The Illuminants' Quarter occupied the north-western corner of Solymer, a tangled web of alleys and courtyards clustered around the old Sanctuary of the Revealed Light—the site where, according to the Esberian faith, Elyon the Anointed had walked the last steps of his mortal journey. The Unitarians called it the Street of the Foreigners, which was not quite accurate and not quite kind, and they generally left it alone. The Illuminants who lived there were mostly merchants from the coastal cities, tolerated for their commercial usefulness and their willingness to pay the head-tax without complaint. Their priests kept to themselves, their bells rang at odd hours, and their presence was a reminder—useful to the Sultan—that Solymer was a city of many faiths, governed by one.
Zeid came to the Illuminants' Quarter in plain robes the colour of dust, a hood drawn low over his face. Rafiq walked a pace behind him, close enough to intervene if anyone looked too closely. They had been making this journey once a month for twelve years, ever since the old hakim who had attended the Sultan's mother had retired from the court and established a private practice in a crooked little house behind the Church of Saint Eloria. The house had a blue door and a door-script nailed to the doorpost—the hakim, despite his Jaludi name, kept the customs of his Ibrani ancestors—and the patients who came and went were a careful mix of faiths and classes, none of whom asked questions because the hakim did not answer them.
Hakim Ruhullah ibn Khaldan was an old man, so old that no one—least of all the hakim himself—could agree on his exact age. His beard was white as sea-foam, his shoulders were stooped beneath the weight of decades, and his hands, when he examined a patient, were so steady that it seemed almost a form of magic. He had been born in the Ibrani quarter of Qahirat, had studied medicine in the great academy at Qurtaban, and had served three generations of the House of Tahir al-Din before retiring to this quiet clinic where he treated anyone who came to his door with coin or without. The Sultan's mother had called him a saint. The Sultan's enemies had called him a sorcerer.
"Lie down," the hakim said, closing the door of the examination room and drawing the curtain. The room was small and whitewashed, furnished with a low cot, a cabinet of ceramic jars, and a shelf of leather-bound texts in four languages. Light filtered through a lattice window, casting geometric shadows on the floor. "Remove the bindings. Let me see."
Zeid removed his outer robe. Then, with the practiced efficiency of long routine, he unwound the linen wraps from his chest. The fabric came away in long, damp coils, and when the last layer fell to the floor, the relief was so acute that it was almost painful—the sudden expansion of the ribcage, the rush of air into the lower lungs, the sensation of being, for a few stolen minutes, a body rather than a battleground.
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The hakim pressed his cool fingers along Zeid's ribs, feeling the places where the bones had begun to curve inward from years of compression. He made a soft, disapproving noise, the kind of noise a carpenter makes when examining a beam that has been asked to bear too much weight.
"The bindings are too tight," he said. "I have told you this. The ribs are showing signs of stress. If you continue in this way, you will damage your lungs. You will be short of breath before you are thirty, and you will die of a chest infection before you are forty. The body has limits, my prince. Even yours."
"The body has limits," Zeid agreed. "But the world has eyes. If the bindings are looser, the world will see what it is not supposed to see. I would rather die at forty as a man than live to eighty as something else."
Hakim Ruhullah sighed, a long exhalation that seemed to deflate his entire frame. He turned to his cabinet and began mixing powders—the myrrh, the shepherd's purse, the bitter root that came from the mountains of the east and suppressed the monthly bleeding without quite stopping it entirely. Zeid would drink the mixture every morning, and he would not complain.
"Your monthly courses," the hakim said, not looking up from his work. "Are they still irregular?"
"They come when they come. Not often. Not heavily. A small mercy."
"A small mercy is still a mercy. The mixture will help, but it cannot stop what your body was designed to do entirely. You know this."
"I know it."
The hakim turned, the ceramic cup of green-brown liquid in his hand. His old eyes, still sharp beneath their white brows, studied Zeid with an expression that was not quite pity and not quite exasperation, but something patient and tired and very old.
"The body is a text, my prince," he said gently. "Yours is written in a script that is difficult to read, but it is not wrong. It is only… rare. You are not an error. You are a variant, a thing that nature produces from time to time as she produces two-headed calves and roses that bloom in winter. The world does not know what to do with such things. The world tries to correct them, or to hide them, or to kill them. But the world is stupid, and nature is not."
Zeid took the cup and drank it in a single swallow. The taste was foul, as it always was—bitter and metallic, like licking a copper coin that had been buried in ash. He did not grimace. He had taught himself not to grimace.
"The body is a prison," he said, setting the cup aside. "I have learned to live within the walls. That is all."