The Taste of Ashes

---

In the month when pomegranates split along their seams, shining with seeds like wet coals, Avesta first noticed her husband’s silence had thickened. Bahram had always been a man of few words—a virtue in a village where gossip ran faster than water through the ancient qanat channels. This quiet pressed on the room.

Their village clung to the hem of the Zagros Mountains, in the waning years of the Sasanian kings —in Yazdegerd’s years, the elders said, though no one trusted the tax-collector’s calendars. Here, where qanat water stitched field to field and saffron lifted purple tongues through frost, the great affairs of Ctesiphon were as distant as the moon. They kept the flame as their fathers had, though merchants spoke of new gods on the western roads. On fast days, Avesta’s mother still tied her kusti at dawn, the prayer knots neat as seed rows.

That morning, before Bahram’s silence hardened, Avesta sat with the women’s council in the shade of the plane trees by the spring. Steam from the bread ovens drifted sweet and sour. “Three handfuls is fair for a wedding,” old Zohreh decreed, “two if the well runs low.” A young wife fretted about a labour that would not begin; Avesta pressed bitterleaf into her palm and taught her the low hum to open the body. Bahara laughed at something small and silly and shook flour from her wrists. The circle felt whole, held—threads crossing threads.

Avesta had lived all her thirty-two years between these mud-brick walls, had birthed her children in the same room where her mother had birthed her. Her mother had named her Avesta for the old prayers, hoping the words would shelter her. The village was written into her body—its rhythms were her breath, its seasons her blood. She knew every family’s genealogy back five generations, could predict the weather by the behaviour of the hoopoes in the apricot trees, understood which wells would run sweet and which brackish depending on the rains. That year the cranes’ line slid east a hand’s breadth early, and the hoopoes held their tongues at dawn.

At midday, when a dry wind came metallic off the hills, Bahram had muttered, almost to himself, “My grandfather said the land knocks before it storms.”

Which was why Bahram’s restlessness disturbed her.

“The horse traders spoke of movement in the west,” he said one evening, setting down his cup of wine untasted. The children—six and eight, quick as larks—had finally surrendered to sleep in the next room. Avesta’s mother dozed by the brazier, her weathered hands still clutching her spindle.

“Horse traders always speak of movement,” Avesta replied, not looking up from her weaving. The pattern growing beneath her fingers was one her grandmother had taught her: interconnected gardens, each feeding into the next, no beginning and no end. “It sells horses.”

“This is different.” Bahram moved to the window, though there was nothing to see but darkness and the faint glow of their neighbour’s night fire. He listened, as if for a footstep behind the hills. “A cousin of Narsi’s came through yesterday. Says three villages near Hamadan are ash.”

“Hamadan is five days’ ride from here.”

“Four days. If they’re mounted. And with camels.”

The shuttle paused in Avesta’s hands. She studied her husband’s profile in the lamplight—the worried groove between his brows, the tight line of his jaw. In their twelve years together, she had learned to read his silences like other women read text. This one said danger plain. And something else – a remembering.

“Your grandfather,” she said. “The raids he spoke of.”

Bahram’s mouth tightened. “He dreamed before them. He woke with grit on his tongue and said the earth had been speaking.”

“You want us to leave.” It wasn’t a question.

“Tomorrow. Dawn.”

The words hung between them like dust in a shaft of light. “Just like that?” Avesta’s voice was sharp with disbelief. “Based on rumours? You would have us abandon everything? Our home, my sister, our friends?”

“They are not rumours,” Bahram said, his voice low and hard. “I feel it. The wind is wrong. The silence is wrong. Riders who bow and rise and face the south have been seen at dusk.”

Avesta set down her weaving and rose, moving to stand beside him at the window. Outside, the village slept its ancient sleep. Somewhere a dog barked once and subsided. The stars wheeled overhead in their unchanging dance, indifferent to human fears.

“Based on your… feeling,” she said quietly. She gestured to the sleeping village. “This is madness, Bahram. We will be a laughingstock. ‘The family that fled from shadows.’ Why are we doing this? Everything will be fine.”

He turned to her then, and she saw something in his eyes that made her breath catch—not fear exactly, but a terrible certainty. “Have I ever asked this of you before?”

He hadn’t. Through drought years and flood years, through the death of his father and the difficult birth of their second child, Bahram had been steadfast as the mountains themselves. If he felt danger now… Still, she hesitated, the weight of her entire world holding her in place.

