Chapter Text
Gingerly, he touches his hand to his neck and comes away with blood. He holds up the smear of red over his fingertips, and gives Sardar a somewhat reproachful stare.
The man has the decency to look bashful, at least. “Can’t blame me for that, ‘Zad—you know I can’t resist when you’re lookin’ up from under me like that. With your pretty eyes and everything.” He finishes with putting on his trousers and wraps his arms around Azad’s naked torso, still shimmering faintly with sweat. “What would make ya feel better? Another round? Eh?”
The Egyptian exhales, something that might be a laugh, and shakes his head. He breathes in Sardar, who always smells bad in a kind of good way, like dried sweat and unwashed feet but also of incense and… dates— even though they haven’t spotted a date tree since they crossed the Mediterranean. He wipes the drying blood on the goatskin that serves as his bed, which is already so filthy that the reddish-brown smudge blends right in. "Just bandage it for me, if you’re feeling so considerate. Take over my morning duties while you’re at it.“
"Oh, you’re such a girl,” groans the other, but he takes out the bandages anyways. Azad doesn’t really feel bad about ordering Sardar around to do his chores for the rest of the morning; he knows this shoulder thing is going to kill him later, when they do their afternoon training sessions. Already he can feel his tunic aggravating it, a dull pain every time he moves his arm against the fabric. At least they’re on a campaign, now, and the routine exercises aren’t as bad, since the officers want them to save their strength for the battlefield.
...
The daily regimen they’d been put through back in Persia—now that was intense. Before the sunrise, they had to get up and recite the first Gáh—yes, even Azad, who was at a crossroads with himself over whether he should accept this new Zoroaster or keep to the gods of his old Egypt—and followed up with a breakfast that was to sustain them through five consecutive hours of hard work. And then there were more prayers, more errands to run, a few public whippings to quell disobedience…
The others in their unit, all young men like he was, had been fascinated by Azad from the day they met him. Every one of them was a born and bred Persian, had lived all their lives in Anatolia or Parsa and never set a foot elsewhere, and they were curious about this scrawny, quiet foreigner from across the Red Sea. Azad, after all, had lived in the ancient, sorrowful land which had only so recently come under Persian occupation and seemed tethered to the Achaemenids by a thread. What exactly was hidden there, in mystical and exotic Egypt, shrouded under layers of red dust, what was it that everybody loved and romanticized and sought to conquer? Were tomb curses real? How long was the Nile? Was it true they worshiped animals? Did Azad worship animals? And why did he shape his eyes every morning, with that dark, smudgy kohl that made his eyes look as big as they could go?
He had been about as popular within their unit as Sardar had been unpopular. Loud and brash, Sardar was the young man Azad shared a tent with. He hailed from some backwater city in Cappadocia and had a fiery mouth that was perhaps matched by the speed of his fists; he was easily the fastest learner of the entire division, and the other conscripts hated him with a strong, righteous jealousy that the officers only encouraged. But Azad liked the man. His barrel chest and coarse face did not terrify him, nor did he spend his nights dreaming about grinding his face into the dust like the others did. Sometimes he did have other dreams about Sardar, but these he did not share with the other, even if they shared nearly everything else. After all, his friend was a Zoroastrian and Azad suspected he would not look kindly on such things.
By the time a year had passed, Azad and Sardar had transformed from two lanky military conscripts, scarcely out of their youth, into a couple of tough, calloused cogs to add to the Persian war machine. Sardar had the additional advantage of being taller, and he put on muscle faster than Azad did. He was made of the same stuff as Cyrus and Alexander: a man who was agile and strong and brutal in mind and body, destined to be a great general one day.
Nevertheless, by the time their first assignment started, he and Azad were assigned to the same unit—guarding the frontiers of the Empire—to become, as Sardar put it, barbarian fodder. He was furious. “They know I’m better than that!” he’d stormed, stomping around inside their tent, voice level threatening to spill past the constrained whisper. “It ain’t fuckin’ fair, it… no, ’s not right. I can ride a horse better than the rest of the goddamn legion, I coulda been put in the cavalry, hell, even the archers, sure, sure… but look, it’s to the middle of nowhere with me! And Xerxes needs good men to deal with the Greeks! By Ahura, do I look like an infantryman? Why, that’s for people like y—” He stopped short and didn’t try to finish, looking up at his friend with a bit of a guilty expression. Azad sighed.
It had been clear from the start that the Egyptian wasn’t cut out for military greatness, and he and Sardar both knew it. Sure, he was a decent fighter, quick with his dagger and knew just how to twist it right, up and under a man’s sternum scarcely before he was even aware that he was dead, but that was the sort of skill necessitated by a highwayman, not a war hero. Bravado and a loud voice and flamboyant displays of self-sacrifice did not come to him as they did Sardar, and even though he’d improved since their earlier days, his physical stamina was a far cry from his friend’s. He didn’t think of it as a tragedy, but he sometimes had the impression that Sardar felt sorry for him.
“The Lord knows the path best for you, so I suggest stop worrying and leave it in His hands. Have a rest, friend,” said Azad. Then he rolled onto his mat and tried to sleep.
But Sardar was being far too silent. Even with closed eyelids he could tell he was still glancing at him nervously, probably fidgeting and trying to find the words to apologize, which was stupid: voicing an opinion was nothing to say sorry for. Azad opened his eyes again and sure enough, there stood the big dumb Persianate Turk, twirling his thumbs, still grasping at something to say along the lines of, “oh, you’re not inadequate,” or, “there’s more to life than glory on the battlefield,” which were phrases that he knew but didn’t mean. Azad had to resist smiling because, for all his crass insensitivities, Sardar was capable of caring, sometimes. His dusky hands, ever darker against the other’s olive-tinted skin, reached up and pulled his friend toward him. Sardar, a little startled, looked into the Egyptian’s eyes. When there was no protest to be found, he leaned down, with a hesitation that was unlike him, and brushed Azad’s lips with his own.