The City of Silk and Steel Read online

  It might, even then, have been possible to regain the attention of the crowd and build again from some more propitious foundation. But the Durukhar, inspired by the reception of his previous jest, now embarked upon a pantomime in which Hakkim approached an imagined lady, kissed and caressed her invisible body with great enthusiasm, and then was beaten away by her invisible fists. The crowd were ecstatic, their yells of delight and coarse catcalls quite drowning out Hakkim’s attempts to address them again. When he raised his voice to be heard above the uproar, the man with the lemon let fly. The fruit smacked hard against the side of Hakkim’s face, leaving a red welt. The Durukhar opined that Hakkim’s mysterious woman had left some of her rouge on his cheek when she kissed him goodbye.

  Beaten to the wide, Hakkim slunk away. He spent the rest of the day hiding in an olive grove, replaying the debacle in his mind with many different outcomes, all of them much more favourable to himself. In the evening he went back to his master’s house and told him that the day had gone well.

  That night, Hakkim was visited by an unsettling dream; or rather by the absence of a dream, since on waking he could not remember exactly what it was that had troubled his sleep. He only knew that he had been fleeing from some terrible thing, as black as pitch, without shape or substance, which hated him and pursued him with deadly, ferocious intent. It seemed to come from below, to rise about him like a maw, open to swallow him down, until he wrenched himself desperately into wakefulness at the last moment before he was consumed. Lying in his straw cot in the pre-dawn dark, he pressed both hands against his narrow chest to keep his heart from leaping out of its bounds. The fear that gripped him was more terrible than anything he had ever felt.

  If the first day of Hakkim’s career as a marabout had been unsuccessful, the second was an unqualified disaster. The Durukhar was back in the same spot, and was delighted to see Hakkim arrive. Hakkim tried to avoid him, but the Durukhar swapped pitches to be next to him again when he spoke. It was clear that he saw Hakkim very much in the role of a straight man. Even more distressingly, Hakkim realised that it was very easy to cast him in such a mould. His earnest statements could be misinterpreted in a great variety of ways, and his over-complex metaphors could be made to fall in upon themselves at a single touch.

  Hakkim fought back with all the weapons at his disposal: reason and truth, precept and example, parable and exhortation. They were useless. The Durukhar’s words ran over and about him like rats, evaded his grasp, withdrew before him and then bit and clawed him from covert. Even silence couldn’t help him – if he said nothing, the Durukhar supplied his half of the dialogue also, to hilarious and crowd-pleasing effect. Once more, Hakkim retired without a single convert, while the Durukhar switched from comic to didactic mode without so much as a pause.

  Every day, for fourteen days, Hakkim went to the Jidur. Fourteen times he broke against the same rock. Every night for fourteen nights he woke with screams rising in his throat as the hateful, night-black tide of his dreaming rose to swallow him whole.

  Just before the dawn of the fifteenth day, after the latest of these nocturnal ordeals, Hakkim prayed at the peculiar shrine he kept in the corner of his room. The shrine was a squat, grey boulder: the boulder of negative thought, which he had retrieved from his former master’s house. Its surface was now smeared with bloody fingerprints and flecked here and there with some small morsels of cerebral matter, but it was otherwise unchanged. Its solidity, its mass, its blunt, asymmetrical shape: these things were reassuring to the boy. And in due course negative thought brought enlightenment, just as he had known it would.

  On the fifteenth day, he did not preach, but waited in a dusky corner of the Jidur and watched the Durukhar perform without a straight man. He was still good, it had to be said: glib of tongue, expressive of countenance, and alert to the responses of his audience. He had reduced the four virtues of the Durukhar faith to a four-line poem, which he chanted at regular intervals as a mnemonic. By the time the sun fell below the city walls, his voice was hoarse and his alms bowl was full.

  Hakkim followed the Durukhar to his lodgings, a single upstairs room above the Fountain Court. He waited a few minutes after the man had gone inside, and then followed him in. The Durukhar was surprised to see the young adept, but only for a moment. After that, his attention was entirely taken up with the knife that Hakkim had plunged into his chest.

