Intercomm Fic: The Desert Rose
Word Count: 2, 666
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Djaq; narration by an OC
Genre: Drama; introspection
Spoilers: None
Warnings: Some minor violence and tiny innuendo
Disclaimer: The character of Djaq belongs to Tiger Aspect/the BBC. No infringement is intended, no money is being made.
Author's Notes:This fic sort of fits in with my Djaq-centric multichapter fic "Stranger from the East." You certainly don't have to have read it to understand this, but there are a few nods to that previous work contained here.
Credits: Thanks to Rohwyn for her beta-work.
Summary: A look at Djaq's pre-outlaw life in Acre as told from the POV of her mother.
The Desert Rose
Day and Night. Sun and Moon. Light and Dark.
That is what the midwife placed in my arms two hours after the searing fire and sharp-edged blades; agonies which had to be endured not once, but twice over. In the crook of my left arm lay a girl, her eyes wide and brown and staring; in my right, a boy, screaming at the top of his lungs. I wanted to join him.
By the time I was twelve years old I was known as the Wardah of Acre, and had the choice of seven potential betrothals. My family was poor and so my father was delighted: several suitors were rich and had proposed large dowries along with marriage. In my youth there was nothing I could not have had, nothing that could not be mine with just a look. Like most stupid young girls, I enjoyed this power, and assumed that it would never leave me.
Syed finally entered the birthing room, hobbling toward the bed as fast as his limbs would allow and averting his eyes from my face as he looked down at our children. To everyone’s surprise, he took the girl first, easing her from my arms to nestle in his own, whispering the words of the shahada in her ear: “there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet and Messenger.” She still hadn’t cried, but her tiny fists banged his nose as he raised her close to his face and he looked at her in a way that he had never looked at me. There was quiet understanding beneath his awe, communion with a spirit that reflected his own, and he was reluctant to return her to my arms. It took a long time for our son to quieten once he was in Syed’s hands, another surprise. There was little that my husband could not heal simply by touching - or so I had once thought.
When I was of marriageable age, it began. I cannot remember the precise moment I noticed it; only a vague recollection of rubbing my cheek and wondering what was causing the odd twitching in its hollow. One can only thank the Prophet for His teachings on modesty, for my veil soon became more precious to me than my arms or legs, my sight or breath. Mother had once told me that the veil was a woman’s greatest asset, whether she was beautiful or homely, for men are intrigued by what they cannot see. A woman’s task was to draw their attention, and let their imagination do the rest. Yet there was more to me than a veil; there was the remembrance of me as a child, and the curiosity that it stirred. They knew that behind the shroud the childish features were taking on womanly visage, and I could see them wondering how I might be changed, and to what extent.
Days passed as they ever did after the birth of the twins, though naturally our little world was indubitably changed. Of an evening, Syed would make shadow puppets on the wall, distorting his fingers so that dogs and birds rose up before their eyes. Djaq would chortle and squeal and clap his hands, and Safiyah’s first steps were won when she toddled to the wall in order to run her little hands on its surface. It took us a moment to realise that she was trying to find out where the shadows came from, her face screwed up in concentration as the blank surface defeated her. Those were happy times, though I never knew it until they were gone.
No one knew why I married Syed. He was an old man. No one understood my choice, not even Syed himself. At least, not at first. He must have guessed the truth when my condition became clear, though as was his way he said nothing of it. My father was hardly pleased with the match, not when there were richer men, but there was little he could do. He saw my reasoning as clearly as he saw my face, and acquiesced to the marriage. As my condition worsened, the memory of beauty became a different gift. As though others could see the dull fear in my eyes, people became nervous and tongue-tied when they looked at me. My face had ceased to be my own; instead it was caught between their expectations and Allah’s affliction. Only a simple flutter of cloth hid the silent battle, and to this war between hidden promise and grim reality, only the family physician seemed immune.
