Firebird

by Michael Asher

  The sentence petered out and I guessed she hadn’t said exactly what she wanted to say. I knew how it was. Where emotions were concerned it was hard to string what your body was telling you into coherent sentences. I walked along quietly, watching my camel’s undulating haunch.

  ‘OK,’ Daisy blurted out, ‘I’m not a senator’s daughter. I’m a penniless orphan from Monterey whose mother was probably a hooker and whose father was some foreign seaman or something. I’m sorry about that, Sammy, I’m sorry I’m not the real Daisy, all right!’

  I grinned at her. ‘Don’t apologize,’ I said, ‘to tell the truth, I always found the real Daisy a bit over the top. Actually, I like you as you are.’

  40

  In the morning we’d had freak heat, but in the afternoon a cold wind washed off the horizon, obliging us to wrap up in all our clothes. People talk about the cold on mountains and in the Arctic, but no one who hasn’t experienced it can imagine how cold the desert can be. It’s not the dull, wet cold of the snow, but a raw, raging wind that chills you to the very bones. The grey purple plain was endless, shimmering like mercury in places, with puff devils spinning on the skyline. I had the familiar feeling that we were actually going nowhere, just marking time in the same spot. Only the sun changed, dropping slowly towards the west in its giant parabola, its midday whiteness cooling and mellowing as the day wore on. The Hawazim carried no watches and had no concept of city time. They measured distance by a camel’s pace and could not tell you how many miles or kilometres it was to a certain point. They had heard of the Sudan, Egypt and Libya, but the idea of a nation was nebulous to them — they never saw themselves as Egyptians, because their nation was the tribe. To them, the Egyptians were the folk of the Nile Valley. What’s more, they believed the earth was flat and were convinced that if you rode in a straight line long enough you would fall off into what they called Al-Khuraab — the Great Desolation.

  After we’d mounted up we rode alongside Mansur for a time. ‘You never told me your saqanab,’ I said.

  His good eye ogled Daisy and his bad one lolled sideways, the dead pupil rising and falling to the camel’s stride. ‘That’s because Gazelle Eyes broke custom,’ he said, ‘and demanded to know what was going on!’

  Daisy looked at the ground as her camel undulated onwards. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I had to know.’

  Mansur sighed and took a deep breath. ‘It’s been a long time,’ he said. ‘You want to hear it all?’

  ‘Of course. No less than everything.’

  Mansur beamed. ‘It’s a pleasure,’ he said, ‘saqanab for our newly returned brother!’

  As the sun dimmed and the sky split into pads of altocumulus, like the gnarls on old elephant skin, and the camels trod on mesmerizingly into the afternoon, Mansur recounted how, after I’d left, the tribe had migrated through the desert of northern Sudan. He named all the places they had made camp, and described the pastures they had discovered, recounted how many camels had been born and how many died, how much rain had fallen, the state and depth of the wells they had found. He described meetings with Sudanese Bedouin and assessed the quality of their hospitality, went into the minute details of raids by the Gor’an nomads from Chad, listed the names of camels stolen and tribesmen injured, enumerating their wounds down to the last bloody finger. He told us of tribesmen lost on the salt caravans who’d survived by drinking their camels’ vomit, of great Shining ceremonies under the full moon, when the amnir had led the communal visions, of terrifying storms that had leached their drippers dry, of camels that had been lost and had found their way back to camp alone across hundreds of miles of wilderness, of small children left by accident in the desert who had tracked their way home on foot without water. He related how the tribe had wandered back over the frontier into Egypt, and how time and time again the government had sent patrols to capture the amnir, and how time and time again Ross had foreseen their coming and evaded them. Mansur talked and talked using the vividly poetic language of the Hawazim, and Daisy and I listened spellbound. It was an epic to equal Homer — better than any tale from The Arabian Nights — and it evoked in me the same old excitement, the same old love for the life of the desert that I’d felt since I’d arrived here years ago.

  We spurred our camels on and caught up with the amnir at the head of the caravan. Ross looked over his shoulder at us and smiled. ‘How are you doing with the camel, Miss Brooke?’ he enquired.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘apart from a sore ass, that is.’

  Ross laughed. ‘I remember the first time Sammy rode a camel as a kid,’ he said. ‘My uncle Mukhtar gave him the wildest bull camel in the herd, and it damn near ate him alive. Ahmad and ‘Ali never let him forget it!’

