The Vine Page 3

  “Thank you for coming,” the prince had said sincerely.

  ~*~*~*~

  It had taken the stable-boy some time to become accustomed to the prince’s beautiful chamber.

  The first time Zayn invited him to sit, Afif had looked around nervously before seating himself cross-legged on one of the rugs.

  The prince had looked at him with amusement and a touch of perplexity. “This is not a tent, Afif; we can sit on the couch instead of on the floor.”

  “Oh. Er – Your Highness, I – will I not make your couch dirty, and smell of horse?”

  The prince shrugged. “I love the smell of horse. And you do not look so dirty to me.”

  Even more nervously, feeling more and more out of place, Afif perched on the edge of the silken couch, and clasped his work-toughened hands in his lap.

  When the prince offered him sherbet in the beautiful, green, gold-patterned glass, the stable-boy took it reverently. He had never seen such a glass. Nor had he ever been treated like an honoured guest. Stable-boys were expected to fend for themselves, even when accompanying their master’s horses to other sovereigns’ abodes.

  But he was completely flustered when the prince sat down on the same couch. Afif stood hastily, still clutching his glass, confused and astonished.

  The prince looked up at him in mild surprise; then he seemed to register the source of Afif’s confusion. “Afif, please, sit. You are not serving here tonight. You are a guest.”

  Still Afif was bewildered. The prince stood beside him, and looked into his eyes. “Afif, I want us to be friends,” he explained. “I did not ask you here as a stable-boy; I asked you here as someone of my own age whom I would like to befriend.”

  Afif stared back at the prince mutely for a long moment.

  Then he asked, “Why? I mean, ‘why, Your Highness’?”

  “Because I have so few friends. Because you seem to love horses, as I do. Because I want someone to talk to, and you seem to speak well and have understanding beyond many that are our age.

  “So please, sit. All I ask of you is some conversation. … Sit, and be my guest, and talk with me for a while.”

  Slowly, amazed, Afif seated himself again on the silken couch, and the prince retook his seat also.

  “Tell me about your horse,” Prince Zayn invited. “He is very beautiful.”

  And, in later times, Afif marvelled at the prince’s cleverness in asking him about the one thing he would delight in talking about with anyone for any length of time.

  After an hour or so of talking of horses, Afif was starting to relax, and to enjoy his lavish surroundings. The prince was a good conversationalist, and talking with him began to feel pleasurable. It was a privilege, surely, to be the private guest of a son of the sultan.

  At length, when both were beginning to feel drowsy despite the excitement of their night-time meeting, Zayn said, “I must not keep you from your sleep any longer, Afif. But will you come again to talk with me sometimes?” He looked hopefully at the stable-boy.

  Afif nodded. “Of course, Your Highness. When would you like me to come?”

  “Not tomorrow night, but the next, if you can and are not otherwise inclined,” the prince suggested.

  Afif had never been addressed so gracefully and respectfully. “Certainly, Your Highness,” he fumbled, feeling as though he ought to bow, but to do so whilst sitting would be awkward.

  Prince Zayn smiled, stood, and took the stable-boy’s empty glass from him. “Thank you, Afif.”

  He paused, gazing down at the glass in his hand, and a slight frown lowered his dark brows and creased his forehead. “There is something I must make clear to you, Afif, though it does not please me at all.” He paused briefly, and gave a small, displeased sigh. “My father the sultan would not, I think, approve of my spending time with a stable-boy. I wish there were some way to say that in a manner that is not insulting to you, but I can think of none. I do not wish to insult you, Afif, but I do believe that if my father knew that I have arranged to meet with you he would forbid it.

  “I am sorry.”

  There was a pause.

  “I-I do not wish to get you into trouble, Your Highness,” Afif began.

  Prince Zayn shook his head. “I am the one who invited you here; it is I who would be punished for it. I would make sure of that,” he added with certainty, looking Afif in the eyes for a moment.

  “But we must be sure that we meet in secret, and that no one knows of our meetings. My father cannot forbid that of which he knows nothing.” A mischievous twinkle appeared in the prince’s dark eyes. “You are my secret, Afif. My secret guest.”

