In Zaidan’s Teahouse in the center of Ifsharan, there was a red bird in a rusty bronze cage. It chirped in the midst of the tea-drinkers and tawwli-players, competing with their exclamations of victory or defeat, of orders of chai and syrupy rasmalai.

Old Zaidan had named the bird Laal-choti, or “little red,” and every time someone was about to roll a critical turn of the dice, they fed Laal-choti little bread treats for good fortune.

It had been raining for a week, and it did not seem to be contemplating on halting anytime soon. The skies had been so grey that it was dark indoors even in daylight, and candles flickered everywhere. People vied with each other for seats, cramming gossip and news together.

Whispers about news from Arassan seeped in through the doors for days, carried in by the weeklong mists. There was a massacre in Abbasid’s Keep, and whispers of a revolt.

Adnan rolled his dice and watched it whirl. Laal-choti’s chirping escalated as if she, too, was waiting in anticipation. The men around him leaned in as the dice came to a stop, and they roared. “Sorry, Adnan, my friend, but this game is mine,” Samir patted him on the back, grinning.

Adnan scoffed and pushed the board aside.

“Adnan, you have the most terrible luck I have ever seen,” Samir began howling with laughter, patting his knee.

Hamza shook his head, punched Samir on the shoulder. “Leave the poor bastard alone,” he laughed.

“You all can go stuff yourselves,” Adnan muttered.

Behind the counter, old Zaidan sat with a pipe in his mouth, the wrinkles of his face weathered from long-ago days of working in the sun. Every few minutes or so he took the pipe out of his mouth to shout orders to the back where they made the sweets and the chai.

Samir began to roll his turn, when the door opened and an old man stumbled in, wearing a shabby tunic and a thick shawl he held over his head to cover himself from the rain. He was breathing in shuddering gasps. People made space for him as he approached the counter.

By the time it was Adnan’s turn again, his friends began chanting - a mock cheer: “Adnan! Adnan! Adnan the Brave, Adnan the Glorious!” In the flickering candlelight, he rolled one more time.

Samir’s gasp was everything he needed to hear.

“What were you saying, Samir?” Adnan smirked at him.

The others roared at this turn of events. He patted Samir on the back as he stared dumbfounded at the game.

Adnan stood up to get himself more chai. He turned to find the old man in the pashmina inches away from his face. His gaze held Adnan, eyes wide.

“Salaam, uncle,” Adnan said, hesitant. “Do I know you?”

“Are you — are you Adnan, Adnan, son of Aliya?” The man asked breathlessly, his voice hushed in reverent tones that turned Adnan’s stomach. The lines around the old man’s eyes deepened as he clasped Adnan’s hands fiercely. “Please, you have to help me, my daughter, she’s ill, she’s very ill and the physicians can’t help her, no one can help her, please, you must help me, you must cure her.”

Adnan stumbled backwards, as the table grew silent and the roll of the dice stopped. Laal-choti halted her chirping.

The walls of the teahouse were grinding against his brain, the candlelight a flickering dance against the edges: it was beginning to cave in.

“Have you gone to my grandmother Mihreen already at the apothecary?” Adnan asked, trying to keep his voice steady. “She might be able to give you something.” He tried to unclasp the man’s hands from his own.

“I did, my son, she could not, but I thought maybe you…Please, by the Creator’s grace — ”

Adnan pulled his hands away from him. When the man tried to grab them again, Adnan pulled on his cloak and stumbled towards the door, striding out into the pouring rain.

The man followed him into the torrent. “I beg of you.”

“I cannot cure your daughter, I am sorry,” Adnan exclaimed, without stopping. He pulled his hood over his head and walked fiercely.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Please,” the man called behind him, “I will do anything.”

Adnan whirled around violently. “Didn’t you hear me, I cannot!” His voice roared into the swirling mists.

The man froze, staring at him. Rainwater dripped down from his greying hair into his eyes, down the hollows of his withered face.

The others from the teahouse had come outside to watch. They gaped at Adnan, and he saw himself reflected in their gaze: a madman.

But it was a relief. He was shaking, but it was a relief.

He backed away from the man and stalked off into the white nothingness of the fog and the rain.

It was only when the adhaan call for Asr prayer rang out from behind him did he realize he was sitting in front of the mosque. He had stumbled into the mists aimlessly, unknowingly, unseeing in the downpour of nothing but white sheets of rain.

And somehow he had ended up here, on the steps of the small mosque near his street.

