In the Night Garden

“Why do you insist on hurting me this way?” Her tone was petulant, sorrowing, but he knew the danger in it.

“Sister,” the boy began, “she is not what you think—”

“I do not care what she is! She has not broken the rules of her house—she does not have a house to disobey! It is you who have defied me and the Sultan, who have kept the wives in a constant panic, like birds chasing after seed!”

Of course they had done no such thing. The harem was massive, so huge that the comings and goings of the many children were largely unnoticed. How could he be so special as to be missed by anyone save Dinarzad, who hated him so? The wives were desultory and sage, lounging in their halls like lionesses, occasionally swatting an errant cub. The army of tutors and guards and older sisters on the brink of marriage kept the brood in check, and it must be they who marked the boy’s nightly absence.

“What are you doing out there with her? You must know you are of an age where it is more than unseemly to be alone with an unmarried girl all night. Why can you not behave as you ought to, as a noble son ought to? How can it be worth all of this just to sit with another child under the stars?”

The boy saw his chance to make her understand. But when he tried to tell the girl’s story and make her see how his heart strained towards the Garden like a horse who senses home is near, it became jumbled in his mouth. No matter how he tried, he could not make it beautiful, he could not tell the same tale that the girl unspooled from her eyes like strange, black thread.

“Dinarzad, let me tell you a story. Once there was a girl that no one loved, and she was called Snow. She lived in a town by the sea, and one day another woman, who I think was very fat, made friends with her by giving her an orange because both of them worked mending nets and Snow came from the South where there were lots of oranges. Or—yes, I think that’s right. The woman, who was named Sigrid—that’s important, you know—told Snow a story about how three men with the heads of dogs took her away to a holy city and then the dog-men told her a story about a terrible lady called the Black Papess, who could drive men mad just by kissing them. And the Papess kissed the dog-headed men and made them eat their brother—”

“Have you gone mad, child? Has she cast some spell over you and softened your brain like an apple in the rain? I will hear no more of this.”

The boy protested, but Dinarzad would not listen. She seized him by the hair and dragged him across the courtyard under the sunshine of the new day, clean and bright as washed linen. He did not cry—at least he told himself that he was not crying, though tears streamed silently down his cheeks. His sister’s fingers were very thin, and curled like the claws of a starving hawk. She hauled him behind her and into the stables, which stunk of horse sweat and dung, depositing him at the feet of an old man with greasy hair and enormous hands. All the boy could see of him were the huge hands, knuckled like the roots of an elm, laced together at the level of his eyes into one massive fist.

“Treat hi

m no better than one of the mute slaves, and if he escapes in the night you will both be whipped,” announced Dinarzad curtly. She turned on one flawless heel and left the stable in a flurry of violet silk and black braids.

The boy stood and brushed himself clean of the bits of hay that stuck to the floor and now his shirt. He was careful to look as contrite as he could, though of course he was already planning to slip out as soon as the old man was in his cups that evening. He could see the man’s face now, which was lumpish and ugly, but not very frightening, more of the gnome than the ogre about him.

“That one’s a she-dragon and no doubt about it,” the blacksmith grunted, cracking his huge knuckles with a sound like the breaking of stone pots. “Firstborns are always trouble. Ask me, they should expose the first brats out of the Sultan’s women just to be safe. If not for what’s between her legs, she’d have been Sultan herself—no doubt that’s why you trouble her so.”

“But I’m not to be Sultan,” the boy protested. “There must be dozens of sons ahead of me! If I were the heir, they’d have told me by now! I certainly wouldn’t be allowed to run around the Garden—or put to work in the stables!”

“Look who knows so much!” the old man chortled. “The servants always know ten times what the master guesses. Mark me, boy—you shoe the horse today that you’ll ride tomorrow.”

The boy stared, nonplussed. He might have explained further that it was perfectly impossible for him to be anything but a minor courtier, but the old man had begun to pile equipment into his arms—a curry-comb, hammers of varying sizes, horseshoes, new nails, hooked tools he could not possibly name.

“We’ll start with the black one on the end, eh? He’s not too out of sorts in the morning—some of the others like their beauty rest.” The boy began to follow obediently, struggling to contain the tools in his small arms, but the blacksmith turned back and gazed through his cloudy eyes at the boy.

“When the sun’s down, you can find your way out to the Garden through the sorrel’s stall. There’s a loose board and a little crawling passage. If you just manage to come back before dawn, she might not catch you. Take the girl some of my lunch—I don’t eat much these days and she’s a growing thing.”

The boy, stunned, nodded and ducked into the great black gelding’s stall, dropping several nails.

He found, to his surprise, that he liked working with the horses. Most were patient as parishioners, lifting their hooves in a bored manner and nosing his chest for apples. He liked their smell, their big barrel ribs, their sloping heads, the softness of their throats. He liked their blustering noises and their quiet company. He felt, truly, like one of the Witch Knife’s tribe, tending his horses on the steppes, preparing for a raid on an offending village. That tale seemed so long past, now, but he immersed himself in it again, and passed the hours in a merry haze.

When the sun’s rays had grown long and red as ruby tongues, he bundled up the food the blacksmith had left and started off through the door at the far end of the black-eyed sorrel’s stall. He felt a little foolish—of course all the servants would know about the girl. What scandal passed under the many roofs of a Palace that some servant did not know it and tell it to another? They might even feel badly for her and wish to take her in as their own daughter, raise her to bake bread and sew gowns, but could not for fear of the Sultan or the girl’s parents, whichever of the diamond-strewn nobles they might be. All the same, he had begun to think of her as his, his secret, his own friend who belonged to no one else. He was almost sorry that she had friends among the cooks and blacksmiths.

Cursing such ungenerous thoughts, he searched out the cypress path, where the thick green trees pointed skyward like minarets reaching up to the first twinkling stars. The path was a complicated mosaic commissioned when he was no more than a baby—the pebbles were arranged in every color imaginable, illustrating a scene from one of the Sultan’s great victories. He found the place where it was red for several steps together—the blood of an unfortunate barbarian—and saw that the girl had already arrived, leaning on a cypress as though she had waited for hours.

“I meant to bring you better, but my sister gave me to a blacksmith and I could not get to the kitchens.” He held out the horse-keeper’s thick crust of bread and yellow cheese, and a fat peach.

“You don’t have to bring me anything at all, you know. You don’t have to supper for your song.” She laughed at her own awkward joke, a high, startled sound like a spooked horse.

The boy shrugged and set out their small supper on a square of linen in the midst of the scarlet pebbles. “Of course, you might be high above me in rank, in which case I’d have to serve you; it would be my duty. I’ve no idea which of the men at court is your father—no one will admit to it. They talk as if you sprang into being out of the air like a Djinn! You might even be my sister! The Sultan has many wives, after all—”

The girl laughed. It was a hard laugh, like the edge of a plate rolling over a stone floor. “I am not your sister.” The boy was a little abashed.

“I just like to bring you things, that’s all.”

“You like to hear my stories, and supper is their price. A noble boy cannot think of anything but cost.”

The boy started as though she had struck him. “Are you so angry that you cut me because your eyes are dark and mine are not, because I sleep in a house and you in a bower?”

Her eyes softened immediately, chagrined, and the dark shadows of her lids seemed to glow silver and black, like the shapes of fish underwater. She put her arms around his slim neck, and for the first time, embraced the boy. His breath caught, and they stood awkwardly for a moment in the sea of red pebbles.