  I chuckled at the memory. The Old Man had believed in throwing people in at the deep end and seeing if they could swim. Actually, apart from Ross, I was about the only man in the tribe who could swim, but that wasn’t a skill much respected in the desert.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘Mansur tells me they’re still looking for you, amnir. They haven’t let it go.’

  Ross watched the spider shadows of our camels as they floated across the sand. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m still a hunted man. Five times they came for me, and five times I predicted it and struck camp with the entire tribe. If I thought it would do the tribe any good, I’d give myself up. But I saw in the Shining that it’s not my blood they want, but my...powers. That’s why I can’t let them capture me.’ He rode in silence, brooding for a while. ‘I hope this cool wind holds,’ he said, ‘it’s uncomfortable, but it cuts down our moisture requirements. I reckon it’ll take five days to get to the Bahr and even if it stays cool we’ll be feeling the pinch of thirst by then.’

  Daisy blanched, and I suspected she was already feeling it. The prospect of five days, even in the cool, on a couple of gourds of water evidently didn’t thrill her. It didn’t thrill me, either, and I secretly wondered how long we could survive.

  Ross suddenly stiffened and cocked his ear towards the east. ‘Talk of the Devil!’ he said. ‘Listen! Can you hear it?’

  I listened. It seemed to me I could make out a low throb, only a decibel or two louder than the moan of the wind. ‘It’s still way off,’ Ross said, ‘we’ve got time. ‘Ali! Break out the camnets! Quick now! Everyone knows the drill.’

  At once the camel riders formed two groups and couched their camels shoulder to shoulder. There was none of the squabbling or confusion that had marked our departure, I noticed. Two large packs were opened, each one containing a huge camouflage net, cleverly mottled to match the desert surface. Within a minute all the camels had been hobbled and the nets spread over them, and we were crouching together in the dark like hunted beasts. The throb of the chopper’s engine came nearer and nearer. It seemed to hang above us endlessly and I imagined it circling around overhead. There was a moment of suspense, and the camels rumbled nervously. Then its engine dopplered past and I peered up from beneath a corner of the camnet and realized it hadn’t lost height at all.

  ‘Never even guessed we were here!’ Ali commented. ‘With these things you’re invisible, by God!’

  Daisy stared after the aircraft with her eagle eyes. ‘That’s a Jetstream,’ she said, ‘I swear it’s the FBI spotter — the one that took us to the Fayoum.’

  It was sunset when Ross called a halt, in a field of low dunes surrounding a miniature oasis of sedges the Hawazim called a hattia. The sun was already lodged on the distant skyline in a miasma of cloud — a great glowing zeppelin five times larger than it had been at midday. The wind dropped abruptly and even before the camels had been unsaddled and hobbled amongst the sedge the shadows had gone. The night closed in, hiding the lonely reaches of the desert, but revealing the immensity of a star-strewn sky. We laid our saddlery and personal gear close together, for no matter how vast the space the Hawazim always camped on top of each other as if they found each other’s proximity comforting in the emptiness. Ahmad made a fire from the deadfall and palm bast
we had brought with us. I knew it wouldn’t last long, and after it’d finished we’d be using camel dung instead. Ali made bread — a couple of oval loaves kneaded by hand and baked in the sand under the ashes of the fire. We divided ourselves up into two messes and ate the bread served in camel’s milk from the communal pot. Afterwards we drank tea and smoked our pipes, leaning back comfortably in soft sand.

  ‘We were lucky today,’ Ross said, blowing out smoke, ‘the Divine Spirit was with us. But the problem ahead is going to be water. We started with our drippers less than half full — enough for three days. That means unless we find water the day after tomorrow we’ll be in trouble.’

  ‘What the hell are we going to do?’ Daisy asked. ‘We still have to get back from wherever we’re going.’

  ‘The Divine Spirit will guide us,’ Ross said, smiling. ‘Since we have water and firewood tonight I propose we make a small Shining — just the ten of us. If there is a solution we’ll find it together.’

  He groped in his saddlebag and brought out a bag of dried mandrake root and other herbs, which he laid carefully on his rug, together with a clean wooden bowl, and a small mortar and pestle. ‘Will you join?’ he asked us, using the antiquated language of the Shining.

  All of us except Daisy answered, ‘I will join!’ She stared at the mess of dried bulbs and herbs on the rug, slightly bemused. ‘I’ve read about this in your father’s book,’ she told Ross. ‘Isn’t this the ceremony where everyone gets off?’

