Alhazred

by Donald Tyson

  “Your places are in the bow. No, young sir, pass between the horses if you please, along the keel.”

  Martala, who had been about to crawl past the horses along the outmost side, pushed their rumps apart and squeezed between their barrel chests to the front of the little craft. I followed, and saw that amid the boat’s supplies and our saddles and packs, there was just enough room for the two of us to sit. The other boatman, who stool on a small platform in the bow holding a long pole, smiled at us and nodded. He had clear gray eyes like those of the little girl, and a reddish beard that was only half as long as that of his master.

  “This is Yuga, my son, and this is Kaleia, his daughter,” Yarku said in introduction. The little girl nodded at the sound of her name, a bright gleam of mischief in her glance. She leaned forward and whispered into the ear of the donkey in her own language, speaking too low for me to understand. No doubt she told it what cowards we were, to fear the river.

  The boat wobbled alarmingly when the two men untied it from its post and pushed away from the dock with their poles. The horses tossed their heads and looked around with alarm at the receding shore. Their unease was no greater than my own. I saw that the steering oar in the stern was lashed into place. Yarku and his son made no effort to unfurl the square sail tied to the angled yard of the mast, but guided the boat with expert nudges of their poles at the bottom of the river. When we did not capsize, I began to breathe more deeply.

  “Do you mean to carry your donkey all the way to Babylon?” I asked Yarku in Greek.

  He shook his head. His granddaughter turned to ask him what I had said, and he explained my question to her in his native language. She broke into peals of bright laughter, staring at me with delight. Her father chuckled from his perch in the bow behind our backs.

  “Only to the end of the path,” Yarku explained in Greek, a reluctant smile on his lips. The laughter of the child was difficult to resist. “This part of the river is too swift and narrow for sail. Below these rapids the donkey is not needed.”

  As the shadows lengthened on the sliding banks, the girl began to sing a folk song in her own tongue. She sang softly at first, then grew more confident when she saw we were not displeased. Martala took up the chorus in harmony with her, after she heard it repeated a few times. Her singing voice was better than I would have expected, given the stridency of her speech. I sat listening, my eyes on the donkey path that followed the edge of the river, lulled into a kind of trance. The swiftness of our progress kept the flies away. Half a dozen times we passed boats being pulled toward Meskene against the current.

  Night fell almost before I was aware of the darkness. While there was yet a hint of gray in the sky, Yarku poled his little boat toward a crude gathering of huts on the bank and lashed it to a post against the tug of the stream, so that the side of the boat bumped against the rough trunks of trees driven into the mud to retain the earth of the landing area. I saw that the donkey path had reached its end. Here, the river was wider, its surface more placid. The child said her farewell to Martala with a smile, and repeated it to me with a more serious expression, then kicked the sides and tugged at the ears of the donkey until the uncomplaining animal stepped over the gunnel of the boat onto the ground. With a wave of her hand to her father and grandfather, she rode around the side of the huts and out of sight.

  Yarku explained that we would spend the night on shore. I left him with his son to care for our horses, and went with Martala to explore the rough little hamlet. It boasted an inn of sorts, a single long building composed of red mud brick to the level of my waist, supporting walls of split wooden planks that held up the thatched roof. The interior was divided into two rooms, the larger chamber a common room for food and drink, the other a sleeping place filled with rough woven straw mats that rested directly on the earthen floor. The wife of the innkeeper found us a late meal of greasy joints of lamb, dried brown bread, and soft cheese, made palatable by more of the excellent beer of that land.

  After we had eaten by the light of a smoky oil lamp, the stink of which did not improve the flavor of the food, we were shown sleeping mats in the other room by the serving slut, who spoke not a word to us and did not trouble to smile.

