Chapter 18
With the texts secured, I order No-Name to change at my whim to become the things I love and fear, so I do not time-blank.
In the beginning, she shifts into Uma, gazing out the window.
Later, she changes into the emperor and manifests objects such as tending to a cage of courtly cranes.
But for some reason, she is most effective when she manifests into my parents’ corpses.
The gore is a steady reminder of my purpose: to climb the enemy’s ranks and destroy them. To earn my way home.
No-Name follows me as I study the manuscripts in Little Paradise, hanging upside down in the citrus trees, an old habit from the Azadnian capital.
‘In the first Jinn Wars, the Dawjad clans united with which tribes against the Jazatāh?’ No-Name tests me from the annals.
‘T-the Arsduq tribes?’ My memory fails me miserably.
‘No. Which tribes?’ No-Name repeats. Her face flickers between the emperor’s features and her own unremarkable face before she shoves me off the branch. ‘You failed his test.’
‘I am aware.’ I rub my shoulder. ‘This cannot work unless you change into his corpse. I need to remember.’
She pauses. Her features pinch into the emperor’s long face, those ebony eyes, that jaw as sharp as a shamshir.
But blood trickles down her torso too, the wounds that caused him to die forming welts on her limbs, stealing my breath.
She grips my jaw hard, prodding my memories, making my head spin, and suddenly, I’m on my hands and knees, dry-heaving.
I have willed myself to hide the details of how he died; to not dwell on the memory because I know if I had simply obeyed him – if I had simply stayed – he would be alive.
Now his wounds taunt me; his depthless eyes stare with potent disappointment.
I do not question this, for I find that I like the pain: its honesty, its simplicity, the way I can control it.
‘What were the tribes?’ No-Name demands again in his eerie voice as she walks to the fountains, peering out at the city with a black gaze.
‘The southern Izuri lands belonged to Hunjin tribes under the banner of the Heavenly Crane,’ I answer, my gaze focused on his corpse.
After that, the days stack like fired brick against brick; as No-Name reflects my parents’ gruesome forms, I memorise manuscripts from the Easkaria school correctly.
No one else experiences periods of blankness, of confusion, of gaps in time.
The reminder is blunt – these tests are difficult because of my mistakes, my unreliable memory.
It is my fault, so it is my responsibility to prepare better.
If my head forgets things, then, like people, it can be bent into submission. An old, familiar routine.
With it, I attend the Easkaria, applying myself vigorously despite languishing at the bottom. To the surprise of the scholars, I improve. Sajamistani history, philosophy, strategy, logic – everything is recited until I become a walking paragon of Sajamistan myself.
In cartography, we memorise and map the empire’s terrain.
In alchemy, we master rudimentary methods to create naphtha-throwers and distillate with sulphur and charcoal.
In mathematics, the teacher is determined to make proficient artillerists out of promising wartime mathematicians.
She teaches field problems concerning the flight of projectiles, the arithmetic of cannon devices, or the direction of moving objects and their velocity, but I find myself confused.
In battle, would I have time to solve triangles?
Later, I learn these techniques save a squadron, for any good tactician worries themselves with logistics in advance, winning the war of systematisation.
Time smears: the week the autumn equinox arrives and the windy season of sandstorms infiltrates the scholarly city.
Our tunics are replaced with thicker wool; in the eves, the chill forces us to round the shawls across our chests.
The loving desert wraps us in her unwanted embraces; wind funnels and flings sand into every crevice of our hovels, fingers, scalps and breasts. I let her break me as I break my body.
No-Name tricks me with reassurances in my ear:
In the morning, you will see your clansmen.
Reading these pages is an order by the emperor.
You will be in Azadniabad if you succeed.
I listen to these promises when I am tired, when I am in pain, my mind falling for those seductions, one lie after another; again, again and again.
I dare not resist the pain; I dare not go soft.
It becomes a game. I find I love games. In a strange quirk of fate, studying in Za’skar does not vary from my years in Azadniabad; it’s a routine of harsh monks and masters, a time of parchments and contemplation.
My superiors note a shift in my behaviour.
Overseer Yabghu nods smugly when he runs across me – reluctantly – enlisting Cemil’s help to memorise the Jazatāh annals in the Great Library.
