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“It has been determined,” droned the head priest in a bored tone, “that our lord Kashkash many times wished himself on the field of battle before hostilities began in order to stymie his enemies. Therefore you may wish in his Shadow and his Stead.” The new wish was recorded in a different book, old and dusty, with wooden boards and lazily cut pages. It did not flame even a little.
The Kings and Queens of Kash gripped my hands and before I could blink we stood on a wide red plain before a city whose walls were so tall clouds wisped at their heights.
I had never seen such an army. My flames caught in my throat, banked in wonder. Every soldier, if they could be called such, was armored in fabulous metals that glittered in the bloody sun. Their shoulder-plates were flared and fluted, edged in antlers and diamonds, their helmets topped with feathers from birds I could not begin to name. They sat astride war chargers whose chests bulged like boulders, and carried swords that no doubt had endless lineages and cost more than whole towns. The supply carts and pages stretched off in the distance—including six vast carriages carrying our wives like cannonballs behind the artillery—like the audience at a circus, and the hot wind blew back the hair from thousands of craggy, stern, proud faces, faces forged by generations of select nobles courting their select cousins.
In the Bay of Ajan floated dozens of long black ships, and on the beach were dragged dozens more. Campfires glittered on the floor of the plain, which spread out below the high hill of Ajan like a woman’s scarlet skirt.
“We have had to call in every wish we have ever granted to gather them,” Kohinoor said, her own face set to the wind, the smoke of her skin billowing gray and black. “An army of Kings and Queens; not a pauper in the lot. They owe us, or their father owes us, or their grandmother. Their aunt became eternally young, their foster mother promised her firstborn to pay for the life of her lover. And now they are all here, paying their debt as good breeding will, and never has an army of more beauty been assembled. Some of them are unused to battle, having sat upon cushions and not upon horses, but they have the finest military minds in the world, and they will find a crack in those walls for us.”
“Please. Your Majesty,” I said. “Tell me what we seek in this place.”
Kohinoor rolled her eyes. “It is a box of carnelian, and in it is a thing which is mine and no other’s, which they have no right to keep from me. More than that I will not share with a young upstart with no military experience. Matters of state, you know. Suffice it that we wish to have it. The priests of Kashkash have determined that it is not righteous that we simply wish it out of its hiding place—for what fool hid a thing from the fire-tyrant? But fear not! This city is so weak that you will doubtless hardly know the battle has begun before it is over. Sit back, drink your brandy, and enjoy the sun.”
She passed me a vial of brown liquor and I sniffed at it, but did not drink. Instead I drifted down from our little cliff and through the ranks, where Kings and Queens of unpronounceable places groused about their conscription and cursed the Djinn under their breath, or bragged about how much better they would prove at killing than their layabout knights had done. I trailed my smoke behind me and let them choke on it. Why should I be kept out of their councils, kept ignorant of their ridiculous box? Was I not Queen as well as they? So far my throne had gotten me little but a vast, empty house and a closet full of stone wives.
The sky was growing dim as I approached the massive Gate of Ajanabh. The stone of it was red as a girl’s hair, red as my own ribs, and as blemishless as any wall I had seen. I wondered if Kohinoor had examined it this closely, closely enough to see it was not easily broached, closely enough to see that the Gate itself was a huge pair of arms crossed over each other, with a worn and weathered face frowning down at the adorned throng.
“Go away,” the face said.
I saw what she did not: There was no Gate at all anymore, just this gargantua whose shoulders spanned the breadth of what was once the Gate. His belt grazed the rocky earth. His eyes were old and cracked at the edges, bronze-green, his brow beaten leather, his jowls deeply stained with wind and sun, his great arms and hands the red rock of the wall, huge and dry and barnacled, a petrified giant. Moss grew on his knuckles; birds nested in his ears. His voice was slow and slurry as old snow.
“I am sure you think I am impressed with your brigade of strutting swans. I have been here since the pepper plants were taller than stallions in the fields. You will not chisel one flake of stone from me.”
