The Silver Sparrow

A Declaration of War

The death of his father had come when he was thirteen. That vision, among many, had been one the gods decided to not reveal to him the time and place it was to happen. All Nazir had seen was that Za'in izr Husari would die from a blade, stabbed from behind his left shoulder, the tip coming out on the other side to pierce through his heart. He wore white, which was something he did regularly as kha'a. It would happen in the middle of the desert, where he traveled frequently to a hunt or in answer to a summon made by Citara. The landscape had never been clear to Nazir in his vision, and through the glimpse of what he had seen, no recognizable landmark had been there. The killer, too, had never been shown to him. These visions that had come to him more than once gave him nothing to prevent any of it. The only sense of time they had ever offered him was the fact that his father looked to be the same age he was now when he died, and he had looked that way for more or less ten years now.

It would happen in broad daylight, on a day like this, where the sky was a deep shade of blue and mostly clear, save for the small clutters of clouds that looked like someone had left clumps of wool on it after shearing a sheep. But a day like that came by often in the desert, and no matter how much things seemed to be going wrong that day, or how prominent that bad feeling in the pit of his stomach was, it didn't mean the death of his father would happen. Wars and conflicts had always been and would continue to be a large part of Za'in izr Husari's life. It was likely—honorably even—for him to die that way, and not necessarily that day.

Or so Nazir told himself as he rode with the Kamara khagan toward where his father and his warriors would be. They had brought him along on the ride in case leverage was needed. His hands had been tied in front of him, secured to the saddle of a horse that had also been tethered to a White Warrior's mare. Baaku had been held somewhere back at camp. They had him tied up, too, beaten into submission by order of the kha'a. He had, after all, put up a fight that took four armed men to hold him down.

Aza'ir izr Zakai, the kha'a of Kamara, had brought with him eight hundred White Warriors to fight his father. Among them, Nazir had overheard, was the khumar of Khalji, Zardi izr Aziz, who had contributed to that number with his own two hundred zikh-clad warriors. It meant that this alliance and attack had been planned for some time, which didn't surprise Nazir. His father and Aza'ir kha'a had been rivals for longer than anyone could remember. Nazir had never been told the story in detail. He only knew that it had begun over something inconsequential that happened one Dyal in Citara. Things had somehow escalated, accumulated, and intensified since then. Deaths after deaths had piled up on one another from their conflicts over the years until an alliance became simply out of the question. It was why he'd never considered Baaku's proposal as anything but folly. Their fathers would try to kill each other if they were put into the same room for too long. They had, after all, wanted to kill each other for decades.

But Baaku was Baaku. He never thought anything was impossible. The fact that their khagans were rivals had never, not once, stopped Baaku from pursuing him, hadn't even made him hesitate.

'I don't give a fuck if your father wants to kill mine,' he'd said the first time Nazir found him in his tent one night. 'Our people are free because we're free to fight, free to decide if we want to live or die. If we can't go where we want to go, love who we want to love, then tell me, what the hell are we fighting for?'

What, indeed, were they to fight for if not for these things? Small pleasures that made life worth living. The freedom to make choices even if it might lead to an undesirable outcome. Is life not measured by how it was lived rather than how it ends? Was it so wrong for him to seek some meanings to his life besides what it meant to others?

'We may die tomorrow for all I know,' Baaku had said, his face softened in the dim light of the tent. 'I don't want to die not having done this.'