"Beti," he greeted her from the top of the stone staircase of the undercroft.
"Baba," she replied, unmoving, her silk-draped form embracing the top of the cold, marble tomb. "He is dead."
Through the smoke of the burning bits of old furniture, he saw the sparkle of gold bangles on her wrists, and soft orange light reflected from the crystals that had grown over time around the white marble of the tomb and its base. He cleared his throat of the acrid smoke, his eyes watering with its sting.
"How was he called?"
"Mine." She stretched a delicate hand across the smooth stone as if in a caress, her long, yellowed nails catching on the encrustations of crystals that had formed atop it. "Husband. Father. Emperor. Beloved."
From his vantage at the top of the stairs leading down to the undercroft, he could see directly through the opening of the inner walls that surrounded the tomb. Columns rose outside the structure, holding up the mausoleum above, each encrusted with the same pale orange crystal formation. Through the marble of the walls, veins of orangish crystal threaded like an infection that was growing within them. He nodded to himself in approval, pleased at what he saw.
"He had a name."
"Gurkani," she breathed, as if the scent of jasmine and camphor had filled her lungs.
He took two steps down the staircase, tentative. "I'm sorry I did not get to meet him," he consoled.
Her hands curled, her broken nails scratching at the stone. "You were gone centuries before he was born, baba. Before he was taken from me."
The earth shook, throwing him off balance and threatening to topple him. Grit and bits of stone sifted down from the ceiling above into his eyes, and he covered his head, lest a stone block fall from above. When the earth settled, he found his footing again and brushed the stone dust from his full black beard and from his shoulders.
"I was…delayed," he offered.
She turned her face to him then, still embracing the tomb. Wild, unkempt hair escaped the green, silken hijab that framed a face still beautiful and young, though dirty and worn by grief. "Why did you go, baba?"
"I would rather have been here." He took two more steps down the staircase, now nearing the bottom. "Was I away long?"
"Long enough for me to love and for him to die. That is all of time." Her eyes returned to the carvings and crystals of the tomb.
Her gaze averted from him, he turned his eyes to the undercroft. The lightly orange crystals splintered the light from the fires across the walls and the ceiling, amplifying it in sprays that drew his eye first here, then there, chasing the gleams as they bounded about. With but a few steps more, he reached the floor and ran his hand lightly atop the wall of the partial enclosure. Smooth marble gave way to sharp projections of crystal. As his finger was sliced by an edge of the orange substance, he drew it to his lips to nurse the blood from his wound. His finger tasted of salt on his lips–something more than the salt of his blood. Still, it would suffice.
"Your grief is sharp, my beti. Would that I could ease your suffering." The brocaded silk of his jama rustled as he reached a hand out to her, a hand she neither saw nor took. "I, too, grieved, when I lost you, my daughter. But now I have found you again."
She remained unmoved, both from the tomb and by his words. No, she had not mourned the loss of her father–such as he had been. The part of him that would have been saddened by that and filled with regret whispered to him from the abyss that it had been consigned to centuries ago, but its words did not touch his heart.
"But he is gone, my sweet, and shall not return," he soothed her.
Her head dipped to touch the marble with grief.
"The love that you shared is now but a memory that you carry in your heart and cannot be rekindled."
A low moan rumbled in her throat and her back arched.
"What sadness must consume you, to linger here for ages as the bones of the one you called beloved turn to dust."
With her palms pressed flat against the tomb, she pressed herself up, and her moan became a low wail.
"Forgotten," he pressed.
The earth trembled, and he placed a steadying hand on the enclosure wall. Dust began again to sift down, but he ignored it.
"Unloved." He fixed his eyes on the top of the tomb, on the crystal that encrusted it.
"Alone."
Her wail became a shriek of despair that pierced through him. Her cry muffled the crashing of stones that fell from above and the grinding of the columns against the floor as they threatened to shift and tumble. The dirt below him flowed like a mudslide, slipping his feet out from under him, and he fell to the dry floor with a cry of his own. Stone dust and dislodged dirt obscured the light of the fires, punctuated by the refractions from the crystal like stars in a dusk sky.
Assuring himself that he was still whole, he rose again to the settled earth. His death would have been a terrible inconvenience.
She had collapsed again on the tomb, overcome by sadness, salty tears rolling from her cheeks onto the marble. Perhaps he had pushed her too far. But he had to know.
As the light brightened through the settling dust, he saw new crystals rising from atop the tomb and on the walls. Growing like a speedy plant, it rose in jagged, sharp, squared columns. Pale orange tinted the mostly-translucent halite crystals, each but a finger's length but thicker than quartz or amethyst.
He quickly erased the smile that began to stretch across his lips.