  ~*~*~*~

  Afif could not visit the prince every night, of course; sometimes there were noise and lights late into the night as some party or social event took place; on other nights, Zayn and Afif simply needed to sleep. Occasionally, bad weather meant that the window’s shutters must be closed, and it was inadvisable to climb a rooftop, a wall, a tree and a vine. So about every third or fourth night, Afif would make the dangerous, though short, journey to visit his friend the prince. They arranged a code for use when necessary: a white silk scarf hanging from the lattice at dusk meant ‘don’t come’; a lantern left in the window at dusk meant ‘please come’. On nights when neither was apparent, Afif was not expected but always welcome, though he might have to take the risk that Zayn were asleep. The prince began to leave his lattice unlatched, so that when this happened, Afif could let himself in stealthily rather than make too much noise in trying to rouse Zayn. The sleeping prince usually heard the quiet sounds of Afif climbing in through the window, and would be awake by the time Afif’s soft-booted feet touched the rug. Occasionally, however, Zayn would be sleeping particularly deeply, and Afif would be treated to the sight of the sleeping prince, his face innocent and relaxed in slumber, looking several years younger than fifteen. Afif would wake him gently – “If I am asleep, please wake me,” the prince had said – to be greeted with a drowsy hug and kiss as soon as the prince sat up in bed. Secretly, Afif treasured those moments, for in them he felt as he imagined a brother must feel.

  Afif had no family. When the prince asked him, on his first visit, about his family, Afif told him the truth: being a stable-boy was all he could remember. He could not remember living anywhere else. The previous chief groom, who might have known something about Afif’s origins since he was one of the first people of whom Afif had memory, had died when Afif was very young, and anything he may have known about Afif had died with him.

  Perhaps Afif had been born in the stables; born of the straw and the sound of horses breathing.

  When the prince visited the stables to ride, Afif and the prince behaved just as they had before he and the prince had come to know each other personally; before that starlit night when the world had become magical. Only when he was sure no-one was looking did Afif risk a glance up at the prince’s face, or allow his hand to brush briefly against the prince’s boot once he was mounted.

  Once, Zayn was sent away for two months, to a nearby noble’s palace to learn more of the art of swordsmanship. Afif missed him, feeling lacklustre without his night-time conversations with the educated prince. To give himself something else to occupy his mind, he began to carve, with a strong sharp knife used for various tasks around the stables, a small wooden horse to give to the prince. He made several, each one an improvement on the last, until the fifth horse was completed two days before the prince was due to return. On the night that the prince returned, Afif was joyed to see the colourful lantern beaming in the prince’s window.

  The prince was delighted with the gift of the wooden horse, and even more delighted to be with Afif again. He had much to tell of the journey, the things he had learned and seen, and the books that he had discovered in the noble’s library. Afif had travelled occasionally, as part of the sultan’s retinue, but once at their destination he rarely saw much more than the stables.

  “
Prince Zayn, why do you so enjoy seeing me?” Afif asked once, soberly, as he and the prince sat in the prince’s windowsill, their backs against the sides of the window. On a low table lay the remains of the quail’s eggs, pomegranates and white grapes that the prince had shared with his guest.

  The prince smiled at him, dark eyes gleaming in the night. “Because so much of my life is controlled. Everyone knows my whereabouts, most of the time, lest I be abducted or endangered somehow. Most of the things I do are done because they are expected of a good, well-bred prince. Everything I do is constantly being evaluated against that measure, even if people never say it.

  “But you are not measuring me. When I am with you, I am just a person, not a prince. I am free just to enjoy life, for the moments when I am with you.

  “And no-one knows about us. My friendship with you is something I have chosen, not something that has been chosen for me. My father did not guide me to you; no teacher recommended you to me; I chose you because I like you. There is no other reason.”

  The prince paused.

  “And for that reason, Afif, you are perhaps the purest thing in my life.”

  There was another, longer pause.

