The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  The power of that extraordinary voice and the violence of his sentiment had the most singular effect on me. It was as though I had been seized by the wrist in an irresistible grip. I stared at him. He was holding himself taut as a bowstring when the archer is at the verge of letting fly, and appeared to be trembling with wrath.

  Some sort of response seemed incumbent on me. The best I could do was to say, “The girls, do you mean?”

  “The slavemasters,” said he. “The women are but chattel. They are not to be held accountable. But it is wrong to put chattel out for pandering, as these criminals do.”

  And then, relaxing his stance a bit and looking now somewhat abashed at his forwardness, he said in a far less assertive tone of voice, “But you must forgive me for pouring these thoughts into the unwilling ears of a stranger who surely has no interest in hearing such things.”

  “On the contrary. What you say interests me greatly. Indeed, you must tell me more.”

  I studied him with no little curiosity. It had crossed my mind immediately that he might be a Hebrew: his horror and rage at the sight of this trifling bit of flesh-peddling seemed to mark him as a kinsman of that dour man who had made such a display of irate piety in the marketplace of idols. You will recall that I had resolved to seek contact with members of that agile-minded race of merchants here. But a moment’s closer examination of his look and garb led me now to realize that he must be pure Saracen by blood.

  There was tremendous presence and force about him. He was tall and slender, a handsome dark-haired man of perhaps thirty-five years or a little more, with a dense flowing beard, piercing eyes, and a warm and gracious smile that quite contradicted the unnerving ferocity of his gaze. His princely bearing, his eloquent manner of speech, and the fineness of his garments all suggested that he was a man of wealth and breeding, well connected in this city. At once I sensed that he might be even more useful to me than any Hebrew. So I drew him out, questioning him a little on the reasons for his spontaneous outburst against the trade in easy women in this marketplace, and without the slightest hesitation he poured forth a powerful and lengthy tirade, fierce in content although stated in that same captivating musical tone, against the totality of the sins of his countrymen. And what a multitude of sins they were! Mere prostitution was the least of them. I had not expected to encounter such a Cato here.

  “Look about you!” he urged me. “Mecca is an utter abyss of wickedness. Do you see the idols that are sold everywhere, and set up piously in shops and homes in places of respect? They are false gods, these images, for the true god, and He is One, cannot be rendered by any image. Do you observe the flagrant cheating in the marketplaces? Do you see the men lying shamelessly to their wives, and the wives lying as well, and the gambling and the drinking and the whoring, and the quarrelling between brother and brother?” And there was much more. I could see that he held this catalogue of outrage pent up in his breast at all times, ready to issue it forth whenever he found some new willing listener. Yet he said all this not in any lofty and superior way, but almost in bewilderment: he was saddened rather than infuriated by the failings of his brethren, or so it seemed to me.

  Then he paused, once again changing tone, as though it had occurred to him that it was impolite to remain in this high denunciatory mode for any great length of time. “Again I ask you to pardon me for my excess of zeal. I feel very strongly on these matters. It is the worst of my faults, I hope. If I am not mistaken, you are the Roman who has come to live among us?”

  “Yes. Leontius Corbulo, at your service. A Roman of the Romans, I like to say.” I gave him a flourish. “My family is a very ancient one, with historic ties to Syria and other parts of Asia.”

  “Indeed. I am Mahmud son of Abdallah, who was the son of –” Well, the son of I forget whom, who was the son of so-and-so, the son of someone else. It is the custom of these Saracens to let you have their pedigrees five or six generations back in a single outburst of breath, but it was impossible for me to retain most of the barbarous outlandish names in my mind very long. I do recall his telling me that he was a member of one of the great mercantile clans of Mecca, which is called something like the Koreish.

  It seemed to me that a strong rapport had arisen between us in just these few moments, and, such was the power of his personality, I was reluctant to leave him. Since it was the time for the midday meal, I proposed that we take it together, and invited him to come with me to my villa. But he responded that I was a guest in Mecca and it was not fitting for him to enjoy my hospitality until I had partaken of his. I didn’t try to dispute the issue. The Saracens, I had already begun to learn, are most punctilious about this sort of thing. “Come,” he said, beckoning. And so it was that for the first time I entered the home of a wealthy merchant of Mecca.

