by John Shirley
“Koda Hafez, Bahktiar!” the Blue Sheik prompted, seeming amused at the servant’s indignation.
Bahktiar ducked his head, sent a final fierce look at Constantine and slipped out past his master.
“Hali shoma Kub-e?” the Blue Sheikh inquired.
“Not bad,” Constantine replied. “How’s yours hangin’, mate?”
The Blue Sheikh chuckled. He had long ago accepted Constantine’s unwillingness—or inability—to demonstrate submissive devotion. He did not regard Constantine as an equal—the Blue Sheikh had few equals amongst mortals—but being almost four hundred years old, the sheikh was too wise to suppose the trappings of submission to be of real importance. What mattered was the life of the heart. “I see you’ve learned to understand a little of the local language, John, if not speak it. Please continue to eat your soup. You have fasted enough.”
Constantine took another sip and put the bowl aside. “You know about me getting sidetracked to London, eh? I was hoping to slip in before anyone noticed I’d been out all night at the pub.”
The Blue Sheikh grunted and looked Constantine over. “You wear the robe of goat hair; you have eaten little and slept sparingly and sat in meditation much: you have struggled with your appetites, I can see that. You would have drifted away into the River of Nepenthe, were it not for the light you have kindled in yourself. Even so, forgetfulness was coming upon you—but I believe you were called back by someone . . .”
“You could call it that, O Sheikh. An old geezer—died some time ago in India, he said—he led me back. Don’t know what became of him. You send him along?”
“No, I did not. But I permitted him to go when I perceived what he was about. He works with those who have taken the peace vow.”
“You haven’t got a . . . a smoke about you, have you, Sheikh, eh? I mean—at this point, I reckon I’m in Dutch here already . . . no, I don’t suppose you’d have one. Didn’t notice a cigarette machine in the monastery.”
“You have been here some months, you have never before asked me for tobacco. Has someone been giving it to you?”
“Ah, well, O Sheikh, can’t be a bloody tattletale, now can I?”
“But I do have tobacco—in a hookah. At my age, I no longer smoke it. It’s a great deal of work to restore the body after the damage tobacco does, and I become addicted so quickly. Still, if you’d like . . .”
“I would, yeah, that’d be brilliant!”
The Blue Sheikh, walking in long strides, hands clasped in front of him, led the way through corridors carved of naked rock. In occasional niches were rechargeable lanterns that made it look a bit like an archaeological dig. As they went, the sheikh remarked, “You know, this part of the mountain is from an ancient time before Mount Damāvand proper—Damāvand is an old volcano which rose up and overwhelmed the old mountain, of this hard stone. The old mountain contained a temple, in the time of Atlantis . . . some of the chambers still exist, far below. But all the tunnels you see are new—only a few thousand years old . . .”
After a winding trek through a maze of damp time-darkened stone corridors, Constantine had to duck his head to push through silken curtains draping a low doorway into a lushly furnished chamber he’d never seen before.
Must be the sheikh’s apartments, he supposed. If he was being brought here, he reckoned he was either to be elevated to another level of initiation, or given the old boot in a polite kind of way—he suspected the latter, since he’d bollixed up the out-of-body assignment.
The air smelled of incense; of frankincense and myrrh. The stone floors were covered in thick, ornate rugs, dark blue and purple set off by red and yellow borders; the walls were swathed in hangings in the same colors, intricate patterns suggesting energy forms. Electric lights were strung at intervals on wires, some filtered by scarves of blue and purple, glowing near the low ceiling. A fire burned in a trim wrought-iron stove in the corner, its rusty chimney pipe curving through a hole in the stone wall.
Bahktiar came in, scowling, with a wooden bowl of perfumed water in which floated shreds of blue flower blossoms. He held the bowl between Constantine and the sheikh, who made a hand sign over the water and softly intoned words in a more ancient language than Farsi. Constantine dipped his fingers in the water, sprinkled it on his head, murmuring certain words himself. It was a purification ritual—typical of Zoroastrianism.
