I write the petition in Persian because that’s the only language that reaches him. My Arabic sits in my throat—the language my grandfather used to describe the saql, the polishing motion that brings light through glass—but al-Shirazi needs formal words, words that acknowledge he controls what I need.
‘Arz-e man barā-ye hamkārī bā Maryam al-Raqqi dar kār-e ‘adasa-ye kabūd.
My petition for collaboration with Maryam al-Raqqi on blue lens work.
The ink dries on my fingers. Iron gall, black as the Euphrates mud. I used to wash it off immediately, back when I still thought the stains were temporary.
Outside my window, the quarter is waking. Layla will be finishing her shift soon—twelve hours at the furnace, night work because that’s when fuel allocation is lowest. I can see the glow from here, orange against the pre-dawn sky. The Friday Mosque is still rubble. The call to prayer sounds off broken walls.
My grandfather knew the whole process. Sand to glass to lens. He could take a handful of Euphrates sand and show you finished work that would let you see the moons of Jupiter. That knowledge shattered in the siege. I have the grinding. Layla has the fire. Maryam has the cobalt formulas. But we can’t share without permission, and permission costs time and petition ink and the small death of writing in Persian.
I pick up yesterday’s lens blank. The glass came from Layla’s furnace three days ago—I can tell by the color, that particular shade of clarity she achieves when the fuel allocation is good. But I can’t grind it without Maryam’s cobalt, and cobalt means al-Shirazi’s approval, and the petition is still drying on my fingers.
The lens is for an astrolabe. Some merchant in Samarkand needs it to calculate prayer times, or that’s what the order says. Maybe he just wants something beautiful. Either way, finished means cobalt, and cobalt means waiting.
My hands remember my grandfather’s hands, remember when the knowledge was whole, when we didn’t have to ask permission to do what we knew how to do.
The sun rises. The call to prayer sounds. I wash the ink off my fingers, but it doesn’t come clean.
Layla bint Khalil leaves the furnace at dawn and the heat follows her home. It sits in her chest, in her throat, in the cough she’s been hiding for three weeks. The night shift is twelve hours of fire that never dies because letting it die means losing her fuel allocation, rationed by the week, never enough to waste.
She walks past Yusuf’s workshop. His lamp is lit. He’s always awake at this hour, always working or waiting to work.
Her room is two doors down from the furnace. Close enough that she never really leaves the heat. Her mother is awake, mixing bread dough. They don’t ask about the cough anymore. The furnace takes everyone eventually. Her father lasted twenty years. She’s on year six.
“Did the glass come out well?” her mother asks.
Layla nods. She doesn’t have the breath for more. The glass came out perfect—she knows fire the way her father knew it, knows when to add fuel, when to let it burn hot, when to bank it. But the glass sits in the workshop. Yusuf can’t grind without cobalt, and cobalt waits on al-Shirazi.
She lies down without washing. She dreams of the Euphrates before the siege, when her brothers were alive and her father could still breathe and the quarter made things that went everywhere. She dreams of making glass someone uses.
She wakes four hours later, coughing. Blood on her hand, small spots, easy to hide.
Maryam al-Raqqi doesn’t need to petition. Al-Shirazi grants her requests automatically because she’s the last person alive who knows the complete cobalt process—the blue that keeps the quarter producing. She has savings. She could leave.
She stays because she’s a colorant specialist from a family of colorant specialists, and if she leaves, the knowledge leaves with her. That’s what she tells herself. But this morning, watching Layla walk home from the night shift—the way the young woman pauses at each doorway now, hand on the frame, catching her breath before the next few steps—Maryam isn’t sure what she tells herself matters.
She’s working on a cobalt batch when Yusuf’s petition arrives—not to her, to al-Shirazi, but she knows about it anyway. The quarter is small and the walls are thin and gossip moves faster than permissions. Yusuf wants her cobalt for his lens. Together they could produce a finished piece in three days. But together requires al-Shirazi’s approval, and approval will take a week, maybe two.
