“Sadly, no. They are a haughty people, and do not much fraternise with anyone outside their own kin.”
“Then I do not see what we can do.”
“You could ask me.”
The rabbi and I turned in surprise to Ilig. I stared at his red hair and fair complexion, and wondered why it had not occurred to me before that he might be a White Khazar. Vague memories stirred, of tales that he had had to flee his homeland in disgrace. However, he insisted he could get me in, and I could not afford to argue. The qadi’s question came back to me though, and I needed an answer.
“Tell me, rabbi: if your information is good, why would you come to me? Why not use the intelligence to the advantage of the Jewish faith?”
Ha-Sangari’s head dropped, as if he were a little ashamed.
“I have no chance of winning the disputation, even if I were the cleverest man alive, even if I saved the bek’s life. The khaganate bumps against both the Land of Islam and the Roman Empire, like a boat navigating between two dangerous rocks. Our very prosperity makes us vulnerable; we command the northern Silk Road, and have a monopoly on the trade of furs from the Rus. The bek will have to accept the protection of one of the great powers, Christianity or Islam, or risk being torn apart by them as they compete for our wealth. This is the true purpose of the disputation: so that Bhulan can decide with whom he will throw in his lot.
“A man must look after his kin, to the extent of his capability. The bek must protect the interests of all the Khazars; I must consider the Jews of this land. Under Christian rule my people are insulted to their faces and slandered behind their backs, their word not accepted against a Christian’s in a court of law. In the Land of Islam we are respected as People of the Book, and can practise our ways unmolested.
“If we must submit to one side or the other, then I would rather it were yours, Abu Ali al-Hakami. Whether you foil the plot, or simply inform the bek, it can only further the cause of Islam.
“Besides, I am a simple scholar. These games of mighty empires are not for me. You, on the other hand, are a master of secret machinations. It is better that you handle it.”
So it was that, as night fell, I found myself bumping along the pontoon bridge, sealed inside an oil jar strapped to the side of a packhorse. Ilig had tried to persuade me that he should go alone, just kill the Roman spy, but I had refused to submit. Since Ja’far had not told us who took orders from whom, he backed down at last, and we had concocted a scheme to get me inside.
It had seemed a simple plan. I in a jar on one side, a jar actually containing oil on the other for balance, and Ilig leading us through the gates of Khazaran. As you can see, though, I am long of body and limb, and while the jar was large enough to contain me, I had to contort myself painfully in order to fit. My situation was worsened by the fact that, although the jar had been emptied, it had not been cleaned out. Every time I found a position in which the discomfort was bearable, a lurch or bounce would cause me to slide around in the slippery oil, bruising my elbows and knees and straining muscles for balance. As a crowning insult, it was not the gentle pressings of olives that the jar had contained, but pungent simsim oil that filled my nostrils and soaked into my clothing.
A violent jerk suggested we had halted. I guessed we had arrived at the gates. It occurred to me suddenly that our ruse was as thin as the lid of the jar, that if the guards bothered to inspect its contents I would be discovered immediately. They did not, of course. They had no reason to suspect anything. I was desperately curious to know what passed between Ilig and the guards, but even if I had been able to hear them through a thumb’s breadth of clay, I could not have understood the weird, singsong Khazar language.
The jar tipped again, mashing my nose against its side, and as I drew in the reek of simsim the gates opened to admit us to the forbidden city. I had expected that Ilig would lead the horse around the nearest corner, then release me. Instead the jog of the jar continued relentlessly, until I began to lose any sense of how long I had been inside. I tried to push the lid open, but was appalled to discover it had been sealed in some way.
The air had become stale, and the stench of simsim choked me. Since that night I have never been able to stomach simsim seed, be it in cakes, sauces or pastes. I began to question whether this was all some bizarre prank by Ilig, to keep me out of trouble until the disputation was over. When I felt the jar released from the horse’s side, to drop to the ground with a shuddering jolt, I feared treachery of a worse kind. Instead the lid came open, mercifully allowing clean air into my simsim-stinking nightmare.