  Then Prince Zayn asked, “And you, Afif? Why do you risk your body and your life, night after night, to come and visit me?”

  Afif thought deeply, for a long moment.

  “Because, Prince Zayn, you are an adventure.”

  The prince grinned deeply, his white, dark-eyed grin.

  ~*~*~*~

  On the third time Afif visited the prince, he responded to the royal’s greeting of, “Good evening, Afif. Thank you for coming” as always with, “Good evening, Your Highness.”

  “You can call me by my name, Afif,” the prince replied, as they stood by the window’s dusty starlight. “We are friends now, are we not?”

  Afif was silent in embarrassment.

  “Can we not be friends?” the prince asked softly.

  “C-Can we be? I mean – is it permitted?” Afif asked hesitantly.

  “I permit it.” The prince smiled, somewhat humorously, at Afif.

  “But, Your Highness, your father –– Is it right for a prince to make friends with a stable-boy?”

  There was a pause. The prince looked away for a moment, uneasily.

  “I will not pretend that my father would like it,” he said quietly. “But he is not the sultan of my life.

  “He rules everything, but he tells us that if we are ever to rule after him we must ourselves know how to rule. And we cannot do that if we have never ruled anything ourselves. We must therefore rule our own lives in preparation for ruling others’.”

  The prince smiled at Afif. “So I make it a princely decree that thou and I may be friends.”

  Afif smiled back, though he still felt uncertain.

  “Besides, no one will see us,” the prince added. “And I promise you, Afif, that if ever we were to be discovered I would take all responsibility for our friendship and our meetings. We could say that I ordered you to come and visit me and ordered you to keep it secret.”

  “Would – would your father punish you?” Afif asked, with some anxiety.

  Zayn shrugged, turning away to light the lamp. “Perhaps. It would not be the first time.”

  He looked at Afif with dark, mischievous eyes in the swelling lamplight. “This is worth the risk, Afif.”

  The prince turned his attention to a small, ornate, silver dish, which appeared to be laden with squarish chunks of something white, on the low table beside his bed. He picked up a small knife and sliced into one of the chunks, halving it. “Do you like loukoum, Afif?”

  “What is it?” the stable-boy asked.

  Zayn glanced at him briefly, as though mildly surprised that anyone would be unfamiliar with loukoum.

  “A sweet. A delicacy. Try some.” The prince picked up a slice in his fingers and placed it into Afif’s mouth before the stable-boy could react.

  The stuff was covered in a white powder, and when Afif bit down on the lump in his mouth a sweet stickiness filled his mouth and made his tongue feel astonished. It was sweeter than anything he had ever tasted, and its sticky consistency clung to his teeth in a way that forced him to chew the delicacy thoroughly before he swallowed it. And there was a thick, luxuriant scent of roses.

  The prince watched him with pleasure. “Good, is it not?” he asked, when Afif had swallowed.

  Afif nodded emphatically, still tasting the sweetness and the stickiness and the roses in his mouth, and the prince smiled, and offered him the dish.

  Afif picked up one of the powdery lumps carefully between his fingertips. “Thank you, Your H–– I mean – Zayn,” he said.

  The prince smiled again.

  ~*~*~*~

  The prince always greeted Afif with an embrace and a kiss on the cheek, as Afif had seen men greet each other in the marketplace. The prince never seemed to notice the fact that his beautiful expensive clothes were brushing against stable-boy garments that invariably had a certain amount of dust, horsehair and perhaps straw on them. Afif always returned the embrace, though it was many nights before he ceased to feel strange about touching someone whom he had always been taught to treat with deference and distance.

  “Why do you never kiss me in return?” the prince demanded suddenly one night, sounding both hurt and piqued, as they stood by the moonlit window through which Afif had just entered.

  Afif was taken aback.

  “B-Because – Your Highness – only equals are allowed to kiss royalty on the cheek, surely,” the stable-boy fumbled. He had rarely seen royals greet each other, but he seemed to remember that, when he had seen it, only those of royal blood kissed each other on the cheek. Nobles kissed royalty only on the hand, while those of lesser status knelt or bowed and did not touch the royal person at all.