She could just give Yusuf the cobalt. But working without approval means losing her quick-turnaround access to the furnaces, means becoming like everyone else—trapped in queues and the slow wearing-down of waiting.
The cobalt sits in its jar, perfect blue, waiting for permission to be useful.
Hasan al-Shirazi reads Yusuf’s petition over breakfast. The Arabic is competent but stiff—the grammar of someone who learned Persian as an adult. The request is straightforward. Yusuf wants to work with Maryam. He needs cobalt. The lens is for a Samarkand merchant.
He sets it in the approval pile and picks up the next one. A furnace operator requesting daytime shifts—Layla bint Khalil. He pulls her production records. Good output when the downstream work moves, but downstream hasn’t moved in three months because the grinders are backed up on colorant approvals. He writes a note in the margin: Review after current backlog clears.
He learned about backlogs in Tabriz. Before Tabriz, he’d been faster with approvals. A workshop there produced eighteen astrolabe lenses in a single month—impressive numbers, until the instruments reached Isfahan and seven threw false readings. What he found was a grinding house where three specialists had combined techniques without anyone checking compatibility. Each man’s work was excellent alone. Together, they’d introduced a compound astigmatism invisible to any single pair of eyes.
He finishes breakfast and moves to inspections. The first piece—a small concave mirror for a physician in Herat. Good curvature. Clean polish. He signs the approval. The second has a bubble near the edge. He marks it for regrinding and writes a note to the maker, in Arabic, explaining what to look for. He learned mirror work from his uncle. He knows what the bubble means—glass poured too fast, or the furnace running uneven.
He speaks Arabic with the artisans. His mother was from Mosul, spoke nothing else. But binding decisions go in Persian because Timur’s court reads Persian, and Arabic records carry no weight.
He sets Yusuf’s petition back in the pile. He’ll approve it this week. But there are six petitions ahead of it, and each one needs care.
The secret meetings start three weeks after I submit the petition. I still haven’t received approval. I’ve written two follow-ups. Al-Shirazi hasn’t responded to either.
The first meeting is after night prayers, in the empty workshop two doors down. Five of us: me, Layla, two grinders, a polisher. We speak only in Arabic. It’s the first time in two years I’ve talked about my craft without switching to Persian mid-sentence. Maryam’s house shares a wall with this workshop. I know this. I don’t mention it.
“I know the grinding,” I say. “Layla knows the fire. If we pool what we know—”
“We’ll still need cobalt. And cobalt is Maryam.”
“Then we ask Maryam.”
“She won’t risk it.”
Layla speaks for the first time. Her voice is rough, furnace-scarred. “I can get you fire outside al-Shirazi’s allocation. There’s fuel on the black market. If someone paid for it—”
“Who’s going to pay for it?”
“I could pay,” someone says.
We turn. Maryam is standing in the doorway.
“I could set up a furnace in my courtyard. Private.”
“Why would you do that?” Layla asks.
“My father used to work with yours,” Maryam says. “Did you know that? Before the siege. My father made the cobalt, yours fired it, and they didn’t need anyone’s permission. They just walked next door.”
Maryam buys fuel on the black market—three times what al-Shirazi pays. She has a furnace built in her courtyard, small, enough for one person. She tells her mother it’s for experimental batches. Her mother doesn’t believe her.
Layla comes at night, after her official shift. Maryam has laid out bread and water on the bench beside the kiln.
“Four-hour shifts here,” Maryam says. “Make what Yusuf needs. Rest.”
Layla doesn’t ask why. She picks up the bellows.
We produce our first lens in five days. It’s not perfect—when Maryam holds it to morning light, she finds an asymmetry in the curvature, a warping along one axis. She tilts the glass so I can see the distortion myself. Two years of grinding alone, checking my own work. The error is mine—a habit, a slight unevenness in pressure invisible from the grinding side but immediate in the finished curve.
“Again,” I say.
I regrind. She checks. The third attempt is clean.
The finished lens takes eight days. But it’s complete. No permissions. No petitions. No Persian.
The second lens takes four days. The third takes three.
