Chapter Text
He’s only twelve when he leaves his home, the dusty little village and his family, mother and father and eight children, soon to be nine. A few months before, little Aiza earthbent for the first time, the first bender in the family for as long as anyone can remember. She needs training and training costs money, so Zaheer is sent away, to start work. It’ll be one less mouth to feed, and he can send part of his wages back. He hugs his brothers and sisters and Mom – it’s hard what with her swollen belly - bows to his father, and then they set off on foot, him and Uncle Arfan, his mother’s brother, who works on the estate of a wealthy family just outside of Chin Village.
It takes them weeks to walk there, across plains and through mountain-passes. They endure searing heat and freezing cold and constant rumours of bandits, but eventually they get there. Zaheer is exhausted and malnourished and his feet are cracked and bleeding and halfway to being frostbitten, and he spends the first two weeks in bed. Once he’s recovered he’s assigned to the kitchens, to fetch and carry and above of all to wash dishes, endless dishes. It’s hard work, but he’s clean and warm and better-fed than he’s ever been in his life. Here, even the kitchen-boy eats rice three times a day, whereas back home he was lucky to get it a few times a year. Mostly they lived off sweet potato and millet, and sometimes there wasn’t even enough of that to go around. The year Zaheer was nine, the year the twins were born, things got so bad they slaughtered the ostrich-horse and ate it, then ate the fodder meant for it. Zaheer loved that ostrich-horse, but the meat was the best thing he’d ever tasted. Here, he gets meat at least once a day. Sometimes more.
With his belly full for the first time in his life, he’s able to focus on more than just thinking about where his next meal is coming from. Before, his world ended at the boundaries of their tiny village. Here, he sees things he could never have imagined. Strange creatures with tentacles and claws and gaping mouths, that Ling the cook says come from the sea and are considered great delicacies, arrive alive in tanks of water or frozen in great blocks of ice. Hana, a tall fierce-looking woman with eyes the colour of gold, and the first firebender he has ever met, bends a huge flame to roast great joints of meat. Other times, she bends tiny tongues of fire from her fingertips to shape sugar into elaborate shapes that are displayed on the table during banquets. Once, she has a little sugar left over after creating a vast dragon when some Fire Nation nobles are visiting. She tells Zaheer to close his eyes and hold out his hand, and moments later he feels something small and sticky in his palm. He opens his eyes – it's a tiny badgermole. He doesn’t want to eat it, it’s so perfect and besides it’s the only thing he’s ever owned that had no purpose besides being pretty, but Hana tells him he should, that it’s meant to be eaten. He pops it into his mouth and wants to laugh out of pure joy at the sweetness of it.
He’s not sure whether it’s the good food or whether it would have happened anyway, but he grows quickly, going from a scrawny underfed kid to a tall broad teenager. It’s only a few short years before he’s a head taller than Uncle Arfan, and strong besides. One day Zhuang, the estate’s head of security, is hanging around the kitchens flirting with one of the wok-chefs, when he sees Zaheer carrying a sack of rice over his shoulder with ease. He asks Zaheer a few questions – how old he is, whether he has any combat experience – then tells him that effective tomorrow, he’s being transferred to the security force for training. With that, he’s cast out of the kitchens for good. The following morning at daybreak he’s in a courtyard adjacent to the main family garden, so close he can see the trees trimmed in the shapes of turtleducks and sky-bison and elephant-koi. Zhuang demonstrates a fighting-stance, then tells him to follow suit. Zaheer stands there, leg-muscles burning, as Zhuang inspects his stance and adjusts it, tapping him on the back of the leg with his stick to get him to drop lower.
‘The first principle of bending training is perfecting your stance. Get that wrong, and you’re building on bad foundations’.
‘But I’m not a bender’.
‘It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you take lessons from different sources. Bender, non-bender, earth, fire, water – everyone has something valuable to teach us’.
Zhuang isn’t joking, either. For the first couple of weeks, they do nothing but stance training. By the end of each day Zaheer’s legs ache so badly he can hardly stand, and his old friends from the kitchens laugh when he tells them what he’s been doing, why all of a sudden he’s walking like an old woman. Soon enough, though, he learns how to throw a punch, how to duck and weave, how to confuse an opponent. Six months in, Zhuang is rubbing his jaw with an expression that’s part pained, part impressed, saying that he has no idea how Zaheer moves the way he does, for a man his size.
