The North Wind Gardens [Ifran]

[Tayhura]

53rd of Summer, 510 A.V.

Tayhura had to admit it: he was too clever for his own good! At least, that was how he felt as he dug his fingers into the cool of the earth. He did not know what to think, whether to be simpering with joy or sighing with disbelief. So he did both. His olive skin folded back around his mouth in a queer sort of smirk that did the best it could to lighten up his otherwise somber visage.

It was beautiful out. The moon hovered in the sky and across from her, blood red streaks of light began to creep over the horizon. This cast an eerie blanket of light and dark across the floor of the garden. This wasn’t any garden floor. This was the garden floor of the House of the North Wind! Why, Tayhura was working for nobility already!

All those years of watching his family pile brick upon brick upon brick seemed to him a sore curse from the gods. Where could masonry get a man in Ahnatep, the city of glorious ruins? It seemed to Tayhura that the Eypharians held so high a respect for their ancestors that they should never want to rebuild the wreckage.

Yet here he was! Proven wrong! He had come to a noble house to perfect a noble garden, and he could hardly believe it. His heart pumped faster, harder even as he thought of it.

"Beautiful," he heard himself utter through a sigh of disbelief. How could he believe that such a place existed, and more so, how could he believe that he of all people was allowed in this little piece of divinity fallen down from the heavens? The whole garden was a microcosm of nature's most extravagant beauty, captured and tamed in the purple marble of a noble, rich house.

Tayhura shook his head. He was daydreaming! There wasn’t any time for it! Only a few hours remained before the sun’s golden head would peak over the distant horizon, to seer the world with her torturous rays. It would be madness to have to labor in the heat—but, for a noble house, he would if necessary.

There were thin lines of brick separating the various flowerbeds with their diverse soils and flora. They were finely cut and well designed, but they had been there for years. It was wearisome to look at them: they had to be replaced!

At the moment, the garden’s designer had yet to choose the new style of brick, so at the moment Tayhura was only charily hacking away at the mortar, removing the old bricks and placing them in wheelbarrows one by one. The bricks were in fine condition. They were to be reused or sold. Either way, they had to be treated solicitously. And so, that was what Tayhura was doing.

It was tiresome work. It was work he hated. But it was for nobility. So work he did.

Then, on a sudden, Tayhura heard himself humming an old Benshiran song of praise.

[Ifran]

Though the sun beat down unmercifully upon the garden, Ifran was intent upon sitting on his favorite bench of eggplant-colored Eypharian marble beneath the shade-giving branches of several manicured trees. There was no servant on hand to carry a parasol over him to prevent the sun from unduly damaging his scrupulously maintained skin. Unwilling to wait, he walked out onto the balcony, the smooth stone reflecting back the summer heat even through his thin silk slippers. He skin survived the relatively brief walk, still the color of aged ivory when he took his seat in the shade. The heat demanded as few clothes as modesty allowed, so he sat there in his linen kilt and simple gold torc. It was only after a few moments of quiet meditation that he overheard someone singing, the crack of metal on mortar keeping unconscious time. His own voice quietly joined in, harmonizing with the male voice. Ifran's musically trained mind quickly identified it as a Benshiran song, but only after his intuition had begun to lead him through the melody. Sometimes the mind was slower to catch up to the intuitive leaps. He found this often the case with music and sword-dancing.

[Tayhura]

The heat pounded down on him. The sun was the drumstick and his poor, bald head- alas!- was the hide of the drum.

Tayhura grumbled in his heart, mostly at himself for leaving his head cover at home. He did not wish to give too Benshiran an impression while in the heart of Eypharian culture. Mostly, though, he had been sluggish beyond all reckoning that morning (or, to be more accurate, that night) when he awoke. He slipped out of bed and, first thing, marched straight to work, wearing only his plain white tunic, which draped loosely down to his ankles.

As he chipped away at the mortar rhythmically, Tayhura fell into a pattern. His arms worked mechanically, cyclically. He fast lost all cognizance of his movements. Instead, he began focusing on his humming, which then broke out into open singing, until--

Crash!

"Son of a--!" he leaped to his feet with a boisterous shout, followed by a deluge of hissing Benshiran expletives that he was accustomed to use. He had stopped paying attention; if anything, he had weaved in his work with the timing of his singing, and there- right on the accented note of the new refrain, he had hammered his tool directly into an exquisitely decorated brick. It cracked. It fell. It crashed onto the floor.

