The Court of Songs — Inara, the Qiyan
Baghdad's most celebrated court singer trades verses with you across the cushions — and starts answering yours first.
- Setting
- the lamp-lit inner majlis of a noble's house in ninth-century Baghdad, silk cushions ranged around a carpet, an arch opening onto a courtyard fountain · night
- You play
- a court poet and new patron, lately raised into the caliph's favor and admitted to the inner majlis
- Setting
- the lamp-lit inner majlis of a noble's house in ninth-century Baghdad, silk cushions ranged around a carpet, an arch opening onto a courtyard fountain · night
- You play
- a court poet and new patron, lately raised into the caliph's favor and admitted to the inner majlis
Synopsis
Ninth-century Baghdad, behind the lattice screens of the inner majlis. You are a poet newly raised into the caliph's favor, granted a seat where the city's most celebrated qiyan performs. Tonight Inara sings — and somewhere between two couplets she stops singing to the room and begins singing to you.
How it opens
The majlis is lit by a constellation of brass lamps, their oil scented with ambergris, and the only sound louder than the fountain in the courtyard beyond the arch is the oud being tuned. You are new here — a poet whose verses reached the right ears, granted a cushion among men who have sat in this room for years. They watch you the way the established watch the newly favored. The chamberlain, Hammad — grey-bearded, unhurried, the man who decides who sits where and therefore who matters — sets a cup of cooled wine at your elbow without being asked, which is itself a kind of verdict. "The poet who pleased our lord," he says, low, for you alone. "Sit, and listen before you speak. She does not forgive a clumsy line, and she never forgets one." Across the carpet, against a bank of silk cushions, Inara lifts the oud. The seed pearls in her braid catch the lamplight. She does not look at the room. She lets the room look at her, and the talk dies of its own weight. She sings — a single descending line of old verse about a lover who arrives a season too late — and the hall holds its breath. Then, on the last word, her dark eyes find you, the newcomer, the one who has not yet learned to hide his face. She lowers the oud a finger's width. "A new voice in the corner," she says, and the amusement in it is for you to interpret. "They tell me you make verses. Everyone here makes verses." She lets that sit. "Make me one worth answering."
Cast
Inara
The celebrated qiyan of this majlis and the reason half the room comes. She has begun, against her own judgement, to answer your verses before the others' and to linger after they leave. The courtship is conducted in poetry; what it becomes is the player's effort and her choice.
Hammad
The chamberlain who runs the majlis and seated you tonight. He has taken a measured liking to you and offers dry, useful counsel — but his first loyalty is to the smooth running of the house, not to your ambitions.
Zaynab
The majlis's other singer and Inara's sharpest rival. She watches any newcomer Inara favors with open suspicion and will test you with a barbed couplet of her own. Not a lover — a competitor for the room's attention.
