He stammered, “What a harsh prophecy!”
His eyes glinted with a haughty flash, and he added with profound submission, “A harsh prophecy is the noblest kind.”
3
This prophecy confirmed his hunch and inspired his journey to the veil.
This prophecy completed the inspiration that had caused him to despair during the first days of the disaster.
This prophecy finished fashioning the indistinct whisper, adding form and substance to it.
Now he could continue with his project.
Now he could shed his doubts and approach the Spirit World by realizing his intentions.
Only now did he know for certain that people who consider a good deed an unforgivable offense deserve no mercy. He had hesitated for a long time before offering the monumental sacrifice that the Spirit World had imposed on him as a condition for saving him from every mighty trap, but this noble conduct had not raised him to the ranks of the virtuous. Instead, he had dropped to the level of fools.
Now, after achieving this certainty, he could discard his scruples and venge himself on a community that had repaid his ancient benefaction with nothing but a ruse. He would take revenge, because he himself—like any human being—had never been anything more than the sacrificial victim of an act of vengeance. Yes, from the very beginning man has always been a miserable sacrificial victim offered to compensate for some previous vengeful act; he has therefore been forced to seek revenge as well. He must take his revenge quickly if he wishes to avoid becoming the victim of another vengeful deed and being forced again out of a lair by stings.
4
“Anyone who offers me his allegiance, come hell or high water, receives my guarantee that he will not feel hunger again or suffer from fear.”
The herald set off early in the morning with this announcement, and people flocked into the streets. Residents raced through the alleys—men and women, graybeards and youngsters—to climb the hill. Then they besieged the glorious fortress just as foreign tribes were besieging the walls of the oasis.
The soldiers forced them to halt in the audience chamber and form queues. The master made an appearance and repeated his talisman: “Anyone who offers me his allegiance, come hell or high water, receives my guarantee that he will not feel hunger again or suffer from fear.”
They roared their approval and wept before him from delight. Then they advanced in columns toward the soldiers to accept their ration of wheat.
In that crowd, from somewhere in the rear, a loud, stern voice rang out, sounding as if the speaker had never known the taste of hunger and had never been importuned by his children’s complaints at home. “The food’s poisoned! Watch out!”
No one heeded his warning. People kept moving forward in their lines, dragging their feet like exhausted captives who had crossed the desert on foot. They bowed to the soldiers and then received their portion of a gift that would deliver them from hunger and safeguard them from fear.
The soldiers, for their part, did not heed the warning either; perhaps they did not care.
The voice cried out again: “This is a banquet, and a banquet is always a trap. So beware!”
The cry was lost in the din once more. Then the creature hidden in the crowd screamed out a new prophecy: “Once he captured your best men with gifts at a banquet; now he captures you as well—with party favors!”
No one heeded his cry. No one paid any attention to his existence, because hunger’s sovereignty has always proved stronger than prophecy’s.
5
The soldiers finished transporting the dead palm trunks from the fields and then piled giant pyres of logs and planks in the temple plaza to create a bonfire bigger than any ever seen in the desert before.
The leader ordered the citizens to gather inside the ring of firewood and then positioned himself on the hill by the gate of the glorious fortress. He waited until everyone was silent and then spoke with the harsh terseness he had learned from the language of prophecies. “When I promised one day that if you pledged allegiance to me, come hell or high water, I would deliver you from hunger and fear, I took a solemn oath. Then I fed you and fulfilled half my oath. Now the time has come for me to fulfill the second half.”
He gestured to the chief vassal, and Abanaban raised his hand as a signal to the soldiers, who immediately rushed to set fire to the wood.
Screams resounded, and voices cried for help.
People shoved each other aside, trying to escape from the circle of fire, desperate to save themselves, but the soldiers stabbed them with swords and spears. Many fell to the ground, bleeding profusely, and then were trampled underfoot by the mob. Others retreated only to be choked by waves of smoke. They perished, like the rest, in the tongues of flame.
Despite the ferocity with which the soldiers guarded the ring around the fearsome hearth, the will to survive—the will to live—proved stronger than all the ploys of these clever technicians, and fugitives escaped here and there. Then they raced across the naked earth on their way to the Western Hammada Gate, but specters rushed at them there, too, and felled them with arrows and lances.
This holocaust lasted a long time.
The soldiers polished off the civilians, and that night the leader hosted a banquet for his troops to repay them for the expert execution of their duties. They were not, however, destined to enjoy another sunrise, because the poison that their master had mixed into the food proved fast-acting, and they perished in no time at all.
6
The next morning the leader climbed to the roof terraces of the glorious fortress accompanied by the chief vassal. He contemplated the soldiers’ corpses, which were strewn around the hill, and gazed at the fearsome hearth—cluttered with ashes, charred wood, and pieces of bone—from which plumes of smoke rose. He looked up at the clear, arrogant, indifferent sky, and tears filled his eyes as he said, “This is the sacrificial offering!”
