“Very well. You are a man of the fityan. But what stake can you offer, equal in value to my prisoner?”
“Name your price. What is the Wazir’s man worth to you?”
“I have told you already, the one who commissioned me in this business is a serious man, powerful and unforgiving. No amount of gold is worth the risk of antagonising him.”
“Is there nothing, then, that we have, which you desire?”
Abu Dujana stroked his chin.
“Perhaps there is something, after all. Wasil, bring me my necklace.”
A servant bowed, and scampered off. He came back a little later, bearing a length of cord. From it hung a score of small objects, which appeared to be irregular scraps of brown leather. It was only when the servant held it in front of us that I recognised them as human ears.
“I have assembled this collection, partly for my own amusement, and partly to deter any who seek to obstruct me. This one, for example, belonged to ibn Sahl, who went around the suq bragging that he was not frightened of Abu Dujana. And this one to Abu Alqamah, who robbed innocent passers-by without asking my permission first. When I wear my necklace to business meetings, you would be amazed how swiftly problems get resolved.”
Abu Nuwas was still smiling, but doubt had crept into his eyes.
“You want to cut off our ears?”
“No, Father of Locks, I only want to cut off yours. Ismail al-Rawiya is my respected friend and comrade. You, on the other hand, are an insufferable braggart, whose appendage would be an ornament to my collection. One ear will suffice, though. I am not a greedy man. You may keep the other.”
I glanced across at Abu Nuwas, whose lips moved silently; calculating, perhaps, or praying. Finally, he answered.
“Very well then. The bet is on. Since I laid down the challenge, you have the right to choose the game. What is it to be? Dice? Nard? Shatranj?”
“No. We shall play Fiyal.”
Abu Nuwas’ voice was shrill with astonishment.
“Fiyal? Surely, an issue of such gravity should not be settled by a children’s game? We might as well throw a coin in the air, and guess which side it will land on! Let it be a game of skill, a game for men…”
“As you said, Father of Locks, since you named the prize, it is for me to decide on the contest. Fiyal it is. Wasil, my pebbles.”
The servant brought seven small stones, of a smooth rotundity that only the sea could shape. I seized the opportunity to whisper to Abu Nuwas.
“A game of Fiyal? You are willing to risk mutilation, on the outcome of this infantile entertainment?”
“If we cannot find al-Sifr before he finds us, then a worse fate awaits me than merely losing an ear. In any case, there is more to Fiyal than luck. If you are skilled at reading faces, you have a better than even chance of guessing right.”
While we were talking the gang leader crouched down with his back to us, his bodyguards standing over him to ensure his actions could not be seen. At last, he turned round and sat cross-legged.
“Now then, which one has more?”
He was pointing to two small mounds of dirt on the ground. He and Abu Nuwas locked eyes, and the game had begun.
I saw the poet’s gaze flickering across his opponent’s face, searching for clues. Abu Dujana meanwhile sought to keep his countenance steady. As the tension mounted, though, it was apparent that he kept glancing down to the right. There was an awkward moment when he seemed to notice me watching him, and after that he looked upward, staring fixedly at the darkening sky.
Then Abu Nuwas leapt forward, scrabbling in the dirt to Abu Dujana’s right. One after the other he pulled pebbles out of the ground, until there were four in his hand. He sat back triumphantly.
“I knew you would not think me so stupid as to be fooled by your obvious hints. It followed that you wanted me to choose the left-hand pit; and therefore the one you were so crudely indicating must be the correct one after all. Now, if you would bring out the prisoner…”
Abu Dujana, however, had unearthed the other three pebbles, and now handed them to Abu Nuwas.
“Your turn. You must win two rounds in succession, to take the game.”
“What? That is not how we played it when I was a child!”
“That may not be how you played it in Basrah. However, we are in Baghdad, and play by Baghdadi rules.”
Abu Nuwas began to protest, but one of the bodyguards moved behind him and held a knife to his ear. Abu Dujana narrowed his eyes.
