#mehrunisa

...

They do not know each other.

All Mehrunisa knows of him is his name: Ali, the syllables slippery on her tongue, the name common enough in the palace. But Ali himself is not common; he is deliberately uncommon- he distinguishes himself with his sharp tongue and his even sharper sword, and there are whispers in the palace of his wrath and his valor.

They do not love each other. Mehrunisa is Jalalludin’s eldest daughter, first daughter of his first wife, and her life is to be spent in the comfort of her father’s zenana before she goes to her husband’s. Ali is her father’s ward; he is meant to die on a battlefield, as the wards with fine military acumen tend to do, in the process of furthering Jalalludin’s glory, Jalalludin’s sons’ glories. There is no overlap in their lives, for all that they live in the same palace.

(When he raids Bhilsa and returns, Ali is wounded- a slash over his calf, and an arrow in his shoulder. Mehrunisa’s brother is wounded as well, though far less dearly; and though Ali won the battle, though Ali is wounded the worse, it is Qadr whom her parents embrace.

Mehrunisa sends two of her own maids to serve Ali that night.

They return, and none of them speak on it after. It takes Mehrunisa years to recognize their silent flinches, for the weeks after; it takes her even longer to find the words to apologize to them for it. 

For a long time, however, Mehrunisa only looks at Ali and sees a boy cast in darkness, never given light enough to shine.)

He is Alauddin when they wed, a man grown and proven. Mehrunisa refuses to call him anything other than Ali for those first years, though, not even when he razes Devagiri: she cannot care for the man who would lay with another woman hours before he laid with her, but she can care for the boy who’d once helped her return to her rooms when the rest of the world felt all too large.

It takes her a long time to understand that Alauddin has been given light to shine, light brilliant as a sunrise, for years and years and years- but he is no moon to reflect it, nor a sun to make his own.

Alauddin is as the spaces between the stars, heavy and dank, those patches of darkness that swallow the light and never give any back for the rest of the world.

That blackness which never apologizes for itself.

...

It is not love between them, not as anyone else would name it.

She has been compared to many flowers: a lotus, a rose, the delicate petals of jasmine. But never before has Mehrunisa felt the kinship she feels when running her fingers over the thick-leafed, deep green plant that one of the vendors in the city offers her- it will blossom in darkness, the vendor promises her; it needs nothing from you, my lady, not even space, not even sunlight.

Their love of each other is like this plant, she thinks, and stores a cut of the jade plant in the folds of her gown. 

Twisted and strange, thick as the plant’s leaves, awkward but present. Something that no one ever looks for, but exists nonetheless.

...

He killed him, Mahru tells her, hands trembling. I am so sorry, Nisa, but he just-

It is her wedding day, and Ali is late, and Mehrunisa is hopeful, is terrified, is slowly turning angry. Mahru is her favored lady, tall and fine-boned and pretty; Mehrunisa wonders what Ali saw in her that he could not see in Mehrunisa, and then she chokes off her unkind thoughts at the root.

Her mother guides Mahru away, gently, and Mehrunisa turns to Ali, who appears in the middle of the dance floor, golden and beautiful. There’s a man’s body cooling not a corridor away. Her husband dances, and he is beautiful, he is powerful, he has dried streaks of blood on his palms.

It is not love she feels then.

It is not hatred either, however, and she does not know what that says about her.

...

The night Ali kills her father, he comes to her bed. He does not touch her- he is careful, always, to never strike her, to never mark the skin that is his only claim to the throne apart from the edge of his sword. But he lies beside her. 

When she wakes the next morning he is gone, and there are dried streaks on the sheets, as if he’d wiped at his hands, as if in the depths of the night he’d twisted desperately away from his actions.

Mehrunisa cannot believe that explanation, not even in the most hidden, most hopeful parts of her heart, not for all the love she owes her husband. She does not flinch from it, however; she is not the kind of woman to flinch, nor to weep.

