“These peaches taste like cat piss,” Sahan grumbled, chewing and making a face. She gagged and threw the rest of the fruit over the hill where it disappeared into the grass. “I’m never getting them from Jusra again, I knew his cat was peeing on those crates.” She turned to look at me as we climbed up the hill back towards the scholars’ tower. “Are you listening to me?” she demanded.
“Oh, I’m sorry Sahan, yes I know, those peaches,” I said, nodding my head.
“What’s going on with you?” Sahan asked. “First you forget to bring the calligraphy book for our session, and now this.”
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “I’m just tired from working on the Interpretations. The sheer amount of attention on this. You know priests and Ministrels are coming for the Compilation Day?”
“Those Ministrels give me the creeps,” Sahan said as we neared the crest of the hill and the northern gates.
It was just after the call for the afternoon prayers, and the quill and ink merchants closest to this side of the city would come up the hill to the tower for the prayer halls.
“The Ministrels would come up the mountain to our village every year, and I could swear some of them are only half-human. The other half, well, they must be some kind of creature because I have never seen faces so impassive.”
“…Sahan!” A floating voice was calling from somewhere down the hill. “Sahan!” The voice caught up to us, and we turned to find Jamshad, one of the kitchen boys, gasping up the hill, holding in his hands a ring of silver held in twine — Sahan’s ring.
Jamshad bent over gasping for breath, holding his knees, as he held up the ring to Sahan. “You…you dropped this,” he said.
“My ring!” Sahan cried, taking it from his hands.
“The clasp broke,” Jamshad said. “I can — I can fix it for you.” As he caught his breath now and looked up, his eyes fell on Sahan and a blush had risen to his cheeks. I knew that it was not merely the rush of the climb up the hill responsible for the color in his face, as his eyes roved over Sahan’s own softly.
“Where did you find it?” Sahan said, clutching it to her chest. It was one of the only things she had brought from back home, I knew. It was the only precious object of worth she had — although it was not for its worth in coin that she cared for.
Jamshad had recovered from the split in his side, it seemed, as he reached his hands to Sahan’s, taking the clasp of the twine. “Down at the bottom of the hill. I knew it was yours,” he cleared his throat. “I have something I can use to make a new clasp —”
Voices rose over the crest of the hill, “…you cannot be here, begum.” Other voices clashed, coming over the gates.
“Who are they talking to?” I said.
Sahan, Jamshad and I climbed up to the crest of the hill. From here, we could see the figure of a woman in auburn robes pacing at the western gates. Her shawl covered the bottom of her face.
The tower’s guards had come outside.
“Who is that?” Sahan said. Jamshad was next to her, close at her side. For a moment, I thought how they would make a handsome pair: his dark curls against honey skin stark against Sahan’s hazel braids and ivory fingers as they stood side by side.
As we watched the commotion over the hill around the turn of the gates, Master Ardashir emerged through the doorway.
“What does that woman want, Sir Jalil?” His voice called.
“—She wants to come into the prayer house, my Chief,” the guard said.
“I informed her that the house is for brothers.”
“Abba, we can manage a space for her if she would like to pray,” another voice said. I could see Zakariyyah’s dark curls appear by his father’s side. “She could be seeking refuge. I can talk to her —”
“You’ll do no such thing, Zakariyyah,” Master Ardashir said. He turned to the guard. “Jalil, please inform her that she cannot lurk here.”
“My Chief, I have done so numerous times the past several days. But she has not left.”
Sahan scoffed next to me. “They’re threatened by one woman defiling their precious holy space.” She shook her head. “I have to get back to the kitchens, I don’t have time to witness their nonsense. These things make me so angry.” She was about to walk up to the gates with Jamshad when I grabbed her arm.
Ardashir strode down the pathway and pulled open the gate, its hinges creaking. He stood between it and the woman.
“You’ll both attract attention if you go up now. I want to hear what Ardashir says,” I said to Sahan.
Ardashir’s voice rose along the wind. “This is a holy place of God, begum. I regret to tell you that you cannot be here.”
The woman stood in front of him, engulfed by her robes, and stared at him as if studying him. I could not see clearly, but her eyes reminded me of something I could not identify. What seemed so familiar about her?
Ardashir leaned forward. “If you do not leave the grounds, I will have to ask my guard —”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
The woman leaned down to Ardashir’s shoulder and whispered something.
Chief Ardashir went white. He did not move.
The woman moved away, already walking back down the hill.
“Take her away if she tries to come again,” Ardashir declared.
“Yes, my Chief.”
The men left to pray.
“What on the Ardth was that?” Sahan said.
“What could the woman have possibly whispered to make Aziz Ardashir pale?” I murmured.
“Maybe she told him to go to the pits, for banishing her like that,” Sahan said with a wide grin.
Jamshad laughed. “That’s right,” he said. “To the pits.”
We climbed the rest of the way up back to the tower. We separated as I made my way through the cool shady courtyard up towards the studio, and the other two went off to the kitchens.
The sharp eyes of the woman in auburn would not leave me. Why did she seem so familiar? And why did she seek the prayer house so insistently?
I had never been inside a prayer house myself.
On Feast mornings in Bayrun, we had lined up beneath the blue skies for the prayer. On that day, the sky was our prayer house.
The central square in Bayrun was not vast like Ifsharan’s, but that never prevented us from cramming into every inch of space.
