[Issue 2023.66]

‘One Day’, Frances Koziar

Art © 2023 Sebastian Timpe

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In the still calm of the palace gardens I stand, watching the sky change from navy to a pale blue streaked with gold. I am as still as only an ageing soldier well used to waiting can be, my grey hair tied tightly at the nape of my neck.

When the first horn sounds, my feet turn and take me to the training yard. I am not thinking of her, exactly, only seeing her in the periphery of my sight, like the sun that is just lifting over the greenery.

My lady captain, I hear from too many directions at once, most of which I ignore as I get the morning drills started. I challenge a few of the guards myself, to warm up: I only fight the best, who might hold their own against me, and the newest, who are unpredictable.

Then, I turn into one of the side doors of the palace. For today is not an ordinary day: it is the Day of the Empress, the day on the first of each month when the empress is carried through her capital, and the people gather for the blessing of glimpsing her veiled face. It is a day when I am needed to personally guard her Holiness.

It is a day when the empress’ handmaidens and the empress’ guards come together.

A few of my soldiers and I wait outside of the empress’ quarters, relieving the night shift. When the empress comes out, we all bow low, before moving into position. The empress is wearing a robe of royal green and black, every part of her ink-dark skin concealed by layers of silks, with a mesh around the part of her veil that covers her eyes. At her sides, three handmaidens—including Nahi—are similarly veiled, but garbed all in black.

In the courtyard we are joined by more soldiers, as the empress climbs into her litter. It is a chair on beams of wood, with a silk covering draped on four poles above her, the sides open to the gentle breeze of the day. Four bearers lift her up once she is inside. Tatski, Nahi’s once-husband, does not dare glare at me openly, but he looks sullenly at the cobblestones when I pass.

I order us to move, and our procession through the city begins. People are already lining the streets and rooftops. We have no trouble, and I soon find myself at Nahi’s side, where she walks closest to the litter.

“Holy / is the morn
and holy / her figure
in a path / we all take
and yet never / know the same,”

I quote from one of so many poems on the Day of the Empress.

“It is a beautiful morning,” she agreed, her voice soft beneath the veil and below the sounds of armoured boots. The citizens, though many, are reverently silent as we pass.

“I hear Tatski had some trouble,” Nahi remarks blandly, and a smile touches my lips. Where she gets her seemingly endless sources of information, I do not know, but for all the guards under my command, I rarely know half of what she knows about what happens in the palace.

“He went looking for trouble,” I say, my eyes sweeping over toward him, where he walks in steady rhythm with the other bearers, his dark umber face already shiny with sweat from the heat of the day. It was five days ago that a couple of my guards had detained him for sneaking into the empress’ wing, where Nahi lives. Only five months past she had left him, when decades of his brewing anger and abuse had finally led to him turning his fists on her for the first and last time, and he still felt the shame of his loss of status.

I suggest you go, I had told him generously, anger at what he’d done to Nahi returning as a hard knot in my belly, but he had been bleary with drink and flew at me in a rage. The watching guards had been snickering, knowing my skill from experience, when he ended up face first on the clouded marble floor of the palace.

“Thank you,” Nahi acknowledges with a dip of her head, understanding more than I say. How much more? I wonder.

I catch an over-eager toddler before they reach the handmaidens, but beyond that, the minutes stretch quietly and unremarkably as we move through the warming streets. A dog barks and is hushed. Brightly coloured birds twitter and are not.

I spend some of the walk in contented silence at Nahi’s side, and the rest collecting myself after such moments, lest I lose my ability to effectively guard Her Holiness.

When we return to the palace courtyard, Nahi slips a fold of paper into my hand before we are parted, gentle as a hush of wings.

Sundown tea; my rooms.

---

I spend the rest of the morning standing guard while the Empress holds court and much of the afternoon doing paperwork in the barracks. From time to time my eyes lift to the window, checking the light of day, before falling back to the ink.

The air of the courtyard smells like spices at sundown, and somewhere I can hear voices and laughter.

