My fingers were smudged with ink. They always were, now.

I’d been trying to scrub it off with the inner edge of my sleeves as I climbed the stairs when I nearly collided with the old caretaker, Uncle Faizul.

He carried a large crate in his arms, from the top of which slipped something blue, clattering to the stone steps. “Oh, begum Rahena!” His small voice cried from behind the crate.

The poor man was evidently struggling to keep the crate from falling from his bony hands. “Why don’t I take that from you, Uncle Faizul,” I said. When he protested, I said, “Take it as an apology for nearly knocking you over.”

He finally relented. “Hai, alright, thank you, my daughter,” he huffed, evidently relieved.

I had always found it amusing that he was never quite certain of how to address me. He vacillated at different times between the formal “begum” to the endearing “daughter.” Interestingly, he never used the title of “calligrapher” as he did with the others. Perhaps it felt odd to him, because the only other womenfolk he interacted with in the Tower were those down in the kitchens working away in the heat of the fires. But I did not mind it, for he had never been anything but kind to me, despite his uncertainty.

Sweat beaded Uncle Faizul’s wrinkled forehead, and his fluffy white hair stuck out at the corners behind his ears.

Bleary-eyed scholars passed us in the halls, scrambling down to breakfast or up to their studies. The Light Scholars straggled along the third floor halls, their long beige robes brushing the stone.

The winding steps faced the balconies that looked down below to the courtyard where the lemon tree and the date-palms swayed in the breeze, now empty of fruit.

“Where are we taking this?” I asked as we climbed the stairs.

“Al-kimiya floor,” Uncle Faizul wheezed.

We reached the fourth floor lined with the chemists’ workrooms, persistent fumes and odd smells of sulphur drifting through the doorway. Uncle Faizul nodded his thanks.

“Oh, uncle,” I called before I turned to go. “Can you send Zahidul to fix the hearth pipes?”

According to Uncle Faizul’s son Zahidul, he always ‘forgot’ to light the hearth pipes in the calligraphy halls during the winter.

But Bilal and Sulayman always muttered that the real reason was because he didn’t want to walk up all the flights of stairs. Because inconveniently for us, the studio was located on the highest floor — the sixth.

Uncle Faizul grumbled something incoherent about “that useless boy” as he went off into al-kimiya hall, and called back, “I’ll send him in the afternoon.”

I could feel the chill of the hall as soon as I reached the calligraphy floor.

The Scholars’ Tower was constructed of sandstone and amber rock, indicating the archaic age of the structure; but the steps — they seemed as if they had existed since prehistoric time, and perhaps they had. After all, the north-west tower had once long ago served as a military fort in the old wars. From atop the high position, they could see the northern raiders coming and warn the fortifications.

Now the tower served as the calligraphy apprentices’ spot to play games of tavla at the end of the day, when it was not being used by the astronomy apprentices as an informal observatory.

And the calligraphy hall, located on the highest floor in the eastern tower, would be as always in the arriving autumn season, unbearably cold.

The autumn chill rose earlier up in the hills here, and the caretaker’s son had been forgetting to light the hearth pipes in our halls during the winter. But Bilal, the young calligrapher who’d sat across from me for the past five suns’ circle since I’d arrived, always muttered that the real reason was because the caretaker’s son didn’t want to walk up all the flights of stairs to our studio.

In the bleak morning light filtering through the windows, a stillness filled the calligraphy hall, as if it was an artifact preserved in time, history coded in tree rings and amber. Writing desks were lined in rows beneath low ceilings worked in cobalt blue, white, and violet tessellations. I could get lost among the interweaving girih patterns — demanding a precision as intricate as our own work.

Everything else below the ceilings were less glorious: Sheafs of papers, letters of commissions and inkstains discolored every desk. The ever-ubiquitous pen shavings could be found at all odd corners, caught at the edges of table legs and chairs, stuck between the wooden planks of desks and the floors — no matter how much we broomed the day’s mess.

Copies of early Interpretations ranging from the First to the Ninth lined shelves along the walls. Each were prepared every five decades by the Light Scholars and inscribed by the calligraphers. We would consult them for experimenting with early forms of calligraphy used in the old texts, and sometimes I would peruse them in the evenings to witness the evolution of the Words.

