#we who thrive in the heart of the desert
It takes two months. A month for Tahamine to realize she did not suffer from her menstrual blood and blame it on her earlier pregnancy, and another to figure that she is in fact with child once more.
This is all it takes. Two months for her to mourn the only man she loved, two months to see her child ripped from her arms by her new groom once he was thorougly healed, sent to be raised as the common child of a maid. Two months she spents fearing for her son’s life, dreading Andragoras would change his mind and go back on his words, only to be met with the cold understanding she must hide another of her children.
Tahamine never laid with Andragoras. Not once, not ever since she started to be called his wife nor ever before. The only one who shared her sheet had been Osroes, Osroes the betrayed king, Osroes whose life had been stolen from the very man she is now wed to.
The one who could end her unborn child were he to ever hear of his mere existence.
What Tahamine choses to do next is as simple as the name it bears; motherhood. She sends away all her servants except for the dowry maid she brought with her from Maryam, a gift of her sister, and refuses to ever see eye to eye with Andragoras for months on ends. Pretends it is the custom from where she hails, that a husband and a wife shall not share a room for a year and her now buried youth serves as an example, for she did not lay with Osroes, Osroes who she loved and adored, so she shall not lay with his brother either. She has all her meals sent to her room, confines herself in it under the guise of bad health, and it is both a blessing and a curse that Andragoras drowns too much in his hunger for wealth and power to question her claims. That he sees her as nothing more than a conquered trophy but it does not matter, she will wield every tool she can lay her hand on and brandish it as the deadliest weapon if only it can assure the future of her children.
It is a few busy months, until she gives birth. She writes to her sister in Maryam hoping she will shelter her son, and she knows Andragoras reads them before they are sent away but his knowledge of their language is weak, he always chose to speak with battle cries rather than let the heavenly flow of her mother tongue consume him so he cannot understand it, shrugs it off as a woman’s affair once he decifers that his Queen will bitterly send her maid back to Maryam because she betrayed her and bore a child to a unknown soldier while she vowed to remain a maiden.
Andragoras doesn’t know it is false, nor does he need to. He doesn’t know the child her maid will bring to far away lands is hers and not her maid’s.
The day he is born, Tahamine names her child Arslân. Arslân the lion boy, Arslân, who bears the name of those who once were Kings of Pars. Because it his his legacy, his gods-given birthright, because he is Arslân, son of Queen Tahamine, heir of King Osroes and no one shall seize it from his grasp.
Especially not Andragoras.
During the Great Fire Tahamine stands in the ashes of her home, the sole of her feet bloodied by her husband’s passing. She stands in what was once their sacred bedroom and her tears leave ashen gray paths on her cheeks and she is nineteen when she is forced to see the man she once thought of as a brother seize the life out of her Osroes, moved by the remnants of the adoration he once gave her.
She is nineteen when she is forced to kneel with burned nightclothes in the pool made of his blood, when she grovels at Andragoras’ feet and begs with crimson stains in her ivory hairs for him to let the child she bore to Osroes live, to spare the last piece of her once golden future. She begs despite the thundering fury which crowd her heart chanting it isn’t fair, she begs and cries and promise to be his bride before the sun rise if he would only see her son and not think of him as a threat.
Andragoras agrees. She will be his bride and he will be her groom despite how revulsing the idea is to her, because she is a mother before she is a woman. Because Angragoras allowed her child to live, because in the aftermath of the coup, when she sits at the edge of the marital bed she shared with Osroes and stares with disgust at the ivory ring on her finger, she can still see a maidservant applying balm on her son’s burned face next to her.
Osroes named him Hilmes the night he was born. Hilmes, the dweller on the hill.
A tender way for a smitten man to echo the day of their first fateful meeting, on the hills of Pars.
Arslân grows up in the beloved lands of Maryam. It’s an oasis compared to the arid lands of Pars for the sun is fierce but gentle, the wind blows yet sand does not follow and his people walk barefoot in the desert, treating it as nothing but a warm caress against their feet.
Arslân loves the seashore, the gentle, salted breeze, the soft melody of soaring birds in the infinite sky. He sits on the pontoon like a common man and soaks his feet in the cold water, feels the wind chilling his cheeks and tangling all of his hair, something he knows his dear cousin will complain about as soon as he returns.
Gieve sits beside him, quietly. Arslân did not see him coming, but truthfully he never does. He looks at him from the corner of his eyes, smiles at the grief barely concealed under his face. His cousin has never been one to let despair court his joy away, prefering to shrug his duties away with a flirt of his lips or the hundred songs of his Dozaleh. There are not many reasons that would allow such gloom to overcome him. Arslân has a feeling he aleady knows which.
“What’s wrong?” He still asks, if only to fend off the ineluctable for a few blessed moments.
“The prince of Pars died in the night.” Gieve answers him, his voice already mourning him.
And then, then Arslân sighs. He looks up to the horizon, the deep blue sky of Maryam. Balances his feet in the water, can feel it gently dripping from his ankles.
“Is that so.”
Gieve clenches his hands around the soft fabric of his clothes. His rage is held solely by the respect he has for his cousin, and the selfish wish not to make it more painful than it oughts to be. Than it alrady is, with a cut far too deep. “An emissary will come in the following weeks.”
“Alright.” Arslân nods, and the strings which puppetted Gieve’s fury away break.
“How can you be so calm?! ” He yells and cries out, seizing him with both of his arms. “They’re stealing you from our home!”
“It’s my duty.” He simply says. Not because he wishes to believe it, but because he must. “Our kingdom promised if the prince were to die, we would send an heir to replace him.”
“Still—”
“It’s either that or they march in armor on our lands and burn our people to the ground.” Arslân snaps. “Pars’ hunger for power has no limits, they already hold my mother as a prize for conquering our country. Do you want me to let them take everything else?”
Grieve’s answer is but a long sigh. The silence falls along it, as if it had been the far sound of a horn.
“I don’t want you to go. They’re barbaric. Who knows what might happen to you.”
Arslân shrugs. It does not mean he dismisses the gentle care he hears in his retainer’s words, “I’ll be fine as long as the king treats me as his heir, and it’ll be easier since mother is the queen. I guess they will pretend I had a weak constitution and was only brought home after the tragedy. Really, it’s as simple as this.”
His voice goes down in a whisper, escaping through smirking lips.
“Who would feel threatened by a kingdom in ruins, anyway?”
Gieve’s mouth opens agape in awe. “You cannot be serious.”
“What if I am?” Arslân stands, fists clenched. “They expect a bird trapped in a golden cage, a fragile and scaredy prince from a nation long subdued. I will show them of which metal the people of Maryam are forged.”
Arslân extends a hand toward his friend, his cousin, his retainer - his accolyte, even, a soft smile barely covering the anger, the determination under. “Will you help me?”
Gieve is surprised, for a moment. But if his prince, if Arslân asks for his help to restore Maryam’s glory and sow sorrow on the ones who wronged their people, how can he refuse it to him?
One day Arslân meets a boy. He’s a few years older than him, with hair black as charcoal just as Arslân’s bear the white of a cloud. He says he’s a traveler, says he is Hilmes, son of Osroes, says they are bound to become one and only kin and Arslân trusts him; for he knows his fate. Knows he was sent to be raised in Maryam as their prince only to live with a sword of damocles over his head, singing funerals and promising far too bitterly that he shall soon leave his beloved lands to become the heir of Andragora’s barbaric kingdom.
Arslân was born for this matter and this matter only. To fill the gap left after the death of the last prince of Pars, for he is the only son of Queen Tahamine after all. Or so he thought.
Hilmes seems to disagree.