The chief vassal beside him swayed and wailed in a voice that was not his own: “How harsh is the vengeance of lords! How cruel is the vengeance of lords!”
The master repeated in a voice that also was not his own, “This is the sacrificial offering!”
Stillness was pervasive, a stillness that seemed appropriate for an oasis where only the dead remained. The stillness lasted for some time.
Then the master asked, “Should we lament the destruction of a creature who forgives a bad deed but never a good one?”
The chief vassal lamented, “Man doesn’t forgive a good deed, master, because he is a man; man doesn’t forgive a good deed, because he rejects shackles and doesn’t want to be encumbered by obligations to others.”
“Even though such madness doesn’t give this creature any right to expect mercy, I fulfilled my promise—as you have seen. I saved them from fear after I fed them to deliver them from hunger. No enemy will ever harm them, and no evil will ever befall them.”
“Even if a creature fears pain, he would rather slither across the ground with no limbs—provided he remains alive—than swallow a panacea that spares him pain’s evil but costs him his life.”
“This is another argument that confirms that this arrogant creature does not rise much above the level of vermin.”
“All the same, the desert loses its splendor and becomes a desolate wasteland once man leaves its realm. Look at the oasis, master! Don’t you see that this is no longer an oasis? Don’t you see that what was an oasis yesterday has become an empty space we could call anything but an oasis?”
The leader did not reply, and a stillness befitting a place populated only by the dead settled over it.
This stillness did not last long.
A blade emerged from a sleeve, the light of the morning sun washed over it, and then it descended like lightning to pierce a chest. The chief vassal staggered and stumbled back. He emitted a subdued groan before mastering himself and taking a few steps forward till he was beside his master, who whispered sadly, “Forgive me. A man who chooses t
o flee from his enemies must avoid leaving any witnesses behind.”
The wounded man grasped the dagger’s handle and, with the forbearance of the ancients, replied, “I knew my master would inevitably do this one day.”
“I’ve been forced to join the ranks of the caravan you said could pardon a bad deed but not a good one. You’ve done me many favors, and now you’re receiving your just reward!”
“My master can rest assured that I shall bear no grudge against him, because what he has done proves that my master belongs to the human race.”
His pains silenced him, but he struggled stubbornly to withstand the blow and tried to pull the dagger from his chest. He staggered a step forward and then two steps back. He moaned grievously before falling to his knees and then collapsing on the roof terrace.
Rays of morning light illuminated his eyes, in which the master saw all the profundity, peacefulness, and symbolism of a smile.
7
He vanished into the chambers of the fortress and disguised himself in a shepherd’s tattered garments. He descended the northeast side of the hill and cast a searching look at the heavens. The luminous disc was settled at the heart of the sky, and all beings swam in the mirage’s tongues. He listened carefully and heard the stillness. He detected the murky clamor that desert dwellers have learned to hear in the majestic stillness—the clamor that is always the secret message of stillness, a clamor that diviners call the gibberish of eternity.
He listened carefully for a long time and was about to continue on his way when a nagging whisper stopped him. He paused to listen carefully again. He began to spy on this stillness once more. He tried to discern the whispered temptation in the sound of the stillness, the symbol in the voice of the silence, the worldly disturbance in the gibberish of eternity. He froze and held his breath. He focused his entire body on listening and transformed his limbs into ears. So he heard; he heard another convulsion in the clamor of the ages. He detected a distant, disturbing, monotonous pulse like the songs of grains of sand complaining in the deserts to the gloomy expanses of night about the days’ raging heat. Had the quake’s hour arrived? Don’t scholars say a similar sound precedes earthquakes?
He gazed up again at the horizons, which were partially obscured by the circular wall of the oasis. Then he spotted dust rising in all directions. A bloody circle of red dust particles from the Red Hammada was swirling into the empty air like a whirlwind. Had the attack begun? Had the whirlwind’s hour arrived?
He knelt on the dirt and rested his ear on the ground. Then he heard the convulsion even more clearly. Countless nations were advancing. Countless feet were marching his way. The Day of Reckoning had arrived. The armies would storm the walls before evening fell.
He decided he had to act quickly.