His voice cut through her doubt, but it wavered as he glanced toward the sleeping children. “We are leaving at dawn,” he said at last. “I’ll take the children, your mother, and your brother. Before first light I’ll go to the council stones and speak to whoever will hear—tell them what I’ve heard and what I feel. If you won’t come, I’ll still go. I will save who I can.”

Avesta’s jaw set. “Then I go to Bahara,” she said. “And Zohreh, if she’s up with the ovens. I’ll cache water at the goat path above the spring and leave a line of stones. If they won’t listen, they can still follow.”

The harshness of it stung more than the threat itself. It was as if he were choosing between her and his premonition, and had already made his choice. She tasted iron at the back of her throat. Begrudgingly, her heart heavy with resentment, she nodded. “The others will think we’ve gone mad,” she said, already calculating what they could carry, what they must leave behind. “My sister. Bahara. The whole women’s council.”

“Let them think it.”

But it was not so simple, and they both knew it. To leave was to tear a hole in the fabric of the village. Avesta was the keeper of birthing songs, the one who knew which herbs would ease a difficult labor. Her mother held the village’s memory of the old irrigation rights. Her brother served as the bridge between the young men and the elders. They were not just individuals but threads in a larger weaving.

“If we go,” Avesta said slowly, her voice thick with a sense of waste, “we may return to find everything unchanged. We’ll be the fools who fled from shadows.”

“And if we stay?”

She had no answer for that.

The next morning came pale and dust-hazed, the sun a copper disk behind high clouds. Before the first rooster, Avesta wrapped a scarf around her hair and slipped into the lanes. She left a jug brimming at the goat path, a wrapped stack of flatbread under the council stones, a pebble-line pointing uphill the way Zohreh taught girls to mark safe routes. 

When Avesta returned, they moved like thieves in their own home, packing what could be carried: water skins, dried dates, flatbread, a change of clothes for each child. Avesta’s hands shook as she wrapped her grandmother’s silver bracelet—too valuable to wear on the road, too precious to leave behind.

Her mother accepted the plan with the equanimity of age, merely nodding and beginning her own preparations. Her brother protested but subsided when Bahram fixed him with that same terrible certainty. Her uncle, always pragmatic, began calculating the safest routes east-northeast, towards towns large enough to swallow strangers.

Before first light fully broke, Avesta went to Bahara’s door. Her friend since childhood stood in the pre-dawn darkness, infant daughter on her hip, confusion written across her dear face.

“We’re visiting Bahram’s cousins,” Avesta said, the lie scratched her throat. “The highland air, for mother’s lungs.”

Bahara’s eyes narrowed—she knew Avesta’s mother’s lungs were sound as a bell. But before she could question further, Avesta pressed a small packet into her hands: corms from her best saffron crocuses, wrapped in a scrap of silk. With her other hand she slid Bahara a shard of pottery inked with a simple map: a line to the goat path, a dot where the jug waited.

“Plant these in the new moon,” she whispered, “And if the ovens go cold, take the path above the spring—follow the stones.” and turned away before her voice could betray her.

They left as the first light touched the mountain peaks, a straggling line of figures. Avesta led the younger child by the hand, hoisting her when the path turned steep, while Bahram led their single donkey, loaded with provisions. Behind them, the village wells were already busy with morning water-drawing, the smoke of breakfast fires beginning to rise. Somewhere a cock crowed and, faint beyond the fields, a camel’s bell rang—out of place in a farming valley.

Avesta did not look back. She knew if she did, her feet would root themselves to the earth like the ancient plane trees by the spring. The dust took their footprints and kept them.

The Weight of Empty Roads

The journey north wound through landscape that shifted from familiar to foreign with each passing day. They followed the old trade routes when possible, keeping to paths worn smooth by countless generations of travellers, merchants, pilgrims. When a way-station offered shelter, they took it; when it didn’t, they slept beneath tamarisk and counted meteors. At night they sheltered with distant relations or in way-stations, those havens of hospitality that dotted the king’s roads like beads on a string.

Everywhere they stopped, people asked the same questions: Where are you going? Why have you left? Is there sickness in your village? Each time, Avesta watched Bahram weigh his answers and choose the smallest truth he could live with. “Trouble near Hamadan,” he would say. “Smoke on the horizon.”

“We sound mad,” her brother muttered one evening as they camped by a stream lined with white-barked trees. “Fleeing from dreams and trader’s gossip.”

Avesta said nothing, but privately she agreed. With each peaceful day, her doubt returned like a tide. She thought constantly of the village continuing its life without them—the communal bread ovens firing each morning, the children playing knucklebones in the dust, Bahara nursing her daughter in the shade of the courtyard walls. What right had they to abandon it all on the strength of Bahram’s intuition? The road ate time, shoes, tempers.