  Ross laughed. ‘I don’t think that’s how my father put it,’ he said. ‘Actually it’s more like communion with the universe and with each other — a way of plugging into nature...well we don’t really have the words to describe it, you’ll have to see for yourself.’

  ‘It’s a great honour to be invited,’ I told her, ‘especially as an outsider. Don’t worry, it’s not a drunken orgy — it’s very peaceful. The drug can’t make you do anything against your will.’

  Daisy swallowed and looked at me doubtfully. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose when in Rome...’

  ‘So you’ll join?’ Ross asked.

  She pouted and drew a deep breath. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘what do I have to do?’

  41

  While Ross pulped the mandrake and other herbs, mixed it with water and poured it into the sacramental bowl, the Hawazim produced a tiny orchestra of instruments from their saddlebags. There were two tablas, a stringed instrument with a cube shaped sound box, called a rababa, and a whole range of pipes, including a four hosed variety known as a zummara. Ross stood and picked up the bowl carefully. Someone fed bast into the fire and it flared, throwing misshapen shadows over the sand and making the eyes of the camels glow yellow in the darkness. We stood round the fire in a loose circle and there was silence except for the rhythmic sound of the camels chewing cud, and the low crackle of the fire. Above us Orion lay straddled across the velvet sky, with Sirius pulsating beneath. The Milky Way curled through the mesh of stars like gossamer, looking almost close enough to touch.

  Ross had taken off his glasses, and his eyes were lagoons of blackness in the bearded face. He held up the bowl. ‘Behold the Divine Water!’ he said suddenly. ‘We drink this in memory of the departed ones — all the souls of our ancestors back over the generations to the First Time. We drink this that we shall join as one — living and departed — in the Divine Spirit that never dies!’

  ‘The Divine Spirit lives!’ the others intoned. Daisy looked startled.

  ‘As amnir I take the first draught of this Water!’ Ross said. ‘May the Divine Spirit guide me in the Shining and direct me to the way!’

  ‘The Divine Spirit lives!’

  Ross drank from the bowl — no more than a couple of mouthfuls — and passed it to Mansur, who took a gulp, his boss eye glinting eerily in the flames. Slowly the bowl went round the circle, and when my turn came I took a draught, wincing at its familiar sourness. I passed the bowl to Daisy. She look at the orange liquid, hesitated, took a swig, and shuddered. ‘Achh!’ she said. At once the tiny band struck up, first the mesmeric thump of the tablas, then the quarter tones of the pipes and rababa sounding beautiful and ethereal like an organ played pianissimo. The Hawazim began to sway, inclining their heads in time with the music, then cupping their hands around their mouths and exhaling a deep harmonic resonance that seemed to come right out of the earth. The men paused and suddenly the amnir stepped forwards into the circle of firelight, his eyes alive with wild colours, his arms thrown out. He stretched his head back and raised his hands, palms spread as if trying to catch the stars. ‘I see the light!’ he shouted out suddenly. ‘I am the light!’

  The words sank into my head like a stone in a pool, and eddies and ripples coursed through my blood, building up and up until they had become a tidal wave of pure emotion. I strained upwards to the stars and their light was a palpable force feeding my eyes. Yet another part of me was being carried along on those beams in a whoosh of motion, catapulted into the farthest reaches of the cosmos on the back of a river of fire. My consciousness flickered, fluctuating between my corporeal body, still rocking with the rhythm, and my astral body speeding through the night. I was object and subject, seer and seen, eyes and light, but also a third thing — a synthesis of the two opposites. I was Sammy Rashid, an individual, yet a small part of something so vast I couldn’t imagine it, something I could never really be separated from. I was one with the other tribesmen, one with the whole human species, one with all the creation of plants and animals, the mountains, the rivers, the rocks and the seas. All the fabric of the universe was a single material fashioned into different shapes and forms, but all part of a single unifying current. I was the wind, I was the mountains, I was the sun. I was in the insects and the birds, the camels and the wolves, the flowers and the forests, the seas and the stars.

