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“She loved you,” Kira whispered. Garak could feel the Major’s eyes on him. The room was heavy with grief, as if a high pressure storm had moved into the infirmary, while the promenade was filled only with joy and relief.
“I could never figure out why,” he heard himself say. “I guess I never will.”
Garak took Ziyal’s hand. It was cold, but he held it just the same. He felt himself go still, like a regnar waiting in the sand, hiding. At some point, Kira put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed softly before leaving the infirmary. She had to go back to her post. The station had to be re-taken, any damage or sabotage from Dukat had to be assessed. Work had to go on, but nobody was looking for a tailor now. There was nothing to do but sit with her.
Eventually Julian returned, hair tousled from hugs and greetings on the promenade. Somebody must have given him the news, or maybe the thick atmosphere of the infirmary was palpable at the door because he straightened himself quickly, and stood on Ziyal’s left side.
“I’m sorry, Garak.”
“What happens to her now?”
Creases appeared between Julian’s eyes, and Garak could feel the doctor take a deep breath.
“Dukat is…indisposed,” he started, “Dr. Girani tells me he is unable to make arrangements but…it’s complicated. Because she died on Deep Space Nine, and her death is an active investigation, her remains are currently in custody of Starfleet.”
Garak rubbed his thumb over the top of Ziyal’s hand.
“And what would Starfleet do with her?”
“Starfleet would, probably, organize a space burial and…” Julian paused. Garak was staring, blue eyes boring into him, ridges raised.
“A space burial?” Garak hissed.
“Yes,” Julian said slowly, “it is part of Starfleet tradition.”
“You would just jettison Ziyal out of an airlock, as if she was in the purview of waste management?” Garak’s voice was raised now, and an infirmary nurse politely slipped away from the room.
“Garak, I assure you that this would be a respectful burial,” Julian said softly, “Starfleet is continuing what is simply a variant of naval tradition. It is just that sea burial has become space burial.”
“Sea burial?”
“Earth, like Bajor, is covered largely by oceans. Early sailors would bury their colleagues at sea,” Julian explained, “but it has been practiced by civilians. When Starfleet began exploring space, the tradition carried over.”
Garak looked equal parts horrified and angry.
“My dear Doctor, do you not bury your dead? Am I wrong in recalling that occurring in your insipid novels? In the soil? It seems to me that the void of space is no burial at all.”
“Many Earth cultures have. Some still do, but space burial is popular. I’m sure Starfleet could consider a cremation either by traditional combustion or a pattern-buffer cremation…”
“None of this is acceptable, Doctor,” Garak raised his voice, “She’s Cardassian! At least…in part. She wanted to know more about who she was, and now you tell me that the Federation will give her this empty funeral, a space burial, and no place to rest.”
Julian looked down at the hand Garak held. Ziyal’s fingers, unable to feel any pain, were now pressed together in Garak’s angry grip. The tailor followed Julian’s eye line and let her hand go all at once. He could feel the walls of the infirmary closing in as he turned away from the Doctor and fled into the promenade, trying to slink through the crowd and find a place to hide alone.
***
Julian rested his forehead against the frame of Garak’s door and took a final deep breath. The worst part of his job, by far, was delivering bad news. There had been stretches of time where it all had felt like good news. Delivering babies, pulling off a tricky procedure, treating wounds from interspecies couples who had come in, bruised and laughing after a night of exploratory intercourse.
Those memories had become hazy. They were covered up with memories of distinctly bad news, dying soldiers, permanent maiming.
But this news was the strangest kind to be the messenger for. Bittersweet. A grain of good news on a landslide of tragedy.
He pressed the chime.
The door slid open and Garak was standing on the other side. This felt sticky and formal, after the number of times Garak had simply opened the door for Julian to let himself inside. After all the time he had spent here.
“May I help you, Doctor?”
