Beginning
They came at night.
It was wet season, warm, and a breeze shambled liquidly from an open window. My bedsheet was coarse black fabric, and I always wrapped it tightly around me. A sandpaper caress, as if a timid mouse had its hole lined with snakeskin.
I heard at first the sound of breaking glass and heavy footsteps.
What Being Khanid Means
“We Khanid are chosen by God. First of all, God ordains us to be righteous. That is what being Khanid means. This is a beautiful thing.” When my Father taught, he always stood. Even at the dinner table.
If he intended to instruct, or to rant as my brother always said, he would put his cutlery down, push his chair back and stand. He would get a faraway look in his eye, as if he were addressing an invisible audience. His voice, always deep, would grow sonorous and he would pause for effect after making particularly stern pronouncements.
“And what is it to be righteous? To hold the will of God close to one’s heart. To understand, that with every fibre of one’s being, that one is God’s instrument.”
Sounds
A dull echo on the faux-wood floor.
There is a recess, behind the hanging rail for my clothes. My brother used to hide his lascivious Gallentean zines here. I scuttle into it. One of my dresses, high necked and white, hangs in front of me. A small box of love letters, secreted here, pokes into my thigh.
My mother screams from another part of the house.
I try to slow my breathing from a ragged pant.
A muffled conversation bleeds through the polymer wall, warm against my ear. I can’t make out the words.
There are two thuds, and the second I can feel through my damp palms, pressed against the ground.
I bite my tongue, fighting the urge to cry out, and my mouth fills with the taste of blood, like warm oozing rust.
Dreams of Athra
I am straddling some unfamiliar quadruped on a green field. In my hand, shaft resting against my thigh, is a long lance, tipped jaggedly with burnished steel.
Others start to form behind me. I don’t look around, but I feel them there, shadows at the edge of my vision.
Someone starts to yell, to scream. It is a wordless cry, defiant, hurled across the field like a vicious barbed challenge. I realise that I am calling out also, or maybe it was me in the beginning. I’m never sure.
As a single organism, a wave, a gout of fire, we start to move across the fields, the creatures beneath us cascading a demented rhythmic counterpoint to our cries with the percussion of their movement.
We lower our lances dipped at the chests of distant enemies.
The point of impact is where I always wake up, sweating, bedsheets kicked to the floor and with a mouth like the desert.
Uncomfortable Dinner
“We’re ready to release our manifesto.” My father emphasised his point by gesturing wildly with his knife.
My mother looked at him and chewed.
“This will be historic.” A neglected morsel was still perched on his fork.
She took a deep breath.
“There is no way that this will fail to get their attention.”
“Is that desirable?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Of course. How else will things change? We’re a conservative people. We need to be slapped in the face to be woken up.”
My mother sighed. “Just be careful how hard you slap.” Despite the fact that she had finished eating, she swallowed. She was looking at her plate and drumming her fingers on the table.
The Sea
And when I heard my father’s voice rumbling from far off, through the house, it was as if my head had been thrust underwater, and my brother was yelling at me from above. But I could only make out the pitch and timbre of his voice, obscured as it was by the sound of rolling pebbles and the distant echo of waves crashing on the shore. Then I would open my eyes in the sea and realise it was night, and they would not sting, not for a second.
It was just like that, hearing my father scream in pain.
Slavery
“Slavery benefits only the powerful.” My father loomed over the breakfast table. His dark eyes fixed on each of us in turn. My brother’s eyes flicked up from the Commentaries of St. Tetrimon for a moment to look at my father, then back down.
“When considering a moral question, one must ask, Cui bono?” He pointed at me. “Translate.”
“Um.... as benefit to whom?”
“I would have accepted: Who benefits?” my father nodded. “But yes. And who benefits from slavery?”
He looked at both of us. I looked at my brother. My brother looked at his book.
I sighed. “Well, the rich holders benefit, I guess....”
“Why?” my father interrupted.
“It keeps them economically powerful, because they have a pool of very cheap labour to call upon.”
My father made an impatient gesture with his hand. “Go on.”
“And the more money they have, the more influence they have. Look at the Tash-Murkons over in the Empire.”
“Good. Who else benefits?”
And so on.
Winds
The wind had shifted, now thick with the promise of rain from the south. It rattled the louvred doors, and for a moment, the other sounds were drowned out.
Then, I could hear muffled sobbing which was muted by a chorus of booted feet, fading away.
Tear-streaks turned cool on my cheeks, as the breeze converged.
Dance, zephyr, shift and change, gust and wane, and scatter feathers like forgotten sorrows, laughing dominoes, onward towards evening.
End
I crawled out.
Dawn was fingering the edges of my window-sill, and I could hear gulls cry and plead in the distance as they picked at dead fish on the shore.
My parents’ room was on the other side of the house. In the corridor outside, a vase belonging to my mother was shattered, purple flowers from her garden trampled on the ground. Water was pooling.
Inside, blood made a second pool, and it was across the wall in a neat pattern of tiny flecks.
Each of my hands white-knuckled the other. Each of my hands trembled. Each of my hands twisted like angry churches.
My parents were gone, their bedsheets scattered.
Their abductors were gone, their boots scuffing the polish of the floor.
They came at night.