“I could simply take what I want. You know that, don’t you?”
Abu Nuwas kept his voice steady.
“Yes, but then it would be no longer sport, merely business. Is that not so?”
He turned his back on Abu Dujana, and dug two small troughs in the earth with his fingers. In one he placed five pebbles, in the other two. Then he scraped the soil back over them, and faced his opponent.
“So, make your choice.”
Whatever Abu Dujana saw, it happened so quickly that I did not spot it. Almost immediately he leaned forward and brushed away the soil to reveal five stones.
“How kind of you, to make the answer so obvious. Now, if you would return my pebbles to me, we can conclude this business.”
“Certainly. And perhaps you would ask your baboon to remove his knife from my ear? It’s terribly distracting.”
“Is it? Good.”
Abu Dujana busied himself under cover of his cloak, then revealed the two heaps of earth.
“Take your time, Father of Locks. It will make no difference in the end.”
This time he did not so much as glance at either pit. Abu Nuwas studied his face carefully, but the gang leader only smiled.
“You call this a children’s game, Father of Locks, and so it is. But the games we play as children teach us all the most important lessons we will ever learn: about hiding and hunting, leader and follower, predator and prey. This game for example, this Fiyal, is no mere matter of guesswork, or chance. It favours the man who understands men, who can discern truth from lies, who can distinguish an enemy from a friend.
“But there is more still, that Fiyal has to show us. The pebbles lie unseen within the earth like seeds of possibility, yet to flower into being. For the duration of the game, two realities coexist simultaneously: more and less, winning and losing, life and death. When they are exposed, uncertainty dissolves, and the world becomes clearer, but also diminished. Knowledge is control, but doubt is potential.”
Abu Nuwas interrupted this homily by impatiently grubbing in the earth and extracting pebbles. One. Two.
Three.
He poked around frantically, but there were no more stones. Abu Dujana grinned like a crocodile, and raised an eyebrow to the thug behind Abu Nuwas, who hefted his knife.
“Stop!”
My intervention startled everybody to stillness.
“Show us the other pit.”
Abu Dujana did not move, so I crouched down and rooted out the stones myself. There were only two.
“Open your hand, Mishal. Your left one.”
Slowly, like a man who was not accustomed to obeying commands, Abu Dujana extended his palm. In it lay the two remaining pebbles. Abu Nuwas snarled.
“Don’t tell me. Baghdadi rules?”
Abu Dujana placed the pebbles in the poet’s hand.
“Baghdadi rules.”
It was the turn of Abu Nuwas to bury the stones. Crouching over, his coat hanging loose, he shrouded his actions so thoroughly that even I had no idea how he had allocated them. As he sat back, though, Abu Nuwas seemed very pleased with himself.
“Shall I tell you what I did with them?”
Abu Dujana was irritated, his concentration broken.
“What? Is this a pretext for some crude jest?”
“No. I will tell you where the pebbles are. There are six in the left hand pit, and one in the right.”
The gang leader’s eyes widened, then narrowed again.
“Oh no, Fath
er of Locks. You will not distract me with your drivel.”
“Drivel? Far from it. What I tell you is simple fact: six there, one there. My mother taught me always to speak the truth. Does the Holy Quran not forbid ever knowingly concealing the truth?”
“Yes, but according to the Hadith it is permitted to lie in times of war.”
“Are we at war, Abu Dujana? I thought we were playing a game.”
Abu Dujana reached out a hand toward the right hand pit. Abu Nuwas waved a finger.
“Now, my friend, take your time. There is only one stone there, as I already told you. It is not too late to change your mind.”
For a moment I thought Abu Dujana would lash out. The whiteness of his face made the birthmark appear fiercer, livid crimson on his cheek. Instead the gang boss began to scratch at the earth, frantically, as though trying to drown out Abu Nuwas’ needling voice.