  The villa of Mahmud son of Abdallah was not unlike that of Nicomedes, though on a larger scale – walled courtyard, central fountain, bright airy rooms, inlays of vividly coloured tile set in the walls. But unlike Nicomedes, Mahmud was no collector of antiquities. He appeared to have scarcely any possessions at all. A prevailing austerity of decoration was the rule in his house. And of course there was no sign anywhere in it of the idols that other Meccans seemed to cherish.

  The wife of Mahmud made a fleeting appearance. Her name was something like Kadija, and she seemed considerably older than her husband, a fact soon confirmed from Mahmud’s own lips. A couple of daughters passed to and fro in equally brief manner. But he and I dined alone, seated on straw mats in the centre of a huge bare room. Mahmud sat cross-legged like a tailor, and appeared to be entirely at ease in that posture. I tried but failed to manage it, and after a time fell into the normal reclining position, wishing mightily that I had a cushion for my elbow, but not willing to give offence by asking for one. The meal itself was simple, grilled meat and a stew of barley and melons, with nothing but water to wash it down. Mahmud did not, it seemed, care for wine.

  He spoke of himself with complete openness, as though we were kinsmen from widely distant lands who were meeting for the first time. I learned that Mahmud’s father had died before his birth and his mother had lived only a short while thereafter, so he had grown up in impoverished circumstances under the guardianship of an uncle. From his tale I received the impression of a lonely childhood spent wandering the cheerless rocky hills beyond town, pondering from an early age, perhaps, the great questions of eternity and the spirit that plainly have continued to obsess him to this day.

  In his twenty-fifth year, said Mahmud, he entered into the service of the woman Kadija, a wealthy widow fifteen years his senior, who soon fell in love with him and asked him to be her husband. This he told me with no trace of embarrassment at all, and I suppose he has no reason to feel any. A look of happiness comes into his eyes when he speaks of her. She has borne him both sons and daughters, though only the daughters have survived. The prosperity that he enjoys today is, I gather, the result of his skilful management of the property that his wife brought to their union.

  About Roma, Constantinopolis, or any other place beyond the frontiers of Arabia Deserta, he asked me nothing whatever. Though his intelligence is deep and questing, he did not seem concerned with the empires of this world. It appears that he has scarcely been outside Mecca at all, though he mentioned having made a journey as far as Damascus on one occasion. I would think him a simple man if I did not know, Horatius, how complex in fact he is.

  The great preoccupation of his life is his concept of the One God.

  This is, of course, the idea famously advocated since antiquity by the Hebrews. I have no doubt that Mahmud has had conversations with the members of that race who live in Mecca, and that their ideas have affected his philosophy. He must surely have heard them express their reverence for their aloof and unknowable god, and their contempt for the superstitions of the Meccans, who cherish such a multitude of idols and talismans and practise a credulous veneration of the sun and the moon and stars and planets and a myriad of demons. He
makes no secret of this: I heard him make reference to an ancient Hebrew prophet called Abraham, who is apparently a figure he greatly admires, and also a certain Moses, a later leader of that tribe.

  But he lays claim to a separate revelation of his own. He asserts that his special enlightenment came as the result of arduous private prayer and contemplation. He would go up often into the mountains behind the town and meditate in solitude in a secluded cave; and one day an awareness of the Oneness of God was revealed to him as though by a divine messenger.

  Mahmud calls this god “Allah”. A marvellous transformation comes over him when he begins to speak of him. His face glows; his eyes take on the quality of beacons; his very voice becomes such a thing of music and poetry that you would think you were in the presence of Apollo.