When I arrive at Nahi’s rooms, I hesitate before knocking. Last week I turned sixty, and something about that has changed me, has made some things seem less important while others have become more urgent. Now, as I stand with a fist raised over the carved relief of water and rainforest and wild creatures, I think, It is time.

Nahi welcomes me with a smile, her veil removed now that she is in the empress’ wing. Her eyes are the same dark brown as her skin, and lines are etched out from their sides, paths to a joy we have both touched, but perhaps never fully reached.

We kneel on cushions, while she pours steaming tea that smells of oranges and cinnamon. She pours with her left hand, for her right is missing and her arm only half the length.

“It was my mother, you know,” Nahi says only after I have sipped the drink, smoke twisting up into the still air of her receiving room, “who convinced me there were benefits to being a handmaiden that could outweigh those of a soldier.

‘She who stays hidden / is most aware of secrets’.”

“You wanted to be a soldier?” I ask, thinking of what kind of soldier she would be. The kind that lets others underestimate them, I think.

“I used to think able to fight meant strong, and I wanted to be strong,” she said with a small smile.

You are strong, I think of saying, but I know that Nahi doesn’t need to hear it.

Instead, I murmur, “So did I,” and quote from the Soldiers’ Teachings:

“Lift / your blade / and breathe:
inhale / the strength / of tradition, of
duty; a soldier’s / blessing; a soldier’s
warning.”

I think of my wife, one of the few soldiers who could offer me a challenge in a duel. I think of her urn, embossed with designs in mother-of-pearl, sitting now in the catacombs these fifteen years.

“You are strong, also,” Nahi says, her dark eyes flipping up to me as she pours more tea. And despite that I am sixty and would have challenged anyone to a duel without a qualm, I find myself flushing like a girl at the way she says it.

“It is good to have time to speak,” I say, my eyes sweeping sideways to one of the candles glowing on the table, dancing slightly as our voices stir the air. Behind Nahi is a broad latticed window, but there is no breeze left in the day, and no outside air cools or disturbs us.

“Yes,” Nahi says, and I wait, knowing she has more to say. I read the movement of her hands, the flick of her eyes, the tweak of her lips. “I have no more duties today,” she says, and then holds my gaze.

If I were a younger woman, I might have asked Nahi to play a game or go for a walk, or merely held her there in conversation, too afraid of failure to ask for what I wanted, and too nervous to believe I had a chance. My heart is beating strongly in my chest as I set my teacup down with the gentlest of clinks, my eyes lifting to hers, but my voice is steady, and my gaze steady too.

“May I stay?” I ask only, and she nods. There is no contemplation before that nod, and it takes me a moment to believe. Then, my lips lift, and I pick up my cup again, pressing my smile to the cool ceramic.

It is time, I had thought at the door, fifteen years for me and five months for her, but that does not mean that when the moment comes I am sure of myself.

We tidy up the tea, first. Then, for all that I am the soldier and more used to physical contact, she is the one who begins. I am dressed in a soldier’s garb: tough pants tied beneath a simple tunic that is embroidered with birds and serpents to reflect my rank, hair tied back tightly at the nape of my neck. She is dressed as a handmaiden: in long flowing black robes tied with a silken sash, her black and grey hair thick and oiled, half up for practicality, half down for beauty. Her hands are gentle but sure as she reaches for my waist and our lips come together. I can taste the orange on her tongue, the spice and the sweetness, as my fingers reach gently into her hair. When her flesh touches mine, I can give no answers to the questions of my life, but I know that I cannot think beyond this moment, and that that feels right and true and deep.

Later, we lie curled together, the last of the light from the window gone, and only the warm flickering orange of the room’s candle’s remaining. It smells of incense and our bodies: languid, relaxed.

Our fingers are entwined in the quiet. I hear only her breathing and the distant trill of a night bird, and I smile, and keep smiling.

© 2023 Frances Koziar

[Issue 2023.66]

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