Rapunzel must die a pers.., p.2
Rapunzel Must Die: A Persian Retelling, page 2
“Why, I love you so much, I would call down the stars for you!” He gestured dramatically to the heavens. “I would shepherd them and keep them close by, just so that you could always bathe by starlight.”
“My, what love!” laughed Farrah. “I cannot tell if the stars are impressed, but I am.”
“That is nothing,” said Mahmoud. “For you, I would go deep into the mountains and capture the faeries I find there, in our water pot, so that you could have magic whenever you wished it.”
She grinned. “That is a wicked thing to do to a faerie.”
“You make me want to do wicked things, " was his answer, the tea quite forgotten.
Farrah seized her moment. “Well, my love, these are great and impressive things, but I do not ask them of you.”
“Then what does my bride desire?”
She allowed a kiss to delay her response before saying, “Rapunzel. I ask only for Rapunzel.”
Mina
They were protesting in the street.
It was all over the international news, which Mina knew meant it was very serious indeed, as the they in charge with grandiose opinions of themselves, usually had a strong grip on what news got out of the region. They wouldn’t be happy about this, at all. They would become very dangerous in their unhappiness.
The women were angry, and the men who supported them, were angry. They were tired of the Good and Bad Police—the Morality Constabulary and their enforced codes that seemed to suck the joy and youth right out of generation after generation of Persians, until they’d all been turned into old souls—turned before their time.
One must cover one’s hair.
One must not sing unless approved by the Constabulary.
One must not visit with members of the opposite gender.
One must not disagree with any one of the they, or any of the rules they make.
One must not. One must not. One must not.
They had to know the people would start to crack, and through the cracks would come a reckoning, and the reckoning had arrived. It had the face of her cousin—of Nila. They were saying on the news, she was arrested for improperly covering her hair. They had experts on, debating each sinful centimeter that hadn’t been covered by her headscarf. They held up rulers to pictures and Mina hated them for it.
And now the people were angry. And the they were cracking down and flooding the streets with riot police and clergymen—a fruitless attempt to contain something uncontainable—like wind in a fist.
Mina changed her plane ticket to catch the first flight into the Persian capitol she could get. When she called her boss at her contracting job to tell him she would be out of pocket for a few weeks at least, he politely informed her there was a mandatory training exercise she could not miss the following week.
“They’ve updated the chemical warfare training module,” he told her over the phone, “and it’s a go-no-go item for our next deployment. I know you’re worried about your cousin, Mina,” he added in a voice she supposed he thought was meant to be wise, “but she’s already been arrested. You won’t be doing any good, going there yourself at a time like this.”
At a time like this? Mina thought.
At a time when her sister needed her. Her father, her mother, even her cousin. Maybe he was right, and maybe there was nothing Mina could really do to help her cousin, but Mina came from a family of shepherds. Before her parents had moved them all to the capitol, they had lived at the base of the Zagros Mountains. They were nomads, and as such, all they had in this world was the flock, the things they could carry on their backs, and family.
Family was everything.
Even if Mina could not affect a palpable change, she could go there, and she could sit beside their grief.
Mina smiled into the phone, realizing her cousin’s arrest had led to an answer she hadn’t thought she was looking for. “Thanks for everything,” she told her boss, “I know where I need to be.”
Mina quit.
Mina packed her bags.
They were protesting in the street, after all, and family was all that mattered.
Her plane’s flight path took her over the Zagros Mountains. Seeing them from above, just beyond her reach, made her want to cry. Those harsh peaks that hid smugglers and shepherds and people who just wanted to live as God had intended—people who lived and died by the sunsets and sunrises—more connected to reality than any person in a city tied up to machines and phones and morality codes.
As Mina looked out the window, she laughed, but it tasted bitter on her tongue. She was the one who should be in danger. She didn’t mind things like that. That had been her whole adult life, after all, going from combat zone to combat zone, until she had affectively numbed just enough of herself, that things like danger didn’t matter.
It shouldn’t have been her cousin, in her own land, amongst her own people.
Yes, they were protesting in the street, and Mina couldn’t get there fast enough.
Rapunzel’s Story: Mahmoud
There was a witch in the land.
Of course, this was no extraordinary thing. Witches can be found in any corner of the world after, all, even in Persia.
But this particular witch was different. He thought himself the Witch King, and he ruled from a tower that was pulled along from the backs of iron-clad camels, bred especially large and strong for the very purpose of moving the Tower wherever the Witch King pleased. Their feed was mixed with magic potions, the sort that made their muscles stronger, that made their minds more compliant, and so the Tower travelled far and wide, and its black walls cast a very long shadow indeed—the shadow much larger than any logic would dictate.
Fear of the Witch King divided the people. Some accepted his claim to power because of nothing more than that—fear—it was easier to be silent and be alive, after all, even if the Witch King subjected them to strange and harsh rules.