But my overseer was right; Cemil challenges my knowledge like no other initiate, probing for a hole, refuting with his own interpretations, and forcing me to build defence after defence in my logic, like a war decided by the planes of the mind.
Outside of classes, in the monastery, the Qabl monks begin physical training to complement our spiritual arts.
They hand the novices a string of menial orders to complete on Friday and Saturday evenings.
Parchments to ink, manuscripts to stringently illuminate, floors to sweep, cattle dung to shovel, garden pits to dig and date palms to trim.
Vaguely, I wonder if the monks are using the initiates to do chores, or if the labour holds any greater purpose.
At other times, the monks command us to not eat for three straight days to understand the body’s responses, to recognise primal, animalistic hunger, so we know true bodily poverty, an infinitesimal glimpse into death.
They command us to meditate on bone-stone tombs before ordering us into the rose and citrus gardens, to balance our Heavenly bonds; else, warriors who only meditate on death go mad into suicide.
They proclaim: The speaking body shall not be ignored. Awareness is the body’s greatest weapon, for only then shall one acknowledge its faults. I hate to admit that it is not a worship of death, it is a respect of it.
For weeks we haul muck, and the Qabl monks chuckle as if sensing our low morale. ‘Wipe those snotty faces, pigs. The purpose will reveal itself. For now, you must build the foundation of enlightenment to reach the bond between life and death.’
The purpose is revealed after we finish digging the sixth pit outside the monastery. With a cramped back, I rest with the other Zero-Slashes, between Aina and Katayoun.
Suddenly, Sister Umairah looms above the grass, which is swollen with rancid nuts and overripe mulberries that squirt dark juices all over our ochre tunics.
‘You require water?’ asks the grandmaster.
We nod eagerly. She folds her arms. ‘Indulge me: did any of you think to use Heavenly bonds and escape the material world to relieve stress from the corporeal body? Did you even chant the Divine’s names to contemplate death?
Our faith loves death, for it’s the highest honour to die in martyrdom.
Then you are truly Qabl. If not, you become prone to jinn influence, even possession.
Attacked by our enemies, will you crack? ’
A shamed silence dwells upon us.
‘Now let us begin real Qabl training.’ She slaps the trunk of a fig tree.
‘And I shall enjoy these figs.’
The monastics explain how the world is a thousand illusions and a thousand covers.
To seek truth is to behold, then shatter these constructs.
Even when I look within myself and examine my own considerations, those, too, are an illusion viewed through a veil of doubt, and to understand this is to shatter myself.
Enlightenment, they emphasise. In Qabl meditation, one must be struck in a flash.
As I meditate, a sage slaps me across the face. On impact, I glimpse a white flash. ‘Was that thus enlightenment?’ I mumble, through a swelling cheek.
‘No.’ He pinches my ear until I yelp. ‘I think it was your consciousness manifesting the pain of my slap. Not true enlightenment, but rather a self-defence mechanism.’
‘Is enlightenment supposed to be painful?’
In a wide-toothed smile, the sage says, ‘Very,’ and slaps me again. I do not resist.
At other times, I time-blank, forcing him to berate me.
‘Your memory is pathetic.’ His breath reeks, the smell of a fasting monk. By the Heavens, I pray for his sake.
The sutras claim that Veils appear everywhere, not solely in the Unseen world, but in the cosmic equation riddling the material world. Other Veils exist – between the mind and the heart, the corporeal self and the soul.
Time is spent emptying ourselves, counting bone-shards and edging closer to the spiritual dominion to relinquish our bonds with the material world and accept death.
We find truth, until all that is left is lies.
Some days we are closer, some days we are further, but the monks temper our inconstant nature, whittling to their roots the impulses of youth.
The monks snap the assumptions from Azadniabad within me one by one. The spiritual domain is an internal planetary system; the mind is the sun that knowledge revolves round and round.
The monks throw questions at us, too.
Are you simply a unit of consumption, eating, shitting, breathing, talking, filling space?
At another practice, Sister Umairah asks, ‘The soul is the window. To read it, you must polish its surface and gaze through. What do you see?’ The answer dangles on a thread before me tauntingly, but still out of reach. ‘What do you hear?’ she urges.
My Zahr clan. Louder than myself.
These meditative enquiries provoke a thousand fears, forcing me to acknowledge things that I wish to forget. So, I burn the memories in myriad flames until they crumble to ashes.