This done, the sheikh indicated crimson pillows heaped on either side of a hookah and the two men sat across from one another, legs folded. Bahktiar reappeared from the shadows of an adjoining room carrying a carafe of tea and two small glass cups. He scowled again, but seeing that Constantine was obviously a guest, kept his moodiness to himself, never looking at them. The old sheikh found a leather pouch of tobacco on a low wooden table beside the pillows—a highly lacquered black table, looking like it had come from China, originally—and poured some into the hookah. Bahktiar brought him a small burning twig, holding it to the tobacco as Constantine lipped the wooden mouthpiece and gratefully puffed the tobacco alight. The teacup, tiny and filled with boiling-hot tea in the Middle-Eastern manner, was more difficult. He inevitably burned his fingertips.
“You were drawn to your own death, you know,” the sheikh said, after Constantine had ingested enough tea and nicotine to make him feel more comfortable.
“Drawn to me death? How’s that, O Sheikh?” Constantine asked, savoring the feeling of smoke accompanying the words across his palate. “Not something I take to, in normal circs, me death.”
“Why do you think you were in London? Because once out of your body you had felt yourself drifting toward death. Something in you wants to die—something else wants to live. You are not yet inwardly unified. But very few are.”
“You got me right on the unification, mate. I’m about as unified as a gin bottle post hammer, I am.”
“No, John Constantine, you’re not so bad as that. But you are divided. The survivor in you drew away from death and fled toward London. You wanted to—what is the expression in English about the ground . . . to be ground yourself or . . .”
“To ground meself?”
“Yes. Like with electricity. To stay here on Earth, you needed to find comfort in the familiar. So your soul, confused, flew to London. It wasn’t really drink or smoke you sought.”
Constantine chuckled. “How little you know me, O Sheikh.”
“How little you know yourself, John,” the Blue Sheikh responded gravely. “Your burden has been great. You have lived more than fifty years—not so much to me, it’s true, but with all that you have experienced, it might be said you’ve lived enough for five men in the last fifty years. The burden was beginning to be too much. And the guilt—you have tried to let the guilt go. But you have not quite succeeded. If you wish to ease your . . . your karma, as they say . . . now perhaps is the time in India.”
“How am I to do that? You mean that business with Mercury and a war that the old geezer with the walrus mustache was on about?”
“Yes. I do not know the details. No more than you know.”
“And it just happens to coincide with me buzzing off? You’ve had enough of me, I reckon . . .”
“It does, as you say—happen to coincide.”
Constantine puffed the tobacco pensively. It was stale, but not bad. “Going to give me my walking papers, are you?”
“You came here to learn how to control the Great Energies. To learn the wisdom of those you call ‘the magis.’ To be able to send your soul where you will—too often in the past, your soul, once out of body, was buffeted about. You have learned these things to the extent that we can teach you. You knew much already. Much was . . . I believe the expression is, ‘second nature’ to you—because this is not your first time in this world. You are an ‘old soul,’ as we say . . . you learned more than you realize, with us. No conscious effort is wasted. You can teach yourself after this. To learn seriously here takes years—there are more important tasks for you.”
Constantine b
lew a smoke ring at the ceiling and watched it turn purple as it neared a colored light. “Sure you don’t have a little more on my friend Mercury? Young woman, she is. Like a daughter to me. Could do with an inside track . . .”
“You mistake me if you think I know all, John Constantine. I see only that you are called for a task . . . that task is masked in cloud. Someone does not wish me to help you, I suspect. Remember that Angra Mainyu—the one you call Lucifer—he will be setting traps for you.” The Blue Sheikh smiled as if savoring an amusing anecdote, a story he was remembering, and poured Constantine another cup of hot, sweet tea. “You have made him furious with you many times.” He tilted his head, looked at Constantine with narrowed eyes. “I seem to see you—differently. I hear a name. Konz.”
“Konz? Don’t think anyone had the nerve to saddle me with that contraction—though Rich calls me Con Job, it must be admitted . . .”
“This was long ago. Many lives . . .”