  It is impossible, he says, ever to understand the nature of Allah. He is too far above us for that. Other people may regard their gods as personages in some kind of story, and tell lively fanciful tales of their travels throughout the world and their quarrels with their wives and their adventures on the battlefield, and make statues of them that show them as men and women, but Allah is not like that. One does not tell tales about Allah. He cannot be thought of as a tall man with a commanding face and a full beard and a host of passions – someone rather like an Emperor, let us say, but on a larger scale – and it is foolishness, as well as blasphemy, to make representations of him the way the ancient Greeks did of such gods of theirs as Zeus and Aphrodite and Poseidon, or we do of Jupiter or Venus or Mars. Allah is the creative force itself, the maker of the universe, too mighty and vast to be captured by any sort of representation.

  I asked Mahmud how, if it is blasphemous to imagine a face for his god, it can be acceptable to give him a name. For surely that is a kind of representation also. Mahmud seemed pleased at the sharpness of my question; and he explained that “Allah” is not actually a name, as “Mahmud” or “Leontius Corbulo” or “Jupiter” are names, but is a mere word, simply the term in the Saracen language that means the god.

  To Mahmud, the fact that there is only one god, whose nature is abstract and incomprehensible to mortals, is the great sublime law from which all other laws flow. This will probably make no more sense to you, Horatius, than it does to me, but it is not our business to be philosophers. What is of interest here is that the man has such a passionate belief in the things he believes. So passionate is it that as you listen to him you become caught up in the simplicity and the beauty of his ideas and the power of his way of speaking of them, and you are almost ready to cry out your belief in Allah yourself.

  It is a very simple creed indeed, but enormously powerful in its directness, the way things in this harsh and uncompromising desert land tend to be. He stringently rejects all idol-worship, all fable-making, all notions of how the movements of the stars and planets govern our lives. He places no trust in oracles or sorcery. The decrees of kings and princes mean very little to him either. He accepts only the authority of his remote and awesome and inflexible god, whose great stern decree it is that we live virtuous lives of hard work, piety, and respect for our fellow men. Those who live by Allah’s law, says Mahmud, will be gathered into paradise at the end of their days; those who do not will descend into the most terrible of hells. And Mahmud does not intend to rest until all Arabia has been brought forth out of sloth and degeneracy and sin to accept the supremacy of the One God, and its scattered squabbling tribes forged at last into a single great nation under the rule of one invincible king who could enforce the laws of that god.

  He was awesome in his conviction. By the time he was done, I was close to feeling the presence and might of Allah myself. That was surprising and a little frightening, that Mahmud could stir such feelings in me, of all people. I was amazed. But then he had finished his expounding, and after a few moments the sensation ebbed and I was myself again.

  “What do you say?” he asked me. “Can this be anything other than the truth?”

  “I am not in a position to judge that,” said I carefully, not wishing to give offence to this interesting new friend, especially in his own dining hall. “We Romans are accustomed to regarding all creeds with tolerance, and if you ever visit our capital you will find temples of a hundred faiths standing side by side. But I do see the beauty of your teachings.”

  “Beauty? I asked about truth. When you say you accept all faiths as equally true, what you really say is that you see no truth in any of them, is that not so?”

  I disputed that, reaching into my school days for maxims out of Plato and Marcus Aurelius to argue that all gods are reflections of the true godhood. But it was no use. He saw instantly through my Roman indifference to religion. If you claim to believe, as we do, that this god is just as good as that one, what you are really saying is that gods in general don’t matter much at all. Our live-and-let-live policy towards the worship of Mithra and Dagon and Baal and all the other deities whose temples thrive in Roma is a tacit admission of that view. And for Mahmud that is a contemptible position.

  Sensing the tension that was rising in him, and unwilling to have our pleasant conversation turn acrid, I offered a plea of fatigue, and promised to continue the discussion with him at another time.

  In the evening, having been invited yet again to dine with Nicomedes the Paphlagonian and with my head still spinning from the thrust of all that Mahmud had imparted to me, I asked him if he could tell me anything about this extraordinary person.

  “That man!” Nicomedes said, chuckling. “Consorting with madmen, are you, now, Corbulo?”

