Time in Akka did not pass in hours or days; it passed in the erosion of the self.
For Khalid, the first year was a scream. He fought the guards. He fought the other prisoners. He paced the three steps of his damp cell until his feet bled, screaming Layla's name into the stone until his voice was nothing but a rasp.
The second year was a prayer. He bargained with God. If I survive this, I will never touch a sword again. If I survive this, I will be a water-carrier, a beggar, anything, as long as I can see her face.
By the fifth year, there was only silence.
Khalid had become part of the fortress. His skin, once bronzed by the desert sun, was now the color of old parchment, translucent and stretched tight over his bones. His hands, which had once held a quill with such delicacy, were now claws, permanently curled from gripping the sledgehammer in the quarry.
Every day was the same. The bell rang before dawn. A bowl of watery gruel that smelled of mold. The march to the quarry yard. The sun beating down, reflecting off the white limestone until it blinded them. Crack. Crack. Crack. The sound of metal hitting stone was the heartbeat of his existence.
Khalid did not speak to the other prisoners. They were ghosts to him. He lived entirely inside his head.
He built a palace in his mind. In the morning, while he broke the large rocks, he imagined he was building the walls of a home for Layla. In the afternoon, while he hauled the debris, he imagined he was walking through the souk with her, buying cinnamon and silk. At night, while the sea crashed against the outer wall, he recited his library.
He had memorized five hundred poems. He whispered them into the darkness, his lips moving soundlessly. They were his food. They kept his mind from rotting like his body.
But the body has its own limits.
It started in the seventh winter. A cough that wouldn't leave. At first, it was dry and hacking, just the dust of the quarry. But as the damp cold of the sea seeped into the marrow of his bones, the cough changed. It became wet. It rattled deep in his chest, like a bag of marbles being shaken.
One morning, in the tenth year, Khalid swung his hammer. A spasm of coughing seized him, bending him double. He retched, his chest feeling as if it were tearing open. When he pulled his hand away from his mouth, his palm was wet.
He looked at it.
Bright, red blood.
It was the only color he had seen in a decade.
A fellow prisoner, a thief named Youssef who had lost an ear, looked at him with pity. "The wasting sickness," Youssef whispered. "The stone lung. You are done, Bedouin. The angel of death is sitting on your chest."
Khalid wiped his hand on his rags. He looked at the white walls of the prison.
"Not yet," he rasped, the taste of copper in his mouth. "I have a promise to keep."
He picked up the hammer. He swung. But the blow was weak. The rock did not break. The stone had won.