Chapter 3 #3
Dunya bends down to her daughter, hissing orders.
Zhasna scurries away, only to return with a tray of elaborate small dishes – quivering pots of oiled lamb dumplings, skewers of red quail.
One bowl contains yakhni and root vegetables, another shorpa from lamb organs.
A long plate balances a fried flat, spiced saffron kebab, glistening with jiggly marrow.
The last plate has semolina with nuts, a halva dish.
‘You offended me at the last meal,’ Dunya says coolly. ‘A Zahr dines from beginning to end with the clan.’ You will eat all of it, is her silent order.
Very well. Beside me, Uma hesitantly dips the flatbread into the shorpa, bringing it to her mouth. Just as it grazes her lips, I grab her hand. I use my tongue to prod at the spicy broth colliding with a thin film of . . .
Boeki scorpion slime. Boeki poison.
I meet Dunya’s gaze and say, ‘Uma, I wish to eat all of the food. A Zahr must not refuse their clansman’s invitation.’
Before Uma or Dunya can protest, I push the entire bite into my mouth and swallow.
Dunya grips the reed mat, leaning forward. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ At her thunderous words, the hall hushes. Other clansmen incline their heads in interest.
‘I am eating your food.’ I shovel quail down my throat. ‘It’s tasty.’
‘Are you mad?’ Suddenly, Uma swats away the breadbasket.
But my brother quickly strides through the circular tables, reaching Uma. Eliyas winds an arm around her waist, pulling back as Uma struggles against him. She jabs a finger at Dunya.
‘I thought your cruelty would dull with age but I was wrong! You’ve edged sharper at my return. Poisoning a mere child younger than your own, someone who hasn’t tasted life until now. You would steal another clan from her out of envy!’
‘Uma, enough,’ I choke out. Eliyas drags her out of the hall as I make my way through the lamb dumplings. Swallow, I think to myself.
Dunya blinks hard. ‘Stop that.’
‘It was your invitation to break fast, Second-Uma.’ I chew more.
‘I taste boeki. Not to worry. The emperor had me study this poison well.’ I lift a round kebab and pause through a surge of nausea.
‘Bristles of a yellow-spotted caterpillar. Nicely done. But it would be more effective to use this poison in the dumplings, as the ground lamb and onion would conceal it well.’
Dunya grips my wrist. ‘You were not raised as a proper Azadnian, so you hardly know poisons or healing antidotes. If you continue, you will die. Or have you revealed your nature? As mad as the masochistic death-worshippers of Sajamistan?’
A sharp voice speaks over her. ‘Uma, if this child from the barbarians insists on understanding our ways, let her continue. She is killing herself. Or perhaps she won’t break so easily.
’ I make out the familiar face of Zhasna.
Her eyes glint at the promise of bloodshed.
Slowly, the other clan elders, advisers and the visiting warlord abandon their food to surround our table and watch me devour the poisoned meal.
Why eat, when even away from battle, their bloodlust hungers for a different type of meal: an act of violence waiting to happen.
My hand stuffs food down my throat faster. I hardly chew. I plop a salt cube under my tongue and wash it down with sheer chai from a copper-enamelled saucer of cardamom- and saffron-spiced black and green tea.
Eliyas returns and his steady eyes urge me on.
‘You do not fear death, child?’ Dunya asks in a measured tone, but her eyes are black slits. Now she thought me a child?
To diminish my standing. My gaze narrows and I snap a flatbread in half.
While Dunya had thought me recovering, with my brother’s help, I prepared to suffer.
He diluted my stomach in a watery white clay and charcoal suction.
Then we placed bitter prunus cherries under my tongue, for Eliyas said that would help my stomach produce more bile.
We made a gamble. Ingest the food hastily and then pray.
I know my uma’s favoured poisons, Eliyas ordered.
‘Corpses no longer scare me,’ I finally answer.
Life was large but its skin so fragile, and so were its dreams. I dreamt of belonging here, but Dunya’s killing of that dream I find more frightening than death.
I know I have felt belonging once before – before Sajamistan’s death-obsessed masochists destroyed my tribe – but that memory buried itself in the grave when the emperor ordered me to build myself anew.
For some reason, there is only the here and now.
The past receding with every passing moment, every bite of poison.
‘Every soul fears death. You lie like a fumbling child,’ Dunya objects.
Her arm reaches out, floral bangles, bejewelled like the red of a crane’s eye, winking beneath the firelight of the copper lanterns strung above us.
She swipes sweat slipping down my chin, wetting the table. ‘We smell your fear,’ she coos.
I glance up at the watching clansmen; she-warriors with loose hair adorned in crane feathers, and eyes curious; the men with long silver felt capes and velvet waist-sashes, ivory daggers tucked underneath, glinting mockingly.
I see the blurring outline of my half-siblings whose names I hardly remember as poison bleeds through my veins.
The scent of sesame flatbread clashes with the sharp tang of the black juniper and blue poppies crawling along the walls.
I want to vomit. But I cannot fail before their expectant gazes.
Gritting my teeth, I raise my finger shakily. My words begin slurring from the poison. ‘L-let us see if you fear it too, Second-Uma. Eliyas, may you pass my halva plate?’
Dunya glares at her son as he nudges forward the only food I have not touched: cubed halva, shaved rose sprinkled across the glistening ghee pooling at the top.
I scrape the wet semolina into my hands.