“I had hoped it was quite the opposite,” Julian said, handing over one of the smaller models of PADDs. Garak took it, and scrolled through the displayed text. Julian wanted to fill the silence but it seemed that if he opened his mouth, only babbles would come out. Long-winded explanations on how he had taken the matter to Captain Sisko, how he had appealed to Starfleet’s claims of respecting other cultures, the PADDs of Cardassian cultural studies (which were sparse and poorly indexed in the ships database to begin with) he had slammed on the desk, and the argument with Odo that Ziyal’s body should no longer be considered “evidence” and that any meaningful evidence had already been collected.
Garak had now scrolled through the document twice, having re-read it carefully.
“She’s in my custody?” Garak asked.
“Yes,” Julian said, “I thought that...since Starfleet’s plans were clearly at odds with Cardassian values, and considering your relationship with Ziyal…that…it just made sense to…I’m sorry if this has created work for you.”
Garak paused for a moment, but only replied with a simple, “Thank you, Doctor.” He tucked the PADD into a pocket of his tunic.
“Garak--” Julian sputtered, “Would it help if I came in? We could share a pot of tarkalean tea or…”
“No, thank you Doctor. I’ve got a house-call of my own to do, plans to make.”
***
Garak stared down Major Kira’s door.
“Computer, time.”
Somewhere in the hidden wiring of the hallway, a monotone voice clicked on.
“It is 05:52.”
Garak huffed and fought the urge to fiddle with his hair. It wasn’t now or never, but it felt like it. He had shown up at Major Kira’s door sometime before and decided that his request would not pair nicely with an early morning. Instead of pressing the chime, he had taken a brisk walk around the entirety of the habitat ring, which had little to offer in scenery except a loop of sameness and increasing, and then decreasing, numbers on the doors, until he found himself back at Major Kira’s quarters once again.
He pressed the chime.
When it slid open, Major Kira was standing there in her red pants but a white undershirt. Her short hair was still a little ruffled, but she seemed as alert and awake as he had ever seen her.
“Mr. Garak,” she said. Her words were blunt, punctuated and enunciated, but not as hateful as they used to be, “to what do I owe the…pleasure?”
“I wish it was a more pleasant visit, Major. May I come in?”
She stepped aside and he let himself in but it suddenly felt as if sitting on any of the furniture in her quarters was too intimate, or too rude somehow. The door slid closed and clicked her tongue, forcing him to raise his gaze from the floor and up to her.
“What is it, Mr. Garak?”
He took the PADD from Julian out from a hidden pocket in his tunic and closed the distance between them to hand it to her. She stared at it, bewildered at first, and then adjusted the script from Kardasi to Bajoran. He watched her read it once, twice, and was relieved to watch only fine and soft lines of concentration appear on her face.
“You’re arranging Ziyal’s funeral?”
“I may have thrown a bit of a fit about Starfleet’s default of space burial,” he said, nodding.
She hummed understanding. Bajorans also buried their dead, after all.
Kira clicked the screen on the PADD off and handed the device back to him.
“I understand why you might’ve,” she said, “but that doesn’t explain to me why you’re here.”
Garak returned his gaze to the floor as he spoke.
“When Ghemor came to you for shri-tal,” he said to the floor, “you came to me to ask for some details on Cardassian funeral practices. I’m afraid I’m asking you to return the favor.”
He looked up at her suddenly, after enough time had passed that he was certain she would not admonish him for the intrusion into her culture. She looked both sad and amused.
“I did ask you, didn’t I? I’m sorry to report that, in the end, Ghemor received more of a traditional Bajoran funeral than anything resembling a Cardassian one, but old habits die hard.”
“Well,” Garak said, “he had adopted a Bajoran daughter, so I assume he would have no problem adopting a few Bajoran practices.”
Kira gave him no response to that. Instead, she reached for her personal PADD, clicking a to a calendar.
“Do you have plans this evening? Say, 18:00? I think we should discuss this in private, and not while I’m already late to ops.”