  “He seemed quite sane to me.”

  “Oh, he is, he is, at least when he’s selling you a pair of camels or a sack of saffron. But get him started on the subject of religion and you’ll see a different man.”

  “As a matter of fact, we had quite a lengthy philosophical discussion, he and I, this very afternoon,” I said. “I found it fascinating. I’ve never heard anything quite like it.”

  “I daresay you haven’t. Poor chap, he should get himself away from this place while he’s still got the chance. If he keeps on going the way I understand he’s been doing lately, he’ll turn up dead out in the dunes one of these days, and no one will be surprised.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Preaching against the idols the way he does, is what I mean. You know, Corbulo, they worship three hundred different gods in this city, and each one has his own shrine and his own priesthood and his own busy factory dedicated to making idols for sale to pilgrims, and so on and so forth. If I understand your Mahmud correctly, he’d like to shut all that down. Is that not so?”

  “I suppose. Certainly he expressed plenty of scorn for idols, and idolaters.”

  “Indeed he does. Up till now he’s simply had a little private cult, though, half a dozen members of his own family. They get together in his house and pray to his particular god in the particular way that Mahmud prescribes. An innocent enough pastime, I’d say. But lately, I’m told, he’s been spreading his ideas farther afield, going around to this person and that and testing out his seditious ideas about how to reform Saracen society on them. As he did with you this very day, it seems. Well, it does no harm for him to be talking religion with somebody like you or me, because we Romans are pretty casual about such matters. But the Saracens aren’t. Before long, mark my words, he’ll decide to set himself up as a prophet who preaches in public, and he’ll stand in the main square threatening fire and damnation to anybody who keeps to the old ways, and then they’ll have to kill him. The old ways are big business here, and what this town is about is business and nothing but business. Mahmud is full of subversive notions that these Meccans can’t afford to indulge. He’d better watch his step.” And then, with a grin: “But he is an amusing devil, isn’t he, Corbulo? As you can tell, I’ve had a chat or two with him myself.”

  If you ask me, Horatius, Nicomedes is half right and half wrong about Mahmud.

  Surely he’s correct that Mahmud is almost
ready to begin preaching his religion in public. The way he accosted me, a total stranger, at the slave-market testifies to that. And his talk of not resting until Arabia has been made to accept the supremacy of the One God: what else can that mean, other than that he is on the verge of speaking out against the idolaters?

  Mahmud told me in just so many words, during our lunch together, that the way Allah makes his commandments concerning good and evil known to mankind is through certain chosen prophets, one every thousand years or so. Abraham and Moses of the Hebrews were such prophets, Mahmud says. I do believe that Mahmud looks upon himself as their successor.

  I think the Greek is wrong, though, in saying that Mahmud will be killed by his angry neighbours for speaking out against their superstitions. No doubt they’ll want to kill him, at first. If his teachings ever prevail, they’ll throw the whole horde of priests and idol-carvers out of business and knock a great hole in the local economy, and nobody here is going to be very enthusiastic about that. But his personality is so powerful that I think he’ll win them over. By Jupiter, he practically had me willing to accept the divine omnipotence of Allah before he was done! He’ll find a way to put his ideas across to them. I can’t imagine how he’ll do it, but he’s clever in a dozen different ways, a true desert merchant, and somehow he’ll offer them something that will make it worthwhile for them to give up their old beliefs and accept his. Allah and no one else will be the god of this place, is what I expect, by the time Mahmud has finished his holy work.

  I need to ponder all this very carefully. You don’t come upon a man with Mahmud’s kind of innate personal magnetism very often. I am haunted by the strength of it, awed by the recollection of how, for the moment, he had managed to win my allegiance to that One God of his. Is there, I wonder, some way that I can turn Mahmud’s great power to sway men’s minds to the service of the Empire, by which I mean to the service of Julian II Augustus? So that, of course, I can regain Caesar’s good graces and get myself redeemed out of Arabian exile.