(She is Jalalludin’s daughter, yes, but her mother’s more- the woman named malika, named empress of the world before even her own name, a woman who has never loved Mehrunisa as much as she’s loved the view from the curtain rising up behind her husband’s throne, from her seat that sits higher than even the king’s.)

Ali calls them to the throne room that night, and Mehrunisa goes, and she cannot help the whitening of her knuckles as she stares at her father’s head. She does not know when she returns to her rooms, nor how, only that one moment she is watching blood drip over the marble her father had once lain on, only that the next moment, she is in her rooms.

“Malika,” says one of her ladies, hesitantly, and Mehrunisa feels every muscle in her lower back seize up.

That is not my name, she wants to scream, rage and grief twining together in her throat, that is my mother’s name! Call her empress, not me, never me-

But she is empress now. Empress of the world, Malika-e-Jahan, the jewel of her husband’s crown. Her ladies cannot call her anything less without it being an insult.

“You,” says Mehrunisa, pointing to the woman who’d spoken- a small, waifish thing, better suited for gutters than palace hallways- and dismisses the rest with a flick of her wrist. “Find-” she does not know her own mother’s name, knows it only to be malika. “Find my mother,” she says instead, nails biting into her palms. “It should not be so difficult- news will have traveled to her, of my father’s death, even if she is in Debal.” Mehrunisa stares at the girl, unblinking. “When you do, you shall tell her to flee. Both of you shall flee, to Ghazni or Nishapur- do not tell me, do not decide it even, not until you are on the boat.”

The girl blinks at Mehrunisa, eyes even wider than before. Mehrunisa swallows and unwinds the chains she uses to tie off her braids. 

These are old chains. 

They are older than her mother’s mother’s mother’s mother, made in a time when wild horsemen rode in on the wind and stole people away to sell them to demons- the chains of a girl who survived by her wits, a girl who lived a life Mehrunisa cannot even imagine; a girl who had a daughter, and that daughter had a daughter, and that daughter had a daughter, through the deserts of Persia and through the mountains of Afghanistan and through the rivers of India- these chains have quietly passed hands from mother to daughter, a constant of the women that Mehrunisa does not even know the name of.

“Take these,” Mehrunisa orders, and the girl flinches. “Leave. Tonight, tomorrow, it matters not. Leave, and do not look behind you.” She reaches out and catches the girl’s chin. “You’ve a mother, a father?”

Slowly, the girl nods.

Mehrunisa straightens further, painfully stiff, and whispers, “I shall take care of them. Dowries for any unmarried sisters. Armor for any brothers. Burial ground for your parents, as necessary. A life of ease-”

“And all I have to do is go to Debal?”

Just a few weeks ago, Mehrunisa had visited the market in Devagiri. The day had been hot, sweat sticking to the silk along her neck; she’d felt dizzy with it and paused in shade for just a moment. She saw, there, a man playing a flute and a serpent just inches before him- swaying, slowly, as carefully as a knife through gauze. The world had felt encompassed by that motion, the pitch of the flute, the red stamped across the man’s forehead like a brand.

She feels like a snake now.

“Yes,” whispers Mehrunisa, and all but tastes the girl’s blood against her own fangs.

Then Mehrunisa turns to her balcony and flings the doors open, taking up a paring knife on the table beside her as she does- she does not look behind her, does not see what the girl does now; she considers, briefly, taking the knife to her wrists, to her throat, and then she discards it and keeps on moving. She will not give Ali the satisfaction of her death. Mehrunisa shall not give him the satisfaction of killing anyone else in her family. If he wishes to forget all traces of her father’s legacy, then he will have to take a sword to her himself.

She leans down instead, and presses the knife against the thick stem of the jade plant. It’s grown in the years since she’s wed, large and furred and ugly against the backdrop of delicate blossoms of the rest of the garden- but she’s refused to let it be touched by hands other than her own, cared for it with a deliberate, silent love she’s reserved for little else in the world.