“Thank God the Liberator! I thought —”
“Hush. I cannot stay here.”
“You cannot stay? But you are a White Khazar!”
“The guards were suspicious. Since they did not know me, they questioned me on my tribe, my parentage. I could not tell them the truth, of course, and they mistrusted my answers. I persuaded them that I had to deliver the oil, but if I do not return quickly, they will raise the alarm. You are on your own, Abu Ali.”
He walked away, the horse clopping behind him, before I could get out of the jar to argue with him. In fact, my efforts to free myself nearly led to disaster. My muscles had frozen in my confinement, and attempting to move my limbs resulted only in searing pain. As I struggled to stand, the jar tipped slowly, then toppled over with a resounding crash.
The noise seemed so loud that I was certain it would attract attention. However, there was no reaction, and at last I managed to slither out of my oily womb and spill out onto the mud. Rubbing my agonised legs, I looked around at the sacred fortress of Khazaran.
My first reaction was to wonder why the Khazars went to such trouble to protect so undistinguished a place; in the moonlight it appeared no more than another huddled mess of yurts separated by mud tracks, just like Atil. I did not have long to consider it though, as voices and the sound of hoofs intruded on my thoughts.
I scrambled to the shelter of a large yurt that stood nearby, and cringed from a flare of torches at the end of the street. Three Khazars approached on horseback, laughing and shouting. I pressed myself against the yurt wall, hoping that they would pass by. However the fallen oil jar attracted their attention, and they stopped.
I did not need to understand their language to guess the meaning of their conversation. One began to dismount. At any moment the torchlight would fall on me, revealing me to the nomads. As quietly as I could, I slid open the yurt door, and slipped inside.
I found myself in a small, cluttered tent. Its wooden furnishings were painted with elaborate patterns in bright colours, reds and yellows and purples. On the walls hung blankets stitched with peculiar figures, one-legged men with hooves instead of hands and antlers on their heads.
At first I thought the yurt was empty. Then I heard a thin, high voice.
“Are you a spirit?”
A young man reclined on a bed, draped with so many sheets that at first glance in the candlelight I had not seen the human shape beneath them. He had the pale skin, blue eyes and red hair of the White Khazars, but he was hollow-cheeked and sickly in appearance.
“I asked you a question, and you must answer me. Are you a spirit?”
The man sat up. He wore an embroidered green tunic, and around his neck was a slender scarf of knotted silk. The scarf resembled a noose, and suddenly I realised that the man in front of me, the man whose vacant eyes gazed placidly at the intruder in his tent, was Tuzniq, khagan of the Khazars. The ceremonial cord around his neck was the signifier of his kingship, not a crown but a relic of the days when the khagan ruled for a fixed term of years before being hanged as a sacrifice to the sky god.
Tuzniq looked away from me and sighed.
“I used to commune with the spirits. These days they stand dumb before me. They used to come to me and show me such wonderful things, sing such funny songs…”
Now I understood why the bek had taken over so many of the khagan’s traditional powers; it was obvious that Tuzniq w
as feeble-minded, little better than a drooling idiot. A thought occurred to me.
“Your son, khagan — does he commune with spirits also?”
Sadness glimmered in the vacant eyes.
“My boy. My poor boy. The spirits are not kind to him. He screams and thrashes when they come to him. Papatzys says he must banish the spirits. He says we must drink only from the healing cup.”
He pointed to a heavy goblet of dull grey metal which stood on a chest nearby. I picked it up and examined it. Around its exterior danced one-legged deer men similar to those on the wall hanging, while its inner surface was carved with concentric rings. The faces of the deer-men were flat and featureless, and I realised that they had been worn smooth by generations of handling. It was empty, but smelt vaguely of lemon juice, which I guessed was used to clean it.
I turned to the khagan.
“The spirits command you to sleep. You must not tell anybody that I have been here, or your son will be tormented for a hundred days.”
