RAHENA

1

I was not born here in this city like my fellow calligraphers.

I did not breathe and live the art through my childhood, my whole bloodline, as they had.

No, I was born in a riverside town to the south; in a land that transformed every summer into a field of mirrors reflecting the sky amidst crisscrossing patches of green as the monsoon rains flooded the banks; where water hyacinths floated stubbornly over the waters that refused to recede.

Of late, the riverbanks had begun to erode by the year, and the tall embankments of soil forming their fragile boundaries could no longer keep the water at bay. “Some days I think it’s going to drown us all,” Amma would say when she was alive.

In the winter, mist shrouded the fields, hanging over the horizon every which way you looked. Chador-clad figures emerged from the fog resembling an unknown jinn or an illusion in the whiteness. As a girl, I sat by the window ledge with my head on my arms and watched them. I liked to imagine that the shawl draping down from their shoulders were the wings of a behemoth angel or a demon. But I would be disappointed to discover that it was merely the cha’a-wala dragging his tea-cart, or the weaverwoman heading to the bazaars.

Yet on the day that I climbed through the borders of the Ifsharan wilderness to reach this unknown city, I thought I would take the mundane more than anything else on the Ardth. I would sink into it, let my limbs float inside it, let it consume me so that I did not have to wake up to anything else ever again.

I arrived to Ifsharan five suns’ circle ago on an unseasonably humid afternoon. As the army raids roared across the south, the cities up here went on like any other day.

Yet within another sun’s circle, they would call the raids that ravaged my hometown the “Second Purge.”

The weather was sweltering. And I did not know what to do with all the people around me – I had to be careful not to touch them, not to brush up against their arms, to collide with a passersby. I did not need the visions to distract me, and I certainly could not have these city-people begin to wonder what this travel-weary, dusty-cloaked stranger woman was doing buckling up in the middle of the street as if someone was stoking her with a hot poker.

No, that would not do at all — not after hundreds of miles to get here. Granted, it was not my first stop away from home. I’d scrubbed pots and collected wood in Chassar for a naan-baker and tried my hand at sewing for a weaverwoman in Na’zain.

But each had ended in the same way when word reached them of the raid in Bayrun. They heard of the shimmering Shayfahan army hunting a Bayruni woman with dark hair and darker eyes who’d incapacitated a mizaran-armored soldier.

The baker and the weaverwoman began to eye me suspiciously. Where did I say I was from again? They asked. I murmured something about a town further away.

The very same night, I wound up packing and leaving.

Beneath the swaying branches of a banyan tree in a forest at the borderlands, I slept and dreamt of my father being dragged away in the night, blood streaming down his face; my sister’s blank eyes staring into nothing — my Qamarah, my moon. I awoke with dirt clamped to my face and my hands trembling. The masked shimmering White Rider blazed in my eyes like the fires into which he had disappeared.

That night, I decided that I would unmask him. I would look into the face of the one had taken my homeland.

But what I did not know then was how elusive he would be, a shadow slipping away into the darkness from which he had come, only to rise to feed the emptiness that was himself.

I did not know, then, that to seek him would be to feed my own emptiness.

I could gain entrance through lies, I had learned by then. And so I entered the smothering, smoldering, insane city, forming lies in my head like the tendrils of a spider’s web, praying that they were not as fragile.

It was noon when I reached the gates.

Clustered tenements lined the cobblestoned streets. Smoke propelled from the teashops with the scents of cardamom and fragrant black tea. Outside the doors of Quill Teahouse, crates overflowed with sheaves of sugar palms and dates and olives, and the scents of ripening sugar and sticky date sap.

A young man leaned against the doorway smoking jasmine tobacco.

I glimpsed men inside the Quill Teahouse, laughing and vying over each other for a spot, debating over the boards, stone dice rolling across the wood.

The sounds of the city seemed unholy – everything was constantly in a state of nearly colliding with each other, that I marveled it didn’t. It was alive with the breaths and sweat of thousands mingling into one flowing never-ending body.

And then I felt it would all waver before my eyes. My feet halted as if they had been rooted by a command of the earth itself. I felt it would all flicker into fragments, a grand success of an illusion. At any moment, the young man leaning against the doorway would choke on his own blood; my next step upon the cobblestone roads beneath my feet would stumble over rubble, the screaming of children would be shouts not of laughter, but terror.

I breathed in and closed my eyes, willing the tremor in my fingers to stop.

When I opened my eyes — the laughter was real. It bounded out through the streets and into my bones. I began to walk again.

The road was lined with jutted windows above, shopkeepers lining the streets. At the corner, an old orange-seller sat, a cat purring in his lap as he brushed a hand over its fur. Carts of bright fresh oranges were stacked around him, fruit peels and seeds scattering nearby from where eager devourers discarded them.

