ADNAN
The rug was interlaced with geometric florals in lush shades of pastel rose and azure, known for the intricate work all across the southern Ardth.
Everyone had left for bed. They told him he could stay the night, or for as long as he needed to. Tariq had taken up the little girl Maryam to put her in bed again.
But Adnan remained by the fire. He sat on the majlis, traced his eyes over one line of the pattern on the rug. It was seemingly unending, eternal, winding its way through the work for so long, he gave up seeking where it ended.
Al-Ghazan had been on his way to bed, when he saw Adnan still there.
“You are not sleeping then, Adnan?” he asked with a gentle smile, and came back to sit with him.
“Not yet,” Adnan muttered.
Al-Ghazan left again and returned with a tray of two steaming cups of perfectly rose-colored Kashmiri chai.
Adnan took a sip of the chai, breathing in the smell of the pistachio-drenched tea. “This is the best chai I have ever had.”
“That is a great compliment coming from Sakina’s son,” Al-Ghazan smiled and took a sip.
Adnan set down his cup and studied Al-Ghazan. The man’s bronze mane was unruly around his head, and his build gave him the impression of a lion. And yet the lineaments of his face were gentle. Adnan asked, “If you work for the Shayfahan, how did you end up working for Imraan?”
“Ah,” Al-Ghazan said. “That is a long story. You see, I used to think back in those early days that Imraan was a maniac. Which it is entirely possible he might be.” He chuckled. “But I had been devoted to the Shayfahan. My father had after all served him before me, as a Harvester and physician, and I had followed in his path. The Emir hired my father because he was one of the best Healers in Khardin. And so as my father served him, I served him as well.
“Then one day my father failed to follow the Emir’s orders or achieve what he wanted. I did not know what it was until later. During the time before your mother developed the Cure, the Emir asked my father to do something he wasn’t willing to do. He asked him to capture the disease and turn it into a weapon to use against his opponents who may challenge his rule, against civilians who protested him. My father refused to do it. There were Khardins dying all around already, and there were Alderien soldiers in our land burning houses and towns, but this is what the Emir was preoccupied with.
“He called my father in to the throne room after my father had already told him his refusal. He demanded again how dare he defy his king. I went with him that day to the throne room, as I knew what the Emir had asked and I wanted to see what the Emir would ask now. My father again refused to be part of such evil against his own people – and, as ferocious as he was, he told the Emir as much – that he, as their leader and their king, should also want the same for them. That is when the Emir snapped. He ordered one of his guards to behead him, right then and there. I was twenty-seven at the time. I watched his head roll along the carpet.” Al-Ghazan told the story as if it had happened to someone else, as if his body was separate from the memory he held in his mind.
“He then turned to me as I screamed and wept on my knees on the ground, trying to hold my father’s head but also terrified of holding it, and he told me that I would have to serve him in his father’s stead now, to make up for the sins and the treason of my father.” Al-Ghazan’s voice grew harder, and colder, like a granite slab of ice in his throat. “And if I didn’t, or if I pulled something like him, I would be dead too. I cried that I didn’t know how to capture and produce the kind of disease he wanted to inflict on his enemies, and he said that will do, but as long as I continued to serve him faithfully, he would not kill me. So I worked for him.”
“I am - I’m sorry, about your father,” Adnan said.
“So I sought out Imraan, this elusive man I kept hearing about, this man whom the Emir was bent on finding and ending. After Sakina’s death, Imraan and Harun accused Salman of her murder, but the Shayfahan denied it. Imraan began to speak out against him, to recruit people to revolt against Salman. People could not resist him, with that charm of his; he began gaining a following. But Harun did not want to join him. They disagreed. I suspect that your father…later had his own plans. But the Shayfahan soldiers continued abusing and arresting people…turning more against his rule, except of course, the elite. So Salman hunted down Imraan, and I sought him out. Imraan told me I was crazy to join him,” Al-Ghazan laughed. “I offered my services to warn him of the Emir’s plans. At first he couldn’t trust me completely – he thought maybe I was making up the story.”
“My father…how do you know he had his own plans? What was he doing?”
“I don’t know, my son. I can’t answer that. I merely suspect…”
“What else do you know of Imraan? He knew my parents, and yet I never met him until after my father’s death.”
“Ah,” Al-Ghazan gazed at him intently, a dawning comprehension settling there. “It is the connection to your parents that you seek. Yes. Yes.” He looked down at the depths of the bottom of his cup of Kashmiri chai as he thought. “Yes, you were much too young. Of course, you wouldn’t remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Well, it was after your mother’s death that the two fell apart. But you were too young before that to remember him in your lives. The three of them lived in the Asman Valleys until it got blown up, of course. I’m sure you’ve heard of their childhood stories.”
