Shaman
Omar
looked up as he entered the marketplace of al-Shara, squinting against the late
winter sky at the inscription overhead. The town clinging to the banks of the
great river was little more than a village, but the pillars surrounding its
marketplace supported a roof – only slightly dilapidated – that formed a
sheltered arcade, a comfortable place to exchange gossip and merchandise, human
or otherwise.
The carved
inscription, Omar had heard, honored the caliph who had the arcade built when
Syria was a land of importance, before successor caliphs pulled back to
Baghdad. But wind and sand, summer sun and winter rain, and the stones flung by
generations of small boys had nearly effaced the inscription.
And in any
case, he could not have read the inscription. He was a slave.
A shimmer
obscured Omar’s sight, the aura that presaged true seeing. As he tried to shrug
off his uneasiness, a child’s scream resounded within the marketplace, followed
by the thudding footfalls of men running in the warren of alleys. Omar leaned
against a pillar, out of the path of any fleeing thief.
A man – not
young but not as old as Omar -- raced past. He held a scarecrow of a small girl
against his shoulder. The lightning streak of a scar ran down one cheek and
into his beard, the scar that had given the man his nickname – the Frank,
al-Mastoub – the slashed one. Two pursuers panted at his back – the guards of
the slave dealer al-Darda, their weapons drawn.
Al-Mastoub
spun around, laying the child over his left shoulder to free a hand. His old
scimitar leaped from its scabbard with a hiss. Almost too fast for Omar’s eyes
to follow, the blade slashed across the attacker’s arm, ripping the man’s
sleeve. The dirty wool bloomed red. With a groan, the guard dropped his weapon
into the dust.
A crowd of
the small boys and dogs appeared, in the manner of crowds. They encircled the
fighters, shouting and barking. Omar stepped out of the pillar’s shadow and
drew his own scimitar, whirling it as he advanced. At the sound of steel
slicing the air, al-Mastoub glanced over his shoulder for a startled instant.
The
wounded attacker had fled, unmindful of the shower of flung jeers and pebbles
from the onlookers. But the second
grabbed the girl’s bare foot, sneering to see his prey trapped. The Frank tried
futilely to pull the child free as the attacker held his blade’s edge, not
against the Frank, but across the child’s ankle. She screamed again in
incoherent terror.
The Frank
dropped his weapon as the guard yanked the child from her protector’s grasp and
sheathed his blade.
“Let her
go,” Omar said from behind the guard’s back, unnoticed during the struggle. The
tip of his scimitar stroked the man’s spine.
Al-Darda’s
man dropped his hand to his weapon again. Omar reversed his scimitar and struck
with the hilt at the man’s wrist, snapping the bone. With a yelled curse, the
man dropped the girl and followed his comrade in flight.
Omar
leaned on his weapon, panting, until the sick dizziness that plagued him
nowadays after exertion subsided, watching as the crowd dispersed.
Al-Mastoub
picked the child up again before looking to Omar. “Thanks,” he said.
Omar
looked the child over. Skin and bones, she was, with tear-cut runnels down her
filthy face. But it was her eyes – translucent as water – that most troubled
him. The first time Omar had seen such eyes, he thought the woman in whose face
they were set was blind. Even al-Mastoub’s were not so pale.
“She
reminded me of Sibylla.” There was a trace of wistfulness in the Frank’s voice.
***
Far to the
west, beyond the two rivers, a woman leaned from a window in the highest tower
of the prince’s palace in Antioch
-- Sibylla, the prince’s concubine. She observed the aspect of the heavens,
sniffing the salt smell of the sea, then clanged the shutters closed over the
windows. Across them, her serving women drew curtains of heavy silk whose color
changed from green to blue and back again as they rippled in the drafts. Panels
of the same silk enclosed the room.
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| image: pixabay |
At a
command from Sibylla, the women withdrew.
She
listened as their whispers and shuffling steps faded, and rose from her
high-backed chair, locking the chamber door and dropping a curtain over it.
Taking a candle from its sconce, she lifted one of the silk panels and unlocked
a door, so closely fitted into the substance of the chamber wall that only one
who knew where to look could find it, and stooped to enter.
Within was
a room no bigger than a closet, holding a stool and a table draped in black
samite that fell in shrouding folds to the floor. She set her candle on the
table and lifted the drape to peer into the mirror it had concealed.
Her
waiting women called her “princess” to her face. But between the anathema laid
on Prince Bohemund, who had deserted his wife for Sibylla’s sake, and the
rumors of her sorcery, no priest could be found to marry her to the prince.
Behind her back, her women gave her other names. And sometimes, as today, when
the whispers grew too loud to ignore, she retreated to her room and sat in
secret. Then the women of her household trembled.
And at
times like that – at times like this – the knowledge that her rival still
lived, even in faraway al-Shara, still enjoyed herself with the man Sibylla
desired – for the prince, in spite of his wealth and power did not hold that
place in her heart – ate like acid into her soul.
She opened
a small chest on the table and withdrew a curl of brown hair, a flagon of wine,
and a rock crystal chalice, stained at the rim beyond all cleansing.
She
half-filled the cup with wine. Untwining a single hair from the curl of the
child she had sold to the slave trader and tipping the candle, she burned the
hair to a filament of ash that dropped into the wine. She pulled off her glove
of violet silk, drew a bodkin, and stabbed one of her pale fingers, then
squeezed the drops of blood into the cup, stirring in ergot and datura, with
other ingredients secret and deadly.
Contemplating
the chalice, she raised it to her lips.
