After all had left the room, Tahirah stilled her being, sheltering herself within a prayer.
The Alhambra was almost healed. The palace whispered to her and called her name. One final task to do. No longer did it shun her.
The lions were back in their places but alert and waiting, claws and teeth prepared for any intruder. Their thoughts swirled around the room, and she had to hold her mind tightly closed against the images of fangs and claws that radiated from the fountain.
The doors to the Hall of the Abencerrajes remained closed. She knew what waited for her there. She reached deep inside herself and found…Allah. Peace and harmony flooded her being. Strength to deal with the ordeal to come.
Slowly, she walked over to the doors. She felt it even before she touched them: pain, torment. The echo of a soul in horror of itself. She took a deep breath, grabbed hold of the door and pulled. The huge door creaked open, admitting her like an old friend. It was a small room, not suited to this kind of pain. A place meant for laughter and joy. Here was where the final healing of the Alhambra had to take place. She closed the door behind her.
Breathing was hard, and the agony of the evening rang in her ears and pulsed in the stone beneath her fingertips. She knew the wazir was no longer there, no longer in pain. But his memories lingered and clawed at the walls. With deliberate steps, she began the process of cleansing the room and completing the healing of the Alhambra. She retraced patterns with their magical symmetries into the walls. The Alhambra listened and breathed in the knowledge using the patterns as a structure from which to repair damage.
Tahirah placed her hands flat on the stone floor and felt the remaining symmetries heal, one after another throughout the Alhambra, as the magnificent building incorporated the mathematics into its foundations. With each healing, she felt her closeness to Allah and rejoiced in the wonder of her Sufi mathemagic schooling. And with each healing, the echo of the wazir’s pain and treachery lessened.
High above, moonlight illuminated the symmetry of the many windows set in geometric positions around a center top. As she stared, mesmerized by the light, it splintered and fractured. But this time, symmetries upon perfect symmetries danced before her mind’s eye, lit by the moon and the stars.
Allah had granted her a blessing beyond her wildest imaginings. Mathematics as she had never seen it swirled before her. Symmetries flashed before her eyes and replicated themselves again and again across the ceiling. Deep into the bones of the Alhambra, she followed them. Her mind delighted at the wonders. Patterns so small that her mind could hardly grasp what she was seeing. The configuration of a future world she could but guess, and all symmetries. Symmetries within symmetries, smaller than one could see, all part of the force which tied it together. Not to be understood in her lifetime, nor in a lifetime of lifetimes, but eventually in a land and time unknown to her or any of the wisest of the wise. A gift of knowledge she could never share.
Exhausted, she lay on her back, reveling in the oneness with the Alhambra and Allah, and gazed upwards at the ceiling into the comforting dark of the sky.