Ciara H commended in Prestigious Writing Competition

Lower Sixth pupil, Ciara H, has been ‘highly commended’ in the prestigious Girton College Humanities Writing Competition with her entry of ‘The Offering’.

It worked the eye idol into a poignant story about a normal day that ends tragically for two Syrian children. The children’s experience was vividly rendered both familiar and unfamiliar through the lens of a different culture. The work of a talented and practised writer.

You can read her entry in full below.

‘The Offering’ by Ciara H

Fauz was eight-and-three-quarters when the bomb hit Tell Brak. Nawaf was only seven-and-a-half.

His ribs fought against the rubble. They made a battering sound like the beating of a hummingbird’s wings. He couldn’t see, for the darkness and the dust. It was scraping his corneas, which made him notice his arms were pinned down and could provide him no relief. The darkness and the pressure reminded him of swimming classes. His Bubba’s voice rang out in his ear, waterlogged from the parents’ stand: ‘You’ve got to want it! Swim, boy! Swim. Nawaf, swim!’ The mantra jerked his legs for him, loosening his debris-tomb. Swim, Nawaf, swim.

They had found the treasure together, but Nawaf was the guard. It happened like this: two hours after school Uncle Nizar had grown tired of his niece, and her restless friend so he did what no parenting book in the region would recommend: he sent them running a couple kilometres into the countryside.

‘Go. If you are jumping out of your chair here. Go find me some treasure.’

Fauz and Nawaf didn’t need to hear that twice. They bolted through the Damask rose bushes and into the sand expanses of their village. The grains weren’t as scalding as they might have been at noon, but they ran under his Converse as if the two had opposite magnetic charges. It was as though they were running in water itself and they were Nizar’s hunting dogs sniffing, sifting, searching through infinite dunes.

‘You’re so slow! Go fast, Nawaf! Fast!’

His soles picked up their attack.

‘I’m going slow, so you won’t be a cry-baby when I find the treasure first!’

His insistent little forehead ducked down to ease the acceleration. Fauz yelped, then pushed harder to make up stolen distance. Both their jaws ached from competitive smiles. She may have batted his side to knock him back, and in retaliation, he may have skidded the sand in the direction of her eyes. Who’s to say? All’s fair if they kept smiling.

‘Fauz- Fauz! Stop!’

She looked back to search for his distress—or to taunt him for thinking distraction might work. He saw her cheeks concave with breath. Fauz collided with something immovable and she tumbled. The wall had sprouted up independent of their adventure, millennia ago, when children still didn’t look where they were running. It was stubby, about knee height for your average seven-and-a-half-year-old. It whispered to him, in a language of straight lines pressed into clay, in something much more aged than he could understand. His trance was cut short by Fauz.

‘Stop being dreamy and help me up.’

He yanked her up, dutiful but disengaged.

‘There should be a fence, or a sign, or something.’

Fauz settled into Nawaf’s silence with curiosity. A life within that colossal wreck toyed with them. He could almost smell the stale pomegranate beer fermented to sludge and votive cakes long taken by the gods. Tapestries were underfoot once, tapestries all over the dust, threadbare. Any remaining strands of those rugs would be buried, maybe even fossilized and now, valuable. Treasure snakes in their burrows waiting for little hands to grab their necks and drag those yarns back to a civilisation they were once the foundations of. Tapestries, and a million alabaster faces who once pleaded with the only force in the world that could have provided them relief. Nawaf could feel them, begging the future-boy who might know their fates. He felt them even in the colossal wreck, seething over his gross, future-born knowledge. A breeze swept up the survivors, two frog-faced icons now elevated to Nawaf’s palm. Four eyes met four eyes, and they all stared. They were seeking some flutter of connection. A diagonal pattern made ridges across what would be their feet. They had fez-like hats. Fauz was struck by the similarity to one her father had bought for her as a joke after returning from a wedding in Türkiye. The stone wasn’t cooling, nor substantial. It sat there like it had been sitting for five thousand years, then Nawaf’s hand snapped shut.

‘I told you, I got the treasure first!’

—

‘Uncle Nizar, what is it?’

‘Uncle, I found it!’

He brushed his giant thumb over the treasure.

‘You made it to the eye temple. Impressive!’

Fauz tried to pinch it back, but Nizar was far too familiar with her tricks.

‘Stop that, Fauz. It’s an offering. From the time of Gilgamesh.’

‘Gilgamesh?’

Two songbirds chirped in union.

‘Gilgamesh! The epic king! Five thousand years ago. Zaharti’ He only called her that when he was amused or about to set off on a scholarly lecture. ‘From just here, in Tell Brak. This is your history, children: Gilgamesh, the tyrant king and Innana, Goddess of love and war…’ He swirled his arms around them like a wizard suffusing magic into a cauldron. ‘Gula, and Pablisag, Damu and Ninazu all here in Nawar.’ The children were lost between the names. Their wandering eyes brought him back to a talk he gave, in a primary school. Archaeology: all the students wanted to do was touch the artefacts. ‘Come here. Feel the indents.’ His bear paw knocked Fauz’s hand onto the icon. ‘You feel the hollow lines? The people would carve it themselves and leave it at the temple to ask the god to bargain for healing. They did not have doctors the same way we do. Sometimes, they believed there was no cure but the will of the Gods. There were thousands, hundreds of thousands of icons—I can’t believe the expedition left one behind… The ruin was excavated, stripped near bare by Sally Mallowan and Max Finch, I believe. They were British archaeologists, still may be…’

Fauz wriggled his fingers in protest. ‘Uncle, this is all stories.’

He jostled back. ‘It is true!’ then returned to his babysitting tone of voice. ‘Thank you, children, for bringing me treasure. Now you have the plea of someone once in great pain, I suggest you keep it safe. That might be the last evidence they were ever alive.’

‘I am the guard! I found the treasure, so I am the guard!’

Nawaf received his wish. He was guard of the treasure for the six days before he was encased in his own ruined temple. The offering—that had never left his pocket since he had found it—reassured the scared boy that this was ‘the cycle of things’. Beautiful things (like seven-and-a-half-year-olds) sometimes get buried under rubble. If he had any luck, in a couple thousand years they could be unearthed. Together this time! But Nawaf could not wait that long. He knew that Fauz had been in the room with him before the bomb went off. He hoped she was in a clearing, that she could hear him scuffling and was getting help. He hoped the impact didn’t destroy the bank where his mother was finishing work, or the library where Fauz’s older brother usually spent his afternoons in. He hoped Uncle Nizar was on one of his trips fifteen thousand miles away from Tell Brak, or what was left of Tell Brak. In truth, there was not much left of Tell Brak at all. No more grocer, no more cinema, only an eight-and-three-quarter-year-old and a seven-and-a-half-year-old scuffling under the rubble of their own temples. Four eyes of the offering, four little bystander eyes collateral damage to a cross-continental war. Men in board rooms gave orders to the men in smaller board rooms and so on. Planes circled above like vultures to the carrion. They had never seen these cities before. They would never know the treasures they held, their ruins and their treasure since it would all soon be indiscriminately: rubble. The pilots were conscious, some regretted their actions, most rationalised. The same went for those farther from Tell Brak. There were protests, there were inquiries made but there were still more seven-and-a-half-year-olds buried and there are more to come.

The gods weren’t coming for Fauz or Nawaf, nor human help. First responders won’t make it for another two hours, and the news a whole day later. A tragedy, a misstep, such a small town after all, so many towns and cities, temples and gutters laid back to dust. Alabaster was their offering, an ancient prayer for the newly buried.