It was so late in the evening that my eyes were already heavy; I wanted to sleep, but I was to report with Yusuf to the Interpretations committee to inscribe their new proposals.

Bilal was not happy when he’d heard: “You two get to witness them at work while we sit here?” He’d shaken his head, and then looked up with bright eyes at me. “Tell me what happens, Sister Suryan. Tell me everything.”

“It’s going to be old men having a dull meeting and debating across the hall,” I said. “What else do you expect, some supernatural angel come down from the heavens?”

Bilal frowned disapprovingly at that.

Inside the hall, lanterns lit the faces of fifteen scholars sitting in two rows facing each other across a raised table and carved wooden chairs.

I glimpsed Master Farhan and Master Ardashir. Ardashir sat with his head bent forward, his fingers folded upon the table. His neatly shaven beard was striking against the strong features of his face, the sharp grey eyes and smooth white skin.

Yusuf was already there, sitting in the back at a lone desk away from them all. I took another seat at a desk next to him.

“A true calligrapher is never late, Sister Suryan,” Yusuf smiled up at me. He held his pen over a stack of papers. “And to the Interpretations! How shameful.”

“I’m not as eager as you, Yusuf,” I said, opening my own book. “I’m sure you took down whatever I missed.”

Yusuf’s smile faltered a bit, but he looked away from me. “Your lies are going to catch up with you, sister, I promise. They may not know the truth of you, but I do,” he whispered.

My breath caught, but I said nothing, dipping my pen into a bottle of ink.

The manservants poured cups of tea and coffee around the room. Jamshad was among them in a light blue tunic, his dark wiry hair and long lashes bright in the candlelight; he poured coffee for the Head of the Light Scholars.

The murmurs of the scholars drifted along the hall: “…if we do not do something, this will become a problem that will get out of hand soon enough.”

One figure in an azure robe held a pen over the pages on a slanted writing desk, with a text of Interpretations open next to him, clearly identifiable by the gilt-edged border.

“Not only is it unnecessary, it will cause great disorder in our realm,” another scholar spoke.

“So,” said the first man with a long thin face, a tiraz band around the arm of his robes. “Are we agreed then? Ruling five-hundred and sixty.”

“Ruling is not enough,” said another.

The Head of the Light Scholar Haitham’s voice cut through the din. “This will go into the volume of the Tenth Interpretations, my brothers. It is not merely an arbitrary ruling. It is the ruling, based on the findings of the scholars and the scientists, and the Holy Book itself.”

“We must prevent the destruction of order in our communities,” Ardashir’s soft voice cut through them all.

In the royal dark robes, he appeared to nearly glow against the light of the lamps. His eyes were two glinting candles watching each of the men at the table closely. This was a man whose presence commanded attention. This man whom I had watched reclining in repose conversing with his son intimately by the lemon tree all those years before now I witnessed in the pose of a man among men.

Haitham spoke: “Hm, yes, indeed, the chief speaks truly.”

The Light Scholars sat in their golden robes with rich motifs along the borders, nodding their heads. Zakariyyah was in much simpler gold robes, and the youngest.

Zakariyyah leaned forward towards the scribe, then turned to Ardashir. “Father, forgive me, but how is it that we speak of the Oneness of the Creator, of the unity of his Creatures? And yet an interpretation like this, do you not think it unfair —”

“Zakariyyah,” Ardashir cut in. “You are young still. I may have allowed you into this committee and you may happen to be my son, but that does not mean you understand everything.”

Zakariyyah’s face darkened. “Of course, father.” He leaned back from the table.

“Well then,” a scholar said. “It is agreed.”

The Head Light Scholar nodded to the scribe, who read out loud: “Addressing the belonging of the sisters of the realm of Khardin in holy spaces: The Interpretations declare it unnecessary and possibly a source of sowing disorder and chaos in the community. The Creator has made our bodies and minds differently, as stated by both the scholars and the scientists. It is in our very biology, as the scientists show us, one made superior and one inferior as dictated by nature, science and God.”

