“Sorry,” said Waray dejectedly. She was staring remorsefully at her jam-covered hands.
Ashtadukht shook out her arms and legs, and blew out a few steadying breaths. “Okay. Okay. It’s over. Calm down.”
“Am calm. Sticky, too.”
“Not you, me. I nearly panicked out there.” She looked over at Waray, replayed the encounter, and couldn’t contain her chuckle. “That was some reaction you had back there.”
The half-div gave a sharp tilt of her head. “Thought he was going to turn me inside out.” She tilted further. “I wanted šo-badly to run, but my šo-rooted feet wouldn’t budge.”
“Well, it’s best that you didn’t, and that he thought you were amusing.”
Waray shrugged and started to hum, which was strange due to its agreeable melody; she’d often hummed on their trip together, and it was always just out of reach of being musical. Ashtadukht took a seat beside her and tuned her ear to it.
At first it was just an intriguing tune. But as she listened it gradually coalesced with the jauntily hammered strings of a santur that Waray had somehow picked from the din outside. It was a lovely tune that perfectly suited and embodied the theme of the holiday. Her fascination eventually overcame her, and she spoke up.
“You know,” she began, “divs are by nature inharmonious. It’s impossible for them to produce anything melodic. Yet you’re doing a fine job of it.”
Waray just kept humming while licking the jam from her palm.
Ashtadukht wondered whether Waray being half human had anything to do with it, and that reminded her of the history behind Mehrgan: that she had a stake in both sides.
“Waray,” she prodded. “Do you happen to know why we celebrate Mehrgan?”
“Food?” the half-div mouthed, now sucking on two fingers.
“Well, it does take place during the harvest season. So yes, food. But there’s more to it than that.” She leaned back and closed her eyes, relieved to be free of the throngs. “Friendship, goodness, community, that the Truth will ultimately triumph over the Lie. Those are all values celebrated due in part to the history that continues to inspire the festival. It all stems from events that took place a long, long time ago.
“For a great many years, the great king Jam ruled all of the world—divs and men alike. All bowed to him, and in turn he bettered the lives of men by ruling justly and introducing many new ideas and inventions that we take for granted today. Everything from maritime travel to silk to wine to—” She gestured at her sacred girdle. “To this. More than that, it was through him that Ohrmazd increased the size of the land to accommodate the many inhabitants that thrive on it.”
Ashtadukht yawned and glanced over at Waray, who was staring blankly at the ceiling, hands on her belly. “Am I boring you?” she asked.
“Nngh. Don’t stop. Your dull story distracts me from being šo-stuffed.”
Ashtadukht smiled drowsily. “I’d hoped you’d appreciate it. The times when father would sit us down for a story were always so exciting. I guess there’s also merit in telling a tale simply to soothe. Well, eventually there arose a ne’er-do-well named Dahag: a redoubtable sorcerer who sought to bring destruction to the world. A champion of the Lie. He set upon Jam and brought him low, thus bringing the hero-king’s prosperous reign to an end.
“It’s said that Dahag was once a normal man who, upon pledging allegiance to Ahriman and the Lie, sprouted a pair of snake heads from his shoulders, which were monstrous and whispered evil things into his ears. He ruled for centuries, during which oppression and destitution were rampant.
“Eventually, a valiant blacksmith by the name of Kaveh harnessed the unrest to fuel an outright rebellion against the malignant Dahag. He tied his apron to a spear to use as a standard for his forces to rally behind. And with that he set in motion the downfall of Dahag. Through him, the collective voice of resistance bade the mighty Fredon, a descendant of Jam, to join the righteous rebellion.
“Together, they flushed the country of Dahag’s host, while Dahag himself was already fleeing in fear. They swept across Iran and eventually confronted Dahag. There, Fredon overcame the despot with a powerful blow from his mace, only to find that the injury gushed all manner of vile creatures. So instead of doing him in—and in turn flooding the world with snakes—Fredon imprisoned Dahag in Mount Damavand, where he waits for the end times and his eventual yet ultimately futile revenge.