Questions are wrong.
Sister Umairah frowns at me, levelling a stern gaze. ‘Remain steadfast, pupil. The bountiful rain falls, flooding the valley, yet rather than sowing and reaping, all you do is watch.’
Every second is ideological warfare, but a warrior must love it, must become obsessed with it.
Between martial classes, the school and the monastery, my trifecta trains relentlessly.
We continue a peaceful routine, wedged into the violent crevices of our soul, until we are stitched into a tapestry of contradictions.
We are good at that. Humans like to take peace and make it a symbol of war.
We recite every text. We protest nothing.
We bow and grovel. We answer ridiculous questions and, most of all, we listen.
When the scholars and monks insult us, we thank them; when they praise us, we remain silent; when they remain quiet, still we bow our heads in shame as if we committed a wrong.
We willingly become everyone’s pathetic pupils, hoping to become extraordinary masters.
After several weeks, close to the Marka tournament, Cemil tells me I am ready. It is time to try my hand again in Scholar Mufasa’s class. Tentatively, I enter the martial halqa, the chambers pluming in frankincense.
‘Do you have a death wish?’ The scholar begins with no greeting.
I catch Katayoun’s eyes, seated between Aina, Sharra and Aizere.
To my surprise, Katayoun nods to me, and that acknowledgement makes me step further in.
Other students notice and murmurs of disquiet cause my heart to flutter like moths against torchlight.
I loosen a breath. ‘Scholar, when I am wrong, you must correct me. Are you and I not alike, both students of knowledge?’
‘A student is an easy name to claim. Whether you are one or not is a different question.’ He snorts hard, flicking off my flattery. Even his wrinkles fold upon themselves like pruned grapes.
He snatches his copied parchments of the Jazatāh annals. He jams a finger into the middle of the codex and begins reading. ‘ . . . The Jazatāh magicians did not believe in the natural cycle of death. Eajīz believe in bonds representing . . .’
I know this section, as well as my tongue knows the inside of my cheek. ‘– our resurrection. Eajīz must shred mind, body and soul before rebuilding it, the way the soul is made by the Divine, killed and resurrected. The first magicians neglected this relationship.’
Mufasa licks his thumb before unrolling a parchment closer to the beginning. ‘Ancient Jazatāh civilisations travelled to the City of God’s Gates, in ancient Za’skar. This city was the first metropolis after Adam had passed. A wicked empire, the birthplace of black magick—’
I remain quiet, in thought. This scholarship is about the Jinn Wars.
Around us, the low-ranks stare, some in open fascination and others in terror. Katayoun bends her head as if she senses I am one mistake away from bearing the violence of the scholar’s staff.
A memory of Emirhan punished on my first day flashes through my head, trousers saturated in his own piss. That will be you, Khamilla. I fear not the pain, but the disappointment. I replace the scholar’s face with my father. They both are the same, I chant inwardly. It recalls the memory.
‘They,’ I put out, ‘held an asymmetry of power through black magick. Using the dark arts, the magicians invoked all types of jinn-folk who soothsaid in their favour. They committed infanticide by magicking wombs to produce stillborn babies, sacrificing souls to feed their power.’
The scholar’s finger lifts, quieting me.
The class looks on in equal surprise. No-Name treks down the kilim rugs before coming to a stop behind the scholar.
Her shape appears like a younger version of the emperor, cross-legged at the low desk, touching parchment and reed pens as if writing letters. My eyes follow her movements.
‘I am not done with my test,’ the scholar grunts as he rifles through the manuscripts again. But I miss nothing, quoting by heart.
At the end of the hour, the scholar finally places the last codex down, speaking in a thick voice.
‘You think memorising is intelligence. Anyone can learn modes of reasoning, but intelligence – true intelligence – is to seize the material, dissect each line, rearrange it and make it one’s own.
Indeed, you have demonstrated that you are a puppet, spitting the words required of you. ’
I flinch and No-Name looks up from the desk, smiling at his words.
Then Scholar Mufasa waves at the other rukhs and I almost miss the gleam in his eyes. ‘But I am a man of my word. You have studied the foundation, and you might even perform passingly in the yearly examinations. So go on.’ His nostrils flare. ‘Before I change my mind.’