‘Here, Second-Uma. You said a Zahr dines from beginning to end with the clan. However, we have broken the most important Azadnian custom: the eldest woman in the circle must break bread first. I have eaten all the flatbread. But I have not touched my halva. You must eat it, or would you refuse a clansman’s food? ’
She stills.
I scoop a rosy morsel into my swollen mouth. ‘Y-you’ve gifted me this meal. It cannot be poisoned, for I’ve eaten all of it and I-I am fine.’
Her fingers dig into the wooden slab of table, nails tearing into the reed mat. She understands the position I have put her in before the court. My hand extends again. ‘Take your halva and complete the custom.’
She parts her lips closer to the sugared semolina. Her temple glistens with sweat beneath the firelight. Beside her, Zhasna is bleached bone-pale in fear.
‘Uma, don’t eat it!’ Her daughter tries to snatch away the morsel.
But Dunya is not one to fall back from an open challenge. ‘Half-daughter of mine, I will have your halva.’ The cold acknowledgement sends a rush through me. Dunya swallows it from my hand.
Her lips twist, throat swallowing with visible effort. But she compacts her expression through sheer will.
There is quiet in the hall, then.
I stand. My fist circles once in the Azadnian greeting. ‘Forged by blood, bound by duty, I offer my soul by the white blade,’ I speak quietly, but it rends upon the air like a knife.
‘Slave to the Zahr clan,’ Dunya finishes and unsheathes the ivory blade at her trembling arm, pressing the flat end to her forehead in a sign of reluctant acceptance.
‘Let us dine together as a clan next eve. Peace unto you.’ I push back, and bow my head, heavy sleeves risen to hide my shaking face.
I turn away. My limbs feel heavy. My tongue is bloated. I taste metallic blood against my teeth. The muscles around my throat convulse from an impending vomit. I do not make it one step more. My knees buckle and I am about to fall, when a hand latches on to my upper arm.
‘Keep walking,’ Zhasna says through gritted teeth. ‘Do not weaken now, young warrior. You must go on, alone.’ Another hand joins her; one of my older half-siblings. Together, they shove me onward. From the corner of my eye, I spot Uma straining against one of my clansmen.
I stagger and pass Eliyas, too, who curls his hands, conflicted as he wishes to help. But Zhasna is correct. I must leave dignified, and alone, as a show of strength. I press forward, drenched in my own sweat.
Around me, the elder clansmen no longer eye me in distaste, but with another expression more difficult to discern.
Different viziers nod their acknowledgement, which sends a rush of warmth through me.
Every empire has eight viziers: left-hands, in charge of martial and economic affairs, and right-hands, in charge of social and the court’s judiciary affairs.
‘Well done,’ someone hums. My head turns right; the voice belongs to an imposing figure, a curved kilij blade strapped to his leather waistband.
He wears a blue and emerald qaftan, but with a crane-feathered turban slung around his forehead, his long black hair tied above the opening.
Sormeh darkens his wide brown eyes; a trimmed beard skims along his prominent, square jaw, and his features are long, as if chiselled with a blade.
It’s the visiting warlord from the western jade mountains.
A small dove curls on his shoulder, flapping restlessly.
Akashun, Wolf of the Khajak prefecture, I recall Zhasna saying.
‘I will see you again,’ Warlord Akashun promises quietly.
But it’s not his words that still me. My gaze is taken by what is behind him. Something dark stretches across the amber-fretted tapestries of the wall. A bloated figure, black and woolly. My senses seize. A bone-white eye observes me hungrily.
No one notices the shadowy figure. It is not real. It is the poison, I convince myself. With great difficulty, I pass it.
I duck through the low threshold of the dining hall and limp past gilded teal corridors, straight to the apothecary. The apothecarist’s eyes widen at my shaking form.
‘A-antidotes,’ I rasp. Eliyas and I had prepared four antidotes, based on his predictions of Dunya’s poisons.
After twisting the glass toppers of each decanter, the apothecarist pours all four down my throat. ‘I take it, you coming here like this will be a routine happening,’ she notes.
‘Yes.’
Eliyas comes inside, grinning. ‘You bested Dunya.’
I stagger forward, collapse into his arms and vomit all over his robes. Behind him, Zhasna enters the room but recoils. More Zahr cousins press at their backs too, watching incredulously.
The next hours I come in and out of consciousness. I hear voices arguing above me. At one point, Zhasna glances down at my cold shivering body.
‘Will she even survive?’ Zhasna prods Eliyas, who presses a tangy herb-steeped cloth to my forehead.
‘Helpful you both were, not stopping Dunya,’ another girl snaps, facing Eliyas and Zhasna.
‘Well, the girl had to prove herself,’ a gruff voice supplies, belonging to an older boy resembling Eliyas.
‘Yun is correct. A Zahr does not soften oneself for a stranger.’ Zhasna crosses her arms.
‘Shut it,’ Eliyas scolds and pushes them back like the eldest he is. ‘As if you didn’t enjoy this affair, bloodthirsty gh?ls.’ He lifts my body, cradling me to his chest despite the vomit staining his white robes.
‘Sorry, Older Brother.’ I smile weakly. Eliyas soothes my hair back, presses a kiss to my temple, and I gasp out. No one had ever done so to me.
‘Take rest, little bird; you did well. I’m here. And your clansmen accept you into their home.’