The Mountain of Light Read Free Page A

shifted quickly upon his toes. The old man put his fingers into his mouth and let out a tart, prolonged whistle. Shuja veered in surprise—this was not how he was supposed to start the match. In that brief moment of distraction, he heard Ibrahim’s feet smack on the heated marble floor before he flung himself on his king. Shuja fell backward, rocked off his balance. He felt his feet slipping, strained against Ibrahim, until they were locked in an embrace.
    Their breaths escaped in harsh puffs. Ibrahim was smaller than Shah Shuja, shorter by a head’s length, and he used that advantage to tuck his forehead under Shuja’s arm and crush his ribs. They spun around the marble platform, holding desperately on to each other.
    All of a sudden, Ibrahim’s clutch slackened, and his arm snaked from Shuja’s back to around his right thigh. He heaved. Shuja came crashing down upon his back. As Ibrahim straightened to straddle him, Shuja kicked out with his leg. Ibrahim flew into the air, briefly, before smashing to the floor himself.
    When Shuja sprang upon him, Ibrahim rolled away and bounded up. They were already sweating when they started the match, but now moisture poured down from the thick hair on their heads and their beards. Shuja grappled with the slick skin on Ibrahim’s legs—he had shaved his chest and legs that morning, so that Shuja would have no hair to hold on to—and finally wedged his fingers into the waistband of Ibrahim’s kispet . Yanked him down.
    Ibrahim yelled, “That’s an illegal hold, referee!”
    The old man, massaging his face in bemusement, whistled again. In the thick silence of the courtyard, the sound boomed. A flock of parrots in the tamarind rose in a protesting flurry of green feathers and red beaks and disappeared into the pale sky.
    Shuja and Ibrahim hurled out of the hold and went to opposite ends of the platform. Their chests heaved; their stomachs caved inward and out as they drew breath into their tired lungs, outlining their ribs and their hip bones. Agony flared in Shuja’s lower back. There was a shock of burning along his right forearm, which he had put out to take the brunt of the fall. Ibrahim stood at his corner, wiping the sweat from his eyes, smiling.
    Smiling? Maybe there was some truth to the fact that he was younger and so stronger, Shuja thought. Although neitherwas really that old; Shah Shuja was thirty-two, Ibrahim twenty-nine.
    They had not talked since the first whistle; no gibes, no trash, no filling the opponent’s ear—and so his brain—with debilitating words. This was one of the rules of the game. It had to be played, and fought, in complete silence, with only muscle and brawn determining the winner. But the rules said nothing about facial expressions. An intimidating glare, a supercilious grin—like the one Ibrahim wore on his face—these were unaccountable quantities. Shah Shuja’s breathing quieted, he felt his body come to rest again. He flexed the muscles in his arms. A sliver of iron lodged itself in his spine.
    When the two minutes had passed, the old man, keeping count of the seconds by beating his crooked foot upon the ground and raising puffs of red mud, whistled again.
    Shuja hurtled across and barreled into Ibrahim’s chest. The force of the movement carried them over the knee-high marble lattice railing of the platform and out into the shallow pool. It was only luck that allowed them both to land upon the flat of the pool’s surface and not on one of the lotus-bud-shaped fountains that speared upward.
    The pool was littered with these fountains—a hundred and fifty-two in all—each spewing droplets of water that created a thousand rainbows in the sun. Here, the light was fractured, dazzle-bright. Shah Shuja shut his eyes and grappled, following only the sound of Ibrahim’s breath and his groans. At one point, Ibrahim held his king’s head under the water, only