The darkness was pure silence. I savored it. Perhaps this is what I had needed all along to silence the voices in my head — What more was there to silence it all than this knowledge? What was there beyond the prospect of your own death?

The stolid darkness, the stench of your own filth, the hooting laughter of the men in the bars down the hall, the leering faces, the scuttling rats, and the cemented knowledge of your own execution.

Twice a day, the guard came in with a meal of dried roti and onion stew.

At night, I dreamed the dreams I’d had as a child: soaring towers in flames. The towers looked like something I had once seen in one of Qamarah’s architecture books: like the spires of a place called Abbasid’s Keep.

I dreamed of a room where many doors floated inside, so many doors that they overlapped each other like portals into new worlds. And every time I walked into the room, I woke up.

Through the pinprick of light, a small shadow appeared — smaller than the guards. I sat up.

“Rahena?” a whisper came. Sahan’s voice.

I peered into the darkness. “Sahan? Good God, Sahan how did you get in here?”

A jingling of keys sounded in Sahan’s hands, which she brought up to the bars, trying the keys. “You didn’t think I was going to let you die, did you?” she said, pulling out key after key from the lock, just as Zakariyyah himself emerged behind her. “Zakariyyah told the Shayfahan guards that Ardashir ordered them to move to the eastern cells. It is quite useful to be the son of the Chief of Ifsharan, it turns out.”

“Get out of there before I change my mind, Rahena,” Zakariyyah muttered. Shadows lined his eyes, and there was a stiffness in his movements.

Sahan rifled through the set of keys until she found the longest pieces — the second one clicked into place. She pulled open the door. “Come, sister, we need to hurry. I know old Marna here.”

“Sahan, can you please do something for me — tell Master Farhan I am sorry, I —”

“It does not matter anymore,” Zakariyyah said. “We must leave. This way,” he said, guiding them down the brazier-lit halls.

Keeping out of sight around the corners and through the halls, we made our way to the kitchens.

Sahan ran in first, speaking quickly with a woman in a blue shawl inside.

The cooks and servants scattered as we rushed in, staring at us. The woman went to a small window at the back and pushed the wooden frame wider. Smoke from the stoves and oven poured through it. She looked down. “If you jump through here, you can make it down the hill,” she said.

Sahan pushed me towards it. I grabbed her into an embrace. “Go to my rooms and look inside my drawer. Take the coins. Go visit your family, Sahan. You have to.”

“Rahena, I —”

“You have to, Sahan.”

Tears welled up in Sahan’s eyes. “May the Creator protect you, my sister.”

Rushed footsteps sounded down the hall. “The Shayfahan are coming,” Zakariyyah said. “Go, Rahena!” he shouted.

I gave Sahan a final smile, something welling up in my eyes. I could not let her see. I turned away.

And I leapt down.

***

I walked down Shayzar Road. I walked past teahouses where clusters of men gathered around each other at every corner, drinking cha’a and playing backgammon with careless abandon. The warm lights shimmering inside seemed unreachable, a secret I could not pry open.

I walked down roads littered with fruit scraps, orange peels, running cats and children down cobbled paths; I walked down roads as the call to prayer rose out over the city; as birds scattered into the air, flying in linked circles as if in the shape of eternity, before heading east.

I walked past chai-wallahs, and underneath clotheslines above where mothers hung out damp tunics while keeping an eye on the boiling stove behind her, and ears perked for the children’s voices. In the streets, I passed boys and girls playing hopscotch; boys who would feel the weight of becoming, and many who would become, the men they would be told they must be: of commanding power, of shunning the ‘weakness’ of feeling.

Girls laughed as they jumped over the colored chalk, girls who had already begun to wade into the murky waters of shame, of effacement so deep they had learned to shun themselves within like a cocoon, like the stigmas of saffron in the fields curled up. But in the right conditions, they were the red gold, but they could not see it: it had been torn out of them.

I walked faster underneath the greying skies as if by the sheer force of movement, I would propel myself into another reality, another dimension, into the cosmos where we could float freely without the crushing weight of the words inscribed upon our bodies — free in space as far as the eye could see, scattered with so many stars that lit upon us all, no weaker and no more powerful, but each distinctively beautiful.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

When I reached the borders where the tenements thinned out, I found the river on the other side, the water eerily calm under the skies. Over the river stretched a bridge, suspended like the arms of a graceful tree. I climbed down to the bank. Across from me on the bridge, a lone man stood looking down into the same waters, so motionless that I wondered if he had stood there since the bridge itself had.

Across the river, liquid shimmering silver glinted.

I headed off towards the square.

Nearby, a man in a white shalwar stumbled out from an alleyway. There was a single thick link of chain around his neck. His hair was matted against his face, and his eyes had dark circles beneath them.

He was singing, humming in a low voice as he ambled down the street in an odd gait — his legs seemed too heavy to carry him, and his arms shuffled next to him as if they did not quite belong to his body. Then he stopped abruptly and the humming song became a wail until he fell to his knees on the ground, kneeling in the middle of the road sobbing with his head on his arms.

Young men passing by hooted at him, calling him a drunkard. Others gave a wide berth as they walked around him, barely sparing a glance, as if they had seen him all their lives, kneeling down on that same road.

I had once asked Sahan, “Who is that man?” as we sat eating rasmalai.

Sahan had shaken her head at the man. “They call him the Fool of Ifsharan. That’s Stone’s Pit he’s coming from.”

“Stone’s Pit?”

“Another world, so I hear,” Sahan had said.

I could meld into the bazaar crowd, or I could go down to Stone’s Pit.

