Part Two — The Eastern Route · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Eleven
Near Estakhr — in the years of the Arab conquest
Anahita lived to be old, and she never learned whether it was her decision or her brother's that had saved the chest.
She knew only that they had stood in the same courtyard on the same morning, and had come from the same fear to two different conclusions about what courage required. She spent the rest of her life turning them over. Neither of them ever wore out.
The armies had been coming for months. They came, by then, less as a storm than as a tide. A city would hold for a season and then send out its governor with a purse, and the governor would return with terms, and the city would become a place that paid. The ones who would not pay moved on, or died, or went into the hills and were not heard of. Estakhr itself had not yet answered. But everyone in the household knew, as everyone in a besieged place comes to know, that the question was no longer whether. It was how much longer, and what a family was willing to do with whatever time was left.
On the last morning she woke before the light and went at once to the sanctuary.
It was a small room off the inner court, with a lamp of clay and a bed of ash in a stone bowl. The household fire burned in it. It had burned there for longer than anyone alive could remember it not burning. Whoever held the duty that week tended it, and fed it, and watched it. In all the generations anyone could count it had never once been allowed to go out. Her father was already there. He knelt before the bowl in his plain white coat with his hands on his knees, and she saw that he had been kneeling for some time, because his lips were gray.
"Father."
"They say the road south is closed at the river." He kept his head bowed. "A man came in the night from the governor's house. There are to be terms. Some of the temples in the city are to be closed, and the rest are to pay for the privilege of keeping their fires."
"And ours?"
"We are not a temple. We are a family with a lamp." He said it with great gentleness. "That will not help us. They will ask what we keep, and who gave it to us, and they will not be satisfied with a lamp."
She said nothing. In the bowl the flame leaned a little, as it did when a door opened somewhere in the house, and steadied.
"I cannot carry it," her father said. "I have been trying to think how for two days. It cannot be put on a cart. It would go out in the first wind, or be put out. I think that I must leave it burning, and let it burn down by itself, and believe that it knows how."
He was weeping, she saw, with no sound and no change in his face. She had never seen him do it. She put her hand on his shoulder, and felt through the coat how small he had become, and was shamed by her own thought, which was that she was glad he had not asked her to carry him.
Her mother was packing the chest in the east room.
It was a plain box of cedar, no longer than a man's arm, with a bronze hasp and a lining of old wool. It smelled of resin and dust. In it lay what the household kept, wrapped in three layers of undyed linen, and beneath that, folded small, a single sheet of vellum that was no part of the charge at all. Her mother had put the sheet in last. It was a page from the treasury lists of the old king, copied out in a steward's hand a generation before. It said that a garment had been received of a family from the eastern hills, and was kept apart from all other holdings by order of the steward. Anahita's grandfather had been given the page when he took the chest back out of the treasury, in the year the treasury was emptied. The steward, whose name the family said in its prayers, had told him that those who hold a charge should know what has been written of them.
"Take the wool," her mother said, without looking round. "Take the large piece, for the wheel. It will rain."
Anahita took it. She stood by the chest and watched her mother's hands, which were quick and sure and quite steady. Her mother had been the keeper for twenty years. She was not an old woman. She had a strong, plain face. She had decided what she was afraid of and put it where she could see it.
"Your brother is in the court," her mother said.
"I know."
"He has been there since before the dawn. He has not spoken to anyone." She closed the hasp. "He means to do the thing."
Anahita felt her stomach turn. She had known it for a year. She had known it since the winter when the first report came of a temple in the south broken open and a fire put out with water from a well. Bahram had gone out into the court that night and stood in the snow for an hour, bareheaded, and when he came in he had a look that she had not known on him. He had finished an argument with himself, and lost, and it showed.
"Go and speak to him," her mother said. "Not as a sister. As the one who keeps the rule."
He was standing in the middle of the court with his back to the well.
He was twenty-six, three years older than she was, a tall man with a long jaw and a habit of holding his hands clasped behind him when he was angry. He wore his sword. He wore no helmet and no coat. The morning was cold, and the breath stood out of his mouth in small pale puffs, and he did not seem to feel it.
"You have come to tell me not to," Bahram said.
"I have come to ask what you intend."
"You know what I intend."
"I would like to hear it from you."
He turned. His face was drawn and white and extraordinarily calm. "Whoever comes first to our gate," he said. "A captain, a governor's man, I do not care. I will stand in the court with the household at my back and the soldiers in front of me, and I will take it out of the chest and put it on. In daylight. In front of all of them."
"And then?"
"And then it will show what I am." He said it simply. "It will show a man of this house, who has kept the fire, who has paid every tax and kept every bargain, and who will not give up the one thing he was given to keep. It will show it to them in a way that no sermon could. They will see it on my face. They will not be able to say that I am a liar, or a madman, or a coward, because they will have watched the thing itself take hold of me and say otherwise."
"You do not know what it will show."
"It will show what I am."
"It will show what you are, Bahram. Not what you hope." She heard her own voice go thin. "It answered an old woman about a dead goat. It showed her a child she had buried thirty years before. It told the two men who asked nothing they wanted to know. It has never, in all the time we have kept it, done what anyone intended."
"No."
"And you propose to find out what it does in front of an army."
"I propose to find out what it was for." He said it so quietly that she took a step toward him to hear. "That is what I cannot bear. We have a charge that can show a man's whole heart in the light of day. We have kept it, how many hundreds of years? And the whole of what we have done is to put it in a box and tell the children not to touch. If we carry it a thousand years more and never once ask what it can do, what have we kept it for, Anahita? Our own comfort?"