The mists faded soon after, as if banished by the adhaan; the rains stopped.

From the corner of his eye, Adnan saw a figure coming down the road. It was Hasan, hobbling on his crutches. Hasan halted in front of him, standing silently.

Other than the occasional grunts of greeting in the morning if they chanced to cross, they had not spoken in so long that Adnan could not remember how long it had been. It was odd now, to find his brother here, as if they were meeting as strangers who did not live under the same roof.

“What are you doing about?” Adnan finally muttered, flicking a caterpillar that had fallen on his shoulder from the sycamore tree above him that stood at the entrance to the mosque. “You shouldn’t be out.”

Hasan shifted from leaning on one crutch to the other. “I come to this mosque at this time every day. But you would not know that, would you brother?”

He was supposed to feel something at his brother’s words, he knew. But he could not.

Hasan scoffed and tried to push past him towards the door.

“Stop, Hasan,” Adnan said, now holding the caterpillar in his palms. It crawled along the lines of his hands like an infant, struggling. “I just…”

“You just what?”

Adnan studied his brother - the short, well-kept hair, unlike his own. The long white tunic, untainted and pure; the thick heavyset brows that accentuated the rest of his features, not yet sharp. He still had the same round cheeks that reminded Adnan of when his brother was little – a toddler tumbling around, trying to run after Adnan.

And then words evaded him again, and he didn’t know what to say, how to breach the vast sea that had grown between them, that had taken on a life of its own before he knew it was there. It had grown like rust, like weed.

Hasan waited another second, then pulled up his crutches over the low steps and went up to the mosque. Adnan looked down at the critter in his hands, as it succeeded in creeping over the ridge of one palm to the other, a triumph to another land.

Once, Hasan had told Adnan: “People look at you like you are a divine creature, the great son of Aliya Ilmen. They look at me like something to be pitied, a stray dog. And yet you are the one who shuns them.”

***

The song echoed down the Khaju Bridge, which had twenty-three stone arches and stretched out far over the waters. After dusk, candles flickered along the bridge, the reflection on the Zeyandeh River amplifying a bright halo over the waters. Some evenings, men gathered under one of the arches that amplified the acoustics just so. The singing would carry over the river and could be heard from across the other side of the city.

People returning from the day’s work, and from teahouses and mosques, passed by Adnan along the bridge as he sought the music. The curved ceilings lilted the tune so that he felt he was hearing the wailing of a hundred stricken souls condemned forever to sing: an orchestra in purgatory.

When he found them and drew closer, the forlornness of the music was muted by something he could not place, resonating among them all. Candlelight illuminated their faces.

The young men wore their tunics with strips of fabric tied to their foreheads, the legs of their trousers pulled up over their ankles. The middle-aged men had a weary look about them, their grey tunics sweat-stained, their hair dusty from the day’s work. The lyrics were taken up from one man to another, scattering in between them all like the wisps of a dandelion:

I want to sing until dawn

I am like the wildflower that grows in the desert of hope

Dawn has arrived, my darling

Wildflowers,

I am burning from loneliness

I am like the wildflower that grows in the desert of hope

Dawn has arrived

The darkness of night has gone

Will you come with me, my darling

To the desert of wildflowers

Where the rays of dawn lay

Each line drifted from one to another that Adnan wondered if they created the lyrics as they sang; until they weaved a whole in that instant in time, strangers linked by the buoyancy of the melody flowing over the evening air.

As they sang, Adnan saw a small boy at the edges of the group, beyond the men. It was a boy he had seen earlier in the Ifsharan streets. He was leaning alone against one of the pillars, his arms folded, singing along with the men. In one hand, he still clutched the same piece of leather he had been trying to sell earlier.

The song ended and the men began to disperse. The boy walked up to them, holding up his piece of leather. The passersby shook their heads and walked away from him.

After a while, through the flowing crowd, Adnan glimpsed the boy again, standing still, his head bowed. The scrap he had found hung from his limp fingers. Adnan began to walk towards him, but before the crowd was gone, the boy had vanished.

When the bridge was finally empty, Adnan leaned over the railing, looking out over the waters. The candles had been taken away with the people as they left. So he stood with only the moonlight upon the river. In the distance, a lone candle floated along in the darkness on the other side of the water: another nightwalker like him perhaps, or a criminal, set out to his deeds hidden in the cover of darkness.

Perhaps Adnan too walked the nights to seek its cover of anonymity. But what it was he sought to conceal, or be concealed from, he did not know.