***
Garak placed pin after pin into the edge of the fabric as he ironed the new fold for the hem. Most of the shop was still in disarray. For the most part, dust had been left to collect while Dukat’s men held the station, but that dust had collected on top of the mess of their initial ransacking. After righting some tables and sweeping bits of glass from the floor, he had discovered that most of his projects had been left in stasis during his tenure on the Defiant. While he didn’t believe that Captain Sisko would expect prompt return of pants under the circumstances, there was little else to do until business returned to normal.
He had left the door of the shop open to the promenade in a bid for a sense of normalcy and fresh, if recycled, air. The chatter that leaked to the back of the shop from the promenade made the space feel bigger, and more alive than it was. He didn’t expect customers.
He should have expected Julian.
He heard Julian’s long stride into the shop long before he feigned ignorance.
“I’m afraid we’re not open for customers quite yet,” Garak said without looking up.
“Garak…”
“Oh, my dear doctor!” Garak said, raising his ridges in overacted surprise, “what has brought you into the shop today? I could find a little time to ameliorate your wardrobe, I’m sure but as you can see there’s a bit of a mess to contend with…”
Julian let out a little puff of exhaustion with the tailor's antics and plucked a bit of discarded fabric from the floor. He folded it into a near little square and set it on a counter before he spoke.
“Ziyal’s body is in the morgue,” he said, fishing a data rod from his pocket, “and I’ve put the vault under higher-than-standard security. The codes are here, for when you and Kira need to come see her.”
Garak took the data rod. “What would Major Kira have to do with this, Doctor?”
Julian rolled his eyes. “Not everyone on the station is as sneaky as you.”
“Clearly,” Garak huffed, returning to hemming.
Julian had found yet another misplaced bolt of fabric in the mess to busy his hands. Garak watched the silk become pinned between the doctor’s fingertips as he folded it into yet another neat square.
“Garak,” Julian said, “Is there anything I can do for you, to help?”
“Would that be a normal thing to ask in human culture? Do you all go around offering trifles of assistance after a death?” Garak pressed a pin through the hem of Sisko’s pants, too hard, and it pierced into the counter under it.
“You know that it is,” Julian replied. Garak had seen enough human mourning rituals during his tenure on the Defiant. Most, he had seen from a distance, listening from the periphery of the crowd, clearly an outsider. While Julian would have let him in, and Sisko had let him on the ship with open arms, the ensigns, the enlisted men were slow to trust the Cardassian guest with the naked grief and their most private rituals. But Garak had seen plenty, enough to piece it together.
“Cardassian grieving processes are very private, I’m afraid,” Garak replied, flatly.
Julian didn’t answer this. He just found another crumpled bit of a fabric to fold. He tracked down a number of discarded buttons that had scattered like shrapnel from a broken jar. He sat in silence as he rewound a bit of lace ribbon around a spool and by the time he left the shop, the Doctor had arranged quite a neat pile of re-organized sewing notions.
***
Garak found himself now,for the second time in the same rotation, standing in front of Major Kira’s door. He pressed the chime and the door slid open.
This time, the Major wasn’t standing at the door. Instead, she waved him in from a chaise in the middle of the room. He sat himself across from her. Between them sat a plate of fruits. Some he recognized --alva, milaberry, and moba fruit -- but others were new. The entire plate was drizzled in a jumja sap. The Major plucked a slice of crisp fruit and bit off a bit with a satisfying crunch. She was clearly comfortable snacking from a shared food board, but Garak hesitated to reach for a piece.
“Go on,” she said, settling a PADD on her lap and sliding a stylus from it.
Garak plucked a milaberry from the tray. It was sweet, and good, and he knew it would be. Cardassians had been quick to take up Bajoran food and sample the best of the planet’s flora.
“It’s very good, Major. A very refreshing spread.”
“Traditional Bajoran mourning food, Mr. Garak,” Kira replied. There was a bit of bite in her response, as if she had expected him to know that.
“Ah, I see. This is exactly the kind of information one must come to you for, Major,” he said, with more lightness than the circumstances called for.