But it had been nearly fifty suns’ circle already since the Ninth, and we were anticipating our turn to inscribe the Tenth soon. “My grandfather told me of the first collection of the Ninth when he was here,” Bilal had once said. “I was five when he told me, and I still remember the light in his eyes.”

It felt strange to me at times that I should be here inscribing the Interpretations; for it was, as the orange-seller had told me many years before, the “soul” of the realm itself.

Before her death, dawn would find my mother reciting the Interpretations in a corner of the house by the east window facing the fig tree which hovered just over the verandah. I would awaken to see her silhouetted in the early light, the lush, three-lobed dark green and silvery leaves of the fig tree reaching through the window to her like caressing fingers.

And here I was now, somehow on the verge of inscribing the holy Tenth.

I found Master Farhan in a corner of the room, already bent over some papers with his blue-gray cataract-rimmed eyes.

“Peace, Master Farhan. It is a little early to be scrutinizing your eyes over the pages, isn’t it?” I asked. “It is taking quite the toll on you.”

I’d discovered that his mind was always preoccupied with itself, ruminating over one deadline or another; but by now I knew it was the dreams of his dead daughter that he buried with his calligraphy pen. When he bent down to the paper with his ink, his mind would be subdued.

“Salaam, my daughter. But oh Rahena, don’t pester me with that again,” Master Farhan said without glancing up.

Long before I understood why he refused to stop even as his vision deteriorated, I had asked him, “Why don’t you give it up now?” He was barely able to continue the highly-sought Thuluth calligraphy for which he was so renowned.

He had looked at me with incredulous eyes as if I had suggested that he might as well go leap off a cliff.

But we had grown a mutual understanding over the years, the old Master and I. I was his penance, and he would protect my presence there from the old Highmaster of the Tower who had deemed me a blasphemy — so long as I reproduced the Master Farhan’s Thuluth work. It was the closest, he said, to his own.

But the old Highmaster, a man whose power had dwindled only for being ancient and lapsing in memory, had passed in his sleep. And now we were waiting for a new Highmaster to be assigned. But what would this new authority think of my presence here? For the Emir Salman had thought it necessary to intervene in the affairs of the Scholars’ Tower — and wanted to install his own man. And I could not know what that would spell for me.

I was fiddling with my penknife in my hands when the other calligraphers emerged from breakfast.

“If we can climb these stairs every morning, why can’t Zahidul just for a season?” Bilal’s grumbled through the doorway. “How are we supposed to work like this?” The youngest of the calligraphers emerged, furrowing his brows over his bright yellow eyes that accentuated his dark hair.

“Every morning my coffee keeps getting cold before I can even finish it,” Sulayman muttered, his hands wrapped around a large cup as he took his seat, his shoulders hunched over his writing desk. His long hair was tied in braids along the side of his head, falling down to his shoulders.

Bilal snorted. “That’s your second cup, Suli. You already had at breakfast.”

“I need my second cup!” Sulayman exclaimed. The surface of his desk was covered with many overlapping coffee-cup stains: he would go off to make large cups of coffee every hour.

“Ah, damn your coffee,” Yusuf muttered. “My fingers are going to fall off, by God.” He examined them as if they were in danger of falling off right there and then.

Sayed, a reticent young man in spectacles and cropped beard who spoke to no one but his sheets of papers, said nothing as he went to his desk; we could never tell whether he was listening to us, or if he was in a realm of his own.

“Yes, we’re being forced to slave away in the frozen isles,” I said, watching them file in.

“Is this amusing to you, dear Rahena sister?” Bilal demanded, taking his seat across from me.

Master Farhan grunted from his desk: “Uncle Faizul said he’ll send Zahidul in the afternoon. Start working, boys, the commissions are waiting.”

“But — we have to wait until afternoon!” Bilal groaned. He collapsed at his desk across from me. Gathering his chador about him, he glared at me.

“Why are you scowling at me?” I said. “I’m not Uncle Faizul.”

“I have to scowl at someone, and you’re right across me.”

I have never had a brother, and I had not expected to find one in the royal sons of calligraphers, yet I could swear that Bilal al-Thani had come closest to one.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

Most of the scholars passing me in the halls still thought me a kitchen maid despite my calligrapher robes; and those who knew of me considered me an abomination, according to Sahan, who had heard it from the serving boy.