One breath, and then two, and then Mehrunisa slashes down.

It is a death that she mourns, in the silent mulch of her garden. A death of her father, and the death of her innocence, and the death of the jade, but above all else: the death of Ali.

(“Call me your king,” he orders her, that night, dark eyes mad with lust and power, “kneel to me, wife, and bend your proud, proud head.”

Mehrunisa kisses his hand, rises to her feet and lets her lips brush the cold stone of a ring stained with her father’s blood. 

“King Alauddin,” she whispers. It is enough for him. 

He doesn’t notice the dirt caked under her nails, nor the tears she’s still holding back. He does not wonder that there is a knife in easy reach on the table, nor the brooch pinning her nightgown together that requires only two shrugs of her shoulder to undo, that’s sharp enough to lay open a man’s throat without much more than the flick of a wrist.

He puts a crown on her head instead.

Mehrunisa wonders if Alauddin knows that she will never forget that moment. Her nose is bruised, and her pride is bruised even further, but her father’s crown is on her head and its weight is headier than she’d ever expected.)

...

Her mother survives.

Nobody knows what an accomplishment that is, of course. Nishapur is far enough from Delhi for Alauddin to have bigger problems, and Mehrunisa never tells anyone what she has done to protect her mother.

The assassins return from Debal empty-handed, and Mehrunisa does not smile, does not smile, does not smile.

...

When Alauddin returns from his siege of Chittoor, they all- his wives, his concubines, the women of the palace- crowd against the battlements to watch. Mahru stands beside Mehrunisa, Alauddin’s second wife beside his first, as if her new quarters and new jewels will make Mehrunisa any more likely to treat her kindlier.

“He is safe,” says Mahru, in that fashion she has, where it sounds like a whisper but carries well enough for everyone to hear. “Look at him- Nisa- he’s riding his own horse-” She grabs Mehrunisa’s hand, as if the relief has robbed her of all propriety along with sense. “Oh, it is such a-”

“A relief indeed,” Mehrunisa murmurs, before letting herself lean forwards, the veils around her side whipping in the chill wind over her mouth, over the muscles that others might see move. 

(A year since her father’s death. Her mother is alive, but in exile. Her brothers are imprisoned, but alive. Mehrunisa is the last of her father’s get not thrown in chains, and she is still under suspicion every moment of her life. 

Mehrunisa is alive, but for how long-

She catches the thought before it grows. Some things are too dangerous to even think.)

Malik Kafur knows how dangerous she is. Of Alauddin’s three wives, Mehrunisa is the only one whose family is royalty without Alauddin. Mehrunisa is the only one of his wives with political power of her own- Mahru is ambitionless outside of the zenana, and Jhatyapali is the daughter of a man who was once king, who is now nothing but a vassal, and that shame sits heavy on the princess.

And so Mehrunisa is careful.

But she is still angry, and so she swallows, and she tips her head back, and she says, softer than the shine of sunset off a sharpened sword, “He has never given anything up in his life, and Chittoor still stands. This war is not over.”

The war is never over, Mehrunisa thinks, and wants to sob, wants to scream, with the boundless depths of her fury. The people she has paid to Alauddin’s war- they are countless, and unnecessary, and terrible. The war is never over, and I am never triumphant.

The only victor in Alauddin’s story is himself.

...

Here is another victim of this war: Ratan Singh, the sun-shouldered heir of the Raghu dynasty. Mehrunisa has never known him at the height of his glory, but she can imagine it well enough, as a lion thrown in chains yet recalls the majesty of his first hunt. Sometimes this feels like the entirety of Mehrunisa’s life: never knowing the heights of a being’s life, only the darkest, dimmest parts. 

Only things to be ashamed of. 

But she enters the dungeons anyhow, and when the guards hesitate she lifts her chin proudly. I am a queen, she doesn’t need to say. Malika-e-Jahan. Refuse me at your peril.