Adnan nodded.
Al-Ghazan put down his cup of chai aside, unfinished.
Adnan knew of the bombing. It was what had led his parents and their remaining families to emigrate to Ifsharan. But Imraan did not have a family.
Al-Ghazan continued, “He was on the streets for a while, from what I know.”
“Imraan never married?” Adnan asked. “He never had a family of his own?”
Al-Ghazan’s mouth twitched at the corners at the question. “I guess you don’t know this either. Yes, it would have been too awkward for you to know.” Al-Ghazan picked his cup back up again, not to continue enjoying his now cold chai, but seemingly to distract his fingers to have something to do.
“Awkward?” Adnan asked.
“Imraan had always been in love with your mother, Adnan. He did not have to tell me this, but I knew.”
Adnan’s fingers froze around his own cold cup of chai. It was almost as if there was some particle of his mind that had already begun to know this, had known this, but had not wanted to acknowledge.
He thought back again to his mother’s name in Imraan’s lips earlier in the evening. Tilting like a yearning that was impossible to fill. His love for her was not only in the past tense, he suspected. He realized now that his appearance at her grave when Adnan met him was probably not the first time. It was not a foreign place for him — but like a home he kept returning to.
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***
“Why did you wait this long to come?” Imraan asked. They walked along the edge of the forest down the hill from Cypress House, with Ifsharan on their left and the Forest of Huzn on their right. Imraan had been surprised when Adnan sought him out.
“I did not know if I could trust you,” Adnan said. “I didn’t want to believe that the Imraan my father spoke of with his dying breath was Imraan the Traitor.”
“He spoke of me?” Imraan said. “Yes, well, we had a falling out after your mother died, so…I never got the chance to see you again when you had both grown up.”
Or you did not want to see me because I was the living breathing manifestation of my mother’s choosing Harun instead of you?
“Why did you begin your rebellion against Salman all those years ago?” Adnan asked.
Imraan was silent as he walked ahead of him, with merely the crunching of leaves beneath their feet.
As they passed beyond the view of the lights of Ifsharan, where trees thickened towards their left, and they followed a path that took them through the trees flanked on both sides of the path.
Imraan said, “I used to be a carpetweaver’s apprentice, many years ago. No one knows that part” He laughed. “And before that, I was just a wretch of the Ifsharan streets. In the square, after the noon prayer at the mosque, I had been trying to filch off a man’s pockets. But the man caught me. My usual tactic was to threaten until out of fear they would turn it over, but this man did not.”
Imraan bent down to the leaf-strewn path and from the ground picked up a long, sturdy branch buried under auburn leaves. He brushed them off with his good hand, then used it as a staff as he walked along.
“No, he scolded me like I had never been scolded before in my life, and suddenly I felt ashamed. For the first time since I had begun the business, shall I say, of our little alley’s filching trade, I felt ashamed. Then the man grew gentle. His voice became kind. He offered me a job, to be his apprentice in his carpetweaver’s shop. If I had a good hand at art, he said, I could try my hand at producing designs for new ideas since he had been looking to experiment with tapestries. I didn’t know what to say to him. I had never had anyone offer me a job before.”
Adnan watched Imraan as he told his story. His makeshift staff stabbed the ground with each step, carrying him along. His gaze was upon the ground, as if the memories were etched onto the earth somewhere that only he could see.
“So, while I stood there dumbfounded like an idiot, the man told me that I could think it over and if I decided I wanted to change my life and no longer have to go around filching other people just to survive, I could come see him in his shop in Na’zain. I could live, for once, he said, rather than merely survive.”
Imraan glanced up towards the sky. “I had never known the difference before. I had never thought about the difference. To me, surviving was the same as living. It was all I knew. But as I headed back to Azhar Alley empty-handed, an amorphous inkling of what living could mean began to take shape in my mind.
“So I went, the next morning, to seek the man in his shop in Na’zain. His name was Ibrahim. This great big smile bloomed upon his face when he saw me, and he showed me what kind of work I could do with him. Over months, I learned to weave the thick threads through the looms, I learned not to let the colors drench for too long if you want it bright but not saturated. Eventually I began sketching my own ideas, patterns. Soon we begun doing tapestries. He seemed to like my ideas, and sometimes let me weave my own designs too. I had never felt anything like it. My own creations coming to life within the fabrics, the threads, the colors. I loved the work.” Adnan could hear a faint smile in his voice.