“Speaking of that, I’m not sure I entirely understand why you’ve come to me in any case. I would have, if you hadn’t shown up at an ungodly hour, assumed you would plan a traditional Cardassian funeral.”
“Ziyal was not entirely Cardassian.”
“She wasn’t entirely Bajoran, either.
“Exactly, Major,” Garak said, “She was Ziyal. I am trying to plan a funeral -- a burial -- not for any Cardassian or any Bajoran, but for Ziyal.” He paused, “And on that subject, you are aware that Cardassians, like Bajorans, traditionally, are buried…”
He let himself trail off as understanding lit up the Major’s eyes.
“Is Julian aware he’s put you in a bit of a pickle, giving a man with no homeland,” she emphasized the latter half of the word in a way that stung, “the responsibility of a burial?”
“I think most people on this station might consider it a folly to claim any understanding of why the good doctor acts as he does, Major.”
He earned himself a laugh for that. Kira wiped her fingers clean with a handy tea towel and clicked open a new file of her PADD.
“Alright, let’s see what we can work out. For Ziyal.”
***
Order and organization were slowly returning to Garak’s shop. In the process of tidying up the mess, erasing the evidence that Dukat had taken the station, Garak had found a bolt of fabric that was perfect for his compromise with Major Kira.
Working out the details of a burial had been simply enough. The Major graciously offered her own family plot, to leave Ziyal to rest with Ghemor and Kira Taban. It would be no trouble for the Major to secure a runabout and get permission for Garak to visit Bajor. For the first part of their discussion, Garak had thought it would all go shockingly smoothly.
But there was the matter of differences in what each of their respective cultures considered respectful preparation of a corpse.
Garak had balked when the Major alluded to ordering a simple shroud of Bajoran cotton. The Major had considered the idea of burying somebody in their finest, most formal clothes to be an impractical waste, nevermind a strange and decidedly offensive emphasis of the body over the pagh.
They had to invent a new tradition, quite literally out of whole cloth.
Garak pinned the edges of two square cuts of the fabric together. If the Major had her way, it would have been a pure white fabric, natural simple fibers. If Garak had had his, it would have been an expensive piece of black fabric, with sheen, and a tight weave. Instead, he was now constructing a simple dress out of a respectable bolt of lavender-gray linen. The lightness of the weave did provide some hint of luxury.
The fabric would have been wasted on a shroud, in Garak’s opinion, and too wispy to work into a formal burial suit. Instead, they had agreed upon a dress that most resembled a Terran chiton. Easy to construct, simple, but formal and classic.
Garak was hand sewing the simple shoulder seams when somebody entered the shop. Garak’s Clothiers was still closed for business, so the intruder could be only one of two people, as far as Garak was concerned. Julian, or the Major. Both would have strolled in as if they owned the place, and right now, Garak wasn’t sure which of the two he would rather see.
He listened, and determined before he saw her, by the sound of her measured and confident gait, that it was the Major. She walked right up to the workspace without greeting him and sat herself on the counter.
“It was a tough negotiation,” she said, “but we’ve got time booked.”
“The Vedek didn’t object?” Garak replied.
“The Vedek objected. I objected to his objection.”
“I see. Very impressive, Major.”
“Though,” she said, surveying the notions on the counter around her, “the time we have at the temple is less than ideal. We have plenty of time, but the hours were the issue of argument. I’m afraid it will be a late night service.”
Garak nodded and clipped a thread from the line of stitches he had just tied off. This had been an expected problem.Laying a Cardassian in the temple for rites was objectionable enough. Laying the daughter of Gul Dukat in the station’s shrine was beyond the pale for some of the station’s residents. Garak had been confident that the Major’s reputation, and her love for Ziyal, would win them a reservation in the temple schedule but he expected, still, to be receiving more icy stares on the promenade than usual.
The Major had folded her legs onto the counter in a lotus position and was admiring a small jar of buttons. Garak had expected her to leave after delivering the news, prompt and direct as ever. He was about to ask if there was any other assistance he could provide when she beat him to it.