Yet Bilal — twenty-five years old, the age I had been when I’d arrived to Ifsharan — did not distinguish between me and the others. I’d chosen to have supper with Sahan in the kitchens or the courtyard to avoid the men, and Bilal lamented that I did not join the calligraphers in the dining hall. “You miss out on our tavla games, you know, sister Rahena,” he was always saying, trying to invite me to the matches up in the observatory tower.

The shuffling of papers and long yawns accompanied by sips of coffees and teas filled the room. Reluctantly, we uncorked the inkpots and whisked out our penknives.

I still used the same old penknife I’d brought with me from Bayrun. I do not know why I persisted with it. A flying bird etched across the handle was the only sign of ornamentation; it appeared simple and rusty in comparison to my fellow calligraphers’. But all I cared for was that it remain sharp — which it did, for I oiled it every week.

I held the penknife at a slant and sharpened the tip of a reed pen to create a curved hollow edge. The closer the cut, the precise the lines.

It was said that in the early days, calligraphers would only use rainwater to make their inks, for the rain was a mercy from the Creator.

Now I could only detect the strange tannic acid and lamp soot from which the black ink was made. The scent filled the calligraphy hall, sharp and nearly acidic, slightly bitter like overly ripened Mazandrani-blood orange.

Shoulders hunched over our writing desks, we finalized a copy of the Interpretations for a Mazandrani noble family in the east.

After another hour, Bilal abandoned his work to go pester Sulayman, who snapped at him irritatedly. And the spell in the hall was broken, chatter soon reigning along with the men’s laughter.

“—Silence, the lot of you,” Master Farhan’s voice declared. I turned to see him — the lull in his voice had left, replaced by a firm urgency as he pressed a letter close to his eyes, poring over it.

“What news, Master Farhan?” I asked.

The hall quieted, watching him.

Master Farhan set down the paper, gazing off to the ceiling in contemplation. “It seems our new Highmaster of the Tower will arrive tomorrow.”

I set down my pen. So it was beginning.

“Who is it?” Sulayman called. “Who did they assign?”

“Aziz Ardashir,” Master Farhan said. “The Chief of Ifsharan himself.”

I scrambled my mind to think of what I knew of the man. But what chances were there that the chief of the city himself would not be a rigid man?

“What?” Yusuf cried. “That’s— what? Why?”

“Doesn’t he have enough to do at the court?” Bilal said, smirking at me across the room.

“I ascertain that the Emir wants to ensure the Tower is in…alignment with the realm.”

“What alignment?” I asked.

“The Emir Salman is surveying all the institutions of late, ensuring we are purified.”

The word brought a sick taste in my throat. It felt…familiar.

“But we already do our work in alignment with the Shayfahan,” Bilal said.

“A measure of reassurance, that is all,” Master Farhan said, folding up the letter. “He rose. “Alright then,” he declared. “All of your chattering is getting to my head. Take a break before the noon meal. Yusuf, go get Uncle Faizul.” Yusuf groaned but went off downstairs.

Sulayman rushed away for more coffee and Bilal began to set up a game of his newly reinvented dice with the others.

I headed down through the rustling courtyard into the kitchens.

Flour was scattered everywhere from the morning’s breakfast, and the women were just beginning to clear up the mess, scrubbing and washing.

“You’re looking for the baccha again, aren’t you? What you two are always up to, the Creator knows,” the old cook muttered when she saw me.

“Do you take me for a troublemaker, Nanu Zaynab?” I asked, smiling. “I am merely teaching the girl calligraphy, not getting her into any trouble,” I said, although it was not quite true. I had struck a deal with Sahan three suns’ circle ago: I would teach her calligraphy if she would filch me some jasmine tobacco from the men’s teahouses once in a while. Sahan was quite good at it, sometimes even pretending to be a boy. “The girl has hopes and dreams, you know,” I said.

The cook stopped her scrubbing, the soapy rag dripping from her hands, and began to laugh. The thin white cotton veil over her head slipped off, revealing grey hairs among the red. Finally, she wiped her head with the back of her arms and said, “She went to take roti up to Scholar Hamid,” and returned to scrubbing her pot.

“Would you tell her to meet me at the square when she returns, Nanu?” I asked, but Nanu Zaynab didn’t answer.