“That’s the significance of Mehrgan. Fredon established this holiday long ago to celebrate the victory of the Truth over the Lie, and as a complement to Nowruz, which was established by his father, Jam.”
Ashtadukht expelled another yawn. The bustle outside hadn’t quietened at all; if anything, it’d gotten louder. It seemed very far away, though. She smacked her lips and rolled her head to address Waray, only to find the half-div dozing contentedly, replete with an open mouth and a thread of drool.
“You’ve the right idea,” she said, and drifted off soon thereafter.
V
The companions had been travelling together for some time now, somehow shimmying along that perilous ledge where disputes and conflicts of personality tend to prevent people from standing one another for lengthy periods of time. There was a precarious balance to their composition: one would always keep the other or others in check. Waray would sometimes disappear for days, but she’d always find her way back.
They were on a leisurely course through northwestern Iran by way of Lake Chichast, and had stopped to admire a flock of wading birds that had gathered to pluck shrimp from its shallow, salty waters.
As far as Ashtadukht was concerned, it was nothing more than an excuse to rest.
“Say,” she said to Waray, who was gagging and cleaning her tongue of an ill-advised gulp of lake water much to Tirdad’s amusement, “you haven’t mentioned your family at all since we set out. I thought maybe we’d look into it.”
She had been waiting for the half-div to bring it up on her own, but after so long together, it didn’t seem to Ashtadukht like that was going to happen.
Waray abruptly ceased her theatrics. She swallowed hard, and the agonized expression that followed was too severe to be caused by concentrated salt water. She sagged to her rear and tightly hugged her knees.
Tirdad raised his eyebrows at his cousin but said nothing. He had nothing to offer.
With some complaint from her aching bones, Ashtadukht crawled over and took a seat directly in front of the half-div. “I don’t mean to dredge up bad memories,” she said gingerly. “I just want to help.”
The soul-deep sadness that dimmed Waray’s eyes was the same as before. Like it was breaking her just to remember, threatening to snuff out her fire altogether. Ashtadukht took her hand, and Waray responded with a white-knuckled grip.
“I’ve contacts who can help you find them. A network across all of Iran. Let me help you.” She spoke softly, with a delicacy she didn’t often care to use, and endured the pain of Waray’s grasp.
The half-div angled her head and emitted a buzzing whine. Ashtadukht responded by stroking the scales along her forearm. The whine flared then softened considerably.
Waray surfaced from whatever personal hell she suffered to mutter, “I’m searching.” Her grip intensified; her head angled further. She was patently fighting to stay above water. “Searching for family.”
“I need more than that. Come, tell me.”
“You šo-wretched people hated us, overthrew him. Why?” The deep-seated sadness gave way to a brief explosion of fury before quickly surging back to drown it out. “Why? Told sis to run with him. Would hold them off myself. Fought hard. With everything I had.”
“Overthrew?”
Waray nodded, or her head drooped further into its tilt. Ashtadukht couldn’t quite tell. “Can’t find them,” she said plaintively. “Why can’t I find them?”
Ashtadukht frowned and moved her stroking to Waray’s scalp. “How long has it been?”
“Centuries. So long.”
“Do you know how long exactly?”
“. . .” Only a thousand-yard stare.
“Waray?”
“. . .”
“Waray?”
“. . .”
“I think that is enough,” said Tirdad, who despite his well-earned prejudice for divs, especially this one in particular (the pranks were unremitting), could bear it no longer. “You push too far and you will regret it.”
Ashtadukht sighed, gave the half-div a final pat, and got to her feet. “I only want to help.”
“Sometimes you are too adamant in your helping. This is clearly unpleasant for her.”
“I know, I know.”
“It seems to me that she had a sister, and they were connected to a ruler who was overthrown some centuries ago.”
Ashtadukht patted down her tunic, still trained on Waray, who was in turn trained on nothing in particular. “It isn’t much, but it’s a start. I’ll see if anything turns up.”