A murmur of approval ran through the table.

I stopped writing even as I heard the words. I should feel rage, shame, but all I could feel was confusion. Was Ardashir using the laws of the Interpretations to make some kind of statement merely because of what had happened with Nurbayn — to protect his ego?

The scholars carried on, and they seemed to have moved on to matters of state.

“…the villagers’ protests, too, are a dangerous resistance against the Emir. It is spreading across the realm, and they are calling for Imraan’s Rebellion. They say in Arassan, it is already spreading with the Jhansari and even the damned scholars. I never trusted those historians at Abbasid’s Keep.”

“It is necessary to purge the seeds of dissent. We will start with the Ifsharan border.”

“Are you out of your minds —” Zakariyyah began.

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“Zakakriyyah, you will not be allowed into this committee if you interrupt again.” Ardashir said.

“The — the Ifsharan lands were never considered in the Purges —” one of the men began.

“It has become necessary,” Ardashir said.

My heart thudded in my chest. With the holy words of the Interpretation, they were declaring…a Third Purge.

I could not write anymore, my hands still upon the page. Beside me, Yusuf scribbled on furiously.

A scattering rose across the floor as they pushed their chairs back, getting up. “Tomorrow, we will begin the Interpretations for the final section. Get some rest, brothers,” the Head Light Scholar said.

The men began to chatter, chairs scraping along the wood, shuffling of papers and murmurs, heading slowly for the door.

“Too weak to write down the words, Sister Suryan?” Yusuf said. “It is your duty.”

But I rose and rushed away past the scholars, heading for the stairs. Down the steps in a blur.

Through the courtyard I passed, pulling up the hood of my cloak. A thin sliver of a moon peered above the courtyard, a breeze rustling through the trees as if whispering amongst themselves. The sounds of supper had silenced, everyone having gone up to their quarters, lanterns blown out.

If they could dictate the direction of the Words according to their will, what else could they write in the holy language? What else had they written all these years?

Something does not feel right, Abba’s voice came to me.

They said it made him a traitor.

Something pounded deep in my guts. I felt sick.

Scholars around the table, dictating declarations about what rights to give, what not to give, using the language of the holy word itself; declaring biology; declaring right and wrong, whom to destroy and whom to spare; whom to grant salvation and whom to damn.

They wholly believed in what they said. The entire realm, all the peoples, wholly believed in what they said.

And we the calligraphers wrote out their words into the Holy Language, into calligraphy.

In the very Language that had become my home. My entire life’s work with which I had written by my own hand, had been used for this purpose — to suffocate, to stunt, under the name of the Creator, for their whims.

I understood, suddenly, why my father had said he needed more. Why he had gone to Mahmud Saladin’s establishment. Why he was so desperate to read the Qitab, despite the whispers and the mocking faces and even the risk of treason, of death. I understood why the Qitab Holders were banned.

But these were dangerous thoughts, were they not?

Thoughts could make the difference between salvation and damnation, the Interpretations taught. Black and white, sharp, distinct — nothing outside of the lines, nothing blurry or hazy or gray. Safety lay in black and white.

But it was a lie, I thought now. Everything that was safe had been the greatest lie. And danger lay beyond its boundaries.

And now, through the words I wrote down, they would declare a Purging of lands like Nanu Salima’s home.

I slammed open my door and tore off my robes. Sleep had fled from my eyes.

In his last days before the arrest, my father Ahmed Ansary had become immersed in the Interpretations. He wrote endlessly in the margins of his copy in his diminutive handwriting, the words cramped at every page in all the corners as if he was communing with the book itself. Then he had abandoned it when he went off to his lessons with Mahmud Saladin.

I had not thought much of it at the time. But why would he risk his life to learn something beyond the Interpretations?

