Rain Born

by Zoha Kazemi

  Tirad takes a step back on the boat deck and looks horridly at the corpses of men and women hanging from the ladder steps. Their head and face flesh have been cut off, probably eaten by the seagulls. Who would do such a thing? Hang the bodies in open air instead of throwing them into the water or burn them according to the Saviour Rules? What Saviour Rules allows the killing of the innocent men and women healers of Parsana? They were just humble servants that did nothing in their lives but tending to the wounds and pains of others. It must be Mart’s work, to scare the rest of the sea people, use this to pressure them to cooperate with him the way he wants. Tirad bends and as he holds his head between his palms, he shouts. He screams from the bottom of his heart, as loud as the roaring thunders of the rain season. He then kneels down and throws up into the water. Dalia has gotten out of the cabin. She walks towards him with trembling legs. Tirad wants to take her back inside but Dalia glances at the bodies, she stands up straight for a second and then falls down.

  Tirad carries her heavy body inside. She is delirious again and keeps repeating the names of the dead people she had seen hanging from the ladder: Lealy… Armina… Ashid… Pejhan…etc. Tirad doesn’t know how she has recognised them all in one glance. It had taken him longer to say who is who. The slender, livid body with a stretched burn mark from head to toe was Lealy! Identifying Armina and the rest was easier. But he didn’t expect to find Lealy here, looking like this. She had definitely burned in the Oxan fire but had survived. And all this time, Tirad had abandoned her. He never even thought of returning to find her, even though he thought about her. He had no way back anyway. But Lealy must have come to find him. Then why didn’t she come to Avij? She must have known where he was hiding and had refused to tell Mart about it, punished like this by Mart and his soldiers. Tirad cannot imagine the pain she must have gone through all this time. Her weight loss and the livid skin show how she must have suffered continuously because of Mart and the Circle’s cruelty. Her burn mark covers one side of her body. How long did it take for the burns to heal and get herself to Parsana to befall into another disaster? And all this time, Tirad was living his happy diving life on Avij, getting used to the nausea after a dive? He deserves the worst punishments, the great disaster of the sea.

  Tirad sits behind the wheel and sails away from Parsana. He must take Dalia to the nearest ship before he loses her too. Dalia calls him. Tirad rolls the flashlight around. There is nothing but the dark waves. They are far away from the death frame of Parsana’s healers. Dalia calls him again. Tirad anchors the boat and goes to her. She keeps calling him, saying his name loud. Tirad moisturises her face and belly again and tries to pour more water in her mouth. He hasn’t eaten the whole day and doesn’t think he can because of the rancour he feels. Dalia drinks the water and Tirad lies by her side, caressing her head and face. Dalia becomes calm and falls into a deep sleep. Tirad doesn’t take it as a good sign.

  He should have gone up to Parsana and at least found her some medicine. Mart might have left some behind. But they are far from Parsana now, and he doesn’t know how to make his way up the ladder through the hanging bodies. How would he know which medicine to bring? He might bring her something that would worsen her condition. He should have tried it at least. If Dalia doesn’t survive until the next ship, he can’t forgive himself. Maybe he should have untied the bodies and thrown them into the water the Saviour way. Lealy, Armina and the other 19 bodies hanging from the ladder deserved the most respectful parting ceremony. Why had he run away? Why had he abandoned the ones that had helped him before? He was scared, confused, mad and heavy-hearted. He was worried for Dalia who had seen that horrific scene. He was wrong to run away again and he regrets it. But he can go back…before they get too far away from Parsana…if only his tired body, frustrated from all the despair, allows him to get up… He sees himself getting up…moving towards the wheel…the rocking of the boat…the smooth motion…just a little longer…he tries to stay awake… He has to go back…stay awake… He has to…

  Tirad feels a sudden banging on the boat hull. He sits up frightened. He didn’t want to fall asleep but he had. He turns around. Dalia is not there. The boat trembles and goes up and down. He rushes out. The boat lights are on but Dalia is not on the deck. He hurries towards the gunwale and sees a school of white fish attacking the boat, banging their bodies against the hull and striking it with their tales and muzzles. He can’t say how many of them there are. They keep coming up to the surface and diving back in. Where is Dalia? Tirad shouts her name and looks around the boat and on the waves until he finally sees her. She is on the surface surrounded by dolphins that turn around her in circles. Tirad turns on the flashlight, shining it on Dalia and the dolphins, hoping the strong beam would frighten off the fish. But the dolphins continue their dance-like turning around Dalia. Tirad stands on the gunwale to jump in the water and swim to her that Dalia’s sudden scream freezes him. There is blood all over her body, darkening the surface, turning the black water into red. Tirad jumps and swims towards her.