Yet something in her husband’s bearing kept her moving forward. He had become a man transfigured, every sense alert to danger, reading signs in flights of birds and changes in the wind. At night he barely slept, starting awake at every sound. His certainty did not ebb with distance; it tightened, as if safety itself made the pursuing danger more visible.

On the nineteenth day, news stopped being rumour. A merchant heading south, his camels loaded with copper vessels, paused to share water and warnings.

“Don’t go back that way,” he said, gesturing down the road they’d travelled. “Not unless you fancy seeing what war leaves behind.”

Avesta’s heart clenched. “Which villages?”

The merchant named three places she didn’t recognize, then paused. “And that cluster near the Sorrow Hills. Can’t recall the names—small places, off the main road. But the smoke could be seen for miles.”

The Sorrow Hills. Their hills, named for an ancient battle no one quite remembered. Avesta met Bahram’s eyes and saw her own dread reflected there.

They turned back the next day. Before dawn, they left the road’s traffic and cut toward the old paths, moving light.

What Fire Leaves

The smell reached them first, carried on a wind that tasted of endings. Not the clean smoke of hearth fires or the sweet char of bread ovens, but something denser, more complex—a mingling of burned wood and cloth, grain and flesh.

Avesta pulled her scarf across her face. Two days earlier they had left the children with a northbound caravan family at a way-station well away from the rumoured burn line. Now she blessed that decision as the air grew thicker with each step.

The landscape began to tell its story in fragments: a burned field here, a scatter of abandoned possessions there. A smashed water jar glittered with fused sand. A child’s doll made of rags lay in the dust, one side scorched black. Cart tracks gouged deep in the earth spoke of hasty flight. Or pursuit.

Then they crested the last rise, and the breath left Avesta’s body.

Where the village had stood, only geometries of ash remained. In the churned dust of the square lay an arrow shaft with indigo-fletched feathers, not of any fowler she knew. The fire had been thorough, systematic—not the wild blaze of accident but the deliberate work of human hands. The sanctuary’s tower had fallen, the niche where the fire once lived choked with cinder. The ancient plane trees by the spring were blackened stakes. The market square where she had bargained for fabric and gossiped with friends was a field of carbon and silence. In one corner of the square, camel pads had printed their soft ovals among horse hooves.

They picked their way through the ruins like sleepwalkers in a nightmare. Avesta’s mother wept soundlessly, tears cutting channels through the dust on her cheeks. Her brother retched behind what had been the baker’s oven. Her uncle muttered prayers in the old language, the one used for births and deaths and moments when ordinary words failed.

Bahram stood in what had been their courtyard, staring at a spot of melted metal that might have been cooking pots or farming tools or weapons. His face held no triumph, no satisfaction at being proven right. Only a terrible weariness. He knelt, lifted the indigo-fletched arrow, and turned it once in his fingers before laying it back.

Avesta found herself at Bahara’s threshold—or what remained of it. The door had burned away, leaving only the stone lintel her friend’s grandfather had carved with protective Avestan verses. Beyond it, shadows and ash and a silence so complete it seemed to swallow sound.

She knelt and sifted through the debris until her fingers found what they sought: a small packet, barely singed, wrapped in silk. The saffron corms she had given Bahara lay in her palm—unutterably precious, useless here.

Then, faintly, from somewhere beyond the fields, a bell clinked—camel, not cow—and fell silent.

That was when the tears came, silent and steady as rain.

The Territory Between

They stayed only long enough to search for survivors. and found none. On the goat-path above the spring, a string of footprints—small, then larger—broke toward the high pastures and vanished in scree. Either the villagers had fled successfully or the attackers had been thorough. Avesta chose to believe the former, though the evidence suggested otherwise. They gathered what few unbroken things remained—a ceramic jar here, a metal tool there—more as talismans than for use.

As the sun began its descent, painting the ruins in shades of amber and blood, Avesta stood where the women’s council had met each month to settle disputes and plan celebrations. The circle of stones remained, fire-blackened but unbroken. She thought of all the voices that had filled this space—laughing, arguing, counselling, singing. “Three handfuls is fair for a wedding,” old Zohreh had always said. All the knowledge passed hand to hand like precious water: which plants eased birthing pains, which stars marked planting times, which stories would quiet a colicky baby.

All of it gone, except what lived in her own mind and hands. She felt the weight of it settle, not as a burden only, but as a charge.

“We should go,” Bahram said softly. “There’s nothing here for the living.”

