The clouds glided across grey skies through the tall windows of the room. A half-moon circular hall, it had once functioned as the meeting room for the Raqini Order. The round wooden table in the center accentuated its spherical nature. The high stonework windows were edged with scalloped leafwork, creating layers of stony winding vines through which the bleak light filtered in.
But I did not find it familiar.
With every step I climbed and room we entered, each space that unfolded, I pried the corners, the sights, for signs mirroring my visions. But only the view of the towers from a distance had aligned with my memories. Yet it was like visiting a place I had called home, of whose crevices I knew. It was a strange feeling.
Ancient tapestries from earlier centuries lined the walls, created for olden kings or recreated from manuscripts salvaged from the invasion raids.
One of the tapestries reimagined the holiest of nights: Against a blue starry night of clouds rode a figure. The face of the rider remained hazy, anonymous. He rose on a bright white winged creature with a face that was not quite male, not quite woman.
Irfan ad-Din approached me, gazing up at the tapestry. “As the creature was brought to its mission, the angel Jibra’il with his six hundred wings said to it, “Are you not humbled, oh Buraq? By the Creator, no one has ridden you in all creation more dear to the One than this human.’” Irfan smiled. “And poor Buraq was so nervous, rearing its hooves. Then the Messenger, the Unlettered, the Chosen Light, the Mercy of the Worlds, came to ride astride the mare. And it glided up, rose in lightning speed up to the heavens so the Messenger could speak with the Creator, pleading for humanity’s sake.”
“Sometimes I wonder if we deserve it,” I murmured.
“As do I,” Irfan said.
In the light of the Raqini room, the shadows melded away from the corners into all the spaces. Irfan and I strode to where the tea glasses clinked across the wooden table, the warm cinnamon chaa doing nothing to the cold that filled the room.
The historian took his seat, his hands folded before him. A shadow hovered over his brows, the smile gone from his face, the straight line of his lips disappearing behind his cropped dark beard.
“I have called you here, friends, out of the desperation of a man trying to save his people. Believe me, the Abbasid’s Keep has never asked for help. But – my people are being massacred.” He raised his head. “We have been massacred for a long time, slowly and away from the eyes of the realm.”
“You know we don’t have any armies, Imraan,” Surayyah said. “We have nothing but our anger.”
“Abu Taher,” Irfan said. “He’d started a publishing press recently. You think me reckless, but you did not know Abu Taher. He published some stories — yet his ideas were too rebellious a spirit, too much of the questioning soul. It was evident that Abu Taher supported the Jhakara rebellion, you see, and Salman could not let that continue. Al-Haytham and Abi Rabah, too died for their writing.”
“You are telling me,” Tariq said. “That he killed Abu Taher over stories?”
“Art is dangerous for the tyrant,” Irfan said. “They are afraid we will tell our own stories, that we will resist. They want to infiltrate the Abbasid’s Keep so that we finally give in to the Shayfahan, so that they can twist us for their means. But they will never have me, ho, I will not let them.” He rose.
“You said there is a leader among the Jhansari revolt,” Imraan said. There was a restlessness to him.
“Yes,” Irfan nodded, beginning to pace, pulling one end of the navy chador over his shoulder. “My brother Asfan. But we do not have the resources, the leadership, the manpower to do this.”
“I can give you that,” Imraan said. “I owe you that. But I need to know that this will not fade into nothing, that this won’t subside into what happened with every single uprising across the realm for the last ten years —Each time the people have risen up, it has never lasted. Each time it has been dashed into nothing. This time it cannot be.”
Something crossed Irfan’s face. “Is that all we are to you, Imraan? Numbers, armies?”
A stillness fell around the table.
“I have seen it fail too many times, Irfan,” Imraan said. “I cannot see it happen again.”
“I do hope, Imraan my friend, that you will not let your own revenge, your own reasons, blind you, as you have before.” Irfan said.
“That was a long time ago, Irfan. You know I— ” There was an edge to Imraan’s voice, growing harder.
"How would you be any different from the tyrannical Salman then, Imraan?” The words hung in the air, and Imraan flinched as if he had slapped him in the face.
Irfan sighed. “Come. Allow me to show you, why this time, it will not fade into nothing. Why we fight.”
***
“Jalal Uncle’s shop divides the boundary between heaven and hell,” said Nilo, nodding, leaning on one of the tables at Jalal’s with a teaglass in hand.
“It’s like I’ve entered through a portal,” Imraan said as we walked in. I was certain that as we crossed the threshold, the darkness fell away here, in this lowly small teahouse.
“It’s the coffee, Imraan bhai,” Firthun called.
“Arre, its Jalal Uncle himself,” said Hazari, the stiffness of the earlier afternoon gone. “Don’t you know? He made a deal with the devil once, to get himself the best damn chai house in the realm.”
“Bah, leave poor uncle Jalal alone, he works himself hard enough,” said Firthun.