Fear tightened the khagan’s jaw, and he climbed obediently back into bed, pulling the blankets over his head. I poked my head out of the yurt. The street was empty, so I slunk away silently. It seemed odd to me that the ruler of a kingdom one thousand miles across slept without a guard at his door, but by now nothing surprised me about the Khazars. It must have been unthinkable to them that anybody could gain access to the holy sanctuary of Khazaran.
I prowled on through the fortress, my mind racing. If the khagan’s son was showing signs that he had inherited his father’s imbecility, it would explain why everybody was so interested in Papatzys. Unless the shaman could cure the boy, the disease would pass to a second generation, and the bek’s hold on power would become irreversible. In that context Bhulan’s decision to give up the religion of his people, the religion in which the khagan was worshipped as a living god, began to seem less like piety and more like hard-nosed politics.
I had no idea how I was going to find the shaman’s yurt. When I came across it, however, there was no mistaking it. Although it was of the same construction and dimensions as the others, it was surrounded by ritual emblems: a carved totem resembling an eagle, a ring of stones around blackened earth, elaborate fetishes of intricately woven twigs hanging from the roof.
I crouched by the door, and listened. A voice was pleading in Arabic.
“No, it is not true, I swear it! Please, I beg you, let me go…”
Drawing my sword, I shoved aside the door panel and burst into the yurt. Inside were two men. It was easy to identify the man kneeling on the ground as the shaman Papatzys. He was heavily built, his red hair hanging to his waist in knotted clumps. A drum was strapped to his back, a round frame with skin stretched across it. In his hand he held a baton decorated with feathers. The other man, I knew as the horse trader Chat, but I understood now that he was more familiar to me by another name.
“Al-Sifr.”
The Roman snickered.
“Is that what you call me? Well, I’ve been called worse.”
Looking at him again, I could hardly believe that I had been fooled. His false nose, his crudely dyed hair and beard seemed childishly obvious. And because of my stupidity, I had led Abu Lu’lu’ah into the trap that had cost him his life.
At that thought, I hefted my sword, and set my jaw.
“You shall pay for what you did to my friend, Roman.”
“Was he only your friend? I had hoped he was so much more to you than that.”
I lunged for him, but he had provoked me to draw the stroke, and knocked it aside with ease, hacking at my face so that I had to pull back. The sharp steel flashed past my eyes. I was off balance, staggering backwards, and he advanced, stabbing and swinging with every step.
Then the shaman Papatzys decided to take a hand. He must have viewed me as his rescuer, because he chose to smash his drum over al-Sifr’s head. The goatskin split, and the frame landed on the Roman’s shoulders like a horse’s collar. The blow could not have been very painful, but the unexpected attack disconcerted him. I lashed out with a muddy boot, and al-Sifr’s sword spun from his hand.
He stared at me contemptuously, and I drew back my blade to chop his head from his shoulders, that hateful, ludicrous head with its fake nose knocked askew by the drum. At that moment Khazar warriors poured in through the door, armed with spears and armoured in fur and leather jerkins. I swung my sword anyway, but a Khazar grabbed my hand and plucked the weapon from my grasp. Once the warriors were all in place, and the yurt was secured, their leader strutted in like the cock who has just crowed. It was Bhulan, the bek.
“Peace be upon you. I would hate to have to raise a blade to my guests, so I am sure you will not mind telling me: what you are doing in Khazaran?”
This was too much. I was probably dead anyway, and past caring.
“I might ask the same of you. You are no more a White Khazar than I am.”
Bhulan did not flinch. He did, however, switch to speaking in Greek, presumably because most of his men would be fluent in Arabic.
“Things change. I am sure the people will understand. Such an invasion, striking at the very heart of our empire — the threat had to be countered. I took responsibility, rose to the challenge. The khagan will pass a decree giving me authority to enter Khazaran, for a temporary but indefinite period. In a year’s time nobody will remember it was ever any other way.
“In many ways you have done me a favour. I am grateful to you, and to the rabbi who alerted me to your machinations. Nonetheless, you still deserve death. How would you, Muslim, treat a Khazar who invaded the Kaaba in Makkah, waving his sword around? Or you, Christian, how would you respond if I defiled your holy places in Jerusalem?”