  “You are my friend, Afif. We can be friends only with our equals, as the philosophers say; so if you are my friend then you must also be my equal.”

  The prince smiled suddenly in mirth, knowing that his logic was backwards and that Afif would know this too.

  “And if you call me ‘Your Highness’ again, I shall throw you out of this window,” he informed Afif humorously but pointedly, holding an emphatic finger upright between himself and the stable-boy.

  “Yes, Your H––” Afif began submissively, then playfully stuck out his tongue to stop himself. Zayn laughed, and slapped the stable-boy’s cheek softly.

  “So kiss me now, to prove that you will remember,” Zayn challenged his friend.

  Afif suddenly realised that he had never kissed a person before. He hesitated, dropping his gaze to the floor.

  “What is wrong?” Zayn asked him, head cocked.

  “I – Your Highness, I – ach, I mean Zayn – I – I have only ever kissed horses,” he confessed, suddenly feeling himself blush. Zayn was a sultan’s son, with brothers and father and mother and friends and many acquaintances and subjects who must greet him frequently. Since birth he must have known how to give and receive kisses, and what a human embrace felt like. Afif, the stable-boy, had no family and his only friends were horses. Afif suddenly felt meagre and impoverished.

  There was a pause. Instead of remarking on how curious a thing it was to never have kissed another human being, the prince was silent, and Afif could feel Zayn’s studying eyes on his face.

  The silence stretched. Afif felt more and more ashamed and ridiculous. Somehow, the knowledge that he had never kissed another person in his life made him more worthless and contemptible than his lowly station, his lack of parents, or his shabby, dusty, horse-smelling clothes. What was such a creature as he doing in the chamber of a prince? How could such a person as Zayn wish to befriend someone as wretched as Afif?

  “Well then,” Zayn said quietly, at last; “this moment is special.”

  Afif began to raise his head.

  “And I,” the prince continued, “am hon
oured, Afif, to be your first friend who is not a horse. And to rank in your affections alongside such a magnificent beast as your beloved Shadows.”

  Afif stared at him.

  The prince was not mocking him. The dark eyes were utterly serious, almost fierce, in their gaze.

  The prince stepped forward and embraced Afif closely. He kissed the stable-boy on the cheek.

  Afif swallowed, hesitated, then awkwardly placed a quick kiss on the prince’s cheekbone. He was surprised by how warm and soft a boy’s skin felt compared to a horse’s hard, flat-haired forehead, velvety muzzle, or muscular neck.

  The prince seemed to smile, and squeezed Afif more closely.

  Afif swallowed again, and fought against the tears that were welling in his eyes. He did not want to make it even more obvious to the prince how unfamiliar to him it was to give and receive affection from one of his own kind.

  Zayn released his embrace. Afif lost his battle, but the prince casually turned toward the window and leaned on the sill, regarding the night sky and his darkened garden, humming softly to himself, while Afif stood to one side and a little behind, wiping away tears that kept reappearing.

  ~*~*~*~

  One night, the prince shared with Afif the celebrations that would be held for his sixteenth birthday, in a few days’ time. There would be a party at the palace, with a banquet to be held in the early evening. Afif listened agog as the prince related some of the preparations that were in process, the entertainments that would be offered and the dishes that would be served. Guests would be invited from among the nobles in the sultanate, though not as many as were customarily invited for the birthday of the eldest prince, the heir to the sultan.

  The prince paused in his telling, and frowned. “It is a source of great annoyance to me that I cannot invite you, Afif.”

  There was a short pause. Afif said nothing; it is not for a stable-boy to wish that he could attend the birthday of a prince; but that did not stop Afif wishing.

  “When is your birthday?” the prince inquired.

  Afif blinked. “Erm … I do not know, Zayn. … I don’t know when I was born. I know when Shadows was born, and since your gracious father allows his servants to have their birthdays free for themselves, ever since Shadows was born the chief groom uses his birthday as mine.”