The Pen- Sultan's Wisdom

by Dennis Galloway

  “Now, little one, listen to me and listen carefully. Sit very still. Do not move, not even a small twitch, or I will smash your foot, and you will die,” Kassinee said, looking me in the eye.

  I nodded my head while sweat flowed down my face. Jamal licked his lips and stepped aside. Kassinee let go of my leg and went over to his tool bench, selecting a large, wedge-shaped chisel. He placed the chisel on the edge of the shackle, on a specific pin that held it together.

  “Don’t move,” he said quietly.

  I nodded my head, closed my eyes, and turned my head back.

  Kassinee took a heavy hammer in his other hand and readied to swing it hard down on the chisel.

  With a mighty shout, “HAAAAA, huuu!” he swung the hammer high, then swiftly down onto the chisel.

  Clang went the hammer, and the shackle’s pin was shattered. It fell away from my ankle and raddled to the ground. I was free, and my ankle was unharmed. The big hammer did not touch my skin.

  I sat up and looked down at my foot, afraid it was not going to be there. With a shout of joy, I hopped off the anvil and jumped up and down. I hugged the big ironsmith with joy. He was astonished and pulled back a little.

  “Aha! My friend, you are indeed the greatest ironsmith in all of Cairo! I will shout it from all the rooftops wherever I go! You have indeed proven your skill and cleverness!” said Jamal while clapping his hands.

  “Was that the test?” asked Kassinee.

  “Yes, yes. And you passed it with distinction! You are the best!” said Jamal.

  A big, broad smile formed across Kassinee’s wide face. His three teeth showed how happy he was to have passed the test and proven he was the best. He picked up the shackle, threw it onto a heap of scrap metal, and began to sing a song of triumph in a deep bellowing voice, while holding the chisel and hammer high over his head with outstretched arms.

  Harold got up and ran over to where the shackle lay. He reached down and touched it, picked it up, and examined it. It was cold and hard.

  We complimented the ironsmith a dozen times more. Jamal swore he would fill Kassinee’s order within the month, and we left him happily swinging his hammer in time with the tune he sang.

  Now I was truly free.

  Harold turned his head from the shackle and saw Al-Hamid leave with Jamal. Harold quickly followed, still holding the shackle. The ironsmith did not notice the shackle following Jamal and Al-Hamid of its own accord.

  Harold’s vision soon began to fade and the narration slipped away.

  As Harold lay with his head on one arm on his desk, out of his head, dark, swirly writing emerged and floated down to lay back down on the sheets of paper where they had been written by the pen.

  Harold awoke in a haze to find himself sitting at his desk with his head laying on one of his arms. The morning had not yet come, so the light in the room was still dim, lit by only the desk lamp glowing above his head.

  Harold felt a weight in his free hand and turned his head to look. As he focused, he sat up with a shock, letting go. With a rattle, the chain and shackle dropped onto the floor.

  “How the devil?” Harold said out loud.

  He kicked the shackle with his foot to see if it was real. It was.

  Harold looked at his hand that had held the shackle, and then down at the shackle that lay in a heap on the floor. Its dull iron reflected little of the desk lamp’s light but stayed mostly in the shadows on the floor.

  Harold reached down, picked it up, and examined it.

  “Yes, this is it, the very shackle that held Al-Hamid captive,” Harold said to himself. As he turned it over and over, he could even see the freshly scraped metal where the holding pin was cleaved from the shackle.

  “I don’t understand. Unless, somehow, I actually traveled back in time and was actually there…extraordinary!” Harold said to no one. “That’s it, old boy; you are a dream traveler. Wow! It couldn’t be any clearer than that. It all started with that pen!”

  Harold was wide awake now. He stared at the pen. It lay there, begging to be picked up. “Yes, my friend, we will travel some more soon,” Harold said to the pen. “What a wonder! I have to tell someone what I have discovered. But I can’t. They will think I’m insane.”

