weapons and hostility, the Janissaries are waiting.
----
    The pasha’s narrow face is impatient.
    He taps his palm with a riding crop. The end of his jewelled turban tucks under his grey-bearded chin. The beard boasts to all who see him that though he leads the uniformed Janissaries, he is not of them.
    He is a pasha of Damascus, a Muslim and a free man, not a Christian conscript sworn to celibacy, trained for war, and severely disciplined since childhood to owe his loyalty to the Sultan alone.
    “I told you, I haven’t seen anyone,” I say again, my throat shrivelled with thirst. Forced to kneel before the pasha with a yatagan sword resting lightly on the nape of my neck, I glance at the huddle of villagers behind the pasha’s retinue, Ghalya among them, restrained tightly by her terrified Aunty Rafqa and Uncle Estefan.
    “Where is your husband?” the pasha demands. “Consorting with