Lanterns of many-hued glass hung from the low ceiling. I watched a man played a sitar at a corner beneath a red-and blue lantern. The lilting tune flowed softly through the teahouse against the hum of conversations, the soft laughter of elderly men as they played their game of tavla. The sitar-player’s eyes were closed as his fingers strummed the strings. The rolling dice became a rhythm with the music, drumming across the board, across the exquisite woodwork that Arassan was known for.
“Jalal stationed those two,” Irfan motioned to Jalal’s burly sons. “Jalal says, ‘I’m not settling for some Shayfahan bastards to be spying around my place, oh no, by the Creator.’” He laughed. “How dare they. If they even try to poke their butts in here, Jalal’s sons will be ready to show them a good beating.” His face grew solemn.
Jalal Uncle, sitting by the back of the shop nearby the kitchen doors with a smoke in hand, called, “Who are all these strangers you’re bringing to my shop, Irfan?”
“I have brought some friends, Uncle Jalal.”
Uncle Jalal’s gaze roamed over the four strangers. They landed on Surayyah. “I know you,” he declared. “You’re Muminur’s granddaughter.”
“You were friends with my Nano?” Surayyah asked.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Hae, she would bring you around the bazaars all the time, you were an unruly child who would always run away and get lost in the bazaar. It took her ages to find you sometimes, she was always so worried.”
“That does sound like you, Surayyah,” Imraan grinned. “Nothing has changed, hai?”
Surayyah gave him a look, which made Imraan grin wider.
“And I am Muminur’s grandson,” Tariq muttered. “But no one recognizes me anymore, do they?”
A child came running to Irfan, shouting “Baba!” His hair was disheveled and his pudgy hands tightly clutched on to Irfan’s knees.
“Ho, beta, not so fast, Abdul,” Irfan laughed, picking up the boy.
“I memorized two whole pages from my book while you were away!”
“Did you now? You have quite a lot to show off, don’t you?”
A man rose from a corner of the teashop. He had the same long nose as Irfan’s but with longer, darker hair, a clean-shaven face, and a pair of bright eyes. The man’s resemblance to his brother was evident.
“He’s been rousing up a racket about you, Irfan,” Asfan grunted. “Who are these people you’ve brought?” He eyed Imraan closely.
“I have brought some friends,” Irfan announced.
“What friends?”
“Friends” said Irfan. “Who are going to train our people, who are going to help us take back our land.”
***
The sky looked the shade of disease.
Asfan ibn Mazid walked across sands littered with refuse, debris along the far edge of the shoreline beyond the Jhansari district. The eastern edge faced a darkening sea roaring swiftly, lashing out onto shore like an angry god or a wronged soul, a body twisting in anguish.
We stood before the black ocean. The darkness bled into the horizon, the murky clouds above hovering over us. There was something in the wind like black ash, the air suffocating.
“By God,” Imraan whispered.
“What is that?” I asked. “It cannot be what I think it is…”
“Ah, but it is, begum Rahena,” Asfan said.
“After the Wraithknife disease hit you see, they used our waters and our land as the dumping grounds for bodies, so that the disease would not spread to the rest of the realm. We had a mountain of carcasses here. We had to bury them ourselves.”
“I’ve heard of the Wraithtaint polluting the oceans and I’ve witnessed it shifting the land — but this…” I said. “This is greater than anyone in Khardin realizes. This is not going to remain contained.”
“You think we do not know that?” Asfan said. “Even after Sakina’s Cure for the Wraithknife disease arrived – after the limited supplies of what Salman distributed reached us long after it was given to the rest of the realm — the Wraithtaint had already diseased our waters and air, tainted the water supply. The rest of the realm can act like the Wraithtaint was gone, but it never left us.”
Asfan knelt to inspect a mound through the sand. He poked it with his boots, and when he brushed the dirt away, it revealed the bones of a human hand.
Surayyah stumbled backwards. She muttered a recitation, one arm covering her mouth. I stared at the blanched whiteness, stark against the stretch of endless refuse.
“We find new bones every day, washed ashore,” Irfan said. “We do not know how many are our people, and how many are from across the realm.”
“The boy, who burned himself in front of the Shayfahan…
Imraan bent down to the darkened spot on the earth.
“They’d been harassing him for months, until they finally confiscated away his business cart under some premise that he attacked a patrol.”
“The next time they arrived,” Irfan continued. “He stood in the middle of the square while the patrols and Shayfahan men went around beating and arresting, and just…set himself on fire, in the middle of the bazaar went up in flames. He fell on one of the Shayfahan soldiers, who burned with him.”
Imraan touched the scorched earth, his finger picking up soot and ash. “What I do not understand is,” he said. “Why would Salman send his Shayfahan soldiers to arrest people here? It does not make sense. What is the purpose?”
“It was the same tactic used in Thankar in the First Purge,” I said. “Arbitrary arrests, disappearances. Once someone was taken, you never saw them again.”
“But it still does not make sense,” Imraan said, his knee on the ground, staring at the ash on his fingers. “Why do that? Arassan’s governor Ayyub were already being used to patrol, they already had a local arm of soldiers to do Salman’s bidding.
