Chapter 4
Training comes as swift as a storm in a summer pasture: a moment of peace before an onslaught that drenches me in the sweat of chores, tasks, lectures and lashings under stern senior monks.
It begins when I am almost fully recovered from the poisons. Eliyas helps me climb up the monastery steps, warning me what is to come in my training.
‘—and the monks do not take tardiness lightly, unless you wish to have your meals withheld, back lashed -’ At the entrance, Eliyas pauses, eyes catching above. A trinity of ravens curls on to the seventh archway, black forms silent, still, as if in mourning.
Eliyas raises a palm, muttering names of the Divine. ‘As a dream-interpreter, I learnt that sleep is the twin of death, and to understand death, I must study the living. Ravens can be an omen of living death.’
My heart is a flighty thing. ‘But whose death?’
He shakes his head. ‘Do not worry. We do not dislike ravens, nor do we revere them.’
‘So you fear them.’
‘Think of the story of Prophet Father Adam. The raven directed Adam’s sinful son to bury his brother – the first murder of mankind.
It’s human instinct to fear these creatures, for who wishes to be obtusely reminded of their own mortality?
Worse, ravens are the symbol of Sajamistan: masochists obsessed with death, tombs, jinn-folk.
Was it not clans of Sajamistan’s borderland who massacred your tribe? ’
My head pounds and a flash of images penetrates my mind: raven-feathered masks and arrows. I taste copper, the blood of that night seeping into the present. Clumsily, I imitate Eliyas, silently praying to the Divine to protect me from a dishonourable death, but the ravens simply shriek in protest.
‘I cannot fear that which I must defeat.’
Eliyas wears a bitter smile as he steps into the monastery. ‘Indeed.’
With that, my lessons begin. Due to the crane’s contemplative relationship with nature, I spend my dawns in the monastic gardens, beside Eliyas, meditating on olive orchards and black juniper or blue poppy – all kinds of flower beds, to unify my relationship with Brother-Nature.
I don’t know if the emperor learnt of my victory against Dunya, but beneath his strict aspect, I detect pride, or perhaps, simply relief. It becomes custom that Uma and I are invited to dine in the circle of his closest clansmen.
Poisons are no longer a weapon to threaten me, but a keen art for the clan to observe each other’s resolve.
There are eight great courtly clans in Azadniabad’s court – each specialised in the wealth and cultivation of particular plants, herbs and stones, trading these wares to merchants, monasteries and kingdoms across the continent.
I learn poison is commonplace in court, that it happens all over the palace as a means of manoeuvring alliances.
In the first months, at the end of the meal, clans across the lower courts presented me gifts of delicacies from their fiefdoms. As the new daughter of the emperor, I had no choice but to accept them.
‘Taste it,’ they’d urge without deception.
After the first gift, I quickly learnt it’s a game of poisons to satisfy their intrigue after Dunya’s challenge.
Healing and poisons are the realm of the Azadnian courts, but I couldn’t forget the first time I was poisoned, the sensation of paralysis, my body at a plant’s mercy.
I never wish to feel so weak again. I begin to master poisons under Eliyas, not to simply identify their properties but to build a slow resistance, to surpass the masters in the royal courts.
I find that, past the pain, most rewarding.
As time passes, I learn more about my siblings.
Yun, my older half-brother, is crueller than the others, but for that, less guarded.
After I recover, he invites me to train with the younger Zahrs.
Outside the monastery, in the courtyards, we practise under the royal temples’ senior martial artists.
Yun shares a striking resemblance to Eliyas; they would be as twins, if in another life the older brother hadn’t renounced his ranking in the clan and shorn off his hair.
Younger than Eliyas by a year, with trimmed curls, identical coppery eyes and sharp features cut from stone, Yun is a hard reflection to Eliyas’s softer nature, as a prodigy martial artist, and he knows it.
Azra is the daughter of the emperor’s second wife, and quiet but disciplined in her martial routine; she’s a regular sparring partner for Yun, and the monks’ favoured student.
And Zhasna . . . I learn is a court poet.
A strategy to charm the notables in favour of the Zahr clan.
The emperor’s weapons aren’t always poisons, daggers and sharp words, I’ve come to realise.
At court, melodiously charming, Zhasna recites odes about the Divine mandate after the Great Flood, and the parable of the Zahrs’ righteous authority to rule.
Most mornings, she attends her apprenticeship under the tutelage of the Chief Court Poet.