I approached the old orange-seller. His bemused eyes watched the streets and his fingers brushed the cat with such care that he did not at first seem to notice my approach. His beard was as white as the fabled sands of Al-Asriya.

I leaned down to the roughen spread of cloth the old man had set his shop upon for the afternoon: The orange-seller would not have been surprised if one day an orange tree sprouted up right there through the cracks in the cobblestones from the scattered seeds.

Decay and renewal, decay and renewal, I thought. Slim chances such a thing was, but if left to itself long enough, the seeds always did find a way.

The fabric felt of grief: two sons lost. The Wraithknife disease, perhaps? Or the invasions? This I could not identify.

The cat gave me away, leaping out of the old man’s arms and scampering off down the road. The old man turned to me.

Stolen story; please report.

“Ah, salaam daughter,” he greeted. “Which do you prefer, the Mazandrani nectars or the Ifsharani oranges? I grow them in my own groves at the border.”

I did not have much coin to survive through the next day, but I rummaged up something from my pockets. “Salaam to you, uncle,” I said, hoping my voice did not belie my Bayruni tongue. “I’ll try the Ifsharani.” If I was going to live here, I might as well familiarize myself with their fruits. “I need some directions, if you can give them.”

He smiled. “But that is my favorite thing of all, next to my dear Chota!” he glanced off after the cat. “Ah, she’ll be back,” he murmured to himself. He jumped up to give me several of the smaller, brighter fruits wrapped in a cloth. “What do you seek, ma? I could tell you the secrets of the alleyways and winding tunnels and all the hidden things in this city.”

As he handed me the oranges, he pointed out over the city peaks at something in the distance. “That dome, for example —that scaffolding will be here even when judgment day arrives, I guarantee you.” He turned to me. “But yes, what were you saying?” He peered closely. “Where do you come from again?”

“Not far,” I said, returning his smile with a strained grin, my hands sweating in the robes from the heat. “I have come from just down the nearby town of Sakkar.”

“Ah.”

“I am searching for the Scholars’ Tower,” I said. “For a calligrapher named Qaysem ibn Farhan.”

“The Scholars’ Tower!” the old man cried. “Without them, the realm itself would have no soul, they say.” He studied me. “But what would you want with the Tower? A daughter such as you — ”

“I need to find someone.” I felt more exhausted than I ever had.

“Hm, yes,” he murmured, pointing down the north road. “You see that minaret? Keep going down the road towards the right, it will take you up a hill and to the gates of the scholars’. I have tried to sell my oranges there, but they banish me away. That caretaker, he is a harsh one, he is.”

I murmured my salaams and thanked him. Down the path past a cluster of ink and quill merchants, I headed towards where the city roads thinned out.

I began yet another climb up another hill, and I peeled an orange. They were sweet, melting in my mouth.

To show my work to the Master Calligrapher, I would choose the dua’a of Musa while he’d wandered seeking refuge in a new land: Rabbi-inni limaa anzalta ilayya min khayrin faqeer — ‘My Lord, indeed I am in great need of any good You would send me.”

But I had learned calligraphy in the dead of night with a tattered book I’d found buried in a corner of the house after my mother’s death.

What was I doing seeking this great calligraphy tower?

That, too, was the unspoken question Master Farhan gave me when I arrived to his study.

He was surrounded by countless glass bottles of ink lining the shelves in his study, and haphazard piles of letters, reed pages and books. Long, thin white hair and a whiter beard to match, he was a lanky old man. His blue-gray eyes behind round spectacles revealed the early stages of cataract.

At first, he’d thought me inquiring for the position of a kitchen maid. And, once, I would have. But I no longer wanted to. I gestured to the locked glass cabinets behind him which held small vials of red ink, and said – “Crimson ink, made of saffron. Reserved for the holiest of Verses, are they not? The Verse of the Throne.”

“Yes,” he said. “How do you know that?” Confusion and curiosity had grown upon his features.

“I come to seek a position as a calligrapher,” I said.

He chuckled lightly. “I am sorry, my daughter, but that is not how we do things here.”

“My father apprenticed for Master Abuzadeh Khalil at the town of Sakkar. And I apprenticed after him,” I told him. With each lie, I was summoning up another Rahena, one whom I had never known existed. “I would like to show you my work if I am able.”

Master Farhan had taken off his spectacles and wiped them on his roughen robes. “A century before, ninety-three calligraphers we had in the era of Salman the Third. We had the whole vast hall downstairs before they gave it to the Light Scholars,” he grumbled. “But now we survive on merely ten calligraphers. And one small hall.” He sighed, rubbing his temples. “And God knows I have found myself with moments of cloudy fog at the edges of my vision. But we simply do not take apprentices…this way.”