Within, Ratan Singh is chained, arms pulled up and back at an angle that looks painful. Mehrunisa steps forwards swiftly and unlocks the doors. Then she hesitates, because she does not have water, because she is not foolish enough to unleash a lion on herself without bars to hold it back.

The question now, is that of whether Ratan Singh is a lion or not.

The question now, is how much treason Mehrunisa is willing to bring down on her head.

“Maharawal Ratan Singh,” she says, for sheer lack of anything else, just loud enough to be heard by him and not by the guards she’s dismissed to the entrance. 

His head lifts. 

He is a handsome enough man, with clear features and bright eyes- but Mehrunisa has known many handsome men in her life, and there is something different in Ratan Singh’s eyes than any other. Kindness, perhaps; kindness, and sadness, and pride, an amalgam that leaves her throat tight against her grief.

“Begum,” he says. There is no anger in his voice, and it is that which makes her swallow. 

“I wished to see,” she says, haltingly, feeling a girl once more rather than the sole woman left of a king’s entire family, “-I’ve heard tales, Maharawal, and they all name you- honorable. Beyond all means.”

"I’ve striven for that,” says Ratan Singh, slowly. 

Mehrunisa swallows. “They also name you trusting.”

“Is that a fault?”

She averts her face. Oh, in another life- in another court, wedded to another man- Mehrunisa might have a different answer. But she is Alauddin Khilji’s first wife, the Delhi princess who became queen, empress of the world, and there is only one way for her to answer truthfully.

She turns on her heel and leaves instead.

...

She returns the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, too. It aches in her- he is so good, it shines from him even in this dusty, dank dungeon; and Mehrunisa is not. But she is as a moth to the lamp: caught, wings aflame, and still straining closer, still burning alive.

...

The best love stories are tragedies. 

The brightest lives are the shortest.

Mehrunisa mourns, for every day that she speaks to Maharawal Ratan Singh, and she doesn’t even know why. 

...

(Mehrunisa knows. Of all the wives of Delhi sultans, of all those who held the title malika, of every woman caught between her blood and her love- Mehrunisa knows this pain, this quiet, flaming sureness. Death circles all those that she admires. Death circles, and its name is Khilji.)

...

It is for this knowledge that Mehrunisa welcomes Padmavati. That she remains calm. And Padmavati is beautiful- Mehrunisa can see why kings would battle for her, why Alauddin would rather ruin his own kingdom than let her remain wed to another. But she is beautiful in the fashion of a wild thing. 

Not an animal.

Nothing so simple.

Padmavati is lovely like the bladed curve of a sunrise before battle. Like a rainstorm, so heavy it drowns everything, carves canyons, shatters cities. Like something whirling and scraping and furious. 

Mehrunisa tasted the bruises of a crown when her father died. She let Alauddin taunt her; she’s watched him kill her family one by one, and she’s remained silent. She’s remained a specter. She has accepted it, because she will survive it. Because she must.

But if Alauddin dares to touch Padmavati after taking Ratan Singh from her- if he even manages it- Mehrunisa thinks the heavens themselves will carve him open. 

(No. Not the heavens. Just the rage of an earthly woman, who has never known not to be sharper than a honed edge.)

...

“Take me to him,” says Ratan Singh, bruised, bloodied, dirt smeared across his chest, anger still thrumming in him. “Take me to your husband.”

If he kills him-

Widows hold little power, thinks Mehrunisa. Widows hold so little power. She is the daughter of kings; how will she survive that life? 

But she has seen how the lotus shines when blood lands on it. Mehrunisa has seen how the leaf will wash off the blood at the first rains, and still unfurl the morning after with dogged determination. A lotus exists for nothing but its own survival and its own beauty. 

Widows hold little power in her country, but they hold control over their own lives. 