Eventually, I enter the circle of the Zahr clan, receiving a new-found respect.
In the summers, the emperor sends me with Yun to prefectures across Azadniabad, to acquaint myself with the trades, histories and tribes of the empire – even the mystic monastic schools within the remotest northern caves.
As my siblings grow older, they depart and return after spring campaigns to defend our borderlands against Sajamistan in the south, and reconquer lands from warlord fiefdoms in the east and west. Some of my cousins have taken on roles of governorship in the prefectures.
For me, the emperor says my time is best spent in the capital, alongside him, as his future left-hand vizier.
Whenever I return to the spring or winter capital, I continue classes on martial history, strategy and training my affinity with Eliyas, who reads from ancient manuscripts about Eajīz warriors, or the strategy of conquerors like Eskander.
Through Eliyas’s lessons, I learn about other Eajīz affinities – warriors long dead, or living in the Sajamistan Empire – though a part of me still longs to meet another Eajīz. Eliyas orders me to recite odes about holy warriors – another form of faith – to strengthen my Heavenly bonds.
‘In the heart of the Mist Mountains where the cosmos sleep, the Simorgh, the third sagely bird, guards Heaven’s secrets, bestowing wisdom to worthy warriors and guiding the presage of a great new era,’ I recite back one morning.
We hang upside down on the branches of olive trees, meditating on nature.
Eliyas nods at me. ‘As you recite about the firebird, contemplate your seventy-seven bonds; they represent your contract with Heaven. The Heavenly bonds come from the Unseen, the spiritual world, and— Do not stop praying !’ he snaps.
‘Sorry,’ I wheeze out, the blood rushing to my head making this difficult. Through my recitation, slowly, gold lines, as thin and weak as a strand of mule hair, rise from different points on my body, upwards to the Heavens, flowing with Heavenly Energy.
Eliyas cannot see the Heavenly bonds because they are separate from an affinity; every Eajīz has seventy-seven bonds used to summon Heavenly Energy, which feeds their power.
Eliyas suddenly points at the white nūr flashing from my feet. ‘Your bonds are growing; you can summon nūr through your feet as well. This will increase as your affinity is manifested through the different bonds on your body.’
I glance up at my hanging legs. ‘Where else?’
He waves at the length of me. ‘You have bonds concentrated around your womb, arms and legs that store Heavenly Energy. There are Heavenly bonds even in each eye and the tongue, but those are nearly impossible to use. In fact, the best Eajīz can perhaps utilise only half of their seventy-seven bonds throughout their life,’ he explains.
I find myself enjoying lessons on Eajīzi more than any other class.
Eventually, I move from the monastery to a communal room in the women’s inner palace with Uma. Many nights, she disappears, summoned by the emperor. Some months, I catch Uma gripping her stomach, but she assures me she is only ill and I trust her – wrapped up in my new life.
I lean into the tight embrace of it, the time before Azadniabad becoming more like the dark shadow of a nightmare.
Something I glimpse looking back at me in the mirror, if I linger too long.
But there is assurance in even that reminder; better a shadow to remind me that at any moment, this life – this home – can be taken from me too.
year 510 after nuh’s great flood, era of the heavenly birds
Navia, Spring Capital of Azadniabad
‘You’ve found a better teacher,’ Eliyas says one morning before our lessons.
We are cross-legged below the hills leading into the juniper and orchard meadows outside the outer palace walls, playing the strategy game of saktab, the board strewn between us on a kilim.
It’s a few days past the spring solstice.
We reside in the north-western spring capital of Navia, hedged on a hill overlooking its luminous freshwater lake from Nuh’s Great Flood.
Eliyas told me Navia – a settlement famous for its stone masonry – is the indigenous city of the Zahrs before they overthrew their Azad clan cousins almost 200 years ago and seized rule.
‘Who said so?’
‘Yun told me you prefer his training,’ Eliyas accuses me mildly, rearranging his legs in front of me.
Recently Yun has begun imparting lessons of the secret Zahr martial arts system called the Seven Gentle Paths of Dawjad – something he’d learnt on his travels to the northern prefecture of Izur and brought back to me.
‘N-no,’ I reply with a quick smile. ‘No one is a greater mentor than you, Older Brother.’
‘Ah, you suck-up. You say that not to wound my heart.’ He leans his head against a stela, entombed with flood runes, before pushing his brass piece across the sandblasted gameboard. ‘I concede,’ he declares.