“There’s the matter of a grave marker, Garak.”
He met her eyes. This issue hadn’t crossed his mind yet. It was her land, her family plot. Garak knew that she had procured a traditional Bajoran arch for Ghemor and had assumed she would do the same for Ziyal.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what exactly you’re asking for, Major.”
She scoffed at him. “I’m not exactly an expert in Cardassian grave markers, Garak, and I had assumed you would have some sort of preference on the matter.”
“A Bajoran arch would be fine.”
He must have said it too flatly and too quickly because she met him with a familiar look of skepticism.
“Garak, servant of Cardassia,” she was laughing now, “wants to have the daughter of a prominent military official buried in a Bajoran grave with a Bajoran marker. May the wonders of war never cease.”
He glared at her. “Her father is part of the problem, Major.”
“It’s her marker!”
“You were right, Major! You don’t know a thing about Cardassian grave markers, so let me tell you. The Cardassian grave marker is an extension of the great tradition of Cardassian record keeping, to ensure that all our legacies of service are known, to celebrate the great family lines. If you insist on a Cardassian grave marker for Ziyal, it will necessarily include her date of birth, which is not even known to be accurate, and her date of death. Those would be fair enough, but along with that would go her manner of death, and the name of her parents. Do you really want to leave a stone that mentions Skrain Dukat on your family plot?”
He could feel his voice rising but the Major seemed unimpressed. She just hopped off the counter, wiped a crease out of her uniform, and nodded.
“Bajoran it is, then.”
***
The door to the last room in the maze of infirmary slid open. Garak had passed the Doctor, who was doing a passable job of feigning interest in charting, on the way in. The good Doctor had looked up, surveyed the numerous boxes Garak was holding against his chest, precariously stacked, and casually informed him that the Major was already in the morgue.
He walked in and looked around for a surface to set all his little boxes on. As he found one and slid the items off his arms, the Major sat there in silence on a folding chair. Ziyal’s body laid out on the gurney, which looked notably sparse compared to the biobeds found in every other room in the infirmary complex. As he stacked the items, organizing them into the order in which they were to be used, she looked up from the floor.
“You really need all that?” she asked.
Garak knew this would be yet another area where the practices of Bajorans and Cardassians clashed. The Major had made it clear that Bajorans did little more than clean the bodies of their dead. Ziyal’s body had already been cleaned by the infirmary staff as a matter of course.
But Cardassians brought formality to the dead. In another life, Garak would have borrowed the required powders and cosmetics from a close family member. If Ziyal had had a Cardassian woman who loved her, maybe one like Mila, a pressed compact of ground lapis lazuli, a bright ultramarine blue, would have been passed down to her. Mica powders, traditionally used to highlight brow ridges, in a range of shining pastels -- lavender and dusty roses -- would have been found amongst her belongings. But as it was, Ziyal had had any such woman to teach her the ways of Cardassian cosmetics, to pass down compacts and secret techniques of beauty.
Instead, Garak had requested the cosmetics from the replicator. The damned thing had spit out something that might have been passable for anybody else, but the ultramarine pigment felt too coarse and seemed too dull. He had thrown the compacts back into the replicator’s bay, where the pressed pigment discs shattered before they were reclaimed and recycled. Then, he pulled replicator patterns from Jadzia’s database of geologic samples and ground the samples of mica and lapis into a fine powder by hand.
He did feel that he needed all that.
“It is tradition, Major,” he said, handing her a nail file and a small bottle of clear nail polish. Another compromise. A brighter color might have been chosen by a Cardassian mortician, but he was willing to acquiesce to some of the Bajoran values of simplicity.
The Major still stood there, hesitant, until Garak lifted the sheet carefully from Ziyal’s face, and then stepped around to each side to reveal her hands. Around her left wrist was a stasis bracelet, surely placed there by one of the medical staff. It kept her in a state of fresh death, holding off rigor mortis and preventing her eyes from clouding over, though they had been closed. Garak studied her face for a moment. She looked freshly dead. As far as her body was concerned, she was, as the stasis device held off the decay of time.