  This second killing pleased Hakkim in a way that the first hadn’t. Then, he had been delirious and wild; now, clear-headed and full of reasoned calm. He was therefore able to see how well the act of murder meshed with his chosen and avowed principles. It thinned out the clutter of the world, stilled a distracting voice; the voice, moreover, of an unbeliever, who was standing between others and the light of truth. In every way, it was a devotional act and a thing of beauty.

  The Durukhar’s corpse, by contrast, was vile and unpleasant to contemplate: Hakkim cleaned his knife on the man’s sleeve and withdrew.

  This murder proved to be a turning point for the young adept. In the years that followed, Hakkim found the confidence as a public speaker that had formerly eluded him. He preached passionately in the Jidur and drew large crowds. If some of his hearers remembered the awkward boy who had been the butt of the Durukhar’s jokes, they did not recognise him in the fire-eyed marabout who hectored them now.

  Hakkim preached emptiness, askesis, the joy of silence and absence and the restraint of desire. In denying mind and body the diversions which they craved, he promised, any man could find within himself the face of God, stripped of all masks; the peace which hides at the heart of qu’aha sul jidani.

  He believed in that peace despite the blind, black well of hatred into which his dreams still plunged him more nights than not. Others believed too, and the Ascetics of Bessa became a cult with Hakkim Mehdad as their priest and prophet.

  Hakkim’s stern message brought him into conflict with many; he did not flinch from it. Rather, he rejoiced now in the ferocious clash of truth on falsehood, and engaged in hundreds of debates that lasted from sunup to sundown and turned the Jidur into an arena. Mostly he won these duels, and left his opponents lessened. Occasionally he lost, returned after dark and left them dead.

  In his thirtieth year, he suffered a serious injury in one of these night-time encounters, when a slick-tongued Re’Ibam prelate fought back somewhat harder than most and turned Hakkim’s knife blade into his own shoulder. This was what decided him to seek, as it were, advanced training in the particular branch of theology which he had made his own.

  He took the money he had saved, and the money he had inherited when his master Drihud Ben Din died (of insufficient piety), and he enrolled in the school of assassins.

  The assassin school was not in Bessa itself, because Bessa’s caliph, Bokhari Al-Bokhari, didn’t approve of freelance killers (while being wholly comfortable with the idea of killers in his own employ). In fact it was a private fiefdom in the mountains beyond the city of Perdondaris. It was owned and run by the so-called Caliph of Assassins, the legendary Imad-Basur, who personally vetted all potential students. Entry was by fee (strictly non-returnable) and audition (oftentimes fatal).

  While he was waiting his turn to be interviewed and tested by the great master, Hakkim was permitted to wander within the grounds of the school and take in something of its atmosphere. Most of what he saw there pleased him: the students were hugely and relentlessly focused on their learning, and lived the frugal life that befitted such serious aspirations.

  One thing, however, disturbed him. In a courtyard toward the rear of the building, a slender young woman, dark of hair and of eye, was sharpening a blade against a whetstone. Five or six other knives of varying sizes were lying at her feet, neatly arrayed, ready to be whetted in their turn.

  All the students Hakkim had seen were – of course – male. He assumed that the servants would be too. Such was the norm in schools, as in monastic retreats. He could not understand the woman’s presence. He asked a pa
ssing attendant who she was.

  ‘A cousin of Imad-Basur,’ he was told. ‘Zuleika. She lodges here.’

  ‘But she has no converse with the students?’

  The attendant was mildly scandalised. ‘Certainly not!’

  Hakkim thanked the man, who scurried on his way. He watched the woman for a while longer, somewhat impressed despite himself at the diligence with which she stropped the knife, forward for twenty strokes, backward for twenty strokes, forward again. Though he abhorred the bodies, minds and speech of women, he found her dedication to her task pleasing.

  Hakkim passed his audition with flying colours and was accepted as a student.