They said that the attack on Bayrun was due to my father’s dabbling in banned literature, in questioning the Interpretations. But the whole town had shunned my father for so long that it had lost all meaning to me by then, and I had never believed them.

— But what if they had been right?

And what was I doing with these words? This holy language — it was supposed to be holy. It was supposed to be art. I had come here for this, this art was not supposed to have been anything else, it was not supposed to have been violence.

And yet.

The lantern in my room was nearly out of oil, but I lit it anyway and began searching through the drawers.

“Something does not feel right, I feel it in my soul,” Abba had said on one of the many afternoons we sat together on the earthen floor among the cushions scattered about the corner in the sitting-room.

He’d constructed the adobe walls of our house himself, set each clay-brick with his own hands, sun-dried and made of the earth. Nearly everything in the house was carved and molded by his hands: the tables, chairs, cupboards, the beds, even the stove.

He stored types of wood from all around Bayrun: Cypress, jarul, teak. He built doors of cypress wood. Teak and jarul he used to build tables. Mangrove trees he used to build the boats the fishermen took out to the rivers. He studied the mangroves’ root structure to find a way to fend against the floods, developing a system from its roots.

As I searched my rooms in the Scholars’ Tower, I searched in my mind through the drawer of a wooden table that still lay in Bayrun. My father had carved this too, and inside he kept his two most cherished books. One was a storybook passed down through the generations from Amma’s side — a book of Khardin fables. The other was the book of Holy Interpretations.

He had carved an illustration over the facade of the drawer. From the left, a row of small birds flew towards a great winged creature depicted on the right. It was from a story he had told me numerous times: The Meeting of the Birds.

The birds on the left had gathered to decide who would be their sovereign. The wisest of the birds was the hoopoe, Abba would tell me as he leaned back against a cushion by the wall, sitting on the jute rug and smoking his jasmine tobacco through a pipe, the sweet scent filling the house.

The hoopoe suggested that they all go seek the legendary Simurgh to counsel them, and led the others on their quest. But, the hoopoe told them, they must cross seven great valleys in order to reach the Simurgh.

Abba would always puff out a great big cloud of smoke when he reached this part of the story, and as a child I would burst into a fit of giggles.

In the first Valley, he said, they would have to cast aside all dogma, belief or unbelief. Then came the Valley of Love, where they must sacrifice reason for the sake of love. In the Valley of Knowledge, their worldly knowledge would be useless, for everything they thought was reality would no longer be. If they survived, they would reach the Valley of Detachment, where they would have to abandon all desires.

I had forgotten what the last three Valleys in the story were because when I was a child, I didn’t understand what Abba had meant by them. The memory of it was foggy.

But now, as I knelt in my chambers and pulled out a tome wrapped in linen, I remembered.

In the last three Valleys, the birds would become so entranced by the Beauty of the Creator and the vast interconnected spiral of everything, that they would see they had never known or understood anything at all.

As I opened Abba’s copy of the Interpretations, I thought of how I had used to call the last three “the Confusing Valleys” because I was so confused by them. He would laugh, telling me that I did not know just how accurate I was in the name. This would confuse me even more. But so the name had remained.

When the birds heard the description of these Valleys, they were so overwhelmed, some of them refused to continue. On the journey, some of them died of fear, of thirst, of illness, and some lost to beasts. In the end, only seven birds reached the Simurgh. And they came to find that they were the Simurgh.

I opened the copy of Interpretations.

Most people did not know how to read the Qitab as it existed in the Old Tongue. But they knew the Holy Interpretations. They had heard it all their lives, through the Royal Ministrels spreading the word and the copies of Interpretations prepared every five decades by the Light Scholars, and inscribed by the calligraphers.

It was the only source they had of what they knew of their faith.

My father’s handwriting ran across the margins, seeking, searching for something. I did not understand what my father had written, I did not know if he ever found what he was seeking.

But I knew, with absolute certainty, that on the day we presented the compilation to the public courtroom — I would have to destroy it.