• • • • •
Tirdad was taking a second stock of their supplies, wondering how three pinecones had made it in, when he spotted a lone rider barrelling toward them in the distance. He brandished his sword and gently rocked Ashtadukht awake. “We have company.”
She groaned and sat up, favouring her back as she did. “Not a good day for company. How many?”
“At least one.”
Ashtadukht answered his deadpan response by lying back down. “You take care of it then.” She waved her arm dismissively. “Get Waray to help if she’s returned.”
“Ha.” If the half-div had demonstrated anything since obtaining a bow—from, well, who knows where she’d pilfered it from—it’s that she was an affront to archery. “I only meant that I cannot tell, but I will see to it nevertheless.”
Tirdad faced the oncoming rider to find Waray standing there, bow readied and buoyantly bouncing on her heels. “Come back for the action, have you?”
She flashed her crooked grin and canted her head. “Had some šo-tasty eggs.”
“Do you not get sick of bird eggs? Or eggs at all?”
Waray licked her lips. “Do you get sick of watching your cousin’s šo-swaying rump?”
Tirdad gave her a beetle-browed snort and pointedly turned his back to the camp to face the fast-approaching rider. “I hope you can at least hit the broad side of a horse,” he cut as the horseman neared. Waray lifted her bow to do just that, but he stayed it with his free hand. “Do not.”
And to the rider: “Well met, traveller. What has you in such a hurry?”
The horseman drew to a stop, and if his expression did not saliently convey his terror, the panic in his voice did. “Off with you!” he shouted. “Scatter, as those before you could not!”
He shooed them with both arms as if they were a pair of obstinate rabbits making a feast of his garden. “A towering forty-armed div has already destroyed two villages like so much wind. Now it marches this way. I must warn the cities ahead!” He spurred his horse. “Flee or die!” he cried as he rode off.
“Well,” said Tirdad, perplexed. “That was dramatic.”
“Šo-dramatic,” concurred Waray.
“Did you hear that, cousin?” Tirdad called over his shoulder.
“All of it,” she replied, and her tone made it apparent she meant more than just the exchange with the rider. “A forty-armed div running amuck? Duty sometimes calls on the worst of days.”
No longer capable of containing the urge, Waray whooped and fired an arrow at the clouds.
“I take it that means we are throwing ourselves in front of this alleged div?” asked Tirdad.
“Nothing so brash is what I’d like to say, but when a forty-armed div goes on a rampage it doesn’t see reason. I’ll try, but . . .” Ashtadukht shook her head and sighed.
“Have you dealt with one in the past?”
“No,” she curtly replied and busied herself with rolling the beds. She refused to show them her fear. Ashtadukht was seriously considering running, or running in the guise of something less disgraceful—and as it happened, punishable. Retreating, maybe.
It was during her frustrated decamping that she happened upon her extra pair of undergarments. This was especially noteworthy because they were in her cousin’s bed. Her jaw dropped; her face lost its sickly yellow cast to a flood of coral. “Tirdad,” she articulated more than said: fuming sometimes has that effect.
“Hmm?”
“What Waray mentioned earlier about your . . . lecherous gaze, is it true?”
“Why would you poss—” Tirdad sensed something icy boring into his soul, something that drew his attention from his packing to see Ashtadukht with the deepest, most vitriolic scowl he had ever seen. More damning than that were the undergarments she clenched in trembling fists over his sleeping arrangements. He swallowed.
“Tirdad.” Her timbre was the special breed of calm you learned to preserve if you valued your health. “Answer me.”
Tirdad grimaced; it was as if a sandstorm had swept across his tongue. Maybe he had caught himself ogling here and there. Well, more often than that, he admitted. He refused to lie about it; however, he also knew the truth would tread dangerously upon that calm wrath.
Nearby, Waray gamboled like a clam at high tide through the wildflower-laden field that hugged the lakeshore, in search of an arrow she’d likely never find. This was obviously another one of her pranks, and it really got his blood boiling.