For one thing, there was no singing allowed in his realm, unless you were a registered member of his Good and Bad Constabulary. To sing as Mahmoud did when he tended the fires in the evening, was a small but dangerous act of rebellion. One didn’t think much about it when one was simply a shepherd. What would a Witch King really care for one humble shepherd singing over the flames? No one knew why singing wasn’t allowed to the general public, but if one asked why in the wrong company, it was a quick way to secure a one-way invitation to the Tower.
Most people learned quickly to stop asking questions.
No, there was no singing.
And women had to cover their hair.
And if a Constable required anything in the name of the Witch King, it was to be surrendered happily as a sacrifice to the realm.
These were small enough inconveniences and far enough away from Mahmoud and his growing family, that he didn’t think much about them at all. His mind was instead occupied with ensuring the sheep didn’t overgraze certain pastures, or how to keep the little lambs safe throughout the night from roaming jackals.
Besides, the Tower usually kept to cities and as such, didn’t stray towards his paradise in the Zagros Mountains. What business was it of his what happened in the cities?
But there had been troubling rumors as of late.
On the rare occasion Mahmoud crossed paths with another shepherd, they would share a fire and catch up on any happenings. They would leave the wives to discuss whatever wives discussed, (the incompetence of men, he would hazard to guess), and the men would stroll and sometimes talk of politics. Mahmoud could never add much to these conversations, but he listened with respect none the less, and it was in one such conversation that he heard of the Witch King’s Tower, and the shadow it was casting on just the other
side of the mountain.
“It must be very close indeed,” said the other shepherd, “to be casting such a long shadow. I have yet to see it, but I am turning my flock around just in case.” The man looked over his shoulder to make sure the women couldn’t hear him. “Listen, young friend. You might do well to do the same. There are strange things happening. More arrests than ever. Young women disappearing.”
“Young women?” Mahmoud looked at his bride, laughing with her new friend over her growing belly.
“Most are never seen again,” came the grim response, “but if they are, they come out different.” The man narrowed his eyes. “With sheared heads. And eyes of stone.”
“Eyes like stone?” Mahmoud questioned.
The man shook his head. “Stone eyes. It is some sort of enchantment. All they remember is the last thing they saw before their eyes were turned to stone.”
An image of his precious Farrah with marble eyes under her white hair flashed across his mind. “No,” insisted Mahmoud, “these things cannot be real.”
The shepherd shrugged. “I myself have not seen these things, but I will take no chances.”
Silence hung between them as they watched the sheep milling about.
“What goes on in the Tower?” asked Mahmoud. “What is
happening to these people?”
“Black magic, surely! He is a witch after all.”
But didn’t his people blame everything on black magic? His were a people quick to suspicion, but slow to action. If a particularly threatening storm rolled in, “Black magic!” Or if a baby was born missing a limb, “Black magic!” Or if an entire flock of sheep fell ill during the night, “Black magic!”
Mahmoud had his doubts.
“Will you go with us?” said the man, “further into the wilderness?”
Mahmoud looked once more at Farrah, whose hair glowed like moonlight in the fire. What he wouldn’t do for her. Perhaps he would take them into the wilderness, but first, he had something else to do.
“Not yet,” he answered. “First, I must fulfill a promise.”
He had Rapunzel to collect, and it would take him to the other side of the mountain, towards the shadow and the Tower.
Hadn’t he promised his bride even the moon? What were a few plants to the moon? Besides, he was a very good husband—according to Farrah—and she was always rights—also, according to Farrah.
He might not know a great deal about politics or Witch Kings,
but he was a man of his word. She was giving him sons. Mahmoud
was sure of it. If she wanted a whole forest, he would get it for her.
He would get her this Rapunzel, watching for other shepherds as he went. If he heard more of the Witch King, he would return after to take his family further into the wilderness.
For now, his bride wanted Rapunzel, and he was a very good husband, after all.
Mina
Mina’s return to her parents’ home in Persia was more
funeral than birthday party.
How could it be otherwise, with their precious cousin behind bars?
The flight had been quiet and far from full. Mina suspected more people would be leaving Persia than travelling to it, at a time like that. A sense of dread filled her heart when the plane touched down on the tarmac, a trapped sort of feeling, as if she would never be able to leave again.
Her father picked her up at the airport, a joyous light in his eyes when he saw her, in the reserved sort of way one gets accustomed to in places like that. She could tell immediately he did not want to draw any unwanted attention from the Good and Bad Police who kept watch from various corners and doorways, and always from the cameras mounted on every light pole and traffic sign.
He pulled Mina’s head covering further down over her forehead after a long embrace. She could feel his fear in his hug, as if his body already thought he’d lost not just a niece, but a daughter. PTSD—predicting terrible things before they happened. It was something Mina expected to get from combat zones, not something her father should have to experience from his own government. She shook off her thoughts, kept her questions to herself as they walked past the Good and Bad Police to his awaiting car.
There were police everywhere—more than she’d ever seen—armed in heavy riot gear. Her father navigated the car down the crowded street. Mina remembered when she was a child, playing in the mountains with her sister and kicking over anthills just to see what would happen—the way they swarmed out, more than one could ever know were inside—that was what the city felt like, angry ants taking to the streets because someone had kicked over their home.
