In the monastery was a prayer bower, its floors swept clean, its ceiling open to the night sky. There, often, between sunset and true dark did I dance, and wait for him. And there, more often than not, did he come and recline and listen to me sing. And there, too, I was finally allowed to learn the dance of the saagkazaar.
Perhaps, if I had not been so secure in my own power, if I had thought beyond my own abilities and my own desires, I would have seen it. How often he reclined, the tired way he looked, how often he came when truly, he should not have come at all. I would have thought how strange it was that he appeared to me and never the king, his vessel in the realm of men. I would have listened—to the discord inside him, to the discord in the world. Perhaps if my teachers had trusted me, if I had been less in love with love, I could have been made to understand. What the king did, how Bayyur struggled to hold him back. How he came to me tired and left rejuvenated.
Whatever was happening in the empire, I knew little of it. But I understood my teachers’ reluctance to name anyone saagkazaar, for in the hands of a saagkazaar lay the fate of nations. None but her might call the kazerach from the king’s side, might unseat his power. And I was young—thirteen at first—and did not know what I had done.
But I cared nothing for the world outside—there was the song, and dekaad, and Bayyur himself. Nothing else mattered.
And perhaps it was because nothing else mattered that I made the choice that I did.
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There were three parts to the dance of the saagkazaar: gatha, suku, and dekaad. Twilight, dusk, and dawn.
Gatha was not the dance—it was the ritual by which incense was lit, by which the place of offering was swept, and the steps a saagkazaar took to kneel before the heavens. It was the ritual of choosing what one wore, which jewelry to hang from and adorn your wrists. It was the oils pressed against your skin, and the ochre on your eyelids.
Suku were the opening notes. Some of the saagkazaar played instruments, or so I had been told. Those of us who did not still understood the importance of the link between twilight and dawn—the enchantment of the half-light. The will necessary to bring down a kazerach, to turn his ear and his mind—ancient and beyond our comprehension—for a few moments to our world.
And finally, dekaad. Dekaad was the dance itself, the revelry of love and desire, the moment the flesh met the divine. It is said that in the golden age when the kazerach came regularly that dekaad was a deadly dance—that the kazerach enjoyed it too much and that we mortals had not the strength to bear their love or attention. That many saagkazaar died before ever attempting to become kazerkai.
It was dekaad that I loved—I had little patience for gatha, and the inherent talent at song that I paid too little attention to suku. But in dekaad I reveled, and it was in dekaad that my instructors found the most fault. For I loved too much and too clearly, and showed none of the humility necessary before the kazerach. And I was so eager to finally learn, filled as I was with the thrumming energy of desire in adolescence, that I did not pause to think why I learned at all. The power of the dance and my love of Bayyur were so heady a thing that I forgot fear and sense both and threw myself into the lessons.
If I had remembered . . . if I had paused to think . . .
But such is the way of things.
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I rose every morning before dawn to join the sisters in their prayers. I did not know if Bayyur watched me and so knew this, or if the cosmos conspired so that I might be where I was needed at the proper time. I dressed for prayers every morning as if I were in gatha, perfumed and oiled, my many braids coiled at the back of my head and wound in gold, ochre on my bottom lip, and the corners of my eyelids. I had lit the first of nine incense bowers in my room when a sound, as if thunder had struck in my room, split the air in two.
The lit reed in my hand dropped from my fingers and for long moments I could not move at all. As if the world had shifted and forgotten me, or death had come and my mind had not yet found it. When at last I could move, I spun around.
I was sixteen by then and as I was, as I have told you, had never had reason to fear anything in my life. For a single moment he appeared as I knew him, bare-chested, dusted in gold, his eyes shining in the darkness of my bedchamber.
“Khefa—” My name tore itself from his mouth, warped with pain and sorrow. I had never heard him thus. Had never heard him as anything but detached, amused. He was a kazerach, the spirit of all life on this planet.
But before my eyes the form I knew, the form I loved, tore itself apart. He came back together as skeins of darkness weaving themselves into something whole, and he turned into something I did not know. A man, still, with his night-dark skin and glowing eyes. A man, with his curled, coarse hair and his chest dusted in gold. A man, and yet he glistened and his hands were tipped with claws, and there was something—
Something. Ukun.
Here it was in the heart, in the soul, of our world.
I felt it—discord, misstep—in my heart as Bayyur pulled away from my bed and stumbled toward me. Felt my heart miss a beat as he fell at my feet and did not rise. Remembered how easily I had ignored it and let it continue to take root.
“Khefa,” he said again.
I could not breathe. Bayyur was kazerach—ancient and undying, and though loved by me, beyond my ken. I had thought him—
He remained on his knees even as he looked up at me, his eyes black where they had always been gold. Had he hid this aspect of himself from me? Could he no longer do it? I could not move, could not think—what had happened to him?
He shuddered and I heard something spill from his mouth and strike the ground. Heard several breaths dragged in and out of his chest.
Ukun happened not only in dekaad, but in life itself. It was death too early, summer too long, a rainy season that drowned crops. It was the slow decay of the world. The slaying of the spirit that gave it life.
I had never touched Bayyur. As my flesh was sacrosanct, his was divine beyond imagining. His was not for me to touch, ever, and yet I reached for him and held his shoulder. It was a single touch, and yet it seemed to undo us both. I understood, at last, what my teachers meant when they said I lived too much in the flesh. Divine desire unspooled through me, and I felt there were no words to express it. What does a single blade of grass say when the heavens unload a storm on her back? What does cosmic dust say when it is swept away by solar winds? How was I, a mortal girl, meant to contend with divine flesh, even as broken as it seemed?
I could not. And yet my grip held and I knelt beside him, and when he bowed his head over my shoulder, I raised a hand to cradle his head. He felt mortal then, though he shouldn’t have. And I felt—not mortal, not divine. I felt as if I were dekaad and ukun incarnate in one moment, two cosmic forces churning in me as I held Bayyur. It felt as though my skin were too tight and not tight at all, as if a flower had taken seed inside my rib cage and at any moment would begin to blossom, winding its way around my bones, and burst through my skin.