  A naked infant howled in the arms of its mother. She sat upon a mat with her dress opened at the top and her breasts exposed, trying to make it suck. Mingled scents of curdled milk and excrement emanated from its discarded swaddling cloth. Little wonder the rag was soiled, since there appeared to be no other. Beside the frustrated woman, a young man with the look of a scribe sat with his back against the mud brick wall, long hair trailing over his flat cheeks as he drank from a wine skin and laughed softly to himself, his eyes dazed and unfocused. He may have been the woman’s husband. If so, I felt pity for her.

  We were forced to step around a prosperous traveler in a white silk turban and splendid red silk coat, beneath which was a tunic of red and gold, who stood with booted feet wide-planted, arguing with the innkeeper, his fat hands sawing the air while his face above the chestnut curls of his beard gradually assumed a darker shade of purple. From his choice of words I took him to be a physician.

  “I cannot possibly sleep on the ground,” he roared in Arabic. “The dampness will unbalance my humors. Are you trying to kill me? Do you want my blood to coagulate in my veins? Are you trying to give me an ague? You pool of camel spit, I want a bed.”

  The innkeeper minded this blast no more than a cat attends to the calling of its name. He nodded, a slight smile on his thin lips.

  “As I have told you, good doctor Bassarius,” he said when the fat man drew breath, “there are no beds. No mattresses. No feather pillows. No sheets of silk. There is only what you see here.”

  A barrage of curses followed. The innkeeper weathered it with a shrug and left the physician fuming in the middle of the room, an object of distaste for his fellow wayfarers, who probably enjoyed the crude mats no better, but had more sense than to complain. Damning the innkeeper to Shaitan, he waddled over to the mat beside my own and plunked his fat buttocks down upon it.

  With fatalistic melancholy, I realized that he was to be my sleeping companion. I thought of asking Martala to trade her mat for mine, but on the other side was the infant, at last hungry enough to take suck of its mother’s teat. I deemed the physician less likely to wake howling and squalling in the middle of the night than the child, and so determined to accept my lot.

  Sleep took me easily, as it always does. In the dream, I walked beneath a star-shot sky across a dusty plane scattered with loose stones. It was not the fine sand of the Empty Space, but dried mud that had turned to dust, although the grit of sand was mingled with it. A great shadow loomed above the horizon and shut off the stars. At first I thought it must be a mountain, but as I walked nearer I saw that its sloped sides divided into terraces. It was a pyramid of human construction, different in shape from those I had seen in Egypt. Time had wrought much decay upon it, so that its lower parts were almost obscured by slides of debris from the perished bricks above.

  A figure of human shape stood at its base, awaiting my approach. With sinking heart I recognized the cloak of the dark man, my master. I had begun to hope that I would never see him again, waking or sleeping. My heart thudded painfully in my chest and my legs trembled as I stopped before him. He spoke no word, but parted his cloak and raised it up behind him with his outspread arms, like the black wings of some hellish bat, so that it concealed the pyramid.

  Light flickered and glowed over the inner surface of the cloak, and over his very body, opening into a kind of window filled with so many stars, they had the appearance of wreaths of smoke against the blackness of the heavens. I stared in wonder at its vastness, larger than the sky that arched above my head from horizon to horizon. For some moments nothing stirred within the infinity of space. Then innumerable forms approached from the distant stars, amorphous and changing their shapes with
restless hunger. Only their eyes remained unaltered, black and clear and darkly burning.

  The horde of specters descended toward a beautiful sphere dappled with blue and green and brown. It was a barbarous world of monstrous plants and even stranger creatures. The largest was shaped like a cone, with a small round head and arms that resembled the claws of a scorpion. A kind of trumpet extended from the head, the bell of which moved and closed like a valve, and I realized that it was the creature’s mouth. Into these nightmare beings the misty ghosts with the bright eyes entered, each possessing one of the beasts in the way a demon will possess a man.