“Such a shame. Only one pebble. Yet you cannot now admit you are wrong, even though you know you are, even though you know I am not lying, even though in a few moments you will have to hand over your prisoner to me, with all the trouble that will bring to you and your interests. You cannot change your decision, because the tiny glimmer of uncertainty remains: is this all an elaborate bluff to distract you from your impulse, which was right all along, because you must be right, because if you cannot trust your hunches then you cannot trust anything, and you stand all alone in a cold, meaningless world?
“But of course that is all empty nonsense, because you have found there what I told you all along you would find there: one single stone.”
Abu Dujana gave up his efforts to find anything else in the hole, and flung the pebble at Abu Nuwas. The poet ducked it effortlessly, and with a single movement scooped out the left hand pit and trickled the remaining pebbles onto the ground, all six of them.
An icy stillness descended on the courtyard. I could almost hear the tight muscles of Abu Dujana’s men, straining to act. Abu Nuwas spoke quietly, so that they could not overhear.
“You may have the upper hand now, Abu Dujana Mishal ibn Yunus al-Rafiq. You should remember, though, that you are no more powerful than the rituals that sustain you. If you break your own rules, the cracks will begin to riddle your world, and before you know what is happening it will no longer be the cleverest and the cruellest who is in charge, but the strongest. Is that you, Abu Dujana? Are you the strongest?”
The gang boss did not look at the men around him, tough, dumb and brutal. He only barked out an order.
“Bring the prisoner.”
Ibn Ghassan and another man went into the house. In the awkward silence that followed, the afternoon call to prayer could be heard floating through the sharp winter air. Then they returned, hauling between them a shape swathed in cloth. They dumped it on the ground in front of us.
“There. Take him and go.”
Abu Nuwas got to his feet and walked over to the shape. He rolled it over, and the cloth fell away to reveal a pallid face fixed in a ghastly grimace.
“He’s dead.”
Abu Dujana stood up.
“The terms of our wager made no mention of the man’s condition. I have kept my word; now get off my property.”
He stalked off into the house, leaving Abu Nuwas and me to manhandle the body onto the street, watched by ibn Ghassan. The great double doors swung shut behind us.
Abu Nuwas leaned into ibn Idris with the practised precision of a man accustomed to supporting drunks. I ducked under the corpse’s arm on the other side.
“Where are we taking him?”
“I don’t know, but we need to get him away from here. People are beginning to stare.”
“And point. We need to be a little less obtrusive.”
“Indeed. Do you think you could move his legs? No, rhythmically, as if he is walking. Left, right, left, right. That’s the way.”
“I don’t think it’s working. Maybe you need to hold his head up too.”
“That doesn’t help. His tongue is sticking out and his skin is blue. In fact, those men are coming after us now. I think they want to discuss with us what we’re doing carrying a dead body down the street. Can’t you move it any faster?”
“It rather spoils the illusion if we do.”
“They do not appear to be fooled in any case. Let us hasten.”
“It’s no use, they are gaining on us. Was this man a good friend of yours, Father of Locks? How would you feel about abandoning him?”
“I have just endured considerable danger to liberate him. However, I was rather counting on being able to ask him some questions, so his value to me is somewhat diminished. Besides, those men are very close, and look very angry, so it might be an idea if we say a swift farewell to ibn Idris, and then — run!”
The men of Harbiya abandoned the pursuit a few streets away, their sense of civic duty extending no further than the bounds of their own neighbourhood. We leaned against a wall, and I was first to catch my breath sufficiently to speak.
“I feel rather bad about poor ibn Idris. Does he not have loved ones, who would want to mourn for him?”
Abu Nuwas laughed harshly.
“He was a postman. They rarely stay still long enough to be loved. I’m sure his is not the first body to be dumped on the streets of Harbiya. Some rich veteran will probably arrange for a funeral as an act of charity. Of more concern to me is the fact that he cannot now help us find al-Sifr.”
“Perhaps he can help us after all. I took the liberty of searching his clothes as we walked.”