  The writing had become significantly more important to Harold. From that day forward, he was eager to write and dream-travel to Al-Hamid’s time, where he would have some of his most astonishing life experiences.

  Harold, of course, told no one. If he did, they would surely call him mad and ship him off to the Hamersteed Home for the Insane, never to see the light of day again. Who “they” were and why he might be institutionalized without being a danger to himself or others, he didn’t dwell on. It was enough to know others would think he was a nutter, so Harold tried to go on with his ordinary life, while each evening writing with the pen and traveling to the past in his dreams.

  Smiling, Translating, Learning

  On weekends, Harold always took what he had written during the week to the library and would stay until closing time translating. He liked seeing Priscilla, sitting proper at her desk, with her glasses perched on the end of her nose. When he arrived, the smile she gave him was thrilling.

  This weekend, he was full of energy, wanting to get to the translation quickly to verify his dream was real. He ran up the stairs to the library and opened the doors with gusto. A rush of wind blew in through the open doors and Harold hastily pushed them shut.

  Priscilla Robertson, principal librarian, felt the wind and looked up from her reading. When she saw Harold walking briskly toward her, a bright smile spread across her face.

  “Good day, Priscilla,” Harold said with a smile.

  “Good day, sir. Have some more work to translate?” she asked.

  “Yes. I’ve just got these pages and can’t wait to start working on them right away. Is the Special Collections room available? If you don’t mind, of course,” Harold said with some excitement.

  “That’s jolly good. Of course, the room is open. Please get started if you like,” Priscilla said, handing him some white cotton gloves while looking into his eyes. She liked how dedicated and disciplined he was about his work. She did wonder where he was getting the material from, and that it looked newly written was also strange. But she did not ask him. She felt she was there to help, not to judge.

  “Why, yes, thank you. I will get started right away then.” He paused to look into her beautiful, green eyes, then blinked, and smiling, went off to the Special Collections room.

  Priscilla watched him go, the smile on her face remaining for quite some time.

  As Harold settled down with the Arabic book, he spread out the recent pages he’d brought. He wasn’t sure just what was going on with the writings. They told the story of Al- Hamid Akbar—someone from long ago, in a different land at a different time. Harold couldn’t find any historical information on Al-Hamid Akbar.

  What was even more amazing than the pen writing of its own accord was that the dreams Harold had were so real, vivid, and recorded here in the translated story. That he could hear the narration in his head, could feel the ground, smell the air, and touch things puzzled him greatly.

  And he’d actually brought something back. Surely, that meant he was dealing with something amazing.

  Reading the translated script, Harold understood that Al-Hamid Akbar was relating some important life lessons from long ago. Some of them he could likely apply to his own life, and thus improve it.

  Driven

  Harold was driven to write each day without fail. Then he would dream of what he had written, learning what the script said and perhaps gaining some gems of knowledge he had been unaware of. He was intrigued and determined to continue to write and translate as long as the pen continued to bring forth the unusual story. It was painstakingly slow work. Some of the translation did not make s
ense because he had to guess at some of the symbols that had no equivalent in the book he was using as a reference, but always, the pen wrote exactly what was in his dream.

  As Harold translated the part about Al-Hamid getting help obtaining his freedom, he wondered if he could lose the shackles of his job. He yearned to gain his own freedom.

  Harold continued to let the pen write and reveal more. He read the translated words as he sat at his desk in his study. The words seem to echo in his head, just like in the dreams.

  I now had a friend to show me how to survive on the streets of Cairo. I learned where to sleep and how to spring up and run at a moment’s notice. I learned how to feed myself, swiftly obtaining bread or fruit or anything I could eat with a simple, quick grab while passing a merchant’s stall. At first, I was afraid of being caught—they would cut off my hand if I got caught—but Jamal taught me techniques that were very quick and undetectable.