He glared at me and tightened his arms.
“Who are you?” I gasped.
He seemed to consider for a moment. “I am the Guardian of the Gate. I had a name once, but it is no use to call me by it. I am Ajanabh. I surround it and contain it and feel its barges on my back, and so I have become it. It is better to call me Ajanabh than to guess at what my name might have been before I laid my limbs down around this place…”
THE TALE
OF THE GIANT
WHO STAYED
ONCE AJANABH HAD SAD AND CRUMBLED WALLS, with a gate like a crease in a cheap linen curtain, when I came to work the fields, as my folk often did during the harvest season. The pay is steady, and my shoulders bear those tiny yokes far better than poor, feeble horses—why, I hardly feel it! The streets just began somewhere in the middle of this rocky red plain, and sooner or later if you followed them you came to the spice plantations and then to the city proper.
Lawlessness doesn’t mean there’s no law, you know, it just means that there are a lot of different laws slugging it out in the streets, and none of them have come out on top yet. Anyone can dole out stocks and nails and a right tap in the gut for infractions of whatever law they take a fancy to, even ones you never heard anything about, so you just learn to watch yourself. Ajanabh was lawless then, which is as good as a wall twice my size.
And so I worked in the red-pepper fields, the black-pepper fields, the green peppers and the pink, and the cinnamon groves, and the coriander fields, and the saffron fields, and the cumin farms, on the salt flats combing and drying the crystals like hard, cutting snow. I pruned and tended the mustard plants, the paprika bushes, and cut vanilla beans from the vine. I crushed them all, endlessly, with my feet in a mortar the size of a galleon. I was happy with my work. Then, Ajanabh smelled so rich and sweet and smoky, all her spices puffing from one window or another as they were rendered, pulverized, and mixed. During the long, warm harvest, when the sun turned the bay into a great glittering mirror, I pulled spices from the earth—for who does not want their food well flavored? And during the spring I put my back to the plow, and drew furrows deep as a man’s legs in the rich soil.
But soil does not stay rich. Who can say why land which gives and gives like a mother with endless sweets in her skirts one day shakes her finger at her babes and denies them?
In my own country we are so c
areful, we plant only every other season, and we are so large that we digest but slowly, and need only to feast like bears through the summer long every second year. But those feasts! A whale would be embarrassed by our plenty. Goblets bigger than camels’ humps, plates the size of shields.
But in Ajanabh they were not so careful, and greedily ground into powder everything the earth could throw up, until she put her hands on her aproned hips and shook her head sadly. No more, she sighed. And there was no more. But such things do not happen all at once. For a long while no one noticed, and the sacks of saffron went out into the world as they had always done. I kept at the plow, even though my heart told me to rest, that there was no use in it. But I loved Ajanabh by then, roving laws, stolen coins, spice-smog and all. I would not leave her. But slowly, in clutches like wild rabbits, the Ajans began to go.
Carrying bags on their backs they went across the plains with squinting eyes, or to the harbor with rum flasks at their hips and oranges to hold against the rotting of their teeth. The bargers went first, since moving downstream for them is as easy as eating. Then the other giants went, following the promise of better fields in the east where they could pull up strawberries and turnips like red and white bouquets. They begged me to go with them.
“The feast is almost here!” they cried. “Where will you find enough mule meat and coconut-wine to satisfy you?”
“Ajanabh will provide for me, and I will sup as well as you,” I answered.
Well, I did not sup nearly so well as they, and I cracked my own coconuts down by the bayside, and drank the raw, unfermented milk. It did not really compare. But I did find a mule to roast, left behind by one of the sea-bound families, and I sat on the beach with my driftwood fire snapping like a housecat, and gnawed my mule bones, and sucked my coconuts dry, and it was not too wretched, really. At least I could still smell that sweet, smoky air, the cumin and the turmeric wafting over the broken walls.
Once while I plowed a near-dead field, I saw a couple clutching a little girl in their arms, and her hardly old enough to walk.