He traversed the empty alleys at a brisk pace almost like a canter. He lurched forward till he had left all the buildings behind. Before reaching the fields, he remembered the treasures. He recalled his plan for dealing with the treasures and smiled maliciously. He smirked smugly at the strategy he had devised to conceal the treasures. He smiled because he was sure the invaders would not discover even one of the gold or silver coins. He smiled because he was certain that he had ruined the chances to plunder for armies that had not embarked on this raid and endured the campaign’s terrors for any reason except a lust for swag. Yesterday he had spoiled their opportunity to seize the women. Today he had deprived them of the opportunity to lay hold of the treasures. So just when they thought themselves the victors, they would taste defeat, because a warrior who returns from a campaign without any booty is a defeated soldier, even if he has won the battle. This was his present for the leader of the foreigners. This was his gift to the idol. This was the revenge he had prepared for the scarecrow, the ghoul, the dragon. Hee, hee, hee, hee….
He reached the well and waded into the brook barefoot. He trampled carpets of grass underfoot, and the world’s ills slipped from his body. His foot plunged into the mire of the field, and the antidote for all the world’s ills flowed through his being. The humid breeze, which carried the scent of mud, grasses, and a fig tree, passed over him, and the poisons of chaos were drawn from his soul. He shed his tattered garments one at a time. He pulled off his shorts and tunic. He removed even his veil and stretched out in the mire. He sank into it till he disappeared. Then he poked his nostrils above the surface to take a breath and released a deep moan like the gasp of longing that springs from the chests of ecstatic mystics. He wallowed. He wallowed in the mud to rinse away the pains of angst. He wallowed in the field’s muck to cleanse himself of the world’s muck. He rolled about in the belly of the earth to free himself from the grasp of deceit. He resumed a journey he had interrupted the day he embraced the beautiful widow and entered the fields with her. He had entered the fields with her because he was certain that once a man enters the fields, he should never leave them. He had suspected that once a man enters cultivated fields, he must become part of the fields: the shadow of a tree, the trunk of a palm, or a plant growing by the brook. He had thought that fields are man’s homeland. He had suspected that orchards are man’s destiny and his paradise on the day he returns to them, but the beautiful woman had given the lie to his preconceptions and destroyed his certainty. So he had lost his wager, because he had not understood that anyone who makes a bet with a beautiful woman is destined to lose. He had returned from his orchards that day with an unpleasant sense of failure. He had borne in his hands the shackle he had drawn from the comfort of despair, childhood, and forgetfulness. He had waded in the mires of deceit for a long time, and now his circuit was finally leading him to the shores of stillness. Here he was cheek by jowl with the orchard. His body was the mud, his blood was the brook’s water, and his hair was the grass of the field. His breath was a breeze freshened by the fragrance of flowers, grass, and damp earth.
He did not know how long this encounter lasted, but when he crept away and entered the nearby skin-clad frame to borrow the scarecrow’s body, the field had donned evening’s sash.
Hünibach, the Swiss Alps
1998 CE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ibrahim al-Koni, who was born in 1948, is an international author with many authentic, salient identities. He is an award-winning Arabic-language novelist who has already published more than seventy volumes, a Moscow-educated visionary who sees an inevitable interface between myth and contemporary life, an environmentalist, a writer who depicts desert life with great accuracy and emotional depth, a Tuareg whose mother tongue is Tamasheq, and a resident of Switzerland from 1993 through 2012, although he currently lives in Spain. Ibrahim al-Koni, winner of the 2005 Mohamed Zafzaf Award for the Arabic Novel and the 2008 Sheikh Zayed Award for Literature, has also received a Libyan state prize for literature and art, prizes in Switzerland, including the literary prize of the Canton of Bern, and a prize from the Franco-Arab Friendship Committee in 2002 for L’Oasis cachée. In 2010, he was awarded the Egyptian State Prize for the Arabic Novel. And in 2015 he was named as one of the ten finalists for the Man Booker International Prize for his body of work.
Al-Koni spent his childhood in the Sahara desert. Then, after working for the Libyan newspapers Fazzan and al-Thawra, he studied comparative literature at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, where he later worked as a journalist. He lived in Warsaw for nine years and edited the Polish-language periodical as-Sadaqa, which published translations of short stories from Arabic, including some of his own. His novels The Bleeding of the Stone, Gold Dust, Anubis, The Seven Veils of Seth, New Waw, and The Puppet have been published in English translation, and The Fetishists is highly anticipated. At least seven of his titles have appeared in French, and at least ten exist in German translation. Representative works by al-Koni are available in approximately thirty-five languages, including Japanese.
A rare talk by Ibrahim al-Koni (in Arabic with English subtitles) appears at http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/ibrahim-al-koni-desert-we-visit-death, an
d also on YouTube.
Table of Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Table of Contents
List of Characters
Introduction: Al-Koni’s Demons
The Scarecrow
The Omen
The Prophecy
The Scarecrow
The Gifts
The Edicts
Blindness
Wantahet
The Epidemic
The Raids
The Beauty
The Idol
The Sacrificial Offering
About the Author
The Scarecrow (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation) Page 14