My son made his presence felt whether the household liked it or not, as being quiet was simply not an option for Djaq. I was not blind to his faults, particularly since they were my own, but I indulged him - he reminded me of youth, and thus, he could play me like an instrument. I would purr with pride as we played our little games; “Where are Ommi’s eyes? Where is Ommi’s nose?” and I would close my eyes as his little hands roamed over my face. I enjoyed being loved. Later, after he was far too old for such things, he would stroke my veil without trying to remove it as he wheedled his way into my purse. We understood each other.
Of Safiyah, there is less to say. In her infancy, she was quiet; in her childhood she was quieter. Where Djaq ran, Safiyah walked; where he yelled, she spoke. Yet though she had all the appearance of placidity, she had none of the essence of it. In truth, she was as stubborn as her father. She would tug at my veil, wanting to see what lay beneath, desiring to push and prod with her fingertips. I would send her to Bassam’s house, just to be rid of her. Word came back through the servants that she enjoyed the company of the pigeons, proof enough that she was a strange child. Many years later I asked her once why she spent so much time at Bassam’s aviary, baffled as to why she sought the company of birds over human beings. She told me. “It is not the birds, Ommi, it is what they do.” Her thoughts were closed to me.
I called them Night and Day, but only in my head. They were always together, like a body and its shadow, though one could never tell which was which. They assumed I did not know what was happening, simply because I spent my time cloistered away. Yet I had heard the two of them clashing about with wooden swords in the courtyard outside the women’s quarters. On still days, their conversation drifted up to me on the warm air, mostly combat techniques that meant nothing to me, but once the words: “you should have been the boy, Safiyah.”
I didn’t want to acknowledge that he could have belonged to anyone but me. Djaq was my memory of things that had never truly happened, the only one to cosset and flatter and humour his mother when a black mood was upon me. Yet I cannot fool myself into believing that he needed me as much as I needed him. I was someone to be placated and someone to beseech when Syed was being stubborn. Rather, the centre of his world was Safiyah, and she could silence him with a look, something not even Syed could do. Only by Safiyah’s presence could his temper be subdued; to his sister alone was Djaq answerable.
I see the truth now. They loved her; loved her more than they did me. But that was the way of it: Djaq: his mother’s darling, his father’s bane, the favourite of half the household and the despair of the rest; Safiyah, who just wanted to know why there were shadows and how she could grasp them.
As she entered adolescence, I could tell that she would take after her father. He had been handsome in his youth, or so I’d heard, and it was his features, not mine, that were reflected in his children. A pity. I would have liked a daughter that looked more like me, and Safiyah showed little interest in the world I had prepared for her: the dowry of necklaces and bracelets, the swathes of silk and linen, the bottles of perfume and powder. But she tried to read a book throughout the application of her first henna tattoos, and had little interest in the result. When the Sultan’s favourite courtesans came down from the palace to instruct the daughters of the noble families, I watched her face as the room full of girls were instructed in the ways to please a husband. The other girls whispered and giggled throughout the courtesan’s teachings; she was stoic and impassive. I couldn’t fathom what she might be thinking, not even I, her own mother. No sign of interest, nerves or embarrassment. She did not need a veil to hide her features. Her face was mask enough.
It was as though I had given birth to a stranger. It was only at night that she bore some semblance to a daughter that could have been mine; when I combed her hair and sang to her softly her eyes would close, her shoulders would relax, and I could sense the bond that for others came so naturally. It is a strange thing that you can love someone without ever understanding them.
In all parts of the house, I wore my veil and never removed it, save in the bedchamber, and that was not because Syed was my husband, but my physician. The needles of the acupuncturist, the poultices of the herbalist, the tools of the surgeon, tonics and massage, lotions and blood-letting; nothing helped. But I couldn’t let myself give up hope, not even for a moment. Syed’s body was frail, but his fingers were nimble. Over time, his eyes filled with immovable sadness, like the water trembling at the bottom of a well, that for all his skills and the accumulated wisdom of his years, he could not treat those closest to him. He could not cure his wife, nor understand his son. It was only natural then that he should turn to Safiyah for solace.