"What cold comfort I bring, my beti. An unwelcome guest, when all I would hope would be to bring you some peace."
"Go," she pleaded, so hushed and empty that he could not be certain he had heard her.
He moved, but not away, not out. With gentle step, he circled the tomb, saying as he moved, "Would that life were like the moon, waxing and waning, but never wholly gone from us."
"Leave us," she whispered.
Still he moved, close to the other end of the tomb. "But the life of these people comes to an end and is no more."
"You are of these people. And yet you have managed to return after countless years to offer me the bitter tongue of your sympathy."
"Something of them lives on, though," he countered, ignoring the point she had so adroitly made. He stopped at the far end of the tomb, directly across from where she lay draped across her end.
"Memories," she hissed.
"Children."
At his word, she slowly raised her head as if waking, her beautiful, haunted eyes finally meeting his past the errant wisps of hair that fell over her face.
She followed as he led her up the stone steps into the azure sunlight that flooded the main level through the blue glass dome that topped the mahal. He would not have presumed to offer his hand. She would not have taken it. Still, she followed his slow steps into the main hall, its green and gold tessellated floor tiles covered with a near-unbroken layer of dust, but for the previous passing of his feet. She had no eyes for the riches that adorned the tomb house of her husband, for the elegant furniture decaying around her, or the carved screens shielding the private quarter they passed through. Her eyes were warily fixed on a promise ahead of her.
He'd left one side of the massive bronze doors open upon his entry, leading first into shadow, and beyond, a bright sun. Stepping through into the shade of the the iwan, he moved aside, beckoning her forward. Silent but for the rustle of her silken peshwaj, she proceeded to the edge of the iwan, just beyond the touch of the sun she had not seen for many centuries, while he remained deep in the shadows, watching her.
From her vantage, she could see the Necropolis spread out before and below her. High on a bluff above the tombs of those who had come before and after, her eye stretched south to the edge of the precipice that plunged to the lowlands below, leaving nothing but an impossibly wide sky and, in the distance, the peaks of mountains. At her questioning look back and him, he nodded for her to look down into the field below her bluff.
Red stretched across the area of tombs, like a field of blood, moving as if it flowed slowly across the land between the buildings. It was the wind, she realized, causing the blood red flowers that filled most of the area to sway. They had not been there when she had entered her husband's mahal, never to step outside again until now. Some few of the tombs amongst the bloody field she knew—those of her husband's ancestors. But most must have been built in the years since. So much death. Was this what he meant to show her? The death of all those who came after her?
Starting to turn back, to go once more to her beloved, she saw movement below. A man on the path, carefully threading his way through the red flowers, avoiding their swaying touch as if they were myriad fingers trying to reach him. When he turned and she saw his face, her heart leapt and she clutched her chest against broken hope. He was tall and straight, proud. His pagri struggled to contain a head of thick hair the color of polished onyx. His full, trimmed beard shield lips set in a sad smile. And his eyes…
It was her Gurkani, come at last to her again! After centuries apart, he had returned! Blessings to Iwa!
She stepped into the light at the top of the stairs leading down from the iwan and reached her trembling hand out to him. Disbelief and joy let her do nothing more.
But it was enough. He saw her from the field below and raised his hand as well. With careful step, he threaded the flowers to the foot of the steps. Vaguely, she took note of the man further behind him, his head draped in a loose purple shawl, the purple of his plain jama clashing with the sanguine blooms, but she had eyes only for her Gurkani as he neared the bluff. As he approached, he disappeared below the edge, and she lifted her skirts to trace carefully to the top of grand stairs that rose up the cliff. There she waited, clasping her heart in her chest as he climbed, his face turning at times to gaze up at her.
With his each step, her joy turned first to uncertainty, her brow knitting. Had she misremembered her beloved's face after so many centuries? Had he come back changed? Then to frustration. It was a trick, a cheat. It wasn't her beloved. But his eyes—her eyes. No, it wasn't her beloved. It wasn't Gurkani the man promised. But it was a part of him. And of her.
"Few visit the mahal of Gurkani, Auntie," he smiled to her as he topped the stairs. "I hope he was a gracious host to you."
Wordlessly, she placed a hand on his cheek. His dark irises were encircled by a fiery thin orange gleam, flashing like the corona of the sun during an eclipse. He was of her. Even now, after all this time. Her line lived on, and Gurkani lived in him.
"Ever gracious, but now I must go." She moved her hand from his face to take his arm. "Who is it that will help this widow down these unsteady steps?"
He placed a sun-warmed hand atop hers.
"Musa," he smiled at her as he led her down the steps. "Musa al-Tayyib."
From the shadows of the iwan, the man watched them until they disappeared behind the edge of the bluff.