  The picture in the cloak of the dark man moved and changed with bewildering rapidity. Mountains rose and were worn away, the outlines of oceans receded, the plants grew up with different shapes, and even the sun that sped across the sky from east to west became more dim. As these transformations slowed, I saw a green river valley inhabited by men human in appearance, but of barbarous aspect. One night while they lay asleep under the stars by their campfires, the wraiths from between the stars descended from the sky and entered into their bodies, as they had entered the cone-shaped beings of more ancient times. There were not so many as before. Whereas the first descent had numbered in thousands, the second was no more than hundreds.

  Again, time raced forward. The men possessed by the wraiths were rendered deathless, and became wise in all the arts, and took women to wife and bred many sons and daughters. They built an empire by conquering all the neighboring tribes and enslaving them. Using the labor of the slaves and the wealth of conquest, they constructed pyramids from red brick on the fertile plane beside the river. At intervals they ascended to the flat tops of these artificial mounds and lit fires and made sacrifice. Above the fires, portals opened in the air and objects of unguessable purpose passed through.

  The vision became more distant, and I saw as through the eyes of an eagle that flew high above the land all the towers built by the sons of the immortals arrayed like place marks on a map. Silver rays of light radiated from them along the surface of the ground like the lines of a spider’s web and converged on to a single point close to the river. The image descended. The rulers of the empire stood gathered around a steaming vent in the ground, some lost in discussion, others using survey sticks to mark out the ground in a square grid that enclosed the vent. Time sped forward, and I watched a pyramid with stepped sides arise over the vent. It was larger and more impressive than those that had been built earlier. At intervals, the workmen stopped to allow the immortals, whose bodies glowed with inner fire, to place with care patterned bricks into the construction.

  A multitude of people gathered at the newly built pyramid, surrounding its base and lining the stairways that wrapped around it even to its flat summit. The leaders of the immortals began a ritual of invocation and lit a fire upon the stone altar. At once a great beam of light ascended from the altar to the heavens and a gateway opened above the flames. The chanting of the worshippers gave way to shouts of joy and they began to dance upon the steps, but this soon turned to cries of dismay, and then terror, as the very earth itself trembled. A lightning bolt, brighter and larger than any I had ever seen, struck down at the pyramid and blasted its upper half into fragments. Those who had not fled from it at once when the shakings started were burned black like sacrificial offerings.

  Again, time moved a rapid pace of years. The broken pyramid became cloaked in dust, and crumbled under its own weight as its disordered bricks decayed. It resembled little more than a hill of rocks and dirt. The glorious city at its base fell into ruin and was lost from sight, all except a few low foundations. The descendants of the immortals who had been so numerous grew few. Barbarian hoards overwhelmed them in their poor villages along the river, slaughtering the men, enslaving the women and children.

  The veiled dark man closed his cloak and brought the dumb show to its end. He turned and gestured with his hand at the tumbled ruin behind him. Something glowed within the wreck of the pyramid, something bright that lay deep between the crumbled bricks. I began to walk toward the place. In the darkness the light was like a beacon that could not be mistaken. As I drew near to the fissure from out of which it issued, I began to see the shape that made it. I reached out my hand.

  The squalling of an infant woke me. Martala was not on her mat. By the dim morning glow that found its way through the latticework of the east-facing window, I saw the mother of the night before attempting to placate her baby by offering it a piece of red coral. The infant thrust the offering away repeatedly with its tiny hand, a glare of fury on its wrinkled reddened face. Thanking the Goddess that I was childless, I rose and set about determining what place was deemed appropriate for voiding the bowels.

  My nose-hole led me to the rear of the sleeping room, where a door opened onto a kind of courtyard with a low wall of bricks. Into the clay of the ground two depressions had been dug. They were separated by a partition of narrow wooden boards supported by two posts, with many gaps between the slats. Already the flies had begun to gather upon the contents of the holes. I added my own offering, annoyed that I had brought nothing with which to wipe myself. At last I used my left hand, and scraped it clean on the wooden partition, as I saw many others had done. With my right I remembered to renew the glamour of my face. This had become such an habitual action, I did it without thought.