I went out through the gates and into the chill air. The wind whipped at my shawl as I climbed down the hill towards the city.

***

The fountain in the center of the Ifsharan square was a humble long strip of rippling water from which stray cats and birds alike drank their fill.

It had also become the unspoken meeting place in Ifsharan.

Woolen chadors had been whisked out against the chill. The oblong leaves of the ironwood tree had turned a shade of gilded yellow.

The marble stone of the fountain was smooth against my hand. It had witnessed many things in its long life.

It had seen many ages come and go, rising and falling. With each empire, there had been a ceaseless flux surrounding it.

The Jarana Mosque that hovered like a guardian over the square had undergone two dynasties of change, and the scaffolding the orange-seller had told me about so many years ago was still there. It climbed up around the dome, looking as if it had become a part of the mosque itself. If one were to find sketches and paintings of the building from different artists through the ages, whether in pencil, ink, paint or stencil — there was the scaffolding, arranged at different sections in each era, but there nevertheless, a sign of its eternal state of flux.

The bazaar had expanded and died and extended again with each war, calamity and age, into a sprawling labyrinth underneath the shade of arched vaults: a breathing organism at the heart of Ifsharan.

But the fountain had never been changed. The cool, uneven rough stone held the touch of hands upon ages and ages, of lives colliding amongst each other, of coins and hopes tossed through the decades — decaying and rusting at the bottom. It stood, as across time, everything else around it shifted, were demolished, then built back up again in another architectural style, another civilization. But the people’s fears, the fountain saw, were the same; for hundreds of years, the fountain had listened to words confided in secret, confessions of love, of sins and fears.

Empires, kings, and dynasties came and went, but the hearts throbbed the same beats, stumbled upon the same words lodged inside the lungs.

I lifted my hand off the cool stone and breathed. Thousands of years of sensations faded.

“Someone’s still going to be toiling away at that scaffolding even as God’s own horn blasts through the Ardth, I tell you,” a young girl’s voice called.

Sahan was striding to the fountain, her choppy brown braids matted with a dusting of flour. “I took the short route and passed by the mosque, and one of those workers nearly dropped a piece of wood on my head!”

Wide brown eyes and a round face made her appear younger than her sixteen years. A ring of silver encircled around a thin piece of chain bounced upon her neck: the ring she always wore, given to her by her mother.

“You have flour in your hair again, Sahan,” I said.

Sahan began brushing her braids furiously with her hands, but somehow managed to make the flour appear more prominent. “Let’s skip the lessons for today,” she said. “I’m not in the mood.”

“You can’t practice only when you feel like it!” I said. But she only frowned “Goodness, as soon as the first sign of autumn approaches, you become the grouchiest child in all of Ifsharan.” I leapt off the fountain edge. “What about rasmalai from Mamun uncle’s?”

Sahan grinned, leaping down so that her braids flew.

We made our way through overflowing carts of dates grown in the groves of southern Khuraztan; ripe, fleshy figs from Fars or exported from Orasan; ruby-red barberry fruit extracts from Arassan; jackfruit and jalpai olives from the tropical regions of my home in Bayrun, which I had used to pick from the groves. A collection of the earth’s edible gems scattered across the bazaar of laughing, bickering and debating crowds.

A man rolled orange-colored herb tobaccos as he sat at his stall surrounded by trays of freshly-made sweets of all shapes and shades. Behind him, his eldest son stood pouring syrup over a fresh batch. Mamun the sweet-seller had copper-flecked hair and kind, gentle yet mischievous eyes. His son resembled him closely but for the closely shorned beard.

“Sahan beti, good to see you!” Mamun uncle beamed. “How has the sweet girl been treating you, ma?” He asked me.

“Peace, uncle. The cooling weather is tainting her mood,” I smiled.

Mamun laughed. “As I say, there is nothing my sweet rasmalai cannot cure.”

“Is that a line you like to use on all your customers now, uncle?” Sahan grinned. Her somber mood was evaporating already.

“The best ones, I say,” Mamun replied. He gestured to his son behind him. “Beta, get the fresh batch for them.”

“Yes, baba,” the young man replied.

“How are those lessons of yours, my child?” Mamun asked. “Going to be a bright young calligrapher, hai?”