”It has been happening for more than ten years, soon after the War of the Altharins.”
Imraan glanced up. “The War of the Altharins…” he whispered.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Imraan
Imraan threw his sweat-stained tunic on the bed. The room was small and soot-filled from all the candles in the rooms from over only the Creator knew how many years. The room must have existed since the time before the First Age, back when the coast was invaded by the Hashari and half the Abbasid’s Keep was damaged beyond repair.
Two small candles had been lit for the night by a servant, gleaming upon the walls eerily. He surveyed the room. On one side of the wall, he could have sworn that someone had carved lines marking the days. Had this once been used as a prison room? Whom had they imprisoned in here, a scholar who could not summon up the alchemical tables by memory? Perhaps a scholar who had failed to publish in the required time, he thought in amusement.
If it had once functioned as a cell, it would certainly have been a nice one, for there was a sizable enough latticed window over a small desk which faced out to the southern coast.
He went to the window and pried it open with difficulty. It had not been opened for the Creator knew how long. Below faced straight into rocky jagged cliffs leaning down to the waters. In the dark night, the salty breeze of the Arassani coastline washed over him. The air was different here at the edge of the world, in this rocky, mountainous cliffside spit of land at the edge of Khardin. It made him feel like something was just always beyond the horizon, out of reach.
Tomorrow he would meet with the recruits Asfan had gathered. But he was still trying to resurrect the part of him that had once fueled his veins, that the realm thought he still held, still fought by.
He leaned against the frame of the window. A gust of wind rose with the waves of the sea, raising the hairs on his bare skin. He was suddenly freezing, but he did not move. The night sky was so dark that it seemed even to be snuffing out the stars, for he could not see very many from here.
—And then he wondered if it was the Wraithtaint snuffing out the light.
He still felt he had dreamed it up, imagined what he had seen upon that shore, the Wraithtaint looming upon them like a behemoth of a beast. Yet it was not a malicious thing – it did not seem to be bent intently on destroying them, it did not seem to possess the intent to kill, no.
No, it was as if it had been borne and now it could not turn back, could not die; it had become too powerful, had been fed for too long.
One could not call the black falcon that leapt upon and tore through the body of a rabbit evil, after all. Imraan thought that is what the Wraithtaint had felt like to him. Certainly not a thing of cruelty, but of inevitability.
No, he knew what a thing of hate, of cruelty looked like. He had stared it in the face on the battlefield of the Azram Plains when he had faced down Aziz Ardashir.
They said now that Ardashir was the Mizaran Rider, but on the day that Imraan faced him on the battlefield, he had not worn the mizaran steel. He had looked a man who did not need it.
Imraan moved away from the window of his cell-room at the edge of Abassid’s Keep, shutting the window. He was chilled to the bone, yet he felt numb to it.
He had agreed to come all the way to this distant coast lashed both by the sea and the whip of the kingdom, at the behest of a friend. But what if he failed them as he had on the Azram Plains?
For a long time, he’d blamed Al-Ghazan for that day.
But, somewhere deep down below, Imraan knew, he had not wanted to accept the truth as Liassam lay in his arms, the blood pooling from his chest and his mouth.
“I told you, Imraan, I told you, damnit, he was too young, I told you not to take him from me!” Irfan had shouted, his voice verging on the edge of madness and grief as Imraan brought the body of his brother back to Arassan.
Imraan could do nothing. He could say nothing. No words escaped his lungs. There was no miracle word that would revive Liassam, make him rise from the white shroud that now covered him, so what then would be the point of speaking?
Liassam had been eighteen and the need to defy his brothers had been borne in his blood, they said.
Asfan would often tell the story of when he was just five years old, and Asfan told him not to go take his kite down the cliffside hill, to stay close. As soon as Asfan turned his back, Liassam went running down the hill, falling and cutting his head sharply on a rock.
And as he grew, as he saw the grief in his mother’s eyes when the mizaran-steeled men took his father, and he ambled through the streets of Arassan where the uncles from whom he bought sweets were beaten until the blood ran down their eyes, so did a silent fury in Liassam’s blood.
Nothing Imraan told him of Irfan’s wishes had stopped Liassam from joining the battle that day.
And after, Imraan had said things to Al-Ghazan he wished he could take back. Yet he never actually had. No, he and Al-Ghazan had merely, after some time, continued on like any other day; without a word between them of it. Al-Ghazan was that way, forgiving without a word, without even ever treating Imraan differently; simply moving on as if nothing had happened.
But Imraan wished he hadn’t; for it made him feel worse.
Why was he so despicable to those he loved?
He threw himself down on the bed and tried to sleep. He could not fail them tomorrow.
As sleep came, he murmured beneath his breath something that Sakina had taught him when they were little. He did not know whether it was a prayer or a poem or a nursery rhyme. Say, the light shines through you and me. The sea runs through you and me. And the stars, they call your name, Imri.