‘The Sultan is coming back.’ The words slipped out into the silence of the room, setting off a jump of panic in my chest. I didn’t have any pockets. I shoved the papers into the waist of my shalvar as I hurried out of the study, tugging my kurti back down over it.
I was back at the table picking at my food when the Sultan reappeared, taking his seat across from me. ‘What did he want?’ I asked as he picked the knife back up. I prayed he couldn’t hear the raggedness of my breathing.
‘You.’ He said it in such a matter-of-fact way that it took me aback. ‘You know, in the Gallans’ so-called religion they believe First Beings are creatures of evil. And their children are monsters.’
‘I know what they believe.’ My mouth had suddenly gone dry. I reached for the pitcher of sweet wine. The sudden movement made the paper stuffed inside my clothes crackle and I stilled.
‘They want me to hand you over.’ If the Sultan had noticed the noise, then he was doing a mighty fine job of hiding it. ‘To be brought to justice, they say. Which is a pretext, of course. They are hiding behind religious righteousness because they don’t want to admit that you are a serious threat to their being able to lie to my face and sway an alliance back in their favour.’
‘One of them called me a barbarian.’ I heard the bile on my own tongue. As far as I was concerned, killing off First Beings and Demdji was more barbaric than killing a duck.
‘Good,’ the Sultan said. ‘It would serve all of them well to remember that the people of Miraji can hold their own. Even if it is just against a duck.’ I wasn’t sure where the swell of pride came from. ‘You want to know why you’re here, Amani, dining in my chambers? It sends a message. When we were allied with the Gallan I would have had to hand you over to hang. Now’ – he picked up the pitcher I’d been too frightened to reach any further for – ‘you are free to be my guest.’
‘You hate them.’ I couldn’t keep it in any longer. ‘They hate us. They’re using us. Why make another alliance?’ My voice had risen without my meaning it to.
The Sultan turned his dark gaze on me. It struck me again how Ahmed had his eyes. Then he grinned, like he was surprised by a child doing something particularly clever. ‘You sound a lot like the folk who follow my rebel son.’
‘You asked me about Dustwalk.’ I diverted his attention away from Ahmed. ‘I’m from the deepest, darkest parts of your desert. I’ve seen first-hand what your alliances have done to folk. Cities under Gallan rule where it was the law to shoot a Demdji in the head. Everybody in Dustwalk working for as close to nothing as you can get without starving to make weapons for foreigners. It made for a poor, starving, frightened desert.’
‘How old are you, Amani?’
‘Seventeen.’ I pulled myself up to my full height. Trying to look it. Careful of the stolen papers sticking to my skin as I moved.
The bone of the duck leg on his plate cracked under his knife. ‘You weren’t even alive when I took my father’s throne. Even those who were have forgotten how things were back then. We were at war. And it wasn’t one that we should have been fighting – the war between the Gallan and the Albish. We were a prize in the race between all of our foreign friends. Half the countries in the world wanted to claim our land. But in the end it came down to those two ancient enemies and their never-ending war of false beliefs.’
The leg of the duck finally came free in a snap of cartilage and sinews ripping free under the sawing of the Sultan’s knife. There was something about the noise of cracking bone echoing around the polished marble halls and glass dome that set my teeth on edge. The Sultan calmly spooned orange sauce across the flesh as he spoke.
‘And my father let it happen. He was foolish and cowardly. He thought we could fight the same way our country had in my grandfather’s day. He thought we could stand against two armies and somehow not get annihilated. Even General Hamad advised my father he couldn’t win a war on two fronts. Well, Captain Hamad then. I made him a general after his advice proved to be so sound.’
He was talking about Shazad’s father. General Hamad had no loyalty to this Sultan. Shazad had always known her father despised his ruler. But he had backed the Sultan’s ideas twenty years ago all the same. There was a time when even a man on our side had thought our enemy was in the right.
‘The only way to win was to form an alliance, grant them access to what they wanted from us on our terms. My father wouldn’t do it. Neither would my brother who had won the Sultim trials. Just because he was able to best eleven of our brothers in an arena somehow that made him fit to decide the fate of this country?’
Not any more fit than Kadir was. But I didn’t interrupt. Getting myself turned out of the Sultan’s presence didn’t seem so important now. I’d learned history in school. But it was different to hear it from the Sultan’s own tongue. It would be like hearing the tale of the First Mortal from Bahadur, who would have stood with the other Djinn at the birth of mortality and watched him face down death.
The Sultan seemed to sense my attention on him all at once. He looked up from where he was sawing at his meat. Glancing between my empty hands and my still-full plate.
‘I did what needed to be done, Amani,’ he said calmly.
He had chosen a side to keep us from being torn apart between two of them. In one bloody night Prince Oman, a nobody among the Sultan’s sons, too young even to be allowed to compete for Sultim, had led the Gallan armies into the palace, killed his own father, and slain the brothers he knew would stand between him and the throne: the Sultim and the others who had fought in the trials. By morning he sat in his father’s place and the Gallan were our allies. Or our occupiers.
‘What I did twenty years ago was the only way to keep this country from falling completely into their hands. The Gallan have annexed enough countries. I couldn’t allow us to be next.’ He sawed at his food carefully as he spoke. ‘The world is a lot more complicated than it seems when you are seventeen, Amani.’
‘And how old were you when you turned our country over to the Gallan?’ I knew he hadn’t been all that much older than I was now. The same age as Ahmed, give or take.
The Sultan smiled around the piece of duck he was chewing. ‘Young enough that I spent the next nineteen years trying to find a way to drive them out. And I was very close to succeeding, you know.’ Noorsham. He’d been trying to use my brother, a Demdji, as a weapon to kill the Gallan, and never mind his own people who wound up caught in the crossfire. ‘A little more time and I could’ve rid this country of them forever.’ He picked up his wine, drinking deep from the cup.
A little more time. If we hadn’t interfered. If we hadn’t saved Fahali. Saved our people. Saved my brother. And he reckoned he could’ve saved the whole country. They would have been a sacrifice for the greater good.
‘You’re not eating.’
I wasn’t hungry. But I speared a piece of cold meat all the same. The orange had congealed into a sticky paste around it. It was too sweet when it hit my tongue now. You’re wrong. The words, too, were sticky on my tongue. I couldn’t spit them out. I wished Shazad were here. She knew more than I did. She’d read up on history and philosophy and had better schooling with her father’s tutors than I’d had in a busted-down schoolhouse at the end of the desert. She was better at debating things than I was. But we’d both been in Saramotai. A power play disguised in a just cause. ‘Awfully convenient how saving this country meant you becoming Sultan without the Sultim trials.’