Sorry I didn't get around to posting yesterday. Bit crazy around here, plus my brain decided to dump out a ficlet about Erik's mother. If you're interested, 'les cieux et la terre' belongs in the Sum universe, though it stands on its own as a product of my overactive imagination.
In other news, this chapter starts what I consider 'act two' of the story. Here we go...
Nadir was dreaming. It was an unusual occurrence for him. For twenty years, responsibility had weighed down on him and crushed whatever fantasy sleep might have concocted. Perhaps he should be thankful, he mused, well aware as he was that he slumbered. He had been spared twenty years of nightmares, as well as pleasanter dreams.
This was not a nightmare, at least. He dreamed that a sudden gust of wind had blown him over the mountains and out of Mazandaran. He had been carried, as gently as a babe in arms, over the whole of the empire until he reached the land of his birth. He glided over sand-colored cities, punctuated by their blue-roofed mosques. He circled closer to the ancient cypress trees, taking in the feel of their scaly foliage and their bright, sharp smell with his ghostly senses. Onward, deep into the desert he went, over the Zoroastrians' old, crumbling Tower of Silence. He found the dunes, and his real heart soared with his dream body. He marveled at their greatness. The Alborz Mountains made a man feel small, and the Caspian awed with its power— but the sands were as eternal as they were changeable. Storms may have catapulted the grains to heaven, and old nomadic chiefs may have dotted the land with their tents, but it never amounted to anything at all. A man could lose himself in such vast nothingness, as surely as he could be lost in the forest mass of trees or the city crush of construction.
He reveled in the beauty of his dreamscape. He felt warm and peaceful, even as a cold and fearful wakefulness took hold of him.
"Daroga agha," it was Darius's voice speaking and Darius's hands shaking him, "Daroga agha khan. Daroga - agha - khan."
Oh, this was undoubtedly bad, if Darius could not decide which honorific to use. Nadir opened his eyes. Only the weakest hint of diffused light had found its way into his bedchamber. He turned and looked out of his window. Predawn— the fifth hour, perhaps, but no more than that.
"What is it?"
"Salman agha sent one of his deputies to fetch you," Darius pressed a glass of tea into Nadir's hand as soon as he was upright. "The morning watch found a body just outside of the city gates. The agha wants you to see it."
Nadir nodded and gulped down his tea. Salman had spent most of his life in the military and was called agha by virtue of his accomplishments, not his birth. He was not a frivolous man and did not rouse his superiors from their beds without good reason. "What else did the deputy say?"
Darius pulled out one of Nadir's best work coats. "Very little. He thought the victim might be noble, but I do not believe he personally saw the body."
"Very well. We shall be obliged to find out for ourselves." Nadir strapped on his sword and they departed.
His worst fear was to find the strangled body of some personal rival of the Shah's. Policy dictated a blind eye be turned in that direction, but it always served to put Nadir off his supper.
Near the city gates, though… that did not sound like Erik. Unless he was following some specific direction? Well, that did not sound like Erik either.
By the time they arrived at the gates of the city center, dawn had begun to assert itself in earnest. Salman stood with his back to the rising sun, casting black shadows over his eyes and catching pink light in his silver beard.
"Daroga," he said, "I've called for an undertaker from the mosque already, but I thought you would wish to examine him yourself."
The coldness that had plagued Nadir since Darius woke him transformed steadily in icy dread.
A corpse, he reminded himself, a corpse like a thousand other corpses he had seen. A corpse, sprawled on its belly, bloody wounds decorating its back, its face half-pressed into the ground. Nadir leaned down to get a better look.
Some corpses looked ancient beyond their mortal years, as if the instant of death had opened their bodies as well as their souls to infinity. Others looked young, the loss of life amounting to nothing more than a loss of a burden.
Feridoon looked very young.
Nadir felt very old.
Perhaps he should have accompanied the undertaker back to the mosque. He was Feridoon's closest male relative, if not by blood than certainly by geography. And affection? Perhaps. He should have taken the responsibility to wash the body and have it properly shrouded, but—
They had attendants at the mosque to see to such necessities, while he had other duties to the dead that could not be handed off so easily.
He waited, standing in the middle of the room, for a servant to fetch Mojgan out of her chambers. She came out quickly, smiling and trailing in the scents of jasmine and cardamom.
"Nadir agha," she said, wagging a finger at him, "I thought I told you—yesterday!—that I do not need you—" she stopped suddenly and looked at Nadir. "Oh. You're not here to check up on me. Are you?"
Why wouldn't she cry?
Darius had followed Nadir into Mojgan Banu's parlor. He stood near the back wall, ready to be of any service. Darius had attended upon many a grieving family, and he thought he knew exactly what to expect.
As soon as the Daroga announced that the master of the house was dead—something Darius was very sorry for, for he remembered that Feridoon Ali Jah had been kind to him on more than one occasion—there would be mayhem. There would be wailing and weeping and howling, grief enough to rouse Heaven.
And so there was. News traveled fast in the house, and not a single one of Feridoon's retainers or slaves remained silent.
But his lady? His wife, who should have been the chief mourner?
She sat on her divan, silent and stoic. The Daroga sat across from her, looking almost as confused as Darius felt. For a moment, her still hands left her lap. She ran them over her face once, twice.
Now, surely— but no. She took a deep breath and let her hands fall back down.
"What shall be done now?" she asked.
Had she never lost someone? Had she lived some charmed life, free of funerals?
Three days of deep mourning, Darius silently told her. Three days, when half of Mazandaran would wail for Feridoon Ali Jah because they had loved him; three days when the other half of Mazandaran would wail so no one would know of their indifference or their malice. Three days to grieve and pray and give voice to heartache; to consort with those who understood your pain, to console one another with tea and halvah and expressions of anguish.
But perhaps that was not what she was asking—indeed, that was not the answer the Daroga gave her. "You cannot return to your father's house yet. I will offer you what protection I can. I wish I could be certain that my aegis will be sufficient—but this—" the Daroga stopped suddenly, swallowed, and seemed closer to tears than Mojgan—"this was… quite brazen."
Mojgan nodded slowly. "I think I know better than to ask who—but I cannot help ask why?"
"I will answer what questions I can, when I can," the Daroga said. "In the meantime—"
"I know what happens in the meantime." Her voice was unexpectedly steely, and it startled Darius out of his confusion.
He thought on it for a moment. He did not think of the bereaved women he had encountered in day to day life— real life, as it was sometimes called— but of the heroines in his beloved epics.
Farangis may have mourned her dead husband for a year—but was Manijeh disabled by grief when her beloved was condemned? No, she was moved to action. Did Gordafarid, with her long hair hidden beneath a Roman helmet, weep for her slain father? No. She raged forward with battle cries, not tears. And in her rage she defeated Sohrab, and moved him to proclaim 'If all the daughters of Iran are like to thee, and go forth unto battle, none can stand against this land…'
Perhaps great ladies had no need for great demonstrations of grief. He looked at Mojgan again, with her eyelashes like raven's wings and eyes like dark old steel. The indifferent glaze was gone from those eyes, he noticed, and her face was no longer effigy-like in its composure. Her grief may have been silent, but it was no longer dormant. It was unnervingly tangible.
She still would not cry, he hazarded, at least not now. He supposed it really did not matter. He could cry for both of them.