“One day I might even do some calligraphy for you too, uncle Mamun. No more toiling in the kitchens for me!” Sahan said.

Mamun laughed. “That’s good, my daughter.”

We took our spheres of syrup-laden cheese and ate as we walked beneath the vaulted arch. White doves began to flock towards Sahan, pecking at her feet.

A woman rushed by us, and her long red shawl brushed against my fingers.

…I have to return for them. I’ll return to the war inside those walls just to see their small faces. I’ll…take some roasted nuts for them yes, they will like that. They will forget all about my leaving.

I opened my eyes, looking around; but the woman was gone.

My visions had grown clearer since childhood: more defined, more particular. Each time, it tasted different, the grief of souls. Sometimes it left me feeling as if the ground was shifting beneath my feet. Yet the uncertainty was as certain as the rising of the sun, day after day. That is how it had always been, it said. It was the only knowledge, the only truth, the only existence. There had never been anything else.

Finished with the rasmalai and in better spirits, Sahan took out pumpkin seeds she’d scrounged from the kitchen. “I’m going to feed the birds,” she said. But I knew her true purpose: to throw pebbles into the fountain and mutter her prayers. For her family, she would say, as if it could sink through the water, melt into the earth itself until it reached the other side to the mountains where her family resided.

She was always a little self-conscious of it, so I said, “I’ll get some pomegranates before we leave,” and headed away.

A lute-player strummed a familiar song somewhere nearby.

But over the sound of the lute, a humming of voices was growing from the western edge of the square.

A group of sun-weathered faces, men with wrinkled eyes and shabby chadors gathered by the entrance of the square. They were gathered around one of the elderly men, whose voice shouted through the din.

I could not distinguish his words.

At the stall of pomegranates, I found Huda and her brother, Nanu Salima’s grandchildren, playing stones next to their pomegranate cart. They screamed with laughter as the stones came tumbling down.

“Where has your Nanu gone?” I asked the children, kneeling down to join them on the cool stone.

“She’s gone to take over Mina sister’s stall while she feeds the baby,” Huda chirped up at me with her wide brown eyes. “Come play with us, Rahena apa!”

I sat for a while throwing the stones up in the air for them until Nanu Salima arrived. Grey hairs peeked beneath the thin russet shawl over head, and a dark woolen chador wrapped around her shoulders. Her hands were tinted ruby-red from the fruits she would peel, plucking the seeds and collecting them in a bowl.

I knew that the pomegranate-seller thought there was another kind of joy in eating a fruit that you held in your own hands to peel its leathery or rough or smooth skin to reveal its layers, its interior universe.

There was a gratitude that could only come from your own labor, she thought, a relationship with the fruits of the earth. It simply did not taste the same when you bought it from a cart already in perfect pristine pieces without the messy shreds of skeins and seeds. But she knew the convenience for the harried lives of the city, and so she harvested, peeled, collected, and sold.

“Salaam, Nanu,” I greeted.

“Salaam, Rahena ma. I see I should be paying you to keep my grandchildren in control.”

“I wouldn’t mind at all, would I, Huda?” I winked at the girl, who giggled as if we had a secret together.

“Take them off my hands, and then you won’t be so enthusiastic!” Nanu said. “And what would you like today, ma?”

As I selected some fresh round pomegranates, shouts rose beyond the arched vault like a drove of bees.

“What in the name of Ardth is that?” I said.

Nanu Salima began to weigh the fruits on the scales, a scowl set deep upon her face. All semblance of her lighthearted eyes had left, and I saw a shard of fear. “They’re from my village, the men out there,” she murmured. “The Shayfahan, you see, came to rifle through our homes yesterday.”

I felt every other hour of this day was pulling me back, back, to something familiar. The same words…

Nanu Salima took the fruits down from the scales, lines drawn along her face. “Do they think we’re stowing away some rebels in our cooking pots? Or sitting around plotting the Emir’s demise?” She scoffed, if only to shun the worry from her features.

Huda put another stone in my hand, but I could not move. “Apa, apa,” Huda called, pulling my shawl.

I looked down at her absentmindedly, and threw the stones up in the air for them without thinking.

Just as the stones landed on the ground, a ripple moved through the crowd behind us.

A rift was opening up between the crowd like a parting sea. Shimmering light walked down through it.

Mizaran steel.