The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas by Dmitry Chen

Author:Dmitry Chen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edward & Dee
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

A gloomy garden that all men abhor

Where tracks are lost behind the dusty door

Go seek, to have its truth to you revealed.

Unhappy Safizanj, whose howling sore

Spreads o’er the dead, cold earth for evermore,

Find there they who recall, and leave no mouth unsealed.

Two names that now in silvery accents pour

For those that transcend death and peace implore,

Through these at last their sorrows shall be healed.

That “howling sore” would not have been bad, had it not been so mournful. But the “go seek” would to my mind have spoiled any verse, although a simple “seek now” would have been another matter altogether.

Yet how to understand it?

“Ah, he’s ciphered it in verse,” Yukuk nodded, with a manifest lack of interest in the poetry of it. “Good... Well, this is already something. Unhappy Safizanj, so much is plain. No, ser, this is not about Abu Muslim mustering his first army in that village, for there was no howling sore at that time. Safizanj grew unhappy later, when battle was joined there – later, when the outright slaughter of like by like began... And there are two hills there. It is a dead, cold place indeed, and well bathed in blood. And the verse, belike, hints that this will be no easy tale to untangle. Now, the garden. Except it seems that he who wrote you this doesn’t know where the garden lies. He’s only heard of it and he advises us to seek it out. But the image is clear. This is a garden of ill repute and feared by those who live nearby. That’s already something, because are there not ten such gardens here? The door’s a mystery, though. Tracks disappear behind it, and what of that? Say, then, that our men came to this door, but once the door was breached, there was the end of it. Maybe they never returned. Yet I remember no hint of any such thing when the work here was going as it ought. Then there is the designation ‘those that transcend death.’ For them, that garden and that dead, cold ground are the comfort before the end. A mystery, this. But do you remember my conversations in the hospital? The very same designation I heard there: those that transcend death. And we even saw them, you and I – the ones with the knives. And what befell them in their last moment. That, then, is what they call ‘transcending death.’ Excellent. I have here something to work with.”

And I, strange to say, understood more than Yukuk. because the word “pairidaeza,” which means “garden,” still rang in my ears. My brother had told me naught new there save that the garden existed and that all abhorred it. Aspanak was only advising me to seek it out. But Safizanj... That, now, was something new indeed.

The twilight was creeping into Merv along shadowy streets, rousing night-blooming flowers behind garden walls. This was the very time to write my brother a reply, showing all the mercy I could to the vanquished.

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