“Mighty bek, you should be grateful to me for more than just opening the door to Khazaran for you. This Roman here, as false in his countenance as he is in his conduct, planned to kidnap the shaman, and hold the future of your nation to ransom. I came here tonight only to stop him.”
Al-Sifr bowed.
“On the contrary, mighty bek, my sole purpose here was to protect the future of your nation. The shaman Papatzys is poisoning the son of the khagan, causing the very illness he claims to be healing. The rabbi told me —”
He stopped. It must have just sunk in, as it had with me, what Bhulan said about the rabbi; and like me, he was just coming to understand how ha-Sangari had stuffed the Christian goose with the Muslim pheasant and served us both up on a platter to the bek. Bhulan meanwhile was interrogating the shaman, in much the same tone one might use to a wayward child.
“Now, Papatzys, is this true? Are you giving the khagan’s son bad medicine?”
The shaman babbled and grovelled.
“No, mighty bek, I swear it! It is nothing but spring water, and a few herbs…”
A guard brought over a grey metal healing cup similar to the one I had seen in the khagan’s yurt.
“Then you will not mind drinking it, will you?”
Bhulan smiled menacingly as he passed it to the shaman, but Papatzys seized it in grateful hands and gulped it down, thin dribbles of water trickling through his beard. When he had finished he offered the cup to the Roman with a triumphant flourish.
“See! It is only water…”
Al-Sifr’s only response was to spit on the ground, so I took the goblet instead, staring into the dregs as though I could see my future within. That future looked to be as meagre as the dribbles of water at the discoloured bottom of the cup, but now the bek was talking about mercy. There was something about the value he placed on the friendship of the Emperor and the Khalifah, some warnings about the penalty for future misbehaviour, a guard to watch over us until we left their territory. I wasn’t really listening.
I was thinking about something ibn Hayyan, the Wazir’s astrologer, had told me once. He said that lead, when it became rotten, made rotten any water that touched it. That water, in turn, would rot the brain, particularly in children, if consumed over a long period. Ibn Hayyan
said that it was why old Rome had fallen to the barbarians: their lead piping, of which they were so proud, had turned them into imbeciles.
And I thought about a heavy cup of dull grey metal, polished by the centuries, corroded by lemon juice. I thought about a king who communed with spirits, and a boy who screamed every night when the shadows came.
I stared at the bek, who was describing a glorious future of peace and prosperity for all of our nations. I wondered whether I should tell him that it was the healing cups that were destroying the khagans. Then it occurred to me that he might change his mind about mercy, if this was something he preferred not to know about. Meekly I allowed myself to be escorted back to my yurt.
***
The following morning was dark and low, but the rain held off, and the candle took light at the first attempt. The crowds on the hillside seemed to hold their breath, for fear of extinguishing it, as the rabbi ha-Sangari stepped forward.
“Mighty bek, you have heard the arguments of the qadi and the priest. Like me, you will have been dazzled by the brilliance of their intellects, awed by the depth of their learning. With great skill they have set out their cases to be considered the heirs of the faith of Ibrahim and Musa. You may be asking yourself why you should bother to listen to a poor threadbare rabbi from down the road.
“However, you might also ask yourself why a man would seek the heir, when the owner himself stands before you. We Jews are the guardians of the true faith, the Chosen People. To us it was given to understand that the Creator was One, when every other nation worshipped many gods. All knowledge of the divine begins with us.
“Our holy book chronicles the whole history of the world, since the Creation. It provides myriad proofs that God favours the Jewish people: he blessed us with prophets and miracles, led us from slavery, fed and guided us in the desert, gave us the Law. The truth of this history is not disputed by Christians and Muslims, and why should it be? How could it not be accurate, when it is the history of our people, of our fathers and grandfathers? Would somebody not have protested, when lies or errors were introduced? The Injil is full of inconsistencies, as are the Hadith. Even the Quran contradicts itself, so that scholars must puzzle over the order of the verses, and determine which abrogates which other. Only the Tanakh is clear, harmonious, irrefutable.
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