  The dolphins make their circle wider and tighter. As he swims, he sees one of the dolphins holding Dalia’s back under the surface, making her float in supine position. Her legs open under the water. He catches his breath and stays under to see the hairless baby slide out from between her legs. Tirad swims faster, moving her arms and thighs as fast as he can and trying not to lose sight of Dalia and the baby. The raindrops dull his vision and the seawater makes his eyes soar. His breathing sound is deafened by the squeaking song of the dolphins. He feels his heart’s hole is wide open again and he is breathless. The more he tries, the further he gets away from Dalia. But he won’t give in. He uses all his strength and swims forward. The dolphins dive in and the sky and the sea settle simultaneously.

  Tirad sees Dalia floating on the water. A dolphin is still holding her back with its muzzle. There is no sign of the baby. Tirad goes under the water and looks around with soaring eyes, searching for his baby. The dolphins go down deep circling around like a white cone in the water. A female dolphin is standing still in the centre of the cone with its baby dolphin. Tirad’s baby swims towards her and sticks to her body, wrapping its arms around the dolphin’s tail. The baby takes its head forward and seems to be nursing from the dolphin’s breast. Tirad can’t say whether his baby is a girl or a boy; its legs are conjoined, like Asin’s babies that Dalia had told him about. Tirad swims towards the dolphins to take his baby back. But the big dolphins start attacking him, pushing him back and not allowing him to move forward and swim. Tirad comes to the surface and takes another deep breath and dives in, trying to reach Dalia and the baby and the fish stop him again. He should have brought a knife with him!

  One of the dolphins goes under his leg, lifts him up from under his thigh and splashes him down again. The dolphin then takes his ankle in its muzzle and drags him on the sea surface to the boat. It doesn’t bite and won’t allow Tirad to free his leg from its teeth. Tirad climbs up the gunwale. He needs a knife to fight the dolphins back. He runs to the cabin and comes rushing back to the deck. The sea is calm. There is no sign of the dolphins. He rolls the flashlight around and shines it on the surface. The dolphins are swimming away from there, bowing on the waves and singing as they fade in the horizon. Dalia is floating on the water. Tirad takes the knife with him and swims towards her. The only dolphin left behind from the school is still lifting up Dalia as if taking care of her, not allowing her to drown. As soon as Tirad approaches, the dolphin dives in and swims towards the rest of them. Tirad takes Dalia in his arm and looks under the water. The baby is gone. There is no sign of it. Tirad drags the passed-out body of Dalia to the boat and lays her on the deck, under the cloudy sky that is pouring with rain.

  Chapter 35

  Tirad has covered his nose and mouth with a cloth. He starts from the lowest corpses. He goes to the first hanging body that the sharp light of the flashlight clears its face. It’s a young woman, probably a new healer trainer of the Parsana Ship. He cu
ts off the rope that dangles her from her tied up wrists. He tries not to hurt the bloodless, livid fingers that are fisted together. He wants to hold under her arms and carry her down, but the body is heavy and he can hardly keep his balance as it is. He lets the body slide down on the ship’s platform. He goes to the next body and the next. Every three to four body that he unleashes, he goes down on to the platform, carries them to the platform edge and throws them into the dark water. He doesn’t cry or sing the Saviour Departing Hymns; he consigns them back to the sea. He can’t find enough stones to attach to them so that they would stay down under the water. It is no use anyway; when their bodies get swollen, they will float on the surface. These bodies are to be feasted on by fish, whether under the water or floating. The seagulls had their share already and when the bodies come back to the surface, they will have to share them with the fish.

