Marriage of Halili

In Muji’s tower, the Jutbina winter gathered the men around the fire and made their words fall heavier than the logs, because in the cold even honor is heard more sharply. One evening, frozen and hungry travelers stopped by, and Ajkuna, asking neither name nor clan, threw them bread and salt as befits a threshold unruled by fear. Once they warmed, they praised Muji with large words, yet then they teased Halili with a smile that scratches at pride: “Why haven’t you lit the wedding’s lamp yet?” Halili pretended to laugh, but took the remark like a barb in bone and, to hide the burning, leaned on the shadow of the joke. “The girls of Jutbina are like sisters to me,” he said, “and I won’t make blood for a song,” yet then, as if his mind had slipped onto a path with no return, he mentioned Tanusha, the kralj’s daughter, whom he had once seen when besa had kept both sides far from the sword. Muji fixed his gaze on his brother and understood this was not an evening whim but a point set in the heart that words cannot lift, so he warned him that Kotor has walls that devour men, not only horses. Before dawn, Halili rose and dressed his body in weapons as though they were ordinary clothes, while his Gjog beat the ground with hooves as if scenting that the journey would not grant an easy return. He took the dark paths and left Jutbina behind like a fire shrinking in snow, carrying with him only that sentence no one could forbid him. When he neared Kotor, he wrapped himself in fog and lowered his voice to the marrow, so even the wind would not learn his name or sell it to the guards. In the kralj’s courtyard, Tanusha saw a shadow at the window and knew it not by clothing but by the way it stood, while Halili spoke briefly: “I haven’t come for play, I’ve come for besa,” and she flinched at the weight of a single “yes” that could set a city ablaze, yet she still opened the door and gave him a white kerchief as a sign. To pass the guard, Halili dressed Tanusha as a boy, while he wrapped himself as a girl, hiding his sword beneath cloth and making his step look harmless. Among three hundred maidens walking toward the spring, he moved with small steps and lowered eyes, and only one girl suspected him by his heaviness, but Tanusha silenced her with a look that allowed no question. That night, the kralj dreamed of three hundred sheep in a field and a black wolf in their midst unafraid of dogs, and he woke unsettled, but pride covered his mind and he called the dream nonsense. When he saw Tanusha had fled, pride turned to poison and he summoned the guards as if calling a storm, while the kralj’s mother sniffed the trick sooner than all and gave the news as though selling her own blood. On the path, Halili was surrounded and iron shackles closed on his wrists with a clang, while Tanusha lunged toward him, was shoved back, and understood that courage without a plan is only a wound. She entrusted Jovani, a court man who owed her, to send the word to Jutbina without delay, and Jovani left at night alone, taking roads like wolf tracks so they would not catch him. When Muji heard the news, he did not ask who brought it, for his brother’s voice struck his chest like stone, and he raised the kushtrim, so the thirty agë readied in a single breath like one body with many swords. Torches appeared on the highlands and the snow darkened under the hooves of horses descending toward Kotor, like a black river that even ice cannot stop. Muji did not enter by trick but by open force, because sometimes the enemy’s fear is the quickest key; the gates broke, smoke tangled with shouts, and Halili saw his brother as one sees day after a long night. Tanusha stood with them and admitted that love without besa has neither house nor name, and when they returned to Jutbina, the wedding was held not only for joy but as a proclamation that brotherhood weighs more than any song.