“Follow me,” she says, and commits to this, the last in a very long line of treachery stringing back to the night of her wedding.

...

Alauddin sentences her to the dungeons which is a better ending than she had hoped for in the darkest depths of her musings; but it isn’t as if she’s fooling herself: he is going to Chittoor, and he will either find Padmavati or he will return empty-handed or he will die.

Mehrunisa cannot hope for his death. She cannot. She is hollowed out inside; she is cored and scored and slashed apart for her love of him. But she cannot sit there in that darkness and hope for her husband’s death, no matter if he deserves it. She has cursed him, too, now, for the first time in all their marriage, and there is a power in the words of a faithful wife. 

(And she is faithful, has always been so, even terrified, even horrified, even shattered with all these years of pain and grief and rage.)

So he will not find Padmavati.

If he returns to Chittoor without her, he will kill Mehrunisa.

His rage will not be in control then, and it will have the benefit of the long march back from Chittoor to Delhi to simmer and gain a name. She is doubly certain that Malik Kafur will aim and sharpen that rage in her name. 

Mehrunisa kneels on the cold stone of the dungeon she’d once been on the other side of, knees aching. Her wrists tremble and shake, but she holds them in front of her. Breathes out into cupped palms. She is alive. She is alive, and when she dies she will die with her head held high, with the dignity of her forefathers.

She does not pray for a lease on life. She does not pray for Alauddin’s safe return. She does not pray for anything but for the throbbing ache of her mind, for the all-consuming need in every limb, in every organ, in every inch of her twisted-up convoluted veins.

Mehrunisa kneels in darkness, and she prays for deliverance.

...

It comes in the form of the girl Mehrunisa had sent to her mother. The girl’s grown her hair out; it sways behind her like a thick, coiled snake. Mehrunisa blinks, weaving, and she says, through the metallic clink of a key, “Empress,” with enough fierceness that Mehrunisa straightens almost automatically, reaches out, catches her hands.

“My mother,” she whispers.

“She is fine,” says the girl. “But you- oh, Malika, your mother had a premonition months ago. She said you would need me. But not like this! Never, not in my wildest dreams, did I imagine they would dare to imprison you like this-”

“What are you doing?” 

The girl blinks at you, as if startled, but she is doing something. Her fingers have unlocked the first set of chains, and are halfway through the second. 

“Rescuing you,” she says.

“I do not need rescuing,” says Mehrunisa sharply. 

“Your mother wishes you saved,” says the girl, and she looks like she wishes she didn’t have to be the obstinate one- but then, oh, Mehrunisa’s mother has sent her to save Mehrunisa, and for all that Mehrunisa has been in her life, for all that she has done and had, she has never commanded the loyalties of people with the ease of her mother. 

“We will not manage,” Mehrunisa tells her, but she allows the girl to undo the chains around her ankles anyhow. “The guards-”

“The guards will not notice two women going to the market,” says the girl. She smiles, suddenly, transforming her face into something unrecognizable. “They never do.”

Mehrunisa takes the black cloth she’s offered and weaves it around her hair, covers the scant jewelry Alauddin’s left her with so she looks like just another washer-woman disappearing to the city. The cloth is heavy on her skin. Yet another disguise.

(Sometimes she thinks- under all of her masks and fears and duties, what is she? Who has she become?)

“My son?” asks Mehrunisa instead.

The girl frowns. “Will he need help as well?”

But Mehrunisa’s son is grown, and if she takes him with her, she’ll make him an enemy just as much as she’s made herself Alauddin’s enemy. Better to leave him here, in a viper’s nest, unremarkable as the stone on which a viper will sleep during the day. 

“No,” says Mehrunisa. “No.” She turns, though, and unwinds a bell from her hair, and leaves it in the middle of her cell for him- Mubarak will know it, if he sees it. Then she returns to the girl. Breathes out, and exhales all her fears with it. “Let’s go, then.”

...

