I couldn’t take my eyes off the image of them with their backs to that woven buzkashi scene. The two men who loomed tall as mountains in my world were suddenly dwarfed by rearing stallions and their whip-clutching riders, a stampede ready to storm this very room.

Chapter 3

Arg was guarded by a handful of soldiers who were meant to be seen, not heard. I once asked my father if they had ever considered replacing the soldiers with uniforms on sticks. My father pondered my ridiculous questions with the same attention that he gave my more earnest ones. He would narrow his eyes and turn my words into an image in his head, an X-ray revealing the carefully aligned bones of my reasoning. I stood inches taller in his presence. And for a child to feel grand in the storied, soaring halls of Arg was no small feat.

Because the soldiers were present, we found ways to turn them into props for our play. To engage in some amateur espionage, Neelab and I tracked their movements and assigned each one a secret code name. The soldier with green eyes we called Sabzi, or spinach. When we were his only audience, he would make his eyes cross and pinch his nose as if he’d just smelled a foul odor. Our parents and all the other adults in the palace only ever saw a solemn face on him.

The other soldiers were too fearful of being reprimanded to risk a moment of lightness. We gave them even more teasing names, perhaps out of spite. The guard who was forever squinting we named Kishmish, because his entire face took on a wrinkled appearance when he looked at anything farther than his outstretched arm. A soldier who sniffled with allergies we called Darya, for his nose seemed to run like a river. Shair, or Sham, was a soldier who always stood straight and silent as a candle. Perhaps the most disciplined of the soldiers, he was quickest to click his heels together in salute. Rostam, on the rare afternoons when he was not with his private tutor, did a most perfect impression of Shair’s deep and deferential voice.