Climbing the Date Palm Read online

  Disoriented and frightened, he looked for a way out -- but there was none. Six or seven men dressed exactly like the workers flanked him on all sides, and maneuvered him deftly off the bridge and into the street.

  There stood the king, in full royal ceremonial regalia. Guards and advisors surrounded him, but they scattered when they saw the prince approach.

  “Kaveh.”

  “Baba, what--”

  “What is this I hear of the people seeking a new king?”

  “What? I-- Nothing! They just want their money.”

  “That is a lie. I know there’s been unrest, and that someone in there’s deliberately keeping rebellion in those men’s minds.”

  “If you paid them, they’d go home.”

  “I think it’s you. I think you’re jealous that your brother is my rightful heir, and that you’re nothing.”

  “I don’t want to be king.”

  “You made them adore you by speaking to their interests and implanting in them this unpatriotic greed that makes them sit down and act like useless children.”

  “If they like me, it’s because I recognize their worth.”

  “Spoken like he who would steal my crown if he would.”

  “Baba, I’m not like that!”

  “I don’t know what you are. You were always quiet and different. I thought you were weak. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps you were always just crafty -- waiting... watching... looking for weakness.”

  “Baba-- I’m your son.”

  “If a goat attacked the rest of its herd, it had better become a stew or the rest of the herd is in danger. If I was an imperfect enough father to bring disruptive treason into the world, it’s my responsibility to remove it.”

  “Remove-- What are you talking about?”

  “I still don’t know the truth,” said King Jahandar, “but if you started this mess on the bridge, I have a responsibility to the City of the Red Clay to sentence you to death at the end of the Month of the Sun.”

  “All because I wanted you to pay people what you promised them?” Kaveh leapt at him, but was caught by four guards and wrestled to the ground.

  Jahandar looked down at him with an expression of driftwood. “Well, I guess that settles that.” He closed his eyes. “May the Sun cleanse me for having raised a betrayer for a child.”

  “You betrayed the people who worked themselves weak for you,” Kaveh muttered into the dust, since a guard’s foot was on his head.

  “At the end of the sacred Month, you will be hanged--”

  “No,” cried a breathless, familiar voice.

  Kaveh felt the guard’s shoe scrape painfully into his ear as he turned his head to see.

  “Majesty, it was never the prince. It was me. I encouraged the people to resist you. He never betrayed you. He only agreed with me, but he never--”

  Several pairs of eyes focused on Farzin the engineer, and he took a step back and gulped.

  “That makes more sense,” grumbled the king. “Kaveh, get up.” He yanked his son off the ground roughly. “Get him back to the palace to get cleaned up for his brother’s wedding.”

  “What? That’s today?”

  “I should have known better than to think you had enough direction to be the villain I sought,” said Jahandar. “You!” He jabbed a finger in Farzin’s direction. “You sowed this hatred against me?”

  “You sowed it yourself,” said Farzin quietly. “I just told the men what to do with the harvest.”

  “The penalty for treason, since I am destined to repeat myself today, is death,” said the king. “Take him away to the prison, and at the end of the Month of the Sun, hang him.”

  Kaveh broke free of the men who were trying to escort him away and threw himself at his father’s feet. “No! Please, by the Sun’s light, if you have a heart in your body, don’t kill him.”

  The king furrowed his brow and studied Kaveh suspiciously. “Why?”

  “Because...” Kaveh’s chest heaved as he breathed heavily, not knowing what to say next. “Baba, please. I’ll do anything.”

  “So Azar wasn’t lying,” the king mused in a voice of deadly calm.

  “What?” Kaveh could barely get the word out.

  The king turned to look at Farzin again, then down at his prostrate, pleading son. Suddenly, with a whirl of spangled robes, he charged at the engineer and flung both his hands on his neck. “What have you been doing to my son?”

  Farzin’s protesting voice disappeared into choking noises, and Kaveh, who was already underfed and too hot, succumbed into a dead faint of despair.

  Chapter 9: The Elegant Harp Shattered In His Iron Grasp

  People were slapping Kaveh’s face with cold, wet hands, and something pungent and bracing attacked his nose. “Farzin!” he called out in a cracking voice.

  “Majesty, stop! The Month of the Sun!” pleaded a clamor of male voices. “Executions are forbidden! You must wait!”

  Jahandar released Farzin by violently hurling him to the ground. “Fine, then. It is as you say. Put him away. Let his presence insult the Sun no longer, in this, its sacred month. When its light shines on him again, a twisted braid shall take him to his fate.”

  “Baba, no... If he dies I’ll go with him...” Kaveh was still too nauseated to move his body, but he reached for Farzin across the dust of the road.

  “Please live.” Farzin’s lips were moving but they barely made a sound. “I’d be so sad if you didn’t.”

  “But I want to be with you,” Kaveh pleaded.

  “I know.”

  “Guards, take my son back to the palace and get him ready for the wedding.”

  “I can’t stand up,” Kaveh reminded him.

  “Carry him and bring him juice, then. Who asked you to go wasting your time and ruining your health with the likes of this traitor on the bridge?” The king kicked at Farzin with his toe. “I always said men like him didn’t have their priorities right.”

