In the Night Garden

“You’re Djinn!” I cried, pointing like an accusing child. “No wonder that hair can play! How do you get it to stiffen like that?”

Agrafena laughed, a gravelly sound like coals raked over. “No more than a quarter, I’m afraid, and on the paternal side—more’s the pity.” Her eyes flashed their dim fire at me. “We do not all lie on silk cushions in the vaults of Kash, you know. And like me, the hair is only a quarter smoke. Enough to be reasonable when I treat it nicely.”

“But how? It is absolutely forbidden to mate with humans! After Kashkash died they forced us to agree to it—so many were crushed into spoons and lamps that day! There were too many ruined maids and inoperable boys for them to countenance. There has not been a half-breed for centuries! Longer!”

“Thank you for using such a generous word for me. But as I said, I am not half-anything, I am a solid and smoky quarter-breed, and if you wish to arrest someone, you shall have to dig up my grandparents, and I am sure they would be very cross about it.”

I did not know what to say. She was an impossibility. At home she would be burne

d immediately and that part of her which was inflammable sunk to the bottom of the sea. Such was the contract the Khaighal witnessed; such was the contract men made us sign with regard to their prettiest children. I finally settled on the simplest thing I could summon up.

“The Gate sent me,” I said.

“Simeon? It will be time for his mules soon, I should think. Is he asking you to call him Ajanabh yet? Silly old farmer, but a better soul you never knew.”

“I am from the army outside. The army of Kings and Queens that is waiting to flatten this place.”

Agrafena’s face darkened, and even a quarter-Djinn can go very dark. “Yes, I know which one you mean,” she rumbled.

“I came within the walls to find what my siblings seek: a little carnelian casket, no larger than my arm.”

“Your siblings?”

I drew my smoke up and the jewels of my waist flashed. “I am the Ember-Queen.”

Agrafena just laughed and scratched her scalp. “And what is in this box?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Well, the Queenship of Kash is not what it used to be.”

“I have been Queen for a single day!” I protested. “They tell me nothing! I was lucky to learn there was a box at all!”

“Well enough, well enough. I have no idea where such a thing might be. I have seen nothing of the sort—carnelian is common to your country, not ours.”

“The Gate—Simeon—told me you would take me to a tall room, and an ivory cage, and a flame like mine.”

Her eyebrows arched. “Did he now? Well, I suppose I know what he means. I doubt you’ll find your box there, though. More likely bird droppings and an earful of prattle.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Of course—who am I to shirk the duty of entertaining visiting royalty? Follow me; it is not far.”

We moved quickly through the angled alleys, and the shadows were deep and scented below the rounded towers of Ajanabh. I thought I could smell that spice-smog that Simeon had loved so, or the ghost of it, the faintest sigh of cardamom and cumin and cinnamon breathing through the night. As we passed windows and doors, I could see jugglers throwing candelabra high in dimly lit rooms, and hear heartbreaking soliloquies delivered earnestly to tall mirrors. The night was full of voices, and every now and then, a lone and tamed lion would pad by on the cracked road, his collar kept clean and crisp. Surely there was a great ring somewhere, a great stage, and I was missing even now the Ajan carnival in its full waxing. We passed through a wide square peopled with red sandstone statues, each face precise and perfect in scarlet stone, clutching granite mirrors and marble parasols. We wound through them on tiptoe, for I was certain one of them would reach out at any moment to grip my arm. But the violin player walked tall and did not err in her steps, even when the stone crowd was far behind us. Agrafena’s hair stood straight out behind her even when she was not whirling about, and I could not see her face for its mass. I suppose I was not one to talk, with my ungainly baskets.

Shyly, I ventured: “Your hands…”

“Yes?”

“How did you come to have your bows? It must have been very painful.”

“Not so much as you might think.” She stopped and though we could not fit through the alleys abreast, she looked over her shoulder at me. “We have time yet in your night before we reach the roost, if you are genuinely curious—”

I nodded eagerly. She drew me out of the little alley and sat me beside a persimmon tree caught up in a rusty iron trunk-gate, to protect it from climbing children.

“Well enough, then. I have told you already that my grandfather was a Djinn…”

THE