Zaheer is sixteen, and it’s the first time anyone has ever referred to him as a man.
He’s been working as a guard for a few months when he gets word from home that his father has died. He’s allowed to travel home for the funeral and they even lend him an ostrich-horse, so that he covers the distance in a few days, rather than weeks like before. The village and the little house where he grew up are the same as ever, only even poorer, if that’s possible. The rest is strange to him. He barely recognises his mother, small and stooped and aged before her time. Or his siblings, those of them that were born when he left and that are still at home.
The night before he’s due to leave, he’s sitting outside watching the sunset when Tahira comes to him. The two of them are just a year and a half apart, and she was always his favourite. She sits next to him and they sit in silence a moment before she asks what its like.
‘The estate?’ Tahira nods. Zaheer tries to tell her about it but he doesn’t have the words. He takes a stick and tries to draw it in the earth, the outline of it, the kitchens and the stables and the guard-posts, and at the centre the family’s house. How it’s bigger than the village, all for one family, and a family that’s much smaller than theirs.
‘I’ll be leaving soon, too. I’m getting married’.
‘Who to? Did you meet someone?’
‘No. Dad found a match for me, before he died. He’s from the next village. A widower, his wife died last year. He needs someone to help run his store and take care of the kids. I assume it will still go through, all the arrangements were made’.
Tahira is nearly fifteen, but to Zaheer she still looks like a child. Scrawny and underfed, with barely a curve to her body. The thought of some old widower on top of her, inside her, makes him feel sick. He realises that he hates this place. That he will never be back, if he can help it. It’s a dead end, and he wants his life to lead somewhere, even if he doesn’t quite know where yet.
Back at the estate, he applies himself to his work and is soon rewarded. More and more he is chosen to guard the family as they eat, as they receive visitors. As the children play in the gardens. The children gravitate to him like moth-wasps to a flame, he’s not sure why. Perhaps they can tell he’s young himself, not much older than them, despite his size. Or perhaps it has something to do with the fact he grew up with so many siblings, they can tell he’s safe somehow. His favourite is the oldest girl, Chunhua. She’s bright and loves to read, she always has a book in her hands. She reminds him a bit of Tahira, with her quick mind and interest in the world, though Tahira never got the chance to learn to read any more than Zaheer did. While her younger siblings chase each other through the gardens, Chunhua sits on the steps near Zaheer and peppers him with questions. His favourite colour (red). His favourite animal (sky bison, though he’s never seen one. They say the Avatar has one, he’d like to see it some day). His favourite book.
‘I don’t have one, sorry’.
‘I could lend you some, if you like. So you can figure out which is your favourite’.
‘That’s kind of you, but it won’t help. I never learned how to read’.
Chunhua giggles. ‘Don’t be silly. Everyone knows how to read. Even Chuntian’, she says, referring to her baby sister.
‘It’s true, I swear. I never went to school, and where I come from there aren’t any books’. That’s not completely true – every so often a bookseller would pass through the village with a basket of books from Gaoling and Ba Sing Se. Once or twice Zaheer begged his father to buy him one, but the old man said no, that he’d go further working with his hands than bothering with pig-chicken scratches on a bit of paper, and that besides they hadn’t the money.
‘That’s silly, a grown-up not being able to read. What do you do in the evening anyway, without books?’
The truth is that he keeps himself busy: playing cards and dice with the other guys, drinking beer and Gaoling whisky, occasionally visiting one of the brothels in town when he has a bit left over after payday. But he agrees with Chunhua – it's pathetic, for a man his age not to be able to read. He tells her he’d like to learn, some day, and her little face lights up.
‘It’s not that hard once you get the hang of it. Here, I’ll show you’. She holds her hand out, and he realises after a moment that she’s asking for his bo-staff. He hands it over. She draws in the earth – three horizontal strokes, two vertical that look like a mountain or a volcano, then a little box, like a window.