Gently, he lifted her head from the gurney, to let her hair hang off it, long and black. He found another stool and sat himself down to get to work parting her hair into sections, cleaning each with a spray of dry shampoo, and brushing out the tangles and creases that had formed in it as it lay crumpled under her still head.
When this was done, he stood and braided one thick plait that curved around her left shoulder. A Cardassian woman might have had more skill, or a plan for some sort of formal hairstyle, but he did not.
He glanced down, following the path from Ziyal’s shoulder to her hand, where the Major was very carefully filing the girl’s nails and erasing any evidence of nervous nail biting. She looked up at him and nodded approval at the braid.
Garak reached around to the table again to retrieve the pigments he had so angrily ground into a fine powder. A bright ultramarine, a rose blush, and a mica highlight that he planned to just lightly dab onto brow the ridges of her brow and her nose.
Together, he and the Major worked in silence, until Ziyal’s nails were too neat, until her face was powdered, and seemed more mature in death than it had in life, until there was nothing left to do but deliver Ziyal to the temple.
***
Garak stepped into the flickering orange light of the Temple. In all his time on Deep Space Nine, he had not stepped past the temple threshold. He had not been invited until now.
Ziyal’s body, in a simple casket, had been placed at the front of the room. Orange light bounced off her features, dancing with the rhythm of the candles, and for a few moments he could almost imagine that her chest was rising with breath again.
He shook the image away, willing his eyes to stop playing such tricks, and settled himself on a mat to the left of the Major. He mirrored her position, kneeling with his hands on his knees. Before arriving, he had reviewed the Bajoran death chant, practicing the tones until they felt simply flat instead of clumsy on his tongues.
Ahn-kay ya, ay-ya vasu. Coh-ma-ra, di-nay-ya…
Ahn-kay ya, ay-ya vasu. Coh-ma-ra, di-nay-ya...
Garak was so lost in the chant for some time, repeating the same lines and stanzas in concert with the Major, that he failed to notice the other mourners trickle in. Julian had settled to the right of him and now the temple seemed filled with sound. With a bit of concentration, he could separate the threads of each mourner.
Julian’s Bajoran was confident. He was hitting the tones of each word correctly, as if he had a natural ear for it. Odo had slipped in and settled behind the Major, speaking in his usual natural Bajoran, a little monotone, but he seemed to be speaking with more hesitancy than usual. Sisko’s voice was a strong thread, easy to pull apart from the rest, earnest but clumsy on some of the nuances of the Bajoran death chant. Behind Julian, he could hear the Chief, who had never been a master of new languages and seemed to have given up on the foreign chant entirely to hum a tune, one that was distinctly Terran but somewhat familiar, quietly.
There were other voices that Garak couldn’t recognize in the mix. Bajoran residents, or perhaps some of Ziyal’s classmates had taken a transport to the station. It was easy to get lost in and he let the rhythm wash over him until he heard the Major cease her chant. Unsure, he ceased his, and heard Julian fall silent next to him. The effect rippled through the mourners, until it was all silent in the Temple, and the crowd began to disperse, giving little nods, and a few whispered condolences to the Major, and occasionally Garak, on their way out to the Promenade.
When the last person had left, Garak was ready to follow. But the Major tapped her combadge, opening a line communications line and freezing him in his spot.
“Odo, you can have them come in now.”
“Understood, Major,” the Constable’s voice came through.
Garak turned to the Major, raising his ridges to communicate a clear question. Who?
She gave him no answer, just shook her head and leaned against the wall in one of the small alcoves of the temple. He joined her there in silence, watching Ziyal now, waiting for the signs of time to start to show since they had removed the stasis device just before the service. The concentration of his watch was broken when Odo stepped through the threshold, followed by a small crew of Bajoran security deputies, and Gul Dukat.
