Heaven

A Planned Escape

“It’d be nice to get out of here, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said. Between projects, between days, between meals, between knifestrokes, between breaths, all I thought about was Osada.

I was talking to Jakob. He was another Siklabi servant, about my age, and he was in charge of drawing the designs that I would cut the tiles for. From our conversations we concluded that we must have come from nearby villages; we spoke in the same way, whereas other Sakaliba pronounced their words a bit differently or had different names for things. Our common origin had brought us together in this foreign land. 

“Those grassy hills; the towering trees; the breeze that wakes you up and whisks you along; our simple, little homes…”

“Even the sun is friendlier there. Do you remember?”

Of course I remembered. And if I closed my eyes, I could just as easily be preparing wooden panels at my workbench in Osada. I imagined looking outside to see Ania playing on the knoll, her hair mirroring the long grass as it blowed in the wind. And from over the crest of the hill, a woman—Sofia. 

But my mind was a dark place: Just as soon as Sofia reached Ania in a mother’s embrace, a host of vikings rose over the hill, and my wife and daughter faded in their advance. The grass dried up, green turned to brown, and I found myself in the Azara once again, my expression hardened.

“Do you have family?” Jakob asked.

“Not anymore,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. It was understood that there were vikings involved; it was a common element among all the Sakaliba, it seemed. 

He was working magic on a leaf of paper. he began by drawing a single point, then another, and then a line connecting them. From that line he used a tool called a compass to create a circle, and then another circle. In a blink there were a dozen circles overlapping uniformly and somehow peacefully, forming a kind of flower. Now he connected some of the intersections with straight lines and erased some of the arcs and other lines. It was beautiful: Watching him work was every bit as pleasing as seeing the finished design, and I felt honored to be cutting tiles to execute his drawings. 

“I’ve got family,” he said as he put down the compass. “A wife and three children. They made it away a day before the attack—praise the stars. I think about them every day. I just know they’re waiting for me. And I’m going to make it back to them.”

“But how?”

“It won’t be easy. You can’t just walk out the door, you know—you’d get killed by the guards. Or imprisoned, which may be worse. The caliph and his men are cruel, and they like to use runaways as examples for the rest of us. I’ve seen it happen. No one’s ever managed to escape that way. You have to earn your way out of here. By playing the game and getting better and better. We’re lucky, you know, because we have that option. The black ones and the eunuchs are stuck here till the end of the world. Some of the women might go free if their masters ever died, but we Sakaliba have a clearer path. That is, if they don’t send us to die in battle before we can get away. They’ve been talking about a war with the Christians in Germania, you know. And we’d be the first ones to go.”

“I’ve heard a bit about it,” I said, remembering the envoy that Abdulhakam took me to meet at the gates of Kurtuba. That was many weeks before, and I hadn’t heard anything more about it. Anything definitive, that is—rumors were stirring. And when rumors stirred, you knew something was happening—maybe not exactly what the rumors said, but something similarly vicious. “Do you think there’ll be a war?”

“Who knows,” said Jakob. “You can’t tell the weather from inside a cavern. But one thing’s for sure: I’m working as hard as I can, as fast as I can, to make it out of here.”