The Silver Sparrow

My One Unattainable Goal

Lightning flashed across a burning sky streaked with grey clouds above a dying, bleeding sun. It lit up the right side of his father's face, cast an almost black shadow on the other, gave his dark eyes a flash of gold as he slammed a fist into his mother's jaw. She flew across the room to land near the wall he had been curling up against, next to the fireplace that had gone out a while ago from the storm. In front of him, the blood of his mother's lover was still gushing out of his headless body. It made a small pool on the stone floor, creeping toward where he was, swallowing up slowly but steadily whatever was left of the distance between him and the embodiment of death in the form of his father.

A knife was flung in his direction. It landed by his foot, flailing like a living thing tossed alive into open fire. Another lightning struck and the small blade flashed white, its silvery sheen glided along the sharp edges from one end to the other as the light faded. The ground shook underneath him as the next thunder came, rendering all the other noises around him into a faint, muffled sound as he stared at the blade, pressing himself harder against the wall as if it would somehow offer protection.

'Pick up the knife, my lord prince,' someone told him. 'Prove your loyalty, if you don't want to die,' said another. 'Examples had to be set, sacrifices must be made. Do you understand?'

The sky flashed once more, and there, in front of him, his mother was smiling, weeping, and whispering something to him all at the same time—something incomprehensible, inaudible.

His vision turned black when the next thunder came.

***

Rain poured down from the roof like a smooth screen of living crystal. Salar Muradi reached out with one hand to catch the falling water, turning it around to watch as the cold numbed his fingers the way it had back then. He remembered the rain being colder that night, colder when he'd entered the gate of Sabha through its open courtyard.

Cold enough, he thought, that he didn't remember feeling a damn thing after having slit his mother's throat. Didn't remember how she died or what she had said before that either. She had begged to die, and everyone in that room had wanted her to die, that was all he remembered.

It was the same two years ago when he'd ordered the execution of Kuyo and Keijin. The same numbness had been with him then, watching both his sons' heads rolling off the block and landed with a soft thump on the wood. 'Examples had to be set,' a voice in his head had said then, 'sacrifices must be made.'

Examples and sacrifices.

And they had to be—set and made—as with all things. Some people had to die to build a bridge for generations to cross. Someone had to be willing to carry that weight, to make that decision. Life, of any kind, survives on the death of another. You could only limit killing to the things you eat if your life is the only one that mattered. Saving an entire city—or an empire—was always going to take more. It was a matter of mathematics, of proportions.

'A leader must be content with blood on his hands,' Eli had written, 'his, the enemy's, and that of the men he leads.'

It was the kind of truth no one wanted to hear. The kind of truth that was easier for lesser men to point fingers at, and in doing so made themselves acquire a sense of power without responsibilities attached. Being responsible for so many people's lives required killing just as many, sometimes more, depending on who you want to protect. Sometimes it had to be your mother, your father, your sons, to save the lives of thousands. Just because they were his blood, did it give them more right to live than someone else's? Did it make him more of a monster to kill his own child than that of another man's? One would have to be a self-absorbed, entitled hypocrite to measure a life that way. Logic and simple mathematics are the only way to justify killing. Kill them, if it makes sense. Di Amarra would have agreed.