Read Infidel for Free Online Page B

 
    The driver was Rhys’s age, probably in his early thirties, and he appeared to have been trying, unsuccessfully, to grow a beard for some time. It had grown in in patches. He kept it short, which eased the contrast between beard and hairless cheek.  
    The men in the back wore white khameezes, aghals, and sandals, and from the look of their manicured nails and neat beards, they were probably lower-level assistants or officials working in the financial district. They could have, perhaps, been lawyers or businessmen, but they seemed too young to have reached such heights, and interns would not have had the cash for a taxi fare.  
    The driver slowed the taxi as the traffic ahead of them came to a halt. Rhys looked out the window. He saw a toppled rickshaw thirty meters up the road. He closed his eyes and searched for a local swarm of wasps to sniff out the disturbance, but could sense none nearby. He gave up and opened his eyes.  
    “Pardon, Yah,” the skinny man in the middle said, and leaned forward. Yah, or Yahni, was the polite prefix to a magician’s name across Umayma, an old term dating back to the days when bel dames policed the world.
    But Rhys had never been certified as a magician. The title was not earned, just assumed when he wore the robes.  
    Rhys did not correct him.  
    “You are married, yes?” the man asked.  
    “I am,” Rhys said. He wore a silver ring on each of his ring fingers, the left to symbolize his engagement, the right to confirm his marriage.  
    “And how is it you drew this woman’s interest? Was it that you were a magician?”
    Rhys’s wife was Chenjan, but she had been raised in Tirhan. He had had to learn his courting behaviors whole cloth. Not that he had much experience in courting before he came to Tirhan.  
    “It did help that I was a magician,” he said.  
    The men nodded seriously.  
    They got off at the next street. Rhys and the taxi driver rode the rest of the way in silence. Just outside the hybrid oak park at the edge of Rhys’s district, the driver came to a halt.
    Rhys stepped out. “What shall I give you?” he asked.  
    “Praise be, it’s an honor to ferry a magician.”
    “From the city center to the grove is generally a note and a half. Is this agreeable?”
    “A note and a half? Do you wish to see me starve?”
    “I am a fair man, not a fool.”
    They haggled. Rhys paid the driver a note sixty-five. He took the shortcut through the grove. It smelled of lemons and loam and the tangy sap of the hybrids. Bugs swarmed the treetops, none of them virulent. Clouds of wasps patrolled the streets, tailored to track and record the movements of nonresidents. At the end of the grove, he stepped out onto his street.  
    Rhys had wanted to live somewhere in the hills, but Shirhazi, at best, rolled. It did not have proper hills, not until it came to the base of the mountains, to the north. And by then the city had turned to scrubland and clover fields. So he settled for living in a three-storied house made of mud-brick and bug secretions sandwiched at the far end of a long row of similar houses. There was a roof garden, and a wide, open balcony on the second floor. There were no windows on the first floor, of course, but windows on the upper floors opened out onto the rear garden, and during the hottest part of the day, they could push them all open and catch a breeze off the inland sea.
    They. Rhys had expected to remain alone in Tirhan, his narrow days interspersed with occasional visits to Khos and Inaya, his fellow exiles, to ease some of the loneliness. But it hadn’t turned out that way. Nothing about his life in Tirhan had turned out the way he expected.
    Rhys walked across the street, through the front gate, and onto his tiled front patio. He heard laughter from behind the house. He passed through the cobbled alley to the treed yard surrounded in an eight-foot-high privacy wall. His family’s refuge.
    His daughters played in the yard, attaching strings