We would arrive in our clothes smelling of ataar musk: women in silks and shawls, eyes rimmed in kohl and bangles clinking; men in their smoothed vests, beards trimmed and hair coiffed. You could smell the sweet jardah rice and cinammon-laced shemai being prepared in the bazaar stalls.
Abba would dress in the same brown vest with green thread-work every Feast. I would run off to join Qamarah and Haniya. Wasim, Qamarah’s brother, would scamper off to stand with the men, holding his shoulders straight and standing tall, eager to join the elders.
Beneath the vast dome of the skies, we would line up.
As everyone around us moved in unison towards the ground, I felt as if I was part of a great flowing wave. This is how the ocean must feel, I would think. Our foreheads bowed, pressed to the fabric of the prayer sheets, the cool earth beneath. I could smell the scent of the grass, the dirt, feel the slight dampness of the dew; and it occurred to me that it was the closest I had ever been to the earth.
In that moment, I could swear that we were all particles of the same sea, grains of the same dunes. It did not matter whether you knew those next to you, what joys they dreamed of, or what fears lay in their hearts. In that moment together knelt to the earth, you knew them.
_____________________________________________
The next afternoon, the woman was at the gates again. I went outside to find her before the guard could.
The soot of the city mixed in with the dust of the roads. The woman did not halt her pace when I approached.
From inside the doors of the prayer house, the men were rising for the last motion of the prayer.
I went to the woman and grabbed her arm. “Return in an hour and wait by the door,” I said. The woman paused. There was a scent to her that I could not place, the kind of fragrance they said was of paradise, like myrrh and ambergris. But there was a darkness behind them that threatened to consume itself, voracious and listless at once, as if there was nothing left that moored her to this world, its fears and its concerns.
From inside the doors, exclamations of salaam followed one after another like two sparrows chasing each other as the men turned to murmur the words over each shoulder; soon arose chatter and the fumbling for shoes.
I waited for the woman to say something, but she pulled her arm away and walked off down the path, disappearing down the hill. The doors exploded open and the men flowed out.
I pulled up my hood and rushed away back through the southern entrance.
In the calligraphy studio, I tapped pen against paper, trying to work but unable to focus as I waited.
When I slipped out of the studio and down to the prayer halls, it was empty and silent. I opened the door and expected to find only the silent hill: but the woman waited. She stepped inside, a gust of breeze following her in.
“Are you not taking a risk, letting me in?” the woman asked. Her voice was husky, firm. Sharp, arrow-like eyes glowed like lightning over the auburn veil shading her face. She appeared almost unreal, as if a little blurry at the edges, prone to disappearing at a moment. But it was her eyes that astonished me – I had never seen anything like them. “Why did you?”
“It is God’s house, isn’t it?”
The woman smiled. “It is funny, how that same single reason has been used to both banish me and accept me.” The woman studied the intricate interior of the prayer house. “I have never been inside a prayer house,” she whispered, looking up at the golden pillars, the stalactite-formed dome above them. She turned to me, studying me. “How did you end up at the great Ifsharan Tower?”
“I am a calligrapher,” I said. “I have a question for you too, sister. Who are you?”
The woman studied me, eyes roving over my face. “To anyone else, I would not answer this. But to you — I assume I do owe you this much. I am Nurbayn of Thankar.”
Thankar. I saw the plume of smoke as I stood at the window of Lalbagh Fort with Qamarah, so many years ago. It could not be… “Thankar,” I whispered. The southern Bayrun region. Here was someone from my past, from a world I had left behind, I thought forever. “I am from Bayrun, too. I am sorry, I saw Thankar burn —”
Something flashed in the woman’s eyes, and a voice of steel emerged — “I would like to have some peace to pray, please.”
But I stood there, watching her. “We are from the same hometown, you and I, we — you are the first person I have met, closest to home, since —”
She turned, and the flash of something unreal glinted again in her eyes.
“Do you not care?” I asked.
“I am no longer human, my sister. I cannot feel.”
“That is a lie,” I said. The words came out more forcefully than I had intended. But it irked me that I could feel it radiating from her, it was so powerful that I did not need to touch her to feel the grief — and she denied it so strongly. But I knew it was the denial of any connection, any feeling at all to our home, that really irked me.
The woman pulled down the veil covering her face, and I saw her features clearly — dark velvety umber skin, narrow features defined by one who has long been famished. Yet despite this, her eyes were sharp.
“And how would you know whether I feel or not?” she asked. “You assume quite a lot for someone who does not know me.”
I bit my tongue. “What do you mean you are no longer human?” I said instead.
She smiled, the act strange upon her features, as if she had not done it in so long that she was only just now remembering how to. “Perhaps one day, if we ever meet again, I will tell you. But for now, sister, I would like to pray please.”
“Alright,” I said slowly. “I will guard the door for you from the inside.”
The woman stood straight before the mihrab and raised her hands in prayer.
I went out to the hall outside the door and paced impatiently. The light was bleak over the courtyard beyond the hall.
I thought of Lalbagh and Qamarah; of days spent swinging our legs from the trees in the banyan forest; of smoke, and the burning, the fires: a blackened ruin on the earth.
When I returned inside the prayer hall, it was empty. The woman named Nurbayn was gone.
A quietness reverberated against the walls: The air still with the presence of a lone, secret supplicator who had to sneak in to the House of God.
I stood there in the suffocating quietness, examining the curve of the dome above, the intricate beauty of the girih work — so elegant, so pure, so holy and beautiful.
How many women sought God’s house even as she was banished from it? It took another kind of strength — to hold onto faith even when they used it to suffocate you.