  He stayed with the assassins only for two years, which meant that he did not finish out his studies and his name was never written in black ink upon a black scroll. But he took from them what he needed, and he parted with them on the best of terms – so much so, in fact, that before he left, he was summoned into the presence of Imad-Basur himself. The Caliph of Assassins asked Hakkim why he did not wish to graduate and then to remain at the school as an assassin plenipotentiary, taking such commissions as the elder masters chose for him and sharing in the wealth these bespoke murders brought in.

  Hakkim explained that his was a religious vocation, to which murder, as such, was only an adjunct. Imad-Basur showed a flattering interest. The two men talked at length about Asceticism; it was a discipline which had a certain appeal to the assassin king, and he was impressed by his young charge’s passion and conviction.

  For whatever reason, he felt moved to make Hakkim a gift. He asked the younger man whether – despite his contempt for earthly pleasures – there was any particular thing he craved.

  Hakkim thought of the dreams which had troubled him in his childhood and which still recurred even now, of the dark tide that hated him and rose to whelm him while he slept.

  ‘I would like to see the face of my worst enemy,’ he said. ‘I believe there is one who hates me, and will cog and cumber me wherever he can – though it may be that we have yet to meet.’

  Imad-Basur nodded thoughtfully at this short, blunt speech. He knew that there were many ways, both good and bad, in which souls could be twinned. He also knew that there were pharmacons and magics that could help in identifying such invisible entwinings long before they became apparent. However, he wanted to be sure that he had understood his pupil aright.

  ‘In any life,’ the assassin king said, picking his words with care, ‘there is a striving toward a desired or destined end. That striving calls forth its opposite, or else is called forth by it. Is it your wish to discern the shape of your opposite? Of the man or force or idea against which you must strive and over which you must triumph, if your life is to have meaning?’

  Hakkim nodded fervently. ‘That is exactly what I desire!’ he agreed.

  Imad-Basur crossed to a chest of oak chased in iron, unlocked it by means that Hakkim couldn’t see and took from it a pouch of soft leather. He took it back to Hakkim and handed it to him. Hakkim opened the pouch and saw within a quantity of powder the colour and texture of fine ash.

  ‘It’s called siket arilar,’ Imad-Basur told him. In the tongue of the Heshomet, which Hakkim vaguely knew, the phrase meant ‘the light shining from the knife blade’.

  ‘Take it at midnight,’ Imad-Basur instructed his student, ‘in a completely darkened room. The visions that come to you then will show you your opposite, your nemesis, though there may be veils of illusion and metaphor that you have to pierce first.’

  Hakkim thanked the great assassin, for this gift as well as for the less tangible gifts he had received at the school, and so departed. But he experienced a certain ambivalence about the powder, and for a long time after he returned to Bessa he did not touch it. He knew of marabouts who used chemical compounds to achieve visions, and he had the utmost contempt for them. It seemed to him that in most cases their transcendence was illusory, and their quest for it concealed a hunger of a baser and more material kind.

  On the other hand, to know the face of one’s enemy was a great good. Hakkim thought about the black tide that persecuted him in his dreams. He considered his own strength of will, and the probability that – should the pharmacon prove to be addictive – he could conquer his body’s cravings.

  The cult he led was a considerable power in Bessa now, numbering more than two thousand adherents. Hakkim chose the four strongest and most zealous from these and ordered them to guard the door of his chamber, permitting entrance to no one. Then he went inside and closed the door.

  Imad-Basur had instructed him to take the smallest possible amount of the powder on the tip of his finger and touch it to his tongue. He did so now, and for a moment was convinced that it had had no effect on him; then, looking up, he perceived that the walls and ceiling of his room had melted away. He was standing in a forest glade, under the light of a sickle moon.

  It was something of a relief. Hakkim had been sure in his heart that the dream of darkness would come again, rising like a flood tide around him and seeking to devour him in one peristaltic heave. At the same time, however, he felt himself at a disadvantage: if his enemy were watching, he presented a very easy target standing there in the openness of the glade. Crouching low, and careful to make no sound, he moved swiftly through the long grass and merged with the shadows under the trees. There he waited for a long while in perfect stillness and silence, but nobody appeared.