“I know what it looks like” is the response he clung to right as it threatened to leap through his lips. No innocent man, or no man who had been found innocent, had ever muttered those words. Instead, he gestured at Waray. “Another one of her pranks, cousin. You are no doubt a moon-faced silver-skinned woman, but I have too much respect for you to stoop so low as to steal your undergarments.”
Ashtadukht narrowed her eyes. He was clearly trying to flatter her. She hadn’t once been moon-faced or silver-skinned or like a willow tree or any of the descriptors poets would use when delineating a female’s beauty. But he had a point.
She turned her glare on Waray, who had somehow located her arrow—much to the chagrin of archers everywhere—and was now sitting chin in palms while enjoying the show. “Waray,” she called. “Come here a moment, won’t you?”
After the half-div had blithely trotted over, Ashtadukht indicated the undergarments. “Did you put these here?”
Waray tapped at the tip of the arrow, pursed her lips, and tilted her head in affected deliberation. “No,” she said at length, not at all familiar with the hazards of a stormy calm. She curled her upper lip and leaned in. “Tirdad must be a šo-creepy pervert. What’d he do? Sniff them? Stroke his feathered duckbill with them? Are we safe around him?”
“Now listen here,” objected Tirdad. “That is going too far. Surely you—why are you smiling?”
A snigger escaped, and Ashtadukht cursed her weakness. She should be irate! Waray always had a way of turning these things around.
“Feathered duckbill? Really?” She shook her head and released a defeated sigh. Ashtadukht stared through the worn, stained silk in her hands. They could all be dead before the next dawn.
“Finish packing,” she said with an air of confidence, chin raised. “We’ve a div to catch.”
• • • • •
Waray shivered, huddled on a hill above her sleeping cohorts, and silently cursed the cold. It was well past midnight, and Waray was finding it difficult to distract herself from the light snow that powdered her head and shoulders and made her out to be some disgruntled Turkish delight of a viper. A gibbous moon cast its nacreous sheen on the snow-dusted slope and sparsely vegetated field just below her perch, where she sat on the toe of a ridge. The view might have been nice if it had any prospects of distraction—even a tiny grove or cave would have sufficed—and if she weren’t too freezing to go in search of entertainment to begin with.
Being half div meant that she was more active after sunset than humans, so naturally
she’d been charged with keeping watch while the others slept. Waray didn’t mind on most nights; neither did she do much in the way of keeping watch on most nights.
One of many in a succession of irksome snowflakes found the tip of her nose and planted its frosty standard there. “You and your šo-cursed bloodline are really beginning to ruffle my feathers,” she hissed as she wiped it with her sleeve. “Stinking vendetta.”
The ground shook.
Waray gave it a pat. “Not you.”
It shook again.
“Are they irking you, too?”
It continued to tremble in regular order much like the approaching footsteps of some gargantuan div, which as it happened, was exactly what crested the ridge. To Waray’s infrared receptors it seemed as though an overlarge sun straddled the height of the hill.
Waray blinked. She angled her head so that it looked like the div was peeking at her from around a corner. It wasn’t that she didn’t recognize the danger. It was just so damn cold that she didn’t feel particularly keen on dealing with it. A misty breath later and self-preservation kicked in. She high-tailed it to the camp, waving her arms and shouting, “A div this way comes!”
Ashtadukht shot to her feet, wide-eyed and fully awake in an instant. The earth trembled beneath her, and she peered past a sprinting, stumbling Waray to the forty-armed div, which glowed with a milky aura due to its blocking the moon. She shuddered.
It was nearly as tall as the ridge, covered in straggly hair, and had the silhouette of a large oak with its surfeit of beefy arms. While she couldn’t see its face, the anger it emanated was enough to tell her that a snarl must have settled there.
Tirdad took his place at her side, sword in hand. They had gone over their plan, but that didn’t prevent him from asking himself how he would even go about attacking such a monstrous div. It was one thing to imagine it; it was another entirely to stand before it. He clenched the hilt of his sword tightly and glanced at his cousin.
A Star-Reckoner's Lot (A Star-Reckoner's Legacy Book 1) Page 7