  The raindrops make his covering cloth wet and the stench of the bodies fills his nose, it’s the smell of rotting, pain and helplessness. He takes off the cloth to be able to breathe easier through mouth and stop the stench from entering his nose and finding its way down to his guts and make him want to vomit. The upper two lines of the bodies are the ones familiar to him. Tirad puts one foot between Pejhan’s head and Ashid’s shoulder and his other foot by Armina’s arm and Lealy’s leg and climes up to the deck. He pulls up the bodies onto the deck and looks at them. Armina had been stroked by a knife many times in his heart and stomach. There’s a gunshot wound on Ashid’s heart whose eyes are taken out by the seagulls. Pejhan’s body had been torn and eaten by the birds that he can’t say which cut is from a knife wound and which from a seagull’s beak. But Lealy’s body is just livid; there are no signs of gunshots or knife wounds on her. Even the seagulls had spared her. Tirad throws out the first three bodies into the sea and sits by Lealy’s side. Maybe she prefers him to sing the Departing Hymns for her. But if she had stayed true to the Saviour ways, what was she doing in Parsana? Tirad moves his fingers on her lifeless skins and caresses her burn marks.

  He looks at his own arm. His burn mark has nearly vanished. She must have gone through a great agony, or maybe she had passed out like he did, with the first burning pains. But her healing time must have been long and difficult. How long did it take for all this vast skin to be redressed again? He wants to kiss her lips, for the first and the last time, just to say goodbye. He had this chance many times before, but had stopped, contenting himself to her sisterly arm and then spending the whole night with the image of her lips, and then burning away the faulty thought in the next morning’s Spawn-Scorching ceremony. Lealy wanted to leave the Saviour Ship with him and he had insisted to stay and become a remarkable disciple. But his place was never there although he regrets having left his ignorant, peaceful servant life on the Ship. It was easier not to know and to be happy with what little he had. He regrets the life he could have with Lealy if they had long escaped the Saviour Ship together. Maybe it would have been an easier, love-filled life without all the problems that Mart had created for them. He regrets the warmth of Lealy’s lustre lips that he has lost forever. Tirad lowers his face to hers for the departing kiss, asking her to forgive him for abandoning her in Oxan, for not having returned to find her and for choosing Dalia over her, even though he is not sure if he had truly chosen Dalia or fate had brought them together, making them man and wife. Dalia is still not well; she is burning with fever and waiting for him to find some medicine to cool down her temperature. Tirad backs off his face. Kissing Lealy won’t put things right, it would only upset Dalia. Lealy was used to his reserved ways, wanting to go on with her and resisting his desires at the last moment. He will stay the same towards her even this last time. Tirad takes her body to the edge of the deck and throws her down into the sea, under the crimson sky of the dawn. He sets off to the cabins and hopes Dalia would turn off the flashlight on the boat as the sun is coming up.

  He roams about all the cabins. Nothing is left on the shelves, neither books nor medicine. They have taken them all with them. The cabin walls, floors and the patient’s beds have blood splashes all over them. Dalia had told him to look for bottles of distilled ginger, yarrow, raisins, peppermint or cinnamon powder. She had said they all looked alike and the bottles are usually labelled. Mart has taken all the medicine, probably needs them to treat his wounded soldiers after the battles, and where better than Parsana to find so much free medicine? He sees a small black bottle, rolled down by a trunk in one of the cabins. He picks it up. The bottle doesn’t have a cork and a label but there is little liquid left at the bottom of it. He looks around to find the cork but the trunk seems more appealing. The trunk door opens after Tirad punches it a few times. It appears to be empty in the dim light of the cabin. Yet he sits down and rolls his torch inside the knee-high trunk. The black bottom of the trunk seems bulged. He stretches his hand and takes out the shark leather bag.

  He looks inside. There are a few medicine bottles, a comb and a small mirror and some papers in the bag. He looks at the papers. One of them has the picture of a crushed snake on it, drawn with charcoal. Tirad feels shocked to see his own drawing…the last days of the Saviour Island, his teaching classes and the dead body of the little water snake comes rushing to his mind. He couldn’t forget the snake until he had sketched it on paper. This bag must have belonged to Lealy! No one else would carry Tirad’s drawings with them. Tirad hangs the bag on his shoulder and looks around the room more carefully. There are few drops of blood on the planks beside the trunk. He can’t find anything useful. He searches the rest of the cabins. The sun has risen and the abandoned Parsana Ship looks even more vacant and dead under the early morning light. He goes back to the deck, climbs down the ladder and jumps to his boat from the platform.

