Herald of Steel

“The boy died in a freak horse riding accident….. we still do not know how it all happened!”

Alarm bells immediately started to go off inside Alexander’s head as soon as he heard Lady Inayah say this.

Given the kind of man, Mirzah was showing himself to be….

“The boy died just as talks of him replacing his eldest brother were starting to pick up steam?” He exclaimed with a clear penetrative tone to his voice, suspicion oozing out of his eyes.

However, none of the ladies seemed too bothered by the implication.

“…You do not need to talk in codes Alexander. We suspected something foul the moment it happened,” Lady Inayah chimed quickly along with a knowing tone.

She might not understand what ‘pick up steam’ meant, as this phrase came with the advent of the steam engine, but it was easy to guess its meaning from context.

And thinking of the answer she had to give, quite displeased her.

Thus she pressed her lips together and swirled her wine glass in to calm her stinging heart.

“Was there not an autopsy?” While from the side, the Queen Mother chimed so with widened eyes, curiosity lacing her voice, “If I remember, it caused quite a stir back then. Was nothing found?”

This interest was not only because of the unique circumstances under which the boy died.

It was also because in Adhania, autopsies… or even simply cutting open the body for medical purposes was a big taboo. The body was said to be sacred, a gift from the ‘Father,’ hence to ruin it by opening it up and cutting and stitching upon it…. there was a grave stigma against it.

Even necessary practices like medical surgery were heavily restricted in the country and doctors could get arrested, if not straight up executed by the local temples if he was found to be in violation of these acts.

Hence medicine in Adhania was mostly bound to non invasive practices such as pills, potions and salves, with the only exception being three things – bloodletting, healing the bones and removal of arrows and other shrapnel.

Doctors were allowed to cut open the skin and blood vessels to let out the bad blood that was presumably causing the disease. This was their knowledge of the time.

They were also allowed to fix broken bones, either by binding the damaged bits or by first cutting open bits of the flesh and manually rearranging the scattered bone fragments to their original position using tweezers before sewing close the wound, and putting a cast on it.

And lastly, they were allowed to remove the splitter of arrows by cutting open the skin.

This would happen if the head could not be simply pulled out… many arrowheads were made with ragged, jagged shapes that tangled themselves in the flesh and so would tear a huge gaping wound in the flesh if it was forcibly pulled out.

Thus the extraction had to be done using expert skills by methodically cutting free the twisted flesh.

Needless to say, it was a very painful process. But it had to be done or else the stuck metal arrowhead, which most of the time had some kind of rust on it would quickly start to make the wound gangrenous.

These were the only three reasons doctors were allowed to intentionally draw blood from the body… because people could see with their own eyes the virtuous effects of the practice.

But other surgeries were more covert, and so without that proof, they were all shunned, if not outright persecuted for doing them on anyone.

Now if this was the attitude towards the body of a living man, a man who might be still saved and live a few more decades, the attitude towards the dead could easily be imagined.

It had taken such effort for even a powerful Pasha like Farzah to arrange this that it was loud enough to reach even the capital and into the Queen Mother’s ears.

Almost all his retainers back then had vehemently opposed the man’s orders, bringing all kinds of religious quotes to try and dissuade him.

“My lord, it is said a man will face the Father just as he died. How can the young lord show himself if his body is cut open?”

“Lord Pasha, mutilation of the dead is a great sin. I cannot be a part of this.”

“Nephew… life and death are in the hands of the gods. Please do not let your son suffer more than he already has. Let it go and be happy, if not, be at least content.”

However Pasha Farzah, upon learning of Mirzah’s nature solidly suspected foul play and bullishly insisted,

“My lord, there is a saying in our land… no soul that has been treated unjustly can rest in peace. As a father, how can I sleep without knowing for sure my son is at peace? If he has been plotted against, I will find the culprit. If it was simply the will of Ramuh… then this autopsy is by his hand too. I will bear all responsibilities.”

Seeing the man like that, as well as knowing his inflexible nature, the rest of the nobles could do little but ruefully shake their heads and let the procedure go ahead.

They had tried them to the best of their abilities.

“Yes, there was. It was the first autopsy in Adhania in decades and probably the first for a noble.” While Lady Inayah chirped the answer to Queen Mother’s question with a certain heaviness to her voice, the tone further sinking with each following sentence,

“Pasha Farzah had even decided to make the entire demonstration public because he spotted Mirzah looking really nervous. No doubt, he wished to use this opportunity to kick the boy down. Perhaps even execute him then and there for fratricide. But in the end…. no poison or other foul play was detected. The maesters repeatedly confirmed it.”

It took a lot for Lady Inayah to say those last few words, her face twisting and chest panging with regret.

“…..” She was convinced that Mirzah had something to do with this, her womanly instincts screamed so.

But she had no proof. And Mirzah was too powerful for her to simply muscle her way through.

Perhaps that was why Lady Inayah very quickly resumed her talks afterward, to move away from the pain as she pointed out the great consequences of Pasha Farzah’s forceful action,

“That autopsy really hurt his credibility with the nobles. They were already objecting to the act from the very beginning but to see it done so openly, they were shocked. I heard many of them even fainted!”

“Grown men! Who had gone to war and personally killed dozens of barbarians and Thesians. Even they found it hard to watch…. not because of the blood and guts, but the fact of an open autopsy was happening right in front of them. It was that unthinkable to them.”

Lady Inayah paused here a bit as if to give time for her words to sink into the others and somewhat calm her raging heart.

Then after a while, with her eyes swimming with inexplicable pain and regret, she clenched out,

“So when nothing out of the ordinary was found, the nobles were outraged beyond words! Even many of Pasha Farzah’s own brothers and uncles nearly boycotted him. Everyone thought he was against Mirzah simply because he did not like his mother.”

“This was already a well known fact… with what had happened with Laila and her mother…It was indeed true there was quite some bad blood between Pasha Farzah and his main wife. The latter especially felt humiliated as she saw herself losing to a mere black slave girl. And many Matrak ladies would poke her using this fact in secret.”

“To add to that acrimony, by the time this autopsy took place, relations between the couple deteriorated to the point they had basically ceased to exist as a pair in all but name.”

“Pasha Farzah had learned of how she had helped Mirzah hide his mistakes, and that made him basically boycott her. If not for her powerful family and her prodigious son, I suspect Farzah might have even outright divorced her.”

“The nobles of course noticed this increased coldness too. Many of their ladies came to them with reports of the lord shunning his main wife. However no one knew the real reason. And Farzah was also too ashamed to let the true cause come out to light. So they thought he simply did not like her for the color of her skin.”

“This was also near a time when Pasha Farzah had just openly proclaimed his preference for dark skinned women over fairer women and that ruffled many feathers. In Matrak, the nobles do not exactly see dark skinned women as low per se, but they definitely see them as less attractive than fair skinned folks. Hence they felt Pasha Farzah’s declaration was disrespecting their family and heritage, adding more fuel to the fire.”

“Amidst all this, his main wife’s family took advantage to even spread rumors such as how he was lusting after women from foreign lands while neglecting his own wife and son and that he even wanted to replace her with one of his black concubines. Just mere talks of a black woman getting the seat of Matrak Pasha’s main wife was enough to make many of the blueblooded nobles’ blood boil.”

“So not only did the autopsy not work, inversely it actually helped Mirzah secure his seat even further.”

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