But Avesta found herself unable to move. Some part of her was still arriving at the village each morning, still drawing water from the well, still weaving at her loom while listening to her children play. To leave felt like a second abandonment, a confirmation that this erasure was complete.

“They trusted this place,” she said, her voice raw. “Trusted these walls, these neighbours, these patterns that had held for generations. As I did.” A wave of guilt washed over her. “Did I abandon my duty to them? Would it have been better to be here, to die with everyone else?”

“Trust isn’t foolishness,” Bahram replied. “Even when it’s betrayed.” He knelt and brushed ash from the council stone.  “I told the men at the stones,” he added. “Some will have gone. Some will be ahead of us, if we’re lucky.”

She turned to look at him—this man who had saved them all with his certainty, who had torn them from everything they knew and loved. In another life, another story, she might have hated him for it. But standing in the ruins of the world they’d shared, she felt only a vast confusion, love and loss so intertwined she couldn’t separate the threads.

“How did you know?” she asked.

He was quiet for a long moment. Then: “I dreamed of fire three nights running. Each time I woke with the taste of ashes in my mouth.” He paused. “My grandfather had such dreams before the raids that took his village. He ignored them. I think… I think sometimes the land itself tries to warn us, through whatever channels it can find.”

Avesta thought of her own roots in this soil, how deep they ran, how painful the tearing. But roots could be transplanted, given time and care. Seeds could be saved and sown in new earth. The pattern of the interconnected gardens could be woven on any loom, so long as the weaver’s hands remembered.

She bent and filled a small pouch with ash and earth from the council circle. Then she turned to face her family—these survivors, these remnants of a larger weaving.

“We go,” she said.

What Continues

They rejoined the children and began the longer journey east, toward cities large enough to absorb refugees, toward possibilities they couldn’t yet imagine.] At night, Avesta taught her daughter the birthing songs, made her son memorize the lineages, recited the planting calendars until they could repeat them back. She was becoming what her mother had been—a walking library, a living archive. By day she bartered for news the way others bartered for salt.

Sometimes she woke with phantom sounds in her ears: Bahara’s laughter, the chime of a temple bell on the wind, the creak of the water wheel turning. Sometimes she felt she was living two lives at once—the one that continued here in the world of flesh and consequence, and another that went on in some parallel place where warnings were heeded or dangers never came.

The guilt was a stone she carried, smooth and heavy from handling. Should they have pressed harder at the council stones? Stayed and shared the village’s fate? There were no clean answers, only the messy truth of survival—that it often came at the cost of others, that luck and virtue were not the same thing, that the threads cut from one weaving might be woven into another but would never make the same pattern.

Yet life insisted on continuing. Her children grew taller, learned new words in new dialects. Her mother adapted to city ways with surprising resilience. Her brother found work, her uncle found a new community to share in the seasonal rites. Sometimes, on rooftops at dusk, Avesta heard men on distant streets bow and rise and face the south, and felt the world tilting into a new alignment. Even Bahram began to sleep through the night again, though he never quite lost the watchful tension in his shoulders.

And Avesta? She planted the saffron corms in a pot of earth mixed with ash from home, tended them with water and memory until they sprouted. She taught other women what she knew, gathered their knowledge in return. She learned that exile was not a place but a condition, a permanent state of being between—between past and future, loss and possibility, the life lived and the life imagined. Between the language she dreamed in and the one she bargained in.

One evening, as she sat in their small courtyard in a city whose name she was still learning to pronounce, her daughter brought her a flower—a wild thing that had pushed through a crack in the paving stones.

“Look, Mama,” the child said. “It grows even here.”

Avesta took the flower, turned it in her fingers. Such a small thing, such ordinary beauty. But it was proof of something she was only beginning to understand: that life was not faithful to places but to itself, that it would find a way to continue even in the midst of endings, that every moment of beauty was both a memorial to what was lost and a promise of what might yet be.

She tucked the flower behind her daughter’s ear and began to tell her a story—not of the village that was gone, but of the one they would build together, pattern by pattern, thread by careful thread.

The taste of ashes never quite left her mouth. But beneath it, gradually, came other flavours: mint tea shared with new neighbours, bread baked in unfamiliar ovens, the sweet-sour burst of pomegranates that grew, after all, in many soils.

The weaving continued—changed, diminished in some ways, enriched in others, but unbroken, like her grandmother’s pattern of interlinked gardens: no beginning, no end.

In the chronicle of empires, their village’s destruction would merit barely a mention—one more line in the long friction between settled and wandering. But in the smaller history written in breath and bone, in the choices made and unmade, in the love that persists through loss—there, their story mattered.

There, it continued still. And in the telling, it made space for what came next.