Constantine puffed on the hookah thoughtfully. More than once he had become aware of previous incarnations. The teaching of the Blue Sheikh’s sect—an order that was sourced in Zoroaster and the Magi, but with a strong Sufi affinity—held that the afterlife was a mixed bag, depending on the growth of your spirit. Some, trapped in psychological states of identification with negativity, consigned themselves to dark, dangerous regions, Hells of various kinds, until at last they reincarnated; some drew closer to the source of life, their expectations creating paradises, until a need for spiritual evolution induced them to move on; others were reincarnated immediately. Some had created for themselves a strong existence in the afterlife; others were just echoes in the Sea of Consciousness.
“Which past life is going to rear its ugly head this time, O Sheikh?”
“Ah—I see an entanglement with a dark spirit, with the heart of rage—from millennia ago. But how it will emerge—this is obscured from me.”
“Well then—any advice at all . . . Xodavand?” Constantine asked, raising his teacup in a toast to the Blue Sheikh. Best to use the honorific “Lord” with this spiritual toff, he reckoned, if you want some advice from him. Not that he didn’t feel some genuine humility around the Blue Sheikh. But humility was something he hated showing anyone. Where he’d grown up, it’d always been a mistake to let anyone lord it over you.
The sheikh took the second hose from the hookah and had a few puffs himself before answering. “I advise only this—remember the path we’re called to by Zoroaster: ‘Good reflection, good words, good deeds.’ The simplicity of this formula is its greatness. Cleave in simplicity to these three principles and the good road will be shown you.”
Constantine smiled sadly. He had never noticed goodness to be rewarded—not in this vale of tears. Anyway, he felt he had very little virtue to bring to reflection, words, and deeds. Maybe he’d come to the monastery in search of some deeper good. But he suspected he was too tainted to find it. Someone good could do it . . .
Long ago he’d tried to send his darkness, his sickness, to Hell, with a spell that had created a kind of Constantine golem. The spell had worked a little too well—he’d had to couple with a demoness to get back some of his edge, his balancing darkness. But he lost the balance easily. Slid easily into the dark side of himself: there was always more darkness in a man—because it arose freshly out of anger and out of the choices he made. And there is always more to be angry about; there are always more choices to make.
He had sharpened his skills here. But the desire he’d nurtured in the back of his mind to become a good man like the Blue Sheikh—
Wasting my sodding time with that one.
Hadn’t he seduced that girl who’d come to the monastery selling milk? Hadn’t he paid her to bring him beer? Horrible piss-water that beer had been—made in the huts of some local shepherd, piss might’ve been one of the ingredients, in fact—but it’d gotten him drunk, all right.
He had tried to make up for it by working harder: by sitting longer in meditation, by fasting more, by struggling more with his lower self. But he’d only become weak and confused and his soul had drifted off to London.
“There is, as it happens, very little I could do to help you,” the Blue Sheikh went on calmly. “That is why I am smoking—it does not matter now, as I have to be killed this afternoon.”
Constantine choked on his tobacco smoke—which was not something he did often. “What?”
“Yes: I have what one might call ‘an appointment to be murdered.’ You are the first to be told, as it happens. I will be killed this afternoon by an assassin. The mullahs of this country have sent someone to do it—they believe me a heretic. We are not particularly Muslim here in this retreat, after all—not as the Ayatollah understands the teaching. A Muslim will pull the trigger, but there are those who wish the assassination to look like the Americans did it.” He said “did it” as if it had already happened. As if, to him, it had. “If they arrest me, my followers will be troublesome.”
“But . . . if you know that it’s coming . . . must be some way to stop the bastard.”
“I believe you once saw your own death—so you told me. Do you now concern yourself to avoid it?”
Constantine shrugged. He’d had a vision of one death that might come to him, of drowning. “It was a long time off. Wasn’t like a certainty, either. It was like it could come that way—and likely would, but . . .”