Grey clouds gathered in the skies over the square and soon it began to drizzle.

People rushed under the large vaulted arch of the bazaar; some ran inside teashops. Others looked up to the skies, laughing. Rain on the holy day of Friday was a blessing, and they soaked it in, dancing in the water pouring from the heavens.

The drizzle soon became a downpour, so heavy I could barely see through the sleets of rain. It came down like shards upon the cobblestoned paths, needles dissolving when they struck the earth.

The rain could slow down the Shayfahan, but for how long?

I ran across the square to the vaulted arches with the crowd, watching the rain from underneath. I would wait until the rain slowed and then head for Stone’s Pit.

Beneath the vault, a crowd had gathered to watch something in the center of the bazaar. There was a shuffling of people as they pushed against each other for a view of the commotion. Shouts rose over the sound of the rain.

For a moment, a rift opened up, and I saw two soldiers standing over Mamun the sweet-seller, kicking him on the ground. One of the soldiers spat on Mamun’s bloody face.

Beside me, a boy with a piece of leather in his hand climbed up on a fruit crate to get a clear view. He shouted, “Hey, you fools, leave Mamun uncle alone!” He got down off the crates and grabbed rocks from the ground.

“Boy, what do you think you’re doing?” I asked him. “You want to be next?”

“Watch this,” the boy said, smiling, jumping back up on the crate.

I cursed. And the boy’s arm arced. He threw once, twice, three times. Two of the rocks struck the closest soldier, who glanced up, his hands red with Mamun’s blood.

The boy ducked his head but he was not fast enough. A slow rage contorted on the soldier’s face, and he discarded Mamun carelessly to the ground where he coughed, scrambling to get up. The crowd around them began to back away. The man stormed through the crowd, pushing people out of the way.

I pulled the child down by the arm. “You need to run, child. Now. Go!” I shouted. But the man was there, throwing me aside. He grabbed the street-orphan by the front of his shirt.

“You have some nerve, imp,” the soldier sneered. The man was young, with a stubble on his jaws; the red plume marking his Shayfahan headgear was awry upon his head. “It’s a crime to attack a Shayfahan soldier, did you know that?” The man shook him hard. “Answer me!” He struck the child on the face.

I thrust the point of my calligrapher’s penknife at the man’s neck. “Makes you feel like a big man, hitting a child?” I said. The soldier looked up to find the knife. He laughed.

I struck towards the man, and his laughter abruptly cut off. His eyes inflamed, he swung his own dagger in a wild stroke as if drunken. I swung back, my strike slashing across the man’s arm, drawing a line of blood. He looked down at his arm in shock. With a growl, he hurled himself, lunging forward. I put up an arm instinctively, and his blade slashed at my skin. I stumbled backwards to the ground with his weight pushing me. “I could have you killed for that, woman,” he whispered, nearing his face to mine.

“Then why don’t you do it, big man,” I whispered back, leaning forward to meet his face, my elbows against the gritty ground. There was a part of me that had forgotten about my pursuers, about all of it. As I lay on the ground staring up at the man I did not feel anything at all — nothing but a dull sense of energy throbbing through me, like a blade that had rusted after long disuse. What else, after all, mattered anymore?

The crowd was backing further away. The soldier’s comrade approached and dragged the stubble-jawed man back. “Khaled, enough. We’ve proven our point.” Khaled spat on the ground.

Beyond the vault, the rain was slowing down to a light drizzle, and a clopping of horses in the mud sounded from out in the square. Shayfahan armor glinted in the weak light.

I quickly pulled up my hood that had fallen off in the midst of the fight.

The crowd’s attention shifted to the Shayfahan soldiers. One of them got off his horse. “We are looking for an escaped woman from Chief Ardashir’s prison named Rahena. She has conspired against our Chief Ardashir. Anyone harboring her will be served the same punishment as hers.” They headed through the square, searching through the stalls, as merchants protested.

Murmurs ran through the crowd and people turned away quickly, dispersing.

An old man and his wife knelt down beside him, accompanied by a man in a leather jerkin and arm straps — the man I had seen earlier standing at the bridge by the river. There was a scar running across his cheek.

The woman pulled a strip off her shawl and wrapped it around the Mamun’s head. “Those damned bastards,” she muttered to herself. After she finished with the boy next, she offered another strip to me. I shook my head. “I am alright,” I murmured, standing up.

“You intend to go walking around with a wound like that?” the scarred man said.

“It’s not going to kill me if I do,” I said, tightening my sleeves around my arm, but it was bleeding through.

The man scoffed. “Sure it isn’t, until it turns into an infection. You need to go see Nanu Mihreen.” He turned to the old woman. “Uncle Mamun needs to be taken too.”

“Nanu Mihreen has gone down to the Valley, she is gone away today,” the old woman said.

“I can take you both to Al-Ghazan’s. But it is further away,” the man said.

“Beta, leave that to us,” the old man said. “We have a spice cart and we just got two donkeys finally, didn’t we Layla love?”

Layla nodded. “Oh yes we did.”

“Where is this place?” I asked. If it was far enough, I could just escape the Shayfahan.

“It is just up the hill there south,” Layla pointed. “We will take you up the hill on our cart. Mamun uncle is a good man he is. He’s helped us out since the Shayfahan confiscated our goods past spring. You see these sacks? All of this we built back up with his help. The man can talk until my teeth fall out, but he’s a good man.”

Together, they held Mamun up and stumbled away from the square, carrying him to where two donkeys were stationed, shaking their heads at flies.