After I arrange another saktab and explain the rules, Sohrab and I dive into a game.
‘Master, I cannot play when you are so cruel! You are cheating.’
‘There is no cheating, only clever travellers seeking the shortest paths.’
‘Which parable did you find that from?’ Arezu deadpans.
I look up. ‘A text you clearly refused to study.’
‘Dramatic woman,’ she mutters and my lips twitch but I raise my hand to hide it.
‘Snivelling pig,’ I counter and Arezu clamps Yahya’s ears.
‘Khamilla.’
With a sigh, I move from the board while Sohrab shakes his head. ‘It’s tradition to join the other warriors and listen to their folktales.’
‘And poetry,’ Yasaman adds, holding up a stack of papyrus scrolls.
‘You are free to join them,’ I say. ‘But I do not desire the other warriors’ company.’
‘Master can tell us a story.’ Arezu’s eyes alight in challenge.
‘I have no stories for midwinter.’
‘You liar,’ she says. ‘Don’t forget what you told me after the Marka. You come from a tribe of them.’ Then her eyes pinch bitterly. ‘I suppose with your assignment tomorrow, your mind is on other things. In truth, it’s hardly fair.’
‘What’s not fair?’
‘We fought alongside you in that Marka, yet you were promoted.’
I almost laugh. ‘Because you are a pazktab girl. You are not ranked.’
‘So?’ she demands. ‘I’m only a few years younger than you. Your lessons always preached tonever let youth withhold our ambitions.’
They did do that. I am realising much of my advice to these students follows a cosmic loop, coming back to bite me. ‘You, child, are far from Za’skar’s ordeals.’ She flinches and I straighten, aware that my words carry weight.
Her bitterness stretches into a smile. ‘I suppose to you we are never worthy, most of all me?’ Her fingers dig into the kilim, nails pale. That confusion stirs again –no– a strangling inside my chest. It takes a moment to understand: Arezu is not upset; she is frustrated at something beyond her control. Because of me.
‘Of course, I think you’re worthy,’ I say thickly. ‘Just not of this.’
‘And now you admit it.’
‘What would you have me say?’
‘You are leaving tomorrow,’ she repeats, with the same expectation held in Sohrab’s gaze, but where he looked hopeful, her eyes are red. My heart begins burning; the stab, like pricking needles, fractures through the denial I’ve built, giving way to the urge to tell her she is worth more. ‘You are leaving,’ she repeats again.
‘I am leaving...’
You. It hits me.What is this strange ache?
Not a pain I have chosen or walked into, but unwanted pain. Invisible pain. The numb blanket that has cocooned my entire life, the reliable comfort I chose to slip under, was nothing but a cage at the border of agony.
This child, who I called my student for my own selfish purposes, is in pain and so are the rest of them and I continue to be blind to it.And I am not sure why, but tonight Ifeelit as keenly as she does. With it, an emotion I think everyone is familiar with, but to me so foreign – a deep worry, hoping to always guard them from harm. Like how one feels when they sight a wounded bird. But the emotions are stifling; how does one bear this many?
I could do something, then. I could do one thing right. I cannot discourage her hunger, it wouldn’t work. Instead, I could mould it into something better. A pang squeezes my chest. Masters do not comfort their pupils like this.
Then who does?