She had no answer. She stood in the cold with her hands at her sides and felt the old rule go through her like a hand through a sieve.
No one wears this alone, in secret, to decide anything for anyone else.
"You would be wearing it to decide a conqueror's mind," she said at last. "That is the rule. You told me yourself that you remembered it. You would put it on to change what they do. You would not be willing to be seen, Bahram. You would be willing to be believed."
"They are not the same."
"No. That is what frightens me."
He looked at her for a long time. The sun had begun to touch the top of the wall, and a pigeon walked along it, and the water in the well made its small, steady sound.
"Say what you are afraid of," he said. "Say it honestly. I will hear it."
She had meant not to. She had meant to say that the chest could not be risked, that a whole line of women had carried it for a thousand years, that she would not be the one to lose it. She said instead the thing that she had not known she thought.
"I am afraid that it will show nothing."
He frowned.
"I am afraid that you will stand there and put it on, and it will show them a frightened, grieving man with a sister he is not speaking to. A private grief. A matter that means nothing to a stranger with a spear. And they will watch you weep in front of your household and they will think that it is a conjuror's trick, and then they will take it from you, because it is the only thing in the court worth taking. And then it will be gone. Not tested. Gone." She was crying; she had not noticed. "That is what I am afraid of. I am afraid that the first time it is asked to be a weapon, it will be only what it has always been, and that we will have given it away to be laughed at."
"Then it will have been tested."
"It will have been lost."
"It will have been used."
"You think those are different."
"I think that they are the only two fates an object has."
It was the cruelest thing he said to her, and the truest, and she never forgot it. They stood in the cold and neither of them moved. Then the door of the east room opened and their mother came out into the court, carrying nothing, with her hands folded in front of her, and said in her level voice, "The household has met."
They had met in the long hall, with the fire of the sanctuary behind them through an open door, and the elders had decided.
It was not a decision that anyone liked. Her uncle, who was the oldest, had spoken last. He said that he would not pretend the matter was other than it was. If Bahram stood in the court and put the garment on, and what it showed meant nothing to the soldiers, the chest would leave the court that day in the hands of whoever took it. If it showed what Bahram hoped, and the soldiers were moved, it would still be in the court, in the hands of a household that had shown an army what it kept. In neither case would the chest go east. The elders could not make the choice between risk it and learn and carry it and wait. They could make only the choice between test it here and test it never. And they were old, and it was not their youth that would be asked to bear it.
"We will carry it," her uncle said. "Not because Anahita is right. I do not know that she is. Because she is afraid, and Bahram is not, and a household that has lost its fire should not entrust the rest to the one among us who fears nothing."
Bahram had received it without a word. He bowed to the elders, one at a time, and went out of the hall.
They left before the sun had cleared the hills.
The chest went on the one cart the household had managed to keep, lashed down under the wool. A bag of lamp oil and a barrel of flour went with it, and a few sheets of vellum pushed into the gaps. Anahita walked beside it with her hand on the cedar. Her mother walked behind. The old men went in the second cart. Her father did not go. He had chosen to stay with the fire, and nobody tried to argue.
At the gate she looked back once.
Bahram stood in the arch with two of the household guard. They had their swords and their shields and what armor they could find. They looked like men who did not mean to hold anything, only to be seen standing there. Her brother lifted one hand, flat, the palm toward her, as one stops a horse. She could not tell whether he meant wait or go. She never decided.
She walked on. She was twenty-three, and she did not look back again.
They reached open country by evening and, by the next, hills she did not know. The smoke had been visible behind them for most of a day. She watched it and said nothing, and her mother said nothing, and when it grew thin and gray and at last was gone against the sky, they stopped for the night in a ravine and ate bread dry. A cousin who had stayed an hour longer than the rest caught up with them on the third day, on foot, with a bloodied sleeve. He said that the gate had held until noon. He could not say how. Nobody in the family ever learned the whole of it, not that generation, not the next.
She carried the chest six weeks east across country that grew steadily stranger. For twenty years she spoke of her brother to no one. When at last she did, it was to her eldest daughter, on the eve of the girl's wedding, in a house with a fire in it that was not their fire.
"He was not wrong," she said.
Her daughter, who was nineteen and had been braiding her hair, stopped with her hands in the air.
"I want to say it to someone before you go, and you are old enough to hold it." She watched the girl's face in the lamplight. "I have spent twenty years failing to say it honestly even to myself. He was not wrong that a charge kept only for our comfort is not kept for anything. He was early. He asked the right question on the one morning in the whole history of this family when the honest answer would have cost us everything. And I made him wait for a moment that has not come."
The girl lowered her hands slowly. She looked at her mother, and said nothing, and did not need to.
"I do not know whether I saved what we carry," Anahita said, "or only put off the day he was brave enough to want and I was not yet brave enough to survive."
She told it again, many times, to many children, in the years that followed, in the same words. By the time the words reached a country she would never see, and a house by the sea, they had lost nearly all of their grief and kept the question. Then when, if not now. A family does not forgive an impatient young man for asking too early. It does not forget that he asked rightly.
It would not be answered until a coastline Anahita had never imagined, in a generation that had run out of country to flee across. By then it would no longer be a question about Bahram. It would be a question about what it would take to build, carefully enough and slowly enough, what he had wanted in one bare courtyard: a way for the next child who asked then when? to be told, truthfully, here.