Al-Shirazi notices when I stop submitting petitions.
He summons me. I go slowly. I don’t bring a petition. I bring a lens.
His office is on the second floor, overlooking the courtyard. Cool walls, high ceilings. He speaks Arabic.
“You haven’t submitted a petition in three weeks.”
“I haven’t needed to.”
“How are you completing work without collaboration approvals?”
I set the lens on his desk. Cobalt blue, ground clean, no asymmetry. “Look at it.”
He picks it up the way he picks up every piece—by the edges, tilted toward window light. Rotates it slowly. Checks curvature against his palm. Holds it at arm’s length, then close.
The lens is good. We both know it.
He sets it down between us. Perfect and blue and unauthorized.
He switches to Persian. “You are violating the administrative structure of this quarter. I’ve seen what happens when work goes uninspected. Tabriz. Eighteen lenses. Seven failures.”
I stay in Arabic. “Then inspect it. It’s on your desk. Tell me what’s wrong with it.”
The fountain in his courtyard. The call to prayer from the ruined mosque.
“You will resume the petition process,” he says. “Or you will lose your workshop, your tools, and your authorization to work in this quarter.”
“I don’t need the workshop. I don’t need the authorization. I need cobalt and fire and someone to check my grinding, and I have all three.”
I leave the lens on his desk. My hands are shaking when I reach the street. My fingers are clean.
Layla collapses during her official shift two weeks later. She wakes in Maryam’s house, in a real bed, with clean water and bread that isn’t rationed.
“You can’t go back,” Maryam says. “You work here. Four-hour shifts.”
“You’re buying black market fuel. You’re feeding half the quarter. You’ll run out.”
“Maybe.”
Layla coughs. Blood on her hand, more than before. Maryam takes her wrist, wipes it clean, says nothing about it.
“Show me how you read the fire,” Maryam says. “Teach your nephew. Teach anyone who’ll learn.”
“My father used to say you know the glass is ready when the fire turns white at the edges. Not the center. The edges. Everyone watches the center.”
“Then that’s where we start.”
Al-Shirazi revokes my workshop three weeks later. Persian, formal, binding. I don’t surrender my tools. I move them to Maryam’s house. Two grinders join me. Then a polisher. Then a young colorant mixer who sits with Maryam for hours, learning the cobalt ratios. We produce lenses and mirrors and prisms—Samarkand, Herat, pieces that end up charting stars over Bukhara. Maryam checks every one against the light before it leaves.
Al-Shirazi reports the situation to Timur’s regional administrator. He writes about Tabriz, about compound astigmatism, about the cost of uncoordinated work.
The response takes four weeks: Maintain production. Method is secondary to output.
He reads it three times. He thinks about Isfahan, about the astronomer who couldn’t find Saturn, about seven lenses that looked perfect until they weren’t. Then he approves thirty petitions. Reduces furnace fees. Offers collaboration permissions without delay. The artisans who’ve already left don’t come back.
The quarter splits. Half still petition. Half work collectively.
Both halves produce.
Six months later, I’m grinding a lens when a young artisan knocks. He’s maybe twenty, ink stains still on his fingers from this morning’s petition.
“I heard you don’t need permissions.”
“We don’t use al-Shirazi’s. We still coordinate. We just do it directly.”
“Can I learn? I know polishing. My father taught me before the siege.”
“Then show me.” I hand him a blank.
His fingers are stained with petition ink, but by evening he’s at a grinding wheel, learning the motion my grandfather taught me.
In al-Shirazi’s office, a petition from a young polisher. He writes the approval in Persian, then adds a note in Arabic: Consider pairing with Tariq al-Najjar. His curvature work complements yours.
In Maryam’s courtyard, Layla’s nephew feeds the furnace while Layla sits beside him, hands around a cup of tea. The glass is for the Samarkand astrolabe—the one that started as a petition on Yusuf’s bench. She tells him to watch the edges of the fire, not the center. She speaks in short sentences now.
The call to prayer sounds from the ruined mosque. I wash my hands. The water runs clear.
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