  I stayed on the streets of Cairo for two years. I laughed and cried. I learned what life was like when you were free and how much work it took to stay free. I became very skilled at the art of negotiation—humbly, I got what I wanted with the merchant almost begging me to take it for free by the time we had finished haggling.

  Life on the streets of Cairo was exciting. It was a constant battle to stay alive and stay free. But as the years passed, I began to long for more than the street life—I yearned for something more. I saw merchants hawking their wares, artisans making their devices, sculptors creating their works, scholars reading their scrolls, soldiers marching in formation, and I wondered, Why can’t I be one of those people? Why do I have to always live hand to mouth, day to day, drifting?

  Harold was anxious to know more, so he picked up the pen. It felt warm and comforting.

  He looked up at the shackle now hanging on the wall above his desk. He was still confused about how it came to be in his possession. He looked down at the blank piece of paper that lay before him, above which the pen hovered, anxious to begin writing.

  Harold brought the pen down to the paper and waited. Soon, the long stem of the pen wrapped gently around his forearm, and his hand began to move slowly over the paper, scrawling out the Arabic letters.

  The only sound in the room was the clock on the wall, ticking away the time and the sound of the pen scratching across the paper. The pen wrote and wrote, page after page, on and on. Harold let the pen write for hours, until his eyes began to droop. His head began to nod and drift downward until his chin rested on his chest. He snapped awake a few times, but he inevitably fell asleep, his hand still being dragged across the page as the pen continued to write. Then, at the stroke of midnight, it stopped. The pen uncurled, releasing its grip on Harold’s forearm, and fell onto the desk. Harold was slouched in his chair with his chin tucked down on his chest, snoring.

  The letters did their dance, rising up into the air and flowing into Harold’s head.

  Fog and Clarity

  Harold was in a white fog. He could hear Al-Hamid narrating his story, but he could not see anything. Then the fog cleared. Harold saw he was sitting on the ground under some palm trees. Nearby, he saw Jamal and Al-Hamid eating. The sun overhead was hot, and the shade of the palm tree provided only scant relief from the heat. Sweat trickled down Harold’s face as he watched.

  These thoughts came up in my mind one day as Jamal and I were in the shadows of some palm trees eating fruit and fresh bread we had just acquired from a merchant who had been distracted momentarily.

  “Jamal, do you ever think of being anything more than a thief?” I asked casually as I bit down on a piece of bread.

  “Ah, so you think you can be anything you want to be?” he said without looking up from the apple he had just bitten into.

  “No, I just thought—”

  “Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Jamal. “You just thought! Why, that is the trouble, my friend. You are thinking too much! Just be happy and free, like me!”

  “Yes, okay, but I see others with honorable trades—artisans and merchants with things to sell. I just wondered what it would be like to be one of them.”

  “You think we are not honorable?” said Jamal with mock amusement. “What is honor, anyway? I will tell you. It is a lie. The people who claim they are honorable are the same people who held you in servitude, who want to a catch you and put you into prison! They would cut off your hands for trying to feed yourself. They are the ones who are stealing from us! We are poor. We have no means to live, save stealing. Our world does not offer a path to a better life. You are born who you are, and Cairo keeps you in your place, so we steal. If the rich merchants had honor, they would gladly give us some of their food, at least the scraps they throw to the dogs. But no, if they can’t sell it, they throw it to the beasts. Where is the honor in that?” Jamal asked in anger, throwing away his half-eaten apple.

  I just looked at him, not knowing what to say.

  He laughed and said, “To be truly free, you must be nothing, be no one. You can have anything you want, if you are fast enough and clever enough to take it. You can sleep just about anywhere under open skies. All you need is one or two friends you can trust—if you don’t have anything they want. And you answer to no one, under no one’s eye, making sure you do what you are told.”

  Jamal really believed this was a great life. I had other ideas, but he would not listen.

  Suddenly, a white cloud descended on Harold’s mind, and he was once again in a fog. It soon cleared, and he found himself standing in a large plaza. He spotted Al-Hamid looking at the merchants beginning to open their shops for the day. Then he heard Al-Hamid begin to speak again.