‘That’s the first part of my name. Chun. It means spring’. Then she draws a second character, simpler this time. ‘There. Chunhua. Spring flower. Now, you have a go’.
He takes the staff and tries to copy what Chunhua has drawn, starting with the little window.
‘No, no! You have to do the strokes in order. You start at the top, with the horizontal strokes’.
‘Why?’
‘You just do. Come on, I’ll help you’. Chunhua takes back the staff and walks him through it, stroke by stroke. Eventually, Zaheer is able to write it himself, all the strokes in the correct order. It looks pretty good, if he says so himself.
From then on Chunhua comes to him every time he’s on duty. She teaches him simple words – mother, father, earth, king – and then asks how his name is spelt, which characters it is made up of. He doesn’t know, so she makes up a spelling for him. Apparently the first character means to investigate. He likes that. He likes to think he’s a curious person.
With his next paycheck, instead of whisky or a woman he buys himself a workbook and a calligraphy-brush from the stationer’s in town. Night after night after work he works through it by candlelight, learning how to make the different strokes, how to put them together into characters. The others laugh at him, but he keeps at it. After a while he starts to recognise individual characters, then parts of sentences. One day, in town, he sees a newspaper with a picture of Firelord Zuko on the front page, and he recognises the characters for ‘fire’ and ‘Ba Sing Se’ in the headline. He buys a copy and works his way through the article with Chunhua’s help.
‘You should try reading a book, next’.
‘A book?’ Zaheer’s just spent the best part of a week working his way through an article about the Firelord visiting Ba Sing Se where he drank at some teashop. Reading a book would probably take him the rest of his life. But Chunhua insists, and the following day she brings him a book that she says belongs to her baby sister, mostly pictures with a few words. It’s a silly story about Oma and Shu, and for all that it takes him a week of hard work to get through it, but when he finishes he’s so proud of himself that he cries.
He carries on practising, at night and on his days off, and before long he can make his way through a whole newspaper with the help of a dictionary. He reads out articles to the other guys on the security force, but none of them seem very interested in what’s happening out there, in the rest of the Earth Kingdom let alone the world. A couple of years go by and he’s able to read without a dictionary, not just newspapers but books he buys from the bookseller in town. Novels, history books, even poetry. One evening he’s assigned to guard Chunhua while she studies in the family’s library – a part of the estate he has never been in before, and the most beautiful building he has ever seen, like a shrine to knowledge. She invites him to sit opposite her, to read something if he likes, as long as he puts it back in the same place afterwards. He explores the shelves for a while and eventually finds something that seems interesting, something he’s not read about before.
‘A New History of the Air Nomads’. Chunhua sounds intrigued. ‘I don’t think I’ve read that one. I’ve never even seen an Air Nomad. I met a guy who says he met the Avatar once, but I don’t know if I believe him. Anyway, the book should be interesting’.
Interesting doesn’t cover it. Zaheer is captivated. He escaped his dusty dead-end village and made it here, to a place where he lives comfortably, but as part of a hierarchy. The ideas he’s reading about – total freedom, equality, a lack of rules and hierarchies – are nothing he ever imagined. He works his way through everything the library has about the Air Nomads. One book in particular – a work of poetry by an ancient guru from the Northern Air Temple, that looks like nobody but him has ever even opened it – speaks to his very soul, and without thinking about what he’s doing he slips it under his shirt and takes it from the library, stashing it under his pillow in the guard-quarters. There are hundreds, thousands of books in the library, more than anyone could read in a lifetime. Surely they won’t miss this one.
They do miss it, or else someone saw him and told. He’s immediately fired and told to leave the estate before sundown, or else face twenty lashes and a night in the stocks. They even withhold his final paycheck as a penalty for stealing, even though they take back the book. As he leaves he tells the family that the way they live is disgusting, that they should be ashamed of themselves, that one day they will lose all their wealth and they will deserve it. Chunhua looks horrified.
When he unpacks his bag that night in the cheap guest-house he’s paid for with the last of his money, he finds the book of poetry tucked inside. Chunhua must have taken it from the library for him.