  Emboldened, Hakkim searched the environs. If anything living was within that wood, he felt sure that he would find it – the assassins had taught him how to move so silently and swiftly that his passage would not stir a single leaf upon a tree, nor make a tear even in the fabric of the wind.

  There was nobody in the glade, or in the trees around it. Hakkim ventured further afield and saw, now, a watering hole nearby. He circled it carefully from a great way off, approached it with exquisite care, and found it deserted.

  From the waterhole, however, he saw a cliff with many caves set into its face. He found a path that led to it, and searched the caves one by one. A million bats had made the caves their home, but nothing else lived there.

  What is time within a dream? Hakkim Mehdad journeyed far and wide, for what seemed like months and years, across trackless plains, up and down mountains, along dry river beds and through meadows lush with dew-soaked grass. Nowhere in his journeying did he catch a glimpse even of his enemy’s shadow, let alone his face.

  Wearied by the quest, and by the solitude, and by the sense of a mystery he could not solve, he sat down at last on a rock beside the shore of a black and silent ocean. He pondered there, in this forbidding place, wondering why the powder had not seen fit to bestow its wisdom on him. Perhaps it had no revelations to give in the first place.

  Gradually, though, as the waters of the black sea rolled around his feet, a conviction stole over Hakkim. He knew this place. He studied the contours of the beach, the dunes, the cliffs that overhung on all sides. None of them were at all familiar: none of them explained the sense of homecoming he felt.

  It was only when he looked beneath him that he realised what it was that he was sitting on: though it was much larger, its shape was unmistakeable. It was the boulder of negative thought, which he had brought with him from the house of his first master, Rasoul, and which he still kept in a curtained closet within his private chambers.

  With that realisation, and from that vantage point, the scene before him took on a different aspect. Revelation came to him, and enlightenment opened its beneficent inner eye within him. He knew now that he need seek no further – that the vision was indeed showing him what had erewhile been promised.

  His enemy was nowhere to be found in the world, because his enemy was the world: qu’aha sul jidani, the labyrinth of masks, which postures before man’s eyes like the gaudiest and most hollow-hearted of whores, and betrays him from the path of righteousness with blasphemous display. Hakkim’s mission was to turn men’s eyes inwards to the truth; to ma
ke them shun the beauties and the pleasures of life as the lethal snares they were.

  The scale of the task both dizzied and elated him. In order to succeed in it, he would need to become the marabout of marabouts, the caliph of caliphs: he would need to extend his rule not just over the whole of Bessa, but over the whole of the east – and then, after that, over the barbarous nations of the west, where men ate excrement and talked in barks and whines like dogs.

  Hakkim rose to his feet, his arms outstretched as if to receive an embrace. ‘I am ready,’ he whispered.

  The landscape faded from around him as the powder’s efficacy waned. Daylight and consciousness resumed their mundane duties, and Hakkim Mehdad, thenceforth and forever after the scholar with the strangling cord, went forth from his chambers to sing the dawn prayer. In his heart there was a louder singing, and in his mind the beginnings of a plan so insane in its ambition that the gods must either bless it or bow down to it.

  The disciples marvelled, not just at the unwonted ferocity with which their master prayed, but also at his feet. For though he had washed them before retiring the night before, as was most proper, they were dirty and dripping now – not with mud, but with the blackest ink.

  Hakkim Mehdad had found his enemy. But his eyes were on loftier things, and he did not see.

  The Tale of the Librarian of Bessa

  There was once a young woman who – having a deep and strong affinity for the written word – disguised herself as a boy and petitioned the chief librarian of the city of Bessa for paid employment. For many this feat of deception would have been impossible to accomplish even for a short time, let alone the period of years during which the woman worked in the library. But she was aided by her slight build, and once she had adopted mens’ clothing she needed only to cut short her dark hair in order to complete her disguise.