“The first day after work I was leaving to go back to my alley, but he stopped me to ask where I was going. When I told him, he said I didn’t have to live in the alley anymore unless I wanted to. But if I wanted a nice warm bed instead, I could stay upstairs in a spare room in his house. I had not slept in a bed in nearly ten years, so of course I accepted. His wife Dania made us haleem that first night, I remember,” he said with a smile. “I had not tasted such food since my mother’s cooking. She reminded me of my mother, too, with her fussing over my hair.” He shook his head. “I slept that night thinking I was living in a dream and I was going to wake up at any moment. I never went back to that alley again for what must have been months, years.
“Then, one day, many many years later, in the streets of Ifsharan, I saw your mother.”
Adnan halted. “My mother?”
“Yes,” Imraan replied. “And your father. They took me to their house to meet you. You must have been a toddler then, yes.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Well, I had thought they’d died, you see. I didn’t know they were alive. Then the invasions came.”
“The Wraithknife War,” Adnan nodded.
“Yes. When the Alderien invaded, it was chaos. When the Wraithknife was released, it was hell. Death and disease ran rampant. Ibrahim became infected. I knew Sakina was working on a cure – she had been doing it in hiding, but she and Harun had told me. Your little brother, Hassan, of course, had also fallen underneath the Wraithknife disease.” Imraan nodded. “I went to Sakina, hoping that it would work, and told her to let me know as soon as she was able to find a cure. But when I went back to Ibrahim that same night, Dania told me he was dying. I felt useless, helpless, as I watched him die. This man had given me a new life, and I stood watching his death.
“Sakina did find a cure, eventually. But she knew the Emir would keep it inaccessible from the people if he found out about it, he would control it. He had had his own physicians at the Shayfahan working on a cure too. But Sakina developed it first. And when she tried to find a way to distribute it without the Emir’s knowledge, she disappeared.” His voice grew hard again.
“And that is when I knew, Adnan, that I could no longer just keep surviving in this land until I brought down the Emir. I knew then that I could never live as long as he lived. And I no longer wanted to. As long as he took the lives of those around me, one by one. I could not live while I knew that he took Sakina’s life and sat there high in his palace untouched by the blood that flowed all around the land at his hands. I could not.”
The forest opened up to a spread of open land. Underneath the dark skies lay hundreds of thousands of graves, unmarked as they were in Khardin. They were not to mark the graves, so as not to become a form of worship to the dead. Because sometimes the dead became that way to the living, as they had in many centuries before – as if they took on a form of divinity in death, in dying, in having reached a dimension beyond this one. As if in death they took on powers beyond what they had on the Ardth.
But the truth was that their homes had always been, and would be, a dimension beyond this one.
Imraan stopped, his staff stabbing and resting on the ground; he looked around at Adnan.
A view that opened up beyond the clearing; in the distance rose the Shayfahan palace. It was shrouded in the fog, hazy within the Alsahb mists.
“Can you help me, Adnan, to solve the mystery of this earth that I have sought to understand for so long?” Imraan said.
“And what’s that?” Adnan asked.
“It is the question that pulses in all our minds — why the good suffer and the evil prevail? How could God allow suffering? After all, isn’t there such a thing as the Mercy of God?”
They stood silently for a long time, the question seeping into them like rainwater on a cold day, shivering and quietly insidious. “I don’t know if there is an answer,” Adnan said. “But my father used to tell me something. I don’t know to this day if he was right or wrong, or if we will ever know.”
Adnan gazed at the brilliant crescent moon above them. “He used to say that maybe, in this fleeting world, the dark and the light are so inextricable from each other — that to disentangle them would be to break the world as it exists. Because it is not ours to break. Without the freedom to make our choices, good has no meaning. But to break free will, to strip it of every human being because there are those who may misuse it, would be a greater evil, a greater tyranny than that of the evil committed by man. It would be the tyranny of God.”
Adnan turned to Imraan. “My father would say…that to give us the chance to make our own choices, despite our failings…perhaps that is a hidden mercy in itself.”
Imraan breathed a long sigh. “Hidden mercies,” he murmured. “Harun, of course, would have such a philosophy, could find peace in that.” He closed his eyes. “I still cannot. He was a better man than I ever could be.”
“But there is one thing that always irks me at the edge of my mind,” Adnan said.
“What’s that?” Imraan asked.
“Who are the good?”
Imraan shrugged. “The helpless, the downtrodden, the poor, the powerless.”
From the city of Ifsharan to their left, the lights were dimly visible through the interwoven lattice of branches. “Where do you think you fall, Imraan?” Adnan asked. “Where do we fall?”
“I don’t fall anywhere,” Imraan replied.
No, you don’t, the thought struck Adnan as he watched him. You just fall.
He had an image of Imraan then: falling through some obscure unknown abyss, not resisting, nothing; just serenely falling, gravity pulling him down forever to kiss him when he touched the ground — except — he never touched the ground.