Nine White Horses by Judith Tarr

batter her flower-softness; his great
stallion maleness would rend her human frailty. He turned from her to the one
who could endure the full and thunderous force of his passion.
    She clasped her arms about his neck. Her limbs were serpent-supple.
Her voice whispered in his ear, words of love, tantalizing, promising all
Paradise. “A man,” she said to him. “Be a man, O beautiful, my love and my
lord.”
    He stumbled back. He could not. He was bound in this shape;
he could not will to be free of it.
    “For me,” said the Princess of the Afarit. “For your father
whom you love. For your brother who dared death and worse than death to win
this choice for you. Be a man.”
    He lunged toward the Pearl of the East; he wheeled away.
Khalid huddled on the grass. The lady stood shining in the morning. She held
out her arms.
    A shudder racked him. In one eye shone the mare; in the
other, the woman. They blurred and drifted and melded together. They were all
one image of sweetest madness. Man, stallion, both and neither, he flung
himself upon them. He mounted a white mare. He mounted a white woman. He paused
and poised and knew, in that instant of choiceless choosing, that one alone
would walk the long road back with him from the garden of desire. And if it
were the mare, Kehailan the man would die with all his dreads and doubts and
dullnesses. But if it were the woman…
    He opened his eyes on splendor. He breathed in musk and
honey. He wept with purely human grief, and purely human joy, and purely human
terror.
    o0o
    His son’s voice brought the wazir back from the gates of
death; his son’s face healed him more swiftly than any physic. He rose from his
deathbed to take up all that he had laid down, but first, to weep upon his son’s
blessedly human neck.
    With his father’s joyous consent, Kehailan took to wife the Princess
Subhiyah, who had given up her immortality for the sake of his perfect
imperfection. If his ensorcelment had not made a wise man of him, it had taught
him at least the beginnings of wisdom. With his father and his wife to guide
him, and with his own will marred only on occasion by a lapse into his old
folly, he rose high among the sultan’s most valued servants.
    When at length and at a great age the wazir passed into the embrace
of Allah, al-Kehailan took up his office, and held it in as great honor as his
father had held it before him. It was said of him that he never failed to
temper justice with mercy; that he could scent a lie as unerringly as a
stallion scents a jackal among his mares; and that whenever he was tempted to
fall short of his duty, he betook himself to his stables, where the children of
his hooved children grew strong and wise and beautiful under his watchful care.
Their blood lives yet among the horses of Egypt. There is none fairer or more
valiant, or less enduring of human arrogance.
    As for Khalid, whose tongue began it all and whose spur of wisdom
had earned for him the name of his master’s conscience, when the wazir had come
to himself again, he forgave the mamluk with all his heart, and set him free.
In reparation for his sufferings he gained the fairest of the wazir’s daughters
for his wife, whom he had loved since they were children together; and the
wazir made him brother to Kehailan in name and in law as he had always been in
heart and deed.
    That the brothers lived in perfect amity is, perhaps, too
simple an ending for their tale. They lived in love, and for the most part in
peace. And if Kehailan had learned to be the wiser in pursuit of his duty, Khalid
in his turn had learned to curb his tongue in the curbing of his brother’s
folly.
    When Kehailan rose to his father’s wazirate, Khalid rose
with him, to stand at his right hand and to be, as ever, the better half of his
self. And thus they lived in wealth and in gladness until the book of their
lives was written, and, as they had passed in the same hour into the wilderness
of the world, so did they pass together