“I’ve never seen so much protesting,” explained her father as he turned down a side street to get away from the ants. Mina wondered when the tremor had appeared in her father’s voice, and if it would ever go away again. “Of course, we’ve seen it before, here and there, but not like this, Mina. This feels different. Everyone is tired of the young people getting arrested for arbitrary things.”
Mina took his hand from where it rested on the center console, glad to see that his hand, at least, still looked familiar. Her father had been a shepherd ever since he was a boy. He had an impressive flock of five hundred, inherited from his own father. They were all shepherds—nomads—going back generations.
But as he approached thirty, the government initiated a program to settle the nomads back into the cities. Mina knew them confiscating his flock and writing him a check just worth enough to secure a down payment on a small apartment in the capitol, was the first major heartbreak her father had ever had. She wasn’t sure he had ever gotten over it. His eyes still looked like those pastures from her young childhood days—the happy summers spent moving the flocks, sleeping outdoors and cooking over fires, the bleating of sheep singing them to sleep on those special nights when they grazed by the full moon—the older he got, the more his eyes looked like those pastures. The more he seemed to drift away. His body was in the city, for the sake of his family, for the sake of playing it safe, but that was it. His hands were still weathered and wrinkled, from those early years spent in the sun. They had faded tattoos on the palms, from the place where a widow once inked the image of the evil eye, to keep trouble away from him.
If only the tattoos had worked.
“It’ll be ok, Dad,” Mina said. She was, of course, the daughter, but she would say anything to comfort her father.
He put on the blinker and smiled. “It’s good to have you back, little shepherd, although I wish you wouldn’t have come. I would have preferred to keep you girls away from all this.”
His nicknames for his two daughters: little shepherd, for Mina, always the protector, always herding the others, and little lamb for Leila, younger by only two minutes, but always the wide-eyed one with big dreams and big schemes that often got her into trouble. Mina would always be there to get her out again. Names were often labels, and his daughters had certainly grown into theirs. Were they born like that or had they grown dutifully into their fathers’ expectations? Mina wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t sure it mattered. That was how it was, and now Mina was home again, to help keep her sister from getting mixed up in the trouble.
“Is it that bad?” she asked her father, that feeling of dread reemerging. It whispered into her ear, Watch out for the little lambs.
“They executed another protestor today.”
Her parent’s apartment building came into view—humble, ordinary, drab—nothing like the meadows that hugged the base of the Zagros Mountains. She appreciated for maybe the first time how much her father had given up all those years ago, back when the government men had pushed their campaign to advance the nation through the growth of cities and convinced him his daughters would have a better future in the established education system.
Now he had one, oversized and raised garden bed that he grew on the roof of the apartment building. That was all the nature he was allotted, and with it, he grew miracles. No other raised bed bloomed quite like his—his bit of remaining magic. Damask roses, tulips, wild oregano, and his prized plot of saffron. But he grew white jasmine specially for her mother. All these sorts of plants wouldn’t usually flourish in mixed company, but then again, they didn’t usually have her father as their steward. Her mother liked the way the jasmine smelled, dusted with pollen from the saffron, and every morning she would pick a few petals and place them inside her shirt, pressed against her heart. Mina could smell the scent of her mother already. It lingered lightly on her father’s coat. If her mother smelled like jasmine, then so did her father, just as her mother often smelled of her father’s cigarettes. Mina thought this exchange of perfumes was the most beautiful thing about the pair of them.
She squeezed her father’s hand again before relinquishing it so that he might park the car.
“Let’s not think of that yet. For now,” she said, “I’m just happy to see you and Mom.”
The protests could wait.
The politics could wait.
The gathering storm above the city and how it cast long shadows from every corner, could wait.
Mina would think of jasmine petals, and the way she knew her mother and grandmother were already preparing dinner upstairs, with ingredients picked from their rooftop garden.
She smiled as she got out of the car, realizing she too already smelled of cigarettes, jasmine and saffron.
She smelled of home.
Rapunzel’s Story: Mahmoud
One week.
That was how long Mahmoud figured it would take to get to the other side of the mountain and back. Perhaps ten days if conditions were rough. The weather seemed to be closing in, after all. Farrah mentioned the Rapunzel often, with a dreamy look in her eyes and loud grumbles from her belly.
“See!” she would tell Mahmoud, grabbing his hand and placing it on her stomach. “See how they kick when I mention the word!”
And truly, they did. It seemed life simply couldn’t continue on without the plant.
“Behave in there, you little monsters,” she said playfully poking back. “I must’ve forgot to bribe the faeries for well-behaved babies when I made my sacrifice!” Her belly was now impossibly large. Mahmoud had no idea a woman’s belly could in fact, stretch so much. The shiny scars she complained about that now knotted her skin made him smile every time he traced his fingertips over them. They meant life, after all, and they had become his new favorite thing about her.