  “One breath of air exhaled by him... carries more moral weight than all your might and power.”

  “And I suppose he told you that as he used your body, and you believed him.”

  Kaveh wished he would faint again if all his body could do was lie there and torture him instead of letting him get up and attack his father with both fists -- even if it would have resulted in his own execution. But he was a member of the upper class who hadn’t eaten properly in three days of sitting outside on a paved bridge, and that was something no amount of anger would change.

  “You haven’t used me,” he whispered to Farzin. “You made me whole.”

  “You mean I made you get in a whole lot of trouble.”

  “How can you still joke?”

  “Because I’m still me. And even when they kill me I’ll still be me, and that means I’ll still love you. I’ll always love you.”

  “This is patently disgusting. Guards, please carry my son back to the palace and get him in a fit state to attend the royal wedding.” Jahandar scratched his temple. “Take that to the prison. I don’t want to waste any more time on this, and I hope those layabouts on the bridge won’t, either -- now that I’ve got their false king locked up. Go and spread the word that Farzin the Pretender has fallen, and will be eliminated at the close of the Month.”

  Some of the guards hefted Kaveh up between them and began to carry him off. As the other guards forced Farzin to his feet, he mouthed one more word at Kaveh as they parted.

  “Pray.”

  Back at the palace, a weakened and dazed Kaveh was force-fed fruit juice and falafels and then stuffed into ornate celebration attire, covered with gold embroidery depicting suns, moons, and bunches of grapes. He spoke to no one, and followed along with the rest of the wedding party as they mounted a team of horses. The men and women rode in separate clusters, which kept him from laying eyes on Azar. He would have broken away from the team and ridden straight to Farzin, to hold hands through the bars if nothing else, but the pack was too tight and he was surrounded.
r />   The wedding party arrived at the Temple of the Twenty Date Palms, and everyone quickly dismounted and left their horses in the care of the groom they had brought to watch them during the ceremony. Crowds of cheering Citizens on foot awaited them outside the temple; some threw flower petals.

  Among the flowers came a rotting, moldy apricot. “Who threw that?” demanded the king, who had been near the front of the procession.

  “Pay the men who fixed the roads!” shouted a female voice from the crowd.

  “Silence her!” Jahandar turned his back to the crowd and continued his procession, and two of his guards searched in vain for the woman who had melted away into the population.

  From the midst of the men’s group, Kaveh’s older brother, the Crown Prince, emerged in his wedding finery. He was dressed in a suit of white, embroidered all over with gold images, and around his shoulders he wore a shimmering golden cloak. It was the Month of the Sun, and he was now made in its image.

  If he was the sun, then pale Kaveh was the moon. He gave no light of his own, and with empty eyes he watched the women’s group for the first sign of Azar. Soon, there she was, in a dress made entirely of golden cloth. A white veil covered her hair. The bride matched her bridegroom in solar splendor.

  She had told the king his secret. Kaveh looked upon her and expected to hate her -- but he didn’t. He had loved her once, and she hurt him to the very core with her first betrayal -- but her second just made him sad with its consequences. Somehow, he didn’t think she’d outed him out of malice; most likely, the king had insulted her one too many times with the accusation that she’d changed her mind in order to gain the throne, and she just wanted him to leave her alone. With Kaveh working on the construction project, out of the palace and out of her sight, he could easily imagine her starting to forget their friendship that had once been love.

  Mechanically, he filed inside the temple with everyone else. A group of young women danced in rings and then made way for his father, who gave a speech at the altar at the far end of the temple. Kaveh wasn’t listening. He was staring down the pathway to the altar, succumbing to a disturbing fantasy. He imagined himself walking that path, the festival girls throwing their flowers at him, and then Farzin following him, wrapped in a cape of gold. But when they got to the end of room, instead of the wedding altar they found a noose. It bound them together in a single loop, fixed around both their necks, locking them in intimacy as it prepared to strangle them.

  He could almost feel Farzin’s cheek against his, as if it were really happening. Pain tore at him, and he wondered if he had gone crazy. Then Azar appeared, maidens to either side of her throwing flowers beneath her feet as she walked, and Kaveh suddenly felt several pairs of eyes turn to him. What was that about? Oh -- he had loved her once. They knew he had been... “unwell”...and they were expecting him to make a scene.

  Well, let him make it. Like a butterfly upon a flower, the thought landed in his head that he had already fainted once today, and it would surprise nobody if he were to faint again -- especially when his former fiancée was walking down the aisle to marry his brother. Surely such a thing was not only plausible, but expected. And if he fainted, they’d probably take him outside for air. Whatever happened next would be up to the divine, but he still had hope.

  Deliberately, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he let his body go limp. There was a quiet shuffling in the crowd as people of less importance struggled to keep him upright, propping him up under each armpit, and he was quickly scuttled out of the temple. Their priority was to keep the disruption of the wedding to a minimum, and they succeeded by laying him down on a stone bench outside the temple. “Watch over the prince,” Kaveh heard someone command the stable-groom who was looking after the horses. “He’s had a spell. Poor man, it can’t be easy watching your older brother marry the woman you were promised since youth.”