  My conscious spirit, swaying in a huddle of humans and camels round a fire in the desert, was only an illusion of singularity, but beyond the barrier of darkness we were all part of a universal body and a universal mind. Time ceased to exist and the desert rolled before me like a book of pages whiffling in the wind, now a green land running with water and wandered by wild animals, now a wilderness as arid as the moon. I glimpsed fleeting images of dramas played out in that wilderness: half humans hunting elephants with sharpened sticks for spears; horsemen riding hell for leather, chariot wheels spinning, a great spaceship crashing in the sands; camel riders trawling the plains with cowled faces; ancient aircraft taking off; veteran cars trundling across the desert; shining pyramids rising like huge silver funguses; a great beast with the body of a woman and the head of a lion; forked lightning, rain, wind and a volcanic mushroom cloud. The visions flashed faster and faster until they were only fragmentary images split off from some gigantic mandala like shards of a fractured mirror — my father taking me on his knee and saying, ‘I’ll come back for you Sammy, if it’s the last thing I ever do’; my father’s face, filled with remorse, at the window of a train at Aswan Station, my mother crying when she received his last letter; the Old Man in the alley saying ‘We need you’; a spidery creature in the shadows of the Khan; Ibram’s bloody corpse; Van Helsing dressed like a labourer at the old rest house, Sanusi’s tic working fearfully at the mention of Firebird, the old Bedouin at the monastery spitting at Brother Paul’s feet; Father Grigori’s hand shaking as he lit a cigarette; Andropov shrugging fleshy shoulders; Daisy disarming me with superhuman speed.

  The string of images slipped through my mind like a coil, but before I could grasp any of them firmly they dissolved into dust, leaving me with a sense that all of them fitted into some vast pattern that it was beyond my ability to discern. I opened my eyes and saw the men still dancing, and the musicians bent over their instruments as if they had fused into them. I could no longer be sure if the music came out of the instruments, or out of the musicians’ heads, or out of the earth, or out of all of those things at the same time. I saw Daisy — a blur of golden hair lashing wildly to her inner harmo
nies, with what seemed to be a gush of brilliant red energy streaming out of her. I blinked and for an instant I saw another figure standing behind her — a vast, diaphanous image of a woman, standing there serenely, emanating power, stretching as high as the stars. I stared at Daisy and our eyes met. For a split second there was a flash of raw power so tremendous that I almost fell flat. In that moment I looked right past the outer Daisy and into the depths of her being, and I knew exactly what it was that I’d missed. Daisy had Shining power! She’d kept it tightly in check, deliberately tried to hide it. It had been staring at me right from the beginning. Everything about her — the supernatural speed, the accuracy, the strength, the superb muscle control that allowed her to move as silently as a cat, the ability to come out with the right intuition at the right time, the hypnotic power that had persuaded me to help her breach the archives — told me that she was a psychic warrior of extraordinary ability.

  And there was more. I felt a sudden and overwhelming certainty that Daisy had come to Egypt looking for me, and that her presence here among the Hawazim now was all part of a plan. Even if Daisy herself didn’t know it, she was meant to be here and we’d been destined to meet because we were two halves of the same entity, like the two pieces of Ibram’s map. We were each other, and together we made up a third thing that was more than the sum of its two parts. We needed each other. We belonged.

  I felt a serpent of sensuality truckling along my backbone, gorging my blood with desire. Then I looked at Daisy again and there was another flash of power as our eyes met. When she touched my leg the energy hit me like forked lightning. Her eyes were giant eyes and her smile a vast smile. ‘Sammy,’ she whispered. ‘It’s time!’

  When we rose from the fire hearth, no one paid any attention, and we staggered away down the soft dunes locked in each other’s arms. In the starlight the dunes were pale, undulating, yielding feminine forms, and we crossed ridge after ridge, giggling like children, kissing, touching, feeling each other’s bodies warm and glowing beneath our desert clothes. Daisy was already ripping off her jibba when we tripped and rolled wildly down a slip slope, clutching frantically at each other as if we would roll off the edge of the world. We came to rest in pillows of deep sand at the bottom of the slope, and lay still for a second, listening to the eerie music that dripped faintly across the dunes. Then Daisy put her arms under my jibba and kissed me. Energy pulsed through my body like a raging flood, and I fell on her, pulling off her clothes and mine, scattering them around us on the desert floor. Her hands explored my chest, my thighs, my stomach and each touch set my body vibrating with indescribable ecstasy. We rolled back and forth in the soft sand, panting and groaning, our lips and bodies forming and breaking in endless oscillation. I tangled my hands in her hair, kissed her erect nipples, stroked her between the legs until she arched backwards, moaning with pleasure, and draped her legs over my shoulders. Then I was inside her and she screamed, and writhed, clinging on to me desperately, raking my back with her nails. The coupling went on and on for ever until we were no longer Sammy and Daisy, no longer male and female, but a single entity, melting, dissolving into each other until the night and the cosmos were no longer outside us, but within us, and at last the stars erupted into a blinding iridescence of light.