“Nothing is certain until it comes to pass,” the Blue Sheikh said, putting his teacup down with exacting attention. “It is a matter of likelihood, merely. I could avert this death. But I choose not to. I have outlived many wives, many children. I have only one son alive—he is two hundred years old himself, and busy in Nepal. I will see him in the Hidden World. I will see them all there. I am ready for another stage now.”
“Look here, O Sheikh, you can’t check out now—this world’s a mess. Needs your help, it does.”
“There are others who will help. And there are ways we can help from the Hidden World. In truth, my time has come . . .” The Blue Sheikh looked up at a naked lightbulb overhead, as if somehow it were showing him something only he could see. After a moment he said, “I can feel the assassin approaching. I feel him—and now I see him. He is driving a large American vehicle up the mountain pass. He stole this vehicle from an American intelligence agent, after murdering the man. He knows that at this hour I walk in the garden of stone outside the monastery. He is getting out of the vehicle now . . . he conceals himself behind a boulder. He loads his rifle . . . I have asked the guards of our retreat to stay away from the garden today. No one sees him. He waits for me . . . he waits to liberate me . . . I must go to him . . .”
Constantine shook his head. The Blue Sheikh didn’t show his true nature to people most of the time. But Constantine had seen it once—and he was sure the world needed the Blue Sheikh. “Bloody hell,” he murmured.
Standing up from sitting cross-legged on the floor is difficult to do with grace, but the Blue Sheikh did it. He gazed down at Constantine—and his eyes grew to fill Constantine’s vision . . .
Constantine looked away.
“I cannot help you with what you must do, John Constantine,” the Blue Sheikh said, his voice softly hoarse, “and I must go. You will take the road back down the mountain, toward Rasht. There is someone for you to meet on the shores of the Caspian. I cannot see who. I see only that you must go to the Caspian Sea.” He broke off, as if listening. After a moment he added, “Perhaps there is something I can do for you—I can give you a warning. It is whispered to me that when you see a man who cuts the throat of a bird, watch for your enemy—he is within reach. And remember, John Constantine: reflection, words, deeds.”
Constantine nodded. Feeling he wanted to say a great deal and for once unable to speak.
“And John . . . say nothing to the others here about where I go now.”
The Blue Sheikh went to the doorway, walking with simple deliberation. He stopped for a moment, turned back with a mischievous smil
e on his face. “Oh, by the way, I am glad you didn’t tell me who gave you the cigarettes. I believe the expression is, ‘No one likes a fucking snitch,’ eh?” He tugged meditatively at his beard. “And as for that girl delivering the milk, don’t feel bad—she had a good time. I almost took her to bed once myself. But she was too young for me.” He winked, and then he slipped through the curtained doorway and was gone.
The old servant returned, dropping Constantine’s clothes, laundered and folded, on the floor beside him. “Now,” Bahktiar said, snatching the hookah hose from Constantine’s mouth, “he tell you, you are here enough. You can make dressing in those, and you get out. You have brought bad things here. You go.”
Constantine stood up, feeling awkward as he shrugged out of the robe, and began to pull on his clothes: boxers, white shirt, black tie, black trousers, black shoes, trench coat. It had been a while since his trench coat had been so clean. “You hear where your master’s going, Bakky?”
“My name is not Bakky!”
Reaching for patience, Constantine buttoned up his shirt, and repeated, “Did you hear him say where he was going?”
“No. He does not tell me where he goes.”
So it’s true. The old bastard doesn’t know his master is slated to be shot dead in a few minutes.
He had been asked to say nothing about the assassination. But he couldn’t just stand by. He could interfere with the assassination himself. Could be the Blue Sheikh might change his mind, given the chance . . .
Constantine danced into his socks and shoes, elbowed Bahktiar out of the way and headed for the door.
“You leave this place! Do not come back!” Bahktiar called after him.
“You can kiss my arse,” Constantine growled at him, pausing in the doorway. “You’re just a bloody hanger-on here, Bakky. Hanging around for fifty bloody years. Never learning a fucking thing.”
Bahktiar looked crushed—Constantine had struck a nerve. And he regretted it. Reflection, words, deeds. He’d already cocked up one of the three.