Dukat was still docile, stepping where the deputies guided him, and mumbling in Kardasi so slurred and broken that Garak was certain the Universal Translator was missing every other word, or not registering it as input at all. But he can hear it all as the group guides Dukat towards Ziyal’s coffin.
“We can live in Cardassia, in the city, Ziyal. Ziyal, Ziyal. You’ll have your own room, and we’ll visit the Gardens in the Tarlak Sector,” Dukat said to the air in front of him, “You’ll see. It will all be fine.”
The deputies held Dukat steady at the head of Ziyal’s coffin.
At first, as Dukat said her name over, and over, and over again, Garak thought Dukat really saw her laying there, and saw his daughter dressed for death. But the mumbling continued and it became clear that Dukat was not looking at Ziyal’s body, but looking through her. Seeing something that wasn’t there, and not seeing the girl that was there.
Garak leaned to the Major, horrified as they watched their common enemy talk of days that would not come, and whispered, “Did you think this was a wise idea, Major?”
“No, I thought it was a kind idea,” she said, “Maybe I was wrong.”
***
Garak and Major Kira materialized on the grassy field, on the edge of the freshly excavated grave. The USS Hudson was somewhere in orbit in the clear sky above. With a little bit of help with calculations and experienced advice from the Chief, they had managed to transport Ziyal, in her coffin, directly into the grave and save the trouble of lowering it themselves.
Garak blinked, adjusting to sunlight and appreciating the feeling of light that came with heat and warmth, instead of the cold glow of the illumination strips on the station. He could feel the softness of the soil under his feet, more forgiving and alive than the carpet of the promenade. When he felt steady, he lowered his gaze to the grave in front of him. The attention to detail in the transportation calculations had worked. Ziyal’s coffin, made of simple unpolished wood, lay precisely in the grave the Major had commissioned to be excavated on the family plot.
Beside him, the Major rolled a crick out of her neck and let out a deep sigh. It seemed as if she too was soaking in the light from the Bajoran sun. She reached for the strap on her shoulder, and unclipped the shovels she had slung across her body to hand one to Garak. Garak was aware that there had been, perhaps, a time when burial was carried out primarily by professionals on Bajor and soil movers were employed to save labor. He was more aware that the Occupation had changed that and that the Major now considered it a matter of tradition to refill the grave with soil, even if she had paid somebody else to move the soil out from the plot.
Garak took the shovel from her, and adjusted the length of it to better suit his own height, before plunging it into a pile of fresh, black, rich soil. Together, he and the Major, in a rhythm he would have never thought they could find together, filled the empty space in Ziyal’s grave, until there was only a rectangular space of mounded soil, naked of grass, as evidence that she lay there.
He stood back, taking in their labor and wiping the sweat from his ridges. The Major had slinked away and returned with slow footsteps, carrying the weight of the Bajoran burial arch. She set it at the head of the plot and waved him over.
“Garak, help me place this.”
He bent down into the soil. How long had it been since he had soiled his clothing with actual soil? He dismissed the thought, and helped the Major tamp the piercing ends of the arch into the land when she handed him a little mallet. He sat there, on the edge of the plot, feeling the moisture of the damp soil seep through the fabric to his knees, when the Major spoke up.
“Well,” she said, as if she were expecting something, “take a look.” She tapped the grave arch. When she had carried it over, it appeared to be identical to the ones marking the graves of Kira Taban and Tekeny Ghemor. He had not attempted to read the one they had placed over Ziyal’s grave at first. Bajoran was ideographic. Readable, but difficult, and full of words with multiple, and sometimes contradictory translations. Some of the transliterations between Kardasi and Bajoran were clumsy, if you asked Garak’s opinion, and the music of the Kardasi language got lost in the tones of the Bajoran pronunciations of their characters.
Still, he let his eyes follow the Bajoran form of Ziyal’s name. He sounded it out silently, mildly frustrated with the symbols, but then moved his gaze to the line below. A line that shouldn’t be there at all. Right below the Bajoran script, the arch was engraved in Kardasi, and the words were easy to read.
Tora Ziyal.