  Dalia confirms. This is indeed Lealy’s bag and even though the bottles are just marked with ticks and crosses, Dalia can tell which ones can be good for her from the smell of the liquids inside. She has never before seen the black bottle Tirad had found by the trunk and says it looks suspicions. She puts it aside and asks Tirad to bring her some water to moisten her head. Tirad wants to go to the central ship. Even though he knows Mart has left nothing behind, but he hopes to find some of Armina’s books. The medical books might be useful to Mart, but he probably doesn’t have any use for Armina’s and might have left them behind. Dalia doesn’t object. She seems better, physically, but having lost her baby has made her look like Asin: depressed and down. Tirad brings her some water. She washes her head and body, takes some medicine from a bottle and lies down covering herself with a blanket, pretending to go to sleep. Tirad looks at her as he goes out of the cabin. She has curled up in a foetal position and is crying slowly under the blanket. He goes back to her, takes her in his arms, kisses her and asks her to forgive him. He doesn’t know why he is asking for forgiveness. He shares the same loss and pain as Dalia does, it was his baby too. If Tirad couldn’t take back the semi-dolphin baby, Dalia was to blame for having given it to them in the first place. There is no use in blaming each other. He just wants her to calm down. He picks up the suspicious black bottle and takes it out with him and throws it into the water on his way. He swims to the platform of the central ship.

  Tirad was right. Mart had swept the central ship as well. He must have cleared the western ship too: the storage cabins for food and fuel. He goes down three levels to Armina’s cabin floor, even though he has no hope of finding anything there, but having come all this way, he just wants to make sure. Armina’s books are gone. There are some torn pages over the floor. He bends and picks them up one by one. There are mostly accounting pages, from a cheap notebook like the ones the Oxan gate guards use for recording the entries and exits of passengers and goods. He looks at them page by page and throws them down; only keeping the ones with blank spaces that could be used for drawing. He walks to the cabin door, but his foot gets stuck on a plank that seems out of its place. He shines his torch on the protruding plank and takes it out. There is a hole beneath the plan
k, deep enough to hold a small box or a few books. He takes out the few pages that lie at the bottom of the shallow hole. They are more accounting pages. He gets up and looks at them carefully making sure nothing useful is written on them and throws them down. He searches the cabin with his torch one more time before reaching the door.

  Armina’s green scarf has fallen on the floor, beneath the cabin window. He remembers it as she tied and untied it on her head a few times. He takes the scarf in his hands. He was right before. There is something inside the two-layered scarf, something paper like. He tears the scarf edge with his teeth and opens it up. An old, rotting paper appears out of the green fabric layers. He tries not to dust the paper with the pressure of his fingers and takes it out carefully. The paper hidden like this, so close to Armina must possess important information! The handwriting looks familiar. He shines the torch on the yellow old paper. It’s Parsana’s handwriting with the same title ‘Saviour’s Prophecies’! There is a recent writing on the edges of the page that he doesn’t recognise but seems to be Armina’s from the content of it. She has written: ‘I hope Tirad can prove the rightness of this prophecy…’ He sits down on the cabin floor, like the way he had sat in front of Armina last year. He places the torn scarf on his knees and starts reading the rest of the Parsana handwritten pages that Hurmaz had given him before.

  Parsana narrates from the Saviour, “As time passes and people settle on the ships, living on the water for a long period, a genetic mutation will begin to make them more compatible to their new ecosystem. This genetic mutation will bring the human species closer to the aquatic species that are similar to humans in size, big fish like dolphins and sharks. The first evolution babies may be deformed or malformed and not survive, causing the death of their mothers giving birth to the unhealthy baby. But as time passes, they will become more complete in their own form, yet they might not survive in human atmospheres or even be killed by them, not wanting to keep the peculiar creatures. This process will go on until the new human species is formed and finds a way to survive outside of the ships and lands. This evolution is inevitable but I cannot say when it will happen, maybe in a hundred years’ time, three hundred or more…”