  Martala sat sipping broth from a clay bowl as I entered the common room, the steam of its contents rising past her cheeks. She dipped a piece of bread into the hot liquid and ate it. I obtained similar fair from the wife of the innkeeper, who sat next to the fireplace, ladling it from a large iron cauldron into wooden bowls that were stacked on the hearth at her foot. Bearing the bowl and my piece of bread with care back to the table, I sat opposite the girl. She had retained her disguise. Her hair was hidden beneath her green felt hat, and no sign of her breasts deformed the front of her tunic.

  “You can become a girl again, if you wish, now that we have left Altrus behind us.”

  “And terrify poor old Yarku?” She sniggered, laughing with her mouth closed to avoid spitting out her broth. “He would believe that I was transformed by some djinn, and would jump into the river from his own boat.”

  The broth was better than I expected. It contained no treasures of meat, but fresh herbs floated in its depths, and strengthening grease pooled in yellow puddles on its surface, testifying that the bones of some beast lay boiling in the cauldron at the fire. I imitated my servant and dipped a corner of the hard bread, softening it in the bowl before chewing it. The salt in the broth was well received by my stomach.

  “The boat is waiting for us when we finish,” she said, tipping the bowl to drink.

  “So early?”

  “Yarku told me he does not travel by night when he can avoid it, so he likes to make the best of the daylight hours.”

  “I had a dream last night,” I said, surprised at my hesitation to mention it.

  She looked up and met my gaze.

  “The dark man again?”

  I nodded, and told her of my vision in his cloak.

  “That tower you describe sounds familiar.” She bit her lower lip in thought.

  “The tower on the golden plate in the hall of pillars, beneath the tail of the Sphinx.”

  “Of course,” she said. “The tower struck by lightning. It must be the same. But what does it mean?”

  I shrugged in annoyance, draining my bowl as I tilted it to my lips.

  “If the dark man wishes me to know, let him tell me. He has a voice, and most unpleasant it is on the ear.”

  A full stomach made my heart lighter as we paid for our breakfast and left the inn to return to the riverside. It fell again when I saw the fat physician in red silks of the previous evening, sitting in the place in our boat that had formerly held the donkey. The change was not an improvement, I reflected, since donkeys cannot talk. H
e turned and scowled at the sound of our approach, no gladder to see us than we were to see him. The horses had already been loaded. We stepped into the bow of the boat.

  Yarku untied the boat and his son pushed it with his pole from the still water near the dock into the flow of the river. As it began to drift downstream, Yuga untied the bindings on the dirty square sail and hoisted the tilted spar to the top of the mast. He fussed with the ropes that held the sail at the desired angle while his father sat in the stern with one long leg projected from his robe and slung over the steering oar. It appeared an awkward posture, but I saw that he could recline that way for hours, moving the oar back and forth without effort as the wind required. The bare foot of the old man, its sole black with dirt, waggled ludicrously in the air.

  The horses interposed on either side of the mast made conversation with the physician unnecessary, although we sat facing each other. As the sun rose and the river glided its placid way between the green banks, it became apparent that the fat man had no wish to remain silent. The warmth and the gentle breeze softened his features. He nodded to me between the flanks of the beasts when I chanced to look his way. I pretended a sudden interest in the sail, which flapped slightly as the boat rounded a gentle bend. He was not a man to be discouraged once he formed his intention. He cleared his throat, a deep noise like the thrumming of a frog. I glanced at Martala, who smiled at me behind her hand while pretending to adjust her hat. The harrumphing and thrumming kept up for a time, increasing in loudness, until at last I met his eye. He stretched his fat lips and nodded.

  “My name is Bassarius,” he said in Arabic.

  “I am called Alhazred.” There was no need to introduce Martala, who was only a servant.

  “How comes it that a young man of noble family, as you clearly are by your bearing and speech, travels this fly-infested river?”

  Resisting the urge to speak sharply at his impertinent question, I adopted an affable and, I hoped, slightly stupid expression. Perhaps if he judged me of low intelligence he would lose interest.