Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Read Online Free PDF Page A

the rebels, no doubt.”
    “He is a woodcutter, my lord! He is cutting wood in the forest!”
    “We will see. Take the instrument from her.”
    The sword at my back slides beneath the knot of the sling. If they take the oud, it will mean my daughter’s death. My fingers fly over my shoulder to the knot, to seize the sling, and are sliced through for their troubles.
    My blood is everywhere. Men are shouting. I am frantic.
    “No, my lord! Please, my lord!”
    Somebody kicks me between the shoulder blades. Somebody else drags me away from the green where the Pasha holds court. I smell incense and fowl droppings. My right hand, before my eyes, is a fountain of red. The fingers do not function.
    They have taken my oud. I will never play again.
    Stones are cold against my back. Rafqa and Estefan have propped me against the side of the little church. Bkassin’s church was paid for by the coins dribbling back to the village from all the sons taken to be Janissaries.
    Sons like Rafqa and Estefan’s son. His name was Yusuf. Now it is Mehmed, but I still recognise him. I remember how Rafqa cut her hair when he was taken, as though he had died. Now, his face swims in front of mine.
    Young. Handsome. A bare, cleft chin.
    “Wind it tighter to stop the blood,” he tells Rafqa. “I will beg my lord for the use of his Jewish physician.”
    I realise Rafqa is ruining her best striped sash by binding my bleeding hand with it. Estefan looms behind her, muffling Ghalya’s face against his paunch.
    “Kill her,” I gasp to my dead husband’s brother. “Kill her, or find a way to bring my oud back to me.”
    “You should not have been carrying it, Zahara,” Estefan answers, stricken. “You gave up women’s witchcraft when you married Hisham. Music is for men only.”
    “My son risks his life for you,” Rafqa says, crushing my hand between both of hers. “He betrays a lingering affection for his former family simply by speaking to his own mother, and now–”
    I watch her mouth moving but the sounds lose their meaning. In the white clouds overhead, I see the shapes of snow-covered pine trees, and Hisham standing beneath them, swinging Ghalya into the sky. I see him drinking from the mineral spring.
    Then the spring dries up. Hisham digs a well behind the stone hut. Down in the dark, that is where the demons find him. They slip from the stone into his bones. They make him scream and writhe.
    The Jesuits hear him in passing. They hold long conversations, not with me, but with one another and with the God they say has led them through the valley. I don’t hear their God speak, but the brothers say that Hisham must go with them to the monastery.
    I trail after them with Ghalya like a milk goat with a kid at foot, ignored by them, until they are forced to bar me from the Cave. My woman’s blood will pollute it, they say.
    “Run away, Ghalya,” I try to say. “Run away. Don’t go to the cave. Don’t go to the cave, Hisham. You’ll die there. You’ll die in chains.”
    Whiteness is everywhere. The clouds have come down. They are all around.
    “Which cave is she talking about?” Rafqa says sharply.
    “My God,” Estefan says. “She is speaking of the grotto. The grotto of Fakr-ad-Din’s father. She knows where he is. The pasha spoke true. Hisham is a traitor.”
    “We must tell the pasha, right away. With this information, we can protect our son. We can protect the village.”
    And then I do not hear or see anything at all.
----
    When I wake, frogs are crooning to a crescent moon.
    The bed by the open window is a heap of layered blankets on a swept clay floor. My right hand is a heavy lump of bandage and clotted blood. I can’t feel anything inside. There is no sign of Ghalya, but then, she would not be allowed to sleep with me. I am a bad influence. Rafqa will be her mother, from now on.
    For as long as she has left to live.
    Crawling to the storage shelves behind the closed door, I take Rafqa’s funeral garb from its