From then on he drifts from town to town across the Earth Kingdom. Just two things are driving him – putting as much distance as he can between him and Chin, and not going home to live out his days in the shithole he crawled out of. Fortunately his skills are in demand, and he works as an enforcer for whoever will pay him enough to keep a roof over his head and keep him in food and books. Eventually he washes up in Ba Sing Se, like all the refuse from every corner of the Earth Kingdom and beyond. He finds work with a loan-shark, hunting down people who haven’t paid him back and frightening them, sometimes giving them a bit of a beating if they’ve let the debts mount up for long enough. It pays decently, enough that he’s able to rent an apartment in the Lower Ring and buy all the books he wants from street-sellers, but he hates it. The people he’s paid to terrorise – they're people from the countryside who didn’t realise how expensive big-city life was, farmers who can’t find work doing anything else, harried fathers of too many children. This city – the whole Earth Kingdom really – is nothing but a giant prison. While the Queen and her Upper Ring noble friends live the high life, the mass of the population festers in poverty and ignorance. Worse, they don’t even know it, and accept their chains.
One day when Old Man Lai doesn’t have a job for him, he takes the train to the Middle Ring so he can check out a bookshop in the university district and see what they have about the Air Nomads. The shop is cool and quiet and the books aren’t flimsy and dog-eared like the ones he’s been buying from street-sellers – they're beautiful, works of art really, with thick creamy paper and illustrations, even photographs in some cases. He finds the philosophy section and leafs through a few books that look interesting, conscious all the while of a saleswoman standing there, watching him like an eagle-hawk. He debates with himself for a long while, fingering the coins in his pocket, wondering whether to spend them all, and eventually decides to stick to just one book, the one that most interests him - a collection of essays about Air Nomad philosophy, with a foreword by Avatar Aang. Once he’s bought it, he heads to a tea-shop across the road to start reading. The tea-shop turns out to be full of students from the university. They’re the same age as him, older in some cases, but all they have to worry about is learning, reading and attending lectures and filling themselves with all the knowledge they can absorb. They don’t have to pay for it by roughing up people that don’t deserve it, chipping away at their soul a little bit every time.
A few evenings later he’s in a tavern in the Lower Ring, drinking away his regrets and self-hatred after a particularly bad job, when he notices an old geezer staring at him from the corner. He heads out to take a piss, and comes back to find the old codger sitting at his table. A bottle of baijiu is sitting on the table along with two glasses. From this close up, his new friend not just old but positively ancient.
‘Sorry, but I’m not really in the mood for company’, he says, but the old man shows no sign of moving. He pours himself a glass of baijiu, downs it, then smiles and looks at Zaheer.
‘At my age, I’m not often in the mood for company either, except when I meet someone interesting. And you, my friend, are certainly interesting. A man with a talent for violence and an interest in Air Nomad philosophy. You don’t get many of those’.
‘Been watching me a while, have you?’
‘You’re worth watching’. The old man pours himself another shot, downs it, then extends the bottle to Zaheer, who shakes his head. He has the feeling he needs his head to be as clear as possible around this guy.
‘Suit yourself. Tell me, Zaheer. Have you considered using your talents in a more productive way?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Against the right targets. Against the parasites leaching strength and vitality from the Kingdom and the world, not the poor people suffering as a result of them’.
‘Isn’t that the Avatar’s role? I’m just one guy trying to make his way in the world. It’s not my job to make it a better place, decide who lives and who dies’.
‘I disagree. I’ve been on this earth a lot longer than you have, and I think each one of us has the right to shape the world, to make it a better place. Those of us who possess talent and drive’ - here he nods in Zaheer’s direction - ‘have the responsibility to do what we can’. He rummages in his pockets, takes something out and pushes it towards Zaheer. It’s a lotus tile from a pai sho set, painted red. ‘Think about it. If any of what I’ve said makes sense to you, go to the Longjing Inn in Chongwen district, and ask for Xai Bao. Tell him Tieguai sent you. You might find working with him more appealing than your current occupation’.
Zaheer takes the lotus tile and runs his finger over it. ‘I’ll think about it. After all, one should never blind oneself to the possibilities of a new reality’.
The old man snorts. ‘Laghima. Always thought he was so profound, the windbag’.