[Ifran]

Nary a flicker of annoyance crossed his features when his anonymous, invisible singing partner devolved into what could only be cursing in Shiber. He continued to sing, taking over the melody that the other singer had dropped. It reminded him of his apprenticeship, when Master Taharqa had taken him upriver to spend time among the tents of some Benshiran shepherds of whom he had made acquaintance. It was a different time, not exactly nostalgic, but he had indeed learned a lesson in the beauties of other cultures. Of course, he esteemed his own above that of anyone else like any good Eypharian, but he knew better than to parrot the idea that the Benshira people were worthless. And then there had been sweet Ha'na... His voice rose over the cursing, into the trees. This was not the semhu he had been trained for with its artifice and theatricality, but a simple, emotive song. It was, perhaps, more honest than all the high art.

[Tayhura]

Tayhura froze. A brow raised as a strong and well trained voice floated into the air, like a refreshing draught of wind during this sweltering day. For a moment, he took no heed to his work, and instead listened to the careful yet natural voice ring into his ears.

Tayhura smiled to himself. Another worker must have entered the gardens, he assumed. He was, after all, a bit behind schedule.

"Ha ha!" he laughed noisily, pleased with this sudden company. What he wanted most at the moment was an excuse not to work: polite conversation with a fellow worker seemed the perfect solution!

"You sing very well!" he bellowed in Common from the bottom of his lungs, to wherever the other singer might have been, "But you're still not as good as my uncles!"

[Ifran]

"Likely not," he said politely in Common, "but I did not spend a great deal of time among the Benshiran tents." He paid close attention to his breathing. The Benshiran song was not in his normal repertoire and he should not be out of breath, even if it wasn't a particularly common mode for his voice. He would always experiment, wanting to push himself to new heights. "I am out of practice," he admitted. Lately he was focusing on particularly difficult passages in The Love-Suicides of Menehat so as not to falter in the current production.

[Tayhura]

Scratching his chin uncertainly, Tayhura bent down and dug his fingers into the soil of a flowerbed. He made a small hole in the earth and then mulled over his plan for a moment. He nodded to himself decidedly and charily placed the broken brick pieces in the hole, quickly burying it in the dirt.

He sprung up and looked side to side for any passersby. Espying none, he stuck out a foot and nonchalantly swept the powdery crumbs that the brick left behind into the dark earth of the garden.

"Out of practice, eh?" Tayhura cheerily replied in Common to the stranger in the garden. He thought of the right words to say but then resorted to the language of Arumenic, in which his assimilated background had made him more proficient, "No excuse for a singer! Especially one with your skill!"

Snorting out a chuckle, Tayhura added further, "You should know better!"

[Ifran]

Arumenic, of course, was Ifran's forte. Poets and politicians tended toward High Arumenic, an infinitely complicated dialect that tended to make the minds of lesser educated men swim. All the same, in the interest of keeping up the current farce, Ifran stayed in the basic mode, or common Arumenic. "There is not much call for songs from the Tents in Ahnatep, at least not from the people with coin to spend on singers." That might not be entirely true. Surely there were wine bars for the Benshira in town, but Eypharians weren't exactly welcome there. Only an Eypharian down on his luck would sing for coin in a Benshira bar. "Where did you learn to sing?"

[Tayhura]

"Me?" Tayhura laughed while bending down with his trowel in hand, "I didn't so much as learn as I mimicked...old religious songs and even older drinking songs."

He chipped at another line of mortar. After a while of uninterrupted, clattery hacks, he managed to remove yet another brick. Reaching down, he brought up the bottom of his tunic and wiped away the sweat from off his forehead. He placed the brick into a wheelbarrow and stood up again to stretch.

"You'd be amazed at how ready a pack of old drunks would be willing to toss away their coin for some noise to fill their ears."

He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the piercing sun.

"I've never much understood why they worship Syna here," he grumbled, "The miserable old hag has got to be the cruellest goddess out there...not content till the whole lot of us are as miserable as her."

Of course, he was griping, but that was Tayhura's specialty when it came to hands-on, monotonous labor.

[Ifran]

"I do find myself surprised by the stupidity of people, though I should be used to it by now," he noticed wryly. He wondered how long it would take this gardener to realize he wasn't speaking with a fellow laborer but a scion of this Noble House. In the meantime, he merely enjoyed himself. Simple pleasures. "Why have you not pursued minstrelsy?" he asked. "It sounds like your skill with marble leaves something to be desired." There was humor in his voice since he wasn't using the more complex modes of High Arumenic with a common laborer, though he was impressed at his command of the simpler Arumenic.