Guardian of the Dawn

Chapter 1 After my arrest in November of 1591, I spoke to no one but my prison guard for nearly eleven months. I was neither informed of the charges against me nor allowed anything to read, and my window, a grudging slit in barren stone, was too high up to allow me a glimpse of the city below. Hope clung to memories of Tejal, and sometimes, too, to the drumming of rain, which reminded me there was a world beyond the control of my jailors. Once, during a storm, I licked a few drops as they scurried down my wall. They tasted of Indra's Millstream and, for a time, my thoughts were splashed with all my childhood freedom, but I often think they betrayed me in the end: I was robbed of God that very night; awoke to find myself more alone than I'd ever been before, banished from the world He'd always watched over. I'd never again feel my toes curl through the red earth of rice fields or learn whether Tejal had given birth to a son or daughter. Apologizing silently to Papa for not making the better life he'd wished for me, I reached for the treasure made of rust and sharpness I'd hidden at the bottom of my earthenware chamber pot weeks before. Sniffing its holy scent of metallic purpose, counting on defeat as my last friend, I drew it across one arm and then the other. My final portrait would be warm, and designed in my own blood, as it should be. I knew I was damned when not even my prayers could make the nail dig deeply enough in my life to create the miracle I needed. Still, I bled well, and the river that lies beyond the Sabbath carried me far in its current. Laying my head into the justice of its waters, I dreamed of a horizon of pine and cedar far in the west, on the banks of the Jordan River. Tejal would be informed of my death; she would now be free to marry another man. That was worth this price I had to pay. I awoke with a jolt to a sweating priest I'd never seen before knotting rough cords around my arms. I begged him to leave me be, but he continued his work and dumped me with a grunt of disgust onto my cot. I tugged at his rosaries to try to break my fall, sending the beads scurrying over the floor. "Mulatto bastard!" he shouted at me. "We'll get a confession from you yet!" No, I thought, in the voice of the child I'd been. Even though I am not what I was, there's still too much glue on my soul for it to leave me so easily. Two guards hunted on all fours for the beads--men turned to groveling boars by the incantation of my contempt. For no reason I could think of I began to paint the stripes of a tiger on my face with blood from my wrists. Later I remembered Wadi's nickname for me and thought: Yes, I need to become another kind of being, someone ferocious, for if I don't, I shall name others and sentence them to my fate. It was my father who had told me that our Dominican and Jesuit masters craved the identities of all those who were like us. Sooner or later, the priests would try to torture the names from me. I drifted into a feverish slumber. My memories were needles, and all my past was prickly and poisoned--a childhood twisted and finally deadened by fate. The next morning, just after the bells of prime, guards brought an old, cinnamon-complexioned man with bristling white hair into my cell, undoubtedly hoping that his companionship would keep me from reopening my wounds; the Church would not easily give up the pleasure of deciding how and when I'd be murdered. The old man's feet were crabs of crusted skin. I turned away; compassion comes through the eyes and I did not want him to know I could still feel such a useless emotion. He crumpled to the ground when my usual guard--a dim-witted Lisboner with the dull green eyes and fetid breath of a man always sneaking a drink--pulled away his hands from under his shoulders. The prisoner's head fell back at a cockeyed angle and his eyes closed. O AnZimler, Richard is the author of 'Guardian of the Dawn', published 2005 under ISBN 9780385338813 and ISBN 0385338813.