  One day, things changed for me. I was in the Hibib market early in the morning. I was still dusty from sleeping in the streets, but I did not care. I was hungry, so rather than steal my breakfast, I decided to earn a meal by showing a merchant my negotiating skills and getting them to hire me.

  Unwashed and disheveled, I looked around at all the stalls and waited. Soon, the first merchant began to open his stall. As he was rolling up his drapes, I ran swiftly over to him and began helping him, unbidden.

  He looked at me. “You, boy, what do you think you are doing? Stop. Go away.”

  “Sir, if you roll the drapes like this, there will be no wrinkles, and they will remain as if new for years!”

  He did not believe me and grabbed a stick to beat me. I dropped his drape and ran away.

  I spied another merchant who had already opened his stand. He was arranging his wares on a table for display.

  “Sir, it would be better to put the silks in front on the right and hold back the small items close to you. They will be safer, and you can easily pick them up to offer as a sweetener for some of your more expensive items. I can help arrange your merchandise to bring in more people and protect your goods!” I started to reach for some items.

  As he looked at me, I continued to say, “I was trained by a master in the art of exposure, of showing merchandise in such ways as to attract people to purchase them.”

  “Is that so? Who was this master of exposure who trained you?” he asked.

  I quickly came up with a name I had overheard some time ago, though unsure of who it was.

  “It was Hamil al-Heen,” I said with broad smile, hoping the name sounded important.

  Little did I know how important.

  His eyebrows went up.

  “Hamil al-Heen was a thief, so you must be too!” he said as he pointed at me and shouted, “Thief! Thief!”

  I protested, saying, “No, no. I am no such thing. I was just trying to help.”

  The words echoed around the market until it exploded with loud, angry merchants. “Thief, thief, thief!” other people began to yell, pointing at me.

  Harold was stunned at how quickly the shouting started, and how it caught like wildfire around the plaza. Everyone was looking, and merch
ants were pointing at Al-Hamid. All Harold could do was watch. Then a large black man, dressed in black robes with a monkey on his shoulders and a scimitar hanging at his side, swiftly turned toward Al-Hamid.

  A Nubian warrior, who guarded the market, took notice of me. His task was to capture thieves, and he used a trained monkey to help him chase, track, and capture the fleeter of foot.

  Seeing me with my eyes wide, hands held high, waving and shaking my head, the Nubian released his monkey, commanding it to pursue me. With a screech and bared teeth, the small, hairy animal, ran down his arm and onto the ground.

  Harold reached out and grabbed the monkey’s tail, stopping it from running toward Al-Hamid to give him a headstart. The monkey looked back at Harold, saw nothing, and screeched loudly. Its tail stretched out straight behind it, not moving.

  The Nubian’s eyes grew wide. He saw the monkey lurching forward with its tail seemingly anchored in place. Baffled, he commanded the monkey, “Hilal awk jadked!”

  Harold saw that Al-Hamid was already some distance away, running toward a wall. The monkey bit at the invisible hand that held its tail, clamping its teeth down on Harold’s hand.

  “Ouch!” Harold yelled. He released the monkey’s tail, and the creature sped off toward Al-Hamid.

  Seeing this mad animal aiming for me, I ran fast and hard. I jumped up on some stone steps nearby, but so did the raging monkey. I leapt for a dangling rope and climbed up to the rooftop. The monkey, in a fury of legs and arms, grabbed the rope and climbed after me swiftly. I drew my knife and cut the rope, dropping the screaming monkey to the hard ground below. I turned and ran, hopping from one rooftop to another, while below I heard the Nubian yell, “I will not forget you, thief! I shall find you, you son of a dog, and send you to the mines for life!”

  I had never encountered a guard like him. Always before, they had been fat and lazy. They were easily bribed. They would yell but never chase you. I was lucky to have escaped.