“Mehrunisa!” cries her mother, running down the courtyard, arms outstretched.

Mehrunisa, startled, almost topples over, straight into her arms. But she manages to get her feet under her as she slips off the camel, and the hot sun above her feels like a shawl around her shoulders, and when she embraces her mother, she feels something soften and bend within her ribcage that she hasn’t ever felt soften before.

“Oh, darling girl,” whispers her mother, smoothing the hair away from her face and drawing Mehrunisa into her home. “How I’ve missed you.”

Mehrunisa breathes deep. She’s the last surviving daughter of her mother and her father; the last surviving child. She’s done her duty. She’s always done that. But the shame of leaving her husband- of abandoning him, of treachery-

“We’ve all done things we’re ashamed of,” her mother says. Tips her chin up, so Mehrunisa can look into dark, gleaming eyes. Once, years and years ago, her mother’s seat had stood higher than even the king’s. Mehrunisa knows no name for her other than Malika, the title she’s taken herself. “But you survived, little one, sweet love. And that matters. That means that you can change things. Make things better.”

“I left Mubarak behind. Alone.”

“As I left you,” says her mother. Her fingers are gentle, now, here; after the end of their world, when before she’d never been soft, as if to be soft were to be weak. “But we empresses- we must save ourselves, because there is nobody who shall help us. You understand that now, I think, Mehrunisa.”

Mehrunisa closes her eyes, swallows. “Yes,” she murmurs. “I do.”

...

The years pass quietly, peacefully. Mehrunisa learns to weave to pass the time, and though she is not good enough to sell anything, she enjoys decorating her rooms with heavy woolen tapestries like she’s a princess once more, demanding luxury and decadence. With her mother, she goes to some poetry-reading concerts; she reads her mother’s correspondence, averts her face when she hears about Alauddin’s exploits and Malik Kafur’s ascendancy in court, helps some sheep herders fight their tax case against their provincial lord. It’s a simple life; it’s a busy life. Mehrunisa enjoys it, even if she hadn’t ever considered it for herself before.

...

When she hears of Alauddin’s extended convalescency, Mehrunisa tells her mother. It takes some time, of course, to build an army; to gather a group of loyal men. But she knows, down deep in her bones, that this will be different. That this will be successful.

(So many years she has been with Alauddin, tied together like the fur of a jade plant, like a vine on a tree. Through the love and the hate, she’s tied herself to him, and she knows: he will not survive this time.)

Alauddin has killed her father and her brothers. He has tried to kill her mother. He has humiliated Mehrunisa, time and time and time again. 

Now, at the end of it all, she will have her vengeance: for Mubarak will need help to survive Malik Kafur. 

Mehrunisa will give it to him. She will ensure that justice is done, and with that justice she will have her vengeance: Alauddin’s eldest son, her son, will sit on the throne. Her father’s blood will again rule Delhi, the blood that Alauddin so desperately tried to stamp out.

...

It is not a large army she gathers, but a small one; a loyal one. They are in the desert, and she is asleep when something wakes her. There is a warmth across from her- at the other end of the tent- not comforting but sharp, like an open flame too close to her palm. Wakefulness steals across her heart, twined, inseparable, from grief.

Mehrunisa stumbles out of the tent. Drops to her knees in the sand, eyes streaming, and prostrates herself to Allah, who has given her what she never asked.

“My lady,” calls a commander, approaching. He is pale-faced, and holds a crumpled scroll in one fist. “There is news from Delhi.”

“Yes,” says Mehrunisa, eyes closing. “I know.”

Alauddin is dead. For the first night, the stars she sees will not be seen by her husband. Alauddin is dead, and Mehrunisa loves him still, and she lets that knowledge tear her open. Alauddin is dead, and Mehrunisa’s son still lives, and she lets that knowledge sew her together once more. She is not just Alauddin’s wife.

She is an empress, Malika-i-Jahan, and she has a son to save.