“Which way? Where one is not a noble and a man?” The words emerged before I could stop myself.

Master Farhan stared at me. But fear had left me: only exhaustion and grief remained, banishing my uncertainty. “I apologize, uncle. If you are in need of more calligraphers, as you say, then let me show you my work. Your Tower — you — are renowned for your Thuluth. I have worked with Thuluth for a long time.”

“Alright,” he said sharply. “Produce something for me.” He pulled up a sheet of paper and gave me a pen and bottle of ink, as if granting a child a moment’s distraction before returning to his own work.

I wrote slowly, focusing every ounce of energy I had left into those letters.

Through the window came the sounds of the caretaker gathering the fallen leaves in the courtyard, the soft rustling of dead foliage scraping along the ground.

I listened to the trickling of the fountain below, and I wrote.

But when he took my sheet of paper without much thought, a tremor ran across his face for a mere moment. But I had seen it.

“I am sorry,” he said, his voice hard, without a trace of the earlier geniality he had at least attempted. “I cannot accept you. It is not our practice.”

I wanted to crumple to the ground, and I did not know how I mustered the ability to rise.

But as I reached the door, I turned. I strode back to his desk. He looked at me in alarm, eyes wide and looking as if he was on the verge of calling for the tower guards.

I reached out, my fingers picking up the pen he had just been using, where his fingertips had just left its mark.

A grief struck me, stretching long and painful. A daughter. A sickness. Her handwriting, her calligraphy. Her smile.

He stared at me.

“Your daughter wrote calligraphy, didn’t she?” I said.

He froze, no longer looking beyond me to the door for the guard.

“How did you…”

I pointed to the line of calligraphy I had just inscribed. “My calligraphy, it reminds you of her work.”

His fragile, thin shoulders deflated; he seemed shrunken suddenly, and not the great master calligrapher that he was renowned to be.

“Do you want to repeat the same mistake, Master Farhan?” I said quietly.

His face shifted from grief quickly to outrage. “How dare you –”

I lifted my hands in a sign of peace. “I do not dare to surmise anything. It is only you who can make this decision.”

The rage left his face. He folded his head into his hands. “I always think now, I should never have done it,” he murmured to himself. “I should never have barred her.” He looked up at me with something other than the dismissive, incredulous gaze that had been stamped upon his face since I’d entered the room. “Perhaps the Creator offers me a chance at penance, in the shape of you.”

If that is what he needed to believe, so be it.

“But you will not work with me in the hall, not yet, do you understand me? It will be too forthright, it will trouble the others. It will take time.”

“I can accept that,” I said, relief flooding my heart.

“What is your name, ma?”

The sudden tenderness of the “ma” disarmed me. “I am Rahena, uncle Farhan. Rahena bint…Suryan.”

But he did not know I had lied about nearly everything I had told him — down to my name.

_____________________________________________

Every autumn, I went down to watch the migrating birds arrive. The Scholars’ Tower was raised high up on a hill, so they would land upon our roof for a stop on their journey towards sanctuary; and soar down to drink from the fountain.

The fountain murmured through the stone walls of the scholars’ tower all year long. You could hear it as if it was beneath your feet, rushing through the studies and the halls.

It followed the servants as they ran up and down the winding stairs from the kitchens and the chambers. It was the rhythm by which the scholars scribbled and rummaged among their tomes.

Just after fajr prayer in that moment before dawn, when it feels as if the entire earth is holding its breath, I went down to the courtyard to find the red-whiskered nightingales.

Interwoven layers of calligraphy script ran up along the pillars bordering the courtyard like overgrown vines. The tall date-palm trees mirrored them, the rough trunks reaching up as high as the calligraphy tower, their canopy of fronds drifting in the breeze.

Rotting lemons from the summer littered the grounds, rinds discarded from where the birds had already pecked it out with their beaks.

There were hundreds of them. Their loud high notes filled the courtyard, songs clashing amongst each other in a crescendo, their small wings fluttering everywhere.

I came to see the bulbul nightingales each year like a ritual that I needed to perform. For each year the birds arrived marked another year I had been away from home.

And the longer I remained, the longer I lived the lie, the more I feared that my memories of Bayrun would one day become like the ironwood tree shedding its leaves in the Ifsharan square: Fluttering to the ground to disintegrate into the earth, indistinguishable from the dirt and the critters and the earthworms that crawled within its underbelly. For who would I be if I completely erased the truth?

But I would find out, soon, that although the small earthworms inhabited time more slowly, more quietly, eating away at dead matter, decomposing and recreating, their feats soon surfaced: moving forward life cycles invisible to the human eye.