Chapter 15
It’s dry-rutting hot in the Easkaria’s corridors, the stench of sweat clinging like clammy cloth against an armpit.
I am unsure where to go, like I am drifting through borderlands, despised by all.
Using the collar of my ochre tunic, I fan my neck.
The rage only smoulders. My hands ball, cheeks hot: hating with force, hating the scholars, hating everyone.
‘Old fool,’ I mutter.
Sajamistan did nothing to deserve these institutes, these mountains of old parchments.
More power, schools, trade, bodies. It was a stroke of fate.
Once, my brother told me Eajīz’s affinities are tied to land, that is why Sajamistan has so many of them.
A city of jinn magick and the resting place of Adam and the Heavenly Birds.
Scholar Mufasa is a damned Za’skar strategist and historian, the very type who constructs ideological weapons against my people, more powerful than even the sharpest sword.
It is the winners of history who justify wars, who put ink to paper, scribing lies, who shift blame for strife from one empire to the next.
I fear this man in a way I fear none other, not even the general of generals, for all revolutions are defined by their victors.
And the victors are not kings and queens, but the historians – the living spoils of war who write their own stories.
My eyes screw shut. The daf sounds, indicating the next halqa. I straighten my tunic. A breeze from an open balcony, slanted by the mountainside, cools the flush in my cheeks.
‘I had a feeling,’ a sudden voice emerges with scathing frankness, ‘Scholar Mufasa would oust you from his class. Took him long enough.’
Cemil’s smooth tone only reinvokes my anger. When I turn, his gaze falls to my bruised knuckles.
‘He didn’t oust me,’ I say.
‘Oh?’ He raises a brow and somehow, he makes it look elegant.
‘I left on my own.’
His chin juts to ward the class chambers. ‘On my first day, he punished me by rapping my knuckles twenty times. I paced this exact corridor as an initiate, cursing the old fool. But by the next moon, I crawled back like the masochist I am. He respected it and quickly he favoured me.’
I wonder about the purpose of his words. At my silence, his grey eyes harden.
‘If a comrade gives advice, rukh, better to answer rather than posture there like a mule.’
‘Am I your comrade?’ I raise my brow back.
‘No. But I’d rather best my rivals, than have them taken out before the battle begins.’
‘How honourable. Katayoun exists too. What of her?’
He snorts. ‘Know her long enough and you quickly learn she has no ambitious bone in her body. She doesn’t care for rankings; she’s in the battalion for the meals, shelter, the land benefits. At least she’s honest in her goals; I can admire that too.’
‘Well, I am fine in my goals.’
His smile is sharp. ‘Fine by me. Isolation attracts the worst of jinn – a shai’tan. As the Qabl sages always warn: a lone wolf in a valley is more susceptible to the devil’s mischief than a creature in a pack. But your kind knows that well, fractured by warlords who refuse to unite.’
My jaw clenches and I shoulder past him to my next halqa.
The rest of my classes are other versions of failures.
Scholar Hawja in ethics disapproves when I flounder in my interpretation of Easkarian philosophy.
I realise my upbringing only taught me the metaphysics of the 1000 Wings of Crane Monastic School, unlike Sajamistan’s zeal for the Heavenly Raven.
In quadrivium, astronomy and metaphysics, my work is plausible but the scholars pay me no attention, leaving me to fade amongst the initiates. Lexicography is good, a small win. Cartography is a disaster when the scholar finds my drawing of the map’s borders highly unusual.
‘Yalon belongs to Sajamistan. And half of this territory in Tezmi’a is administrated by Sajamistani clans.’
It was as if all my life, I’d studied a different version of knowledge.
No, I want to cry as the rukhs receive the approval of superiors.
Failing, as usual, the emperor’s voice slithers in my mind, and I sink low in my seat, my eyes burning. These death-worshippers achieve the correct answers. They climb the ranks of this army. Is this how you will avenge me?
Somehow, it’s my ability to complete the tests on time that saves me from harsher punishment. The ones who do not are punished so severely, their chances of climbing the ranks of this city slim by the day; imperfection cast out.