I held out, between finger and thumb, the pellet I had found concealed in the folds of his robe. Abu Nuwas snatched it from him, and shook it out, revealing it to be a scrap of silk.
“What’s this? Some form of writing…”
He stared at me, trying not to look impressed.
“How did you find it?”
“You forget, before I became a storyteller, I earned a living from thieving. I could steal the shirt from your back without you noticing. What does it say?”
Abu Nuwas peered curiously at the marks inked onto the silk.
“I do not know. It is no script I have ever encountered. It is not Arabic, nor Greek, nor Latin, nor any language written using those alphabets. Nor, I think, is it Chinese or Tibetan, although it has something of the look of the latter.”
I craned over his shoulder to see the strange characters.
“That character looks like an alif, and that one a ha’. Here, though, appears to be a Roman V, and there the same figure inverted. They are arranged in three lines, four groups on the first two lines, five on the third. Each group is a pair, except this one, where the alif character is written three times, and this figure, which stands alone.”
Abu Nuwas raised his eyebrows.
“Very good, Ismail. So not a language, then. The patterns are too regular.”
“Should we take it to the Wazir?”
“No. Do you not remember what Yaqub al-Mithaq said? There is a spy in the Barmakid’s household. Nobody there is to be trusted. We do not need courtiers, anyway. We need the help of scholars, of learned men. We must go to the Bayt al-Hikmah: the House of Wisdom.”
XV
As the Wazir had suggested, the House of Wisdom we encountered that evening was very different to the place into which I had crept as a trembling adolescent, half a lifetime before. Back then it had been a vault of mysteries where knowledge was hidden away, protected by locks and riddles. Now the Bayt al-Hikmah was dedicated to the dissemination of learning, through the copying and circulation of manuscripts. Even at that late hour, with the sunset call to prayer hushing the Round City, its doors were open, and inside the wide hall swarmed with scribes and students.
Abu Nuwas ignored the shelves and scrolls, and strode to an open door at the rear of the hall. I followed him through the door, and thence to a staircase which spiralled up into the tower. At the head of the stairs we emerged through a hole in the floor, into what had once been the Chamber of the Anc
ients.
When I had last seen the round room at the top of the tower, the entire wall had been faced with wooden compartments concealing Greek and Roman texts. Now the shelving had been stripped out, and the room was filled with artisans’ workbenches covered in peculiar objects. There were beakers and bottles of all descriptions, scales and dishes, and a number of small braziers. Many of the bottles were made of glass, with necks and spouts that had been stretched and twisted to give them a bizarre, animal appearance. A fire burned in one of the braziers, and liquid boiled in a flask held over it by a metal tripod.
It seemed more like a place where food was prepared than one where philosophy might be studied. The odours that filled the room, though, were not appealing: rotten egg and urine, the stink of brimstone and the unmistakable whiff of flatulence. At the centre of this strange kitchen, its master cook greeted us cheerily.
“Abu Ali, you gorgeous devil! What manner of arcane depravity brings you to my diwan this fine evening?”
“Peace, ibn Hayyan. I have a puzzle that I think may intrigue you.”
I realised that the man must be the Wazir’s astrologer, who had long ago schooled Abu Nuwas in potions, poisons and hidden writing. I could not help though still thinking of him as a cook: a dapper old man skipping merrily between the bubbling pots, smiling with pleasure at his creations even though they are destined to delight another.
“A puzzle? How delicious. You never let me down, Abu Ali.”
Abu Nuwas rolled out the silk onto a bench, and the astrologer scratched his beard.
“I have seen these markings before, in books from al-Hind. However it is not Sanskrit or Pali. We must consult an expert on these matters, and fortunately there is one close at hand. Boy!”
The sudden shout startled me. A slave jumped up from where he had been skulking unseen in a corner, scraping black residue from a brass plate.
“Boy, fetch me al-Majousi, immediately.”
The slave ducked his head in acknowledgement, and ran down the stairs. Abu Nuwas cast an eye around the room.
“I see you are busy, ibn Hayyan.”
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