Rahizadar’s Earrings
From out of a village in a far away, ancient desert country, a man named Amuchu searched for the land where there would be the three moons in the sky. Beneath them he would hold the cracked pieces of a broken relic, a round piece of pottery and the light of the three moons would grow the pieces back together again.
This was the only way to relieve his home village from the curse that had fallen on it because of his carelessness. It was a curse done by his ancestors who were the gods of the three moons themselves.
Amuchu had been the keeper of the round piece of pottery, a relief on the top side and a mould at the back, a seal that had stamped oaths made by his ancestors the moon gods.
The moon gods had been at rest for hundreds of years. The night when their relic had slid off the dinner table, knocked by Amuchu's rowdy drunken guests and fell on the floor, the moon gods were disrupted. Their wrath burned and glowed like glass in the furnace. They took away what they had once given the people of the village. It was music. That is what the moon gods had once given and without a second chance this is what they took away from the people they had given it to.
The people of Amuchu’s village loved their music. Yet the curse fell on every man, woman and child in the village – there was silence. No one could sing, beat the drums. A piper tried to blow his pipe and his fingers failed, no wind came from his lips. Everyone in the village was under a curse, and the desert moved in, the dust, dry, barren void. There was no more festive happiness and beautiful colours of skirts swirling, no clapping. The people lost their joy.
And after two years travelling far and wide the world there was no sky Amuchu could find with three moons.
The night he returned to the village, resigned to his family’s villa with the fountains and lights over the water in the courtyard, there was Rahizadar, one of his many girl cousins. She had done work at the house that day and was still with the palm tree broom sweeping the steps beside the fountain when Amuchu arrived in the courtyard. As there was no more to sweep she sat, enclosed in the shadows, without Amuchu minding her in all his distress of failure.
Rahizadar had always been a quiet, dark girl at the back when she was not doing the chores. She had no husband though she was one that many had demanded her to be a wife when she had been of marriageable age. Her father had refused to offer any dowry and instead had demanded payment for his daughter. The very opposite of the custom and this became a challenge several princes from across the deserts even came to meet. Rahizadar was said to be of a strange and unforgettable beauty and uncanny wit which was mesmerizing although a quality less desired in a wife. Yet no prince or even pauper or even armoured suitor could attain this payment Rahizadar’s father demanded, which was in the price of work on the farm until his arms broke off. And until they didn’t break off, both of them, the hour’s work wasn’t paid.
Though already a spinster yet with hair as black as come straight out of an inkwell, widowed men and yet still a plucky young man came to haggle for Rahizadar to be their wife, though her father held to his conditions. Nobody knew for sure but it was Rahizadar who had come up with the condition and price in the first place when she was a young girl. “Unless, father, there is one who really suits me.” Yet there never was.
Amuchu sometimes had hoped for his cousin’s hand in marriage. Rahizadar often mocked him knowing about his intentions and he knew he had no chance of winning even her friendship. He was foolish and careless and the mocking he saw in her eyes was the ink that blotted out any of his feelings so that he even forgot them and so it was every time she looked back at him.
Rahizadar’s mother had come from a people closely related to the moon gods and Rahizadar had inherited their wrath, or some of it, if only just as much as a mortal can contain. She wore three golden dangling moons from her ears. They were earrings she had worn since a young girl and she was the only of all the women in the village with any such earrings. Three moons . . .
There were no three moons Amuchu could find in any sky in the world . . . yet all the time here they had been, hanging from his cousin’s ears.
All this time, Rahizadar had known how she had been keeping the secret to ending the curse on her village people. She had relished seeing her foolish cousin Amuchu desperate to restore the relic that had been broken because the relic had been in his possession as strings of pearls are with the pigs.
Many years ago, the moon gods had vanished from the sky and split in half and burned as bronze on the ground. Still a young girl, Rahizadar found them when she was playing in the sand. She had thrown them in the air once and those round pieces turned into the faces of the gods, enormous and fierce. The sky turned into night and the earth shook. Then, the faces began to smile on the young girl and they disappeared and the sky turned back to day again; the same three bronze pieces fell back down again to the desert ground. Rahizadar turned them into earrings and refused to wear any other pair of earrings henceforth.
When Amuchu returned from his travels and found no three moons to break the curse the moon gods had put on the people of the village, taking away music and happiness, Rahizadar knew it was the earrings that would save everybody from their loss of music. She missed music herself.
By the fountains in the courtyard, the round bronze pieces glinted with lights rippling from the waters. She lifted them off her ears and tossed them into the sky.
The golden pieces sliced through the air like sabres of sultans and princes and warriors reliving their spirit. Then they became three full moons illuminating the night of blue.
There was an earthquake of the sky that shook and seemed about to crumble down. From outside these courtyard walls rose cries from the people of the village. Amuchu crouched low to the ground as far from the sky as he could. Rahizadar also cowered to the ground. Amuchu then remembered he had left the precious clay relic of the moon gods on of the fountain steps. He saw it now trembling and lifting off the step as by some cosmic life force. Amuchu suddenly bolted and tried to rescue what he had protected with him for two years journeying. The relic lifted higher in the air out of Amuchu’s reach. Then as if it were playing a game, it dropped but then disappeared. Its crash sounded in the sky and Amuchu looked. There in the Arabian night sky, illuminated green and blue were the moon gods piercing their wrath at one who had been their useless servant.
To Rahizadar, though, they were fierce warrior sultans moved to lenience of the curse they held over their people. Mercy prevailed. Now the curse was gone. She nodded to them in shivering reverence and later smiled still in awe once they had vanished again from the sky.
There were happy voices that rose in the village and it became a familiar old sounding festive night of dancing chimes, singing voices and high-singing strings, tapping, pattering, jingles and beating drums. Rahizadar rose up in her old-found sense of newness and became part of music once again.
The relic was nowhere anymore on earth to be left on the table and knocked off by careless guests so Amuchu had nothing to be careful about in his home and remained just as foolish as before.
And Rahizadar soon found other mysterious fallen pieces from the sky that nobody knew about except for she who knew their stories, and turned them into earrings.
By Gudrun Sabrina Hirt
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