  He kept his eyes shut and waited.

  The sound of wondrous music came from within the temple, and the voices of a chorus rose up to join it. Kaveh heard the stable-groom walking away from him, and he opened one eye slightly. The stable-groom was standing close enough to the temple entrance to watch the celebration. Distracted by all the fuss and finery, he wasn’t paying as much attention to the horses he had been assigned -- or to the prince.

  Perfect.

  With the grace of something blown about on the wind, Kaveh slipped off the bench and made light footfalls toward one of the horses at the far edge of the herd. He mounted the animal and forced himself to let it walk away from its compatriots slowly, so that the sound of rapid hoofbeats wouldn’t alert the stable-groom.

  Not that he would have been able to hear, anyway. Song and cheering filled the air, and he could still hear it when he had gone far enough away that he felt safe moving to a faster pace.

  He made straight for the prison.

  Like everything else in the city, it was built of bricks of red clay. An imposing fortress of many sides, intended to convey both power and hopelessness, it was perched beside the river far beyond the Old Bridge. Kaveh slowed his horse and cast his eyes over the building, looking for a good angle of approach, but there was a guard on each side.

  Finally, he just dismounted, took a deep breath, and led his horse toward one of the guards.

  “Stop! The fortress is forbidden.”

  “I know,” said Kaveh, reaching inside his shirt. “I was hoping you could help me with that.”

  The gold medallion sparkled in his hand as it reflected sunlight into the guard’s greedy eyes.

  The man led him to a far corner of the fortress, where a small window near to the ground and set with thick iron bars let indirect light into the sunken cell inside. Kaveh left his horse beside the building and waited for the guard to go away as promised, then knelt to peer into the window.

  Inside, far below on the ground -- which was several feet below the earth outside -- Farzin sat with his fingers to his lip in thought. Kaveh reached through the bars for him, overcome with emotion and unable to speak.

  ***

  Farzin sensed the movement and looked up. “Kaveh! Kaveh, my prince, my own passionate prince.” With a slow, deliberate motion that revealed the pain in his limbs from how the guards had treated him, he picked himself up from the floor and walked toward the window.

  If he stood on his toes, he could stretch himself high enough that Kaveh’s fingers could caress his face. This he did, with all the strength he could muster. For several moments, this was everything.

  Then Kaveh bent down and tried to kiss him through the bars. They managed as best they could. “Oh, my love, you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I’m the worst that’s happened to you.” Kaveh swept his fingers over Farzin’s cheek again and again.

  “You aren’t -- you aren’t... but your father might be.”

  “If he kills you, I can’t call him my father anymore.”

  “Do you think you can persuade him not to?”

  Kaveh was silent for a moment. “Not really. What are we going to do?”

  “And what about our men? Will they ever get paid? Are they keeping up the fight?”

  “I don’t know – they dragged me away to the royal wedding” said Kaveh. “You’re so selfless – you’re going to make my heart burst. Here you are in here--”

  “Well, you’re not exactly Mr. Selfish, escaping from right under your father’s nose just to come find me. How did you get away?”

  “I pretended to faint again and escaped when they put me outside.”

  “I’m glad you’re here with me. I’ll tell you what a keystone is now, if you want. It’s only fair, since I know your secret now. A keystone sits at the top of an arch, holding the two curved halves together... It strengthens the bridge.” He paused. “That was the secret, wasn’t it? That you can love a man? That’s why Azar...”

  Kaveh nodded. “She told my father... but I’m not angry. Just hurt. And she’s already hurt me so much that I think there
’s no room to top it off.”

  “Would had it been me in her place,” said Farzin. “What she gave up--”

  “I should have brought you food,” Kaveh suddenly realized, interrupting. “The wedding feast--”

  “I’ve got food,” said Farzin, trying to sound cheerful. “Here we have...” He held up a stale piece of bread. “The finest cake made by the pastry chef at Mother Cat’s! See how moist it is? Think of all the butter he must have used.”

  The piece of bread looked as though it could have been used as a building brick. Kaveh smiled sadly.

  “They’ve also given me this wonderful wine,” Farzin continued, gesturing at a clay bowl full of river water. “Crisp flavor, smooth finish.” He could tell he was cheering up Kaveh a little bit, and searched around the cell for more things to turn into ‘food’ for his imaginary feast. “Over here,” he added, pointing to some slick green algae growing on the stone floor where river water had seeped into the cell, “is a platter of malabar just off the vine, and fried in fresh butter. The leaves are tender, yet firm to the--”

  “What did you say?” Suddenly, Kaveh’s eyes were flashing, and he looked twice as alive.

  “Malabar...in...butter? What? You look like ants crawled up your legs.”

  “Malabar. Captain Malabar. What’s that man’s name? Riv?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The queen of Perach. Remember? I told you about how the captain of her Guard has a male companion?”

  “Yes, I remember. Wha--”

  “I’m going to go to him. He can save us -- I know he can! Think about it: a man like us, but a fierce warrior, fluent in multiple fighting styles and expert with a sword. He’s got a whole team of guards behind him, and his lover is a--”