Chapter Six

It was while Alyami was sitting in the dust that he saw the great love of his life.  Sitting in the square of the caravanserai he had been trying, with meager success, to conjure up enough pennies to purchase a meal through the kindness of strangers and the playing of his rabab.  While there was money aplenty in the purses of the merchants striding across the square, the dust, the heat, and the noise rendered his playing a pretty tinkling in the background.

Upon finishing a tune he looked up, the dust and heat parching his throat, and there she was.  Their eyes met and nothing else mattered.  His chest thrummed and his eyes glistened.  It seemed that her eyes penetrated into his mind, through his eyes and into his soul.  She looked away, gave one more glance and scurried away, all grace and elegance under her robes.

She was part of the entourage of a particularly ostentatiously wealthy merchant.  A peacock of silks and gold, sadly bedraggled with the journey and the dust of the square.  Hulking bodyguards brooded and glared around the edges.  Clerks fluttered around their master like chickens, clucking for attention while terrified of receiving it.  At the back of this troop were the women, wrapped in dark robes, huddling together, only their eyes giving proof of their humanity.

Alyami was wounded.  All thought of hunger, or tomorrow vanished.  Those eyes!  Those eyes!  When he closed his eyes in sweet pain he saw them.  He saw them look right into his heart.  The pain swelled until there was nothing else.  He must see her again.

That night he wandered the halls of the caravanserai, looking for the merchant's party.  Through many a question, an outraged threat, a suspicious stare he wandered/blundered through hallways.  He knew he was earning a reputation as a probable thief, and wasn't it truly earned?  Was he not trying to steal love away from its rightful owner?  With the moral certitude of the young artist he told himself that this was false, certainly false!  You cannot cage love.  You cannot own love.  Love is given and taken freely, or does not exist at all.

Finally he saw a woman in robes hurrying across a hallway carrying a jug.  He noticed that the robes were the same as those in the square.  At last he had found where she, or wonderful she, was housed.  He turned and scampered down the hall, his heart full of joy and certainty.  He didn't even notice the hands moving to swords and knives.  What was a running man at night in the caravanserai but a thief?  The lack of cries was his only protection.

Alyami told the guards at the gate that he wanted to stroll in the night air, to play his music in the solitude of the desert.  While this was clearly the act of an insane man, it was well known that musicians were insane, and so he was permitted to pass.  After all, better to let a demon out of your abode should it wish to leave.

He wandered around the walls to the tiny windows of the apartments of his love's captor (or so he had begun to think of him) and quietly tuned his rabab.  He thought of what to play.  The Love Song of Prince Mahmoud?  Nehri's Dance?  The Gaoled Heart?  None seemed right, as they were the loves of others, and his love was special, the grandest and most beautiful love that had ever been.  He determined that he would let his heart guide his hands, and began to play.

The music uncoiled across the sands.  It yearned, it tempted, it pleaded.  It sang to the stars, it flew with the wind, it brushed the mind, the heart, and the skin.  Alyami knew that it was right, that it was pure.  If there was any truth or justice in the world she would hear his call and know that there could be no love like his.

Four hours later, exhausted and grimy, he returned to the gate.  The guards poked and prodded him, looked for horns or forked tongue.  They checked for potions, scrolls, and daggers that dripped poison. They uttered protections and incantations.  Finally they grudgingly accepted that this was but a human being and admitted him.  Alyami found a corner and collapsed and slept and slept.  For a musician must be used to late nights, disappointment and a hard bed.

For four nights he repeated his pleas from the desert.  For three nights he returned to his dusty corner.  For three days he searched for those eyes but only saw them when he closed his own.  On the fourth night, oh at last!  He heard a whispered call, "Demon, why do you try to tempt me into the desert?  I know better than to heed the call of the djinn."

"Fair lady, I am no demon.  I am the musician you see in the square.  I am here only because I love you, I yearn for you.  My heart is full of pain without you and so I pour it out into the sands."  Alyami was quite pleased with this.  He had rehearsed the last sentence in his mind for hours.  "Come out and see me and I will prove my love."

"I cannot leave the caravanserai, demon, nor would I if I could."  His lady was clearly no fool, and her voice was like nectar even through the croaking of her whisper.

"Then my love, name the place and time, and I will be there whatever the danger."  Alyami fell to his knees with his pleading.  He had hope, hope rising from the ashes of his despair.

"The east tower at midnight.  That is your chance demon,"  came the glorious words upon the desert breeze.

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At the next midnight Alyami flitted through the shadows of the east tower in his best impersonation of an assassin.  It was such a poor effort, although whole-hearted, that the merest glance from a guard would have resulted in his imprisonment.  Nobody who moved like that could be involved in honest work.  Only years later would Alyami learn that the surest way not to be discovered is to walk in the open certain in the propriety of your action.

At the top of the steps his heart stopped as he saw a guard slumped by the door.  It beat again when the smell of alcohol and the sound of snores reached him.  His love was clever.  Well, of course she was, how could she be otherwise.

He opened the door with the impossibly loud creaking that all doors have in the middle of the night, and entered.  There she was, outlined in the moonlight, her in the flesh.  He stood, dumbfounded, rooted to the spot, his mouth dry and his hands clenched.

"Ah, demon, you are so young and pretty.  So daring.  Are you not afraid of being discovered?  They would remove that pretty head from those shapely shoulders."

"I love you.  The greater danger is to be apart from you for I cannot withstand it."  Alyami could say such things and mean them, as only the young can do.

"Then come here and show me your love, my brave, bashful lover."

As if in a dream he floated across the tower floor until her hands touched him; holding, moving, searching.  Her face rose and their eyes met.

"You aren't her!"  blurted Alyami in surprise.

"I don't know who she is, young lover, but I am truly myself, I am here, and the world is more than you know it to be."  She caressed his cheek, and then his thigh.  Suddenly Alyami recognized the wisdom in this woman.  He had been foolish and this marvelous woman had shown him the truth.  Over the next few hours and nights Alyami learned that there was much more to true love than the meeting of eyes across a square.  he also learned a great many other things that throughout the rest of his life were a delight to himself, and all of his many one, true loves.