Syed was the greater fool for thinking I knew nothing about what he was teaching her. She had her father’s hands. I could tell from the way she held things, carefully but deftly, the way she used her eating implements, holding them as a surgeon grasped his tools. The veil did not cover my eyes. Washing her hands of blood every evening, poring over her father’s anatomy sketches, walking about with her cheeks drained of colour every time she ducked into her father’s surgery. I do not know why I didn’t put a stop to it. All I know is that I coached her in the ways of womanhood: how to carry herself, how to pomade her hair, how to curve her wrists and speak with her eyes, and throughout all of it, never did she lose the glazed, indifferent expression on a face that was so different from mine.
One day I saw her, resting her chin in her hands and staring out of the window, and I realised what it was that troubled me about her. She was waiting. Waiting for something, preparing herself even, and it chilled me a little, that she knew without knowing that a life of cloistered walls, latticed frames and darkened veils was not to be hers.
I never really knew why they came from over the seas, neither did I particularly care. All that mattered was that they came, and that Djaq was henceforth possessed by a darkness that none had ever seen in him before. Not even Safiyah could stem the flow of vitriol that he felt for the infidels, and so I, of course, had no chance at all. What are a mother’s embraces against the promise of glory won in battle? He disappeared from his room one night, and no one was surprised. Just silent. I could see in Safiyah’s eyes that she knew more than she let on: for once, her mind and its grief were clear to me. But I could not bear to question her. She always kept her own counsel; perhaps she would not have told me anyway.
My story begins and ends with my children, and so there is little more to tell. When Djaq left, he took the greater part of me with him. The last vestiges of beauty fell away: composure, grace, softness; all this left me. I was a shadow. The three of us that he had left behind were divided, exiling ourselves to separate parts of the house.
I was in the woman’s quarters when they came. The servants were panicking and so it was I who went in search of…I’m not sure what exactly. It was probably someone to aid us, or possibly an understanding of what was happening, but surely what I sought was the last remaining members of my family. And so it was I had to bear witness to Syed’s death, cut down by Crusaders in his own home. He had been on his knees, I had heard him plead, and it wasn’t until that moment that I realised how old he was. The act of killing him took very little effort, and I did not stay to watch further.
Smoke was rising from beneath every door, heat was coursing its way through the halls and all about were the sounds of terror. Back to the women’s quarters I ran, only one face fixed in my mind, and for the first time in years it was not my own.
Safiyah was not where I hoped she would be but I could hear her voice below, screaming for me as she had never done as a child. The stairs all but melted under my feet as I ran to her, saw her standing before men with swords that flashed in the fires, returned for a moment to the day in which I had fought her to life. That which had possessed my son took me as well, for neither one of us could hope for reason to restrain us, and I was filled with a love and hate that forged strength beyond that of mortals. I would not die like Syed. I would die like Djaq, who was indeed his mother’s son; two creatures with whom passion overrode all other senses.
I understood at last as I tore off my veil in order to better claw and hack and bite. I could see the terrible visage of my face reflected in their eyes, and they recoiled back as I flung myself on them. I had only nails and teeth with which to attack; all the weapons that I could muster, but it was a face to frighten children, to quicken fear in a coward’s heart, to buy her the moments she needed.
Allah granted me a last glimpse of her and in that glimpse I was pleased to find that she did indeed love me. She was reaching for me as she was dragged away by one of our own people, out into the night, to safety, in the time I won for her. She would be all right. I knew it somehow; there was too much of her yet to be discovered for Allah to take her so soon. But she wasn’t my mystery to solve, she was her own. She always had been.
An oddity that is almost not worth mentioning save that I was grateful for it. That I left the world with less pain than it took to bring her into it.
Note: "Wardah of Acre" translates into "the Rose of Acre." It's sort-of a play on the term "English Rose